Pub Date : 2018-06-20DOI: 10.2979/JFOLKRESE.55.2.04
Tok Thompson
Abstract:This article argues for broadening the purview of folklore as a discipline to include nonhuman agents as well and suggests that aesthetics could be productively used as a touchstone with which to begin to connect the discipline of folklore to other studies, particularly ethology, through the theoretical framework of posthumanism.
{"title":"Folklore beyond the Human: Toward a Trans-Special Understanding of Culture, Communication, and Aesthetics","authors":"Tok Thompson","doi":"10.2979/JFOLKRESE.55.2.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/JFOLKRESE.55.2.04","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article argues for broadening the purview of folklore as a discipline to include nonhuman agents as well and suggests that aesthetics could be productively used as a touchstone with which to begin to connect the discipline of folklore to other studies, particularly ethology, through the theoretical framework of posthumanism.","PeriodicalId":44620,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH","volume":"55 1","pages":"69 - 91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2018-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46864177","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-06-20DOI: 10.2979/JFOLKRESE.55.2.03
Sabina Magliocco
Abstract:To what extent do modern Westerners imagine animals as spiritual beings? How do they view animals' interiority compared with their own? In this article, I explore vernacular ontologies about animals that exist alongside dominant Western notions. In these narratives, animals are portrayed as having interiority similar to that of humans, living on after death in spiritual form, and interacting with humans as messengers from spiritual realms. My findings, based on a large mixed-methods study and ethnographic data, demonstrate that across religious traditions, people create vernacular ontologies that contradict official religious and scientific teachings, but are at least partly based on interpretations of empirical experiences. I hypothesize that as personhood is increasingly extended to companion animals, people are more likely to imagine afterlives for all animals that parallel their beliefs about human afterlives. Moreover, people are more likely to deviate from scientific and religious tenets when they have personal experiences of a spiritual nature involving animals.
{"title":"Beyond the Rainbow Bridge: Vernacular Ontologies of Animal Afterlives","authors":"Sabina Magliocco","doi":"10.2979/JFOLKRESE.55.2.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/JFOLKRESE.55.2.03","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:To what extent do modern Westerners imagine animals as spiritual beings? How do they view animals' interiority compared with their own? In this article, I explore vernacular ontologies about animals that exist alongside dominant Western notions. In these narratives, animals are portrayed as having interiority similar to that of humans, living on after death in spiritual form, and interacting with humans as messengers from spiritual realms. My findings, based on a large mixed-methods study and ethnographic data, demonstrate that across religious traditions, people create vernacular ontologies that contradict official religious and scientific teachings, but are at least partly based on interpretations of empirical experiences. I hypothesize that as personhood is increasingly extended to companion animals, people are more likely to imagine afterlives for all animals that parallel their beliefs about human afterlives. Moreover, people are more likely to deviate from scientific and religious tenets when they have personal experiences of a spiritual nature involving animals.","PeriodicalId":44620,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH","volume":"55 1","pages":"39 - 67"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2018-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41676884","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-03-16DOI: 10.2979/JFOLKRESE.55.1.05
Sue Tuohy
Abstract:In the early twentieth century, Zhang Yaxiong, a reporter from northwest China, began research on songs from his native region, and in 1940, published the first nationally-circulated anthology of hua'er songs. His work was central to promoting the idea of hua'er as a genre of folksong, as a multiethnic and regional tradition, and as a valuable part of a broader Chinese artistic tradition. It contributed to the establishment of the field of hua'er studies and to today's public celebration of hua'er songs. Zhang's promotion of hua'er, and hua'er studies' later promotion of Zhang, have mutually and multiply intersected through ongoing discourse and practice over the last seven decades. This case illustrates the central role played by collector-editors and their anthologies in the construction of traditions and in the dissemination of values. Viewing collector-editors and anthologies as participants in long-term creative communicative processes, this article emphasizes the communal and intertextual nature of both. It argues they are constructed through social interactions within particular contexts as they draw from resources of the past while negotiating the needs of the present. They, in turn, produce materials and ways of knowing and doing to be used by those after them.
{"title":"Collecting Flowers, Defining a Genre: Zhang Yaxiong and the Anthology of Hua'er Folksongs","authors":"Sue Tuohy","doi":"10.2979/JFOLKRESE.55.1.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/JFOLKRESE.55.1.05","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In the early twentieth century, Zhang Yaxiong, a reporter from northwest China, began research on songs from his native region, and in 1940, published the first nationally-circulated anthology of hua'er songs. His work was central to promoting the idea of hua'er as a genre of folksong, as a multiethnic and regional tradition, and as a valuable part of a broader Chinese artistic tradition. It contributed to the establishment of the field of hua'er studies and to today's public celebration of hua'er songs. Zhang's promotion of hua'er, and hua'er studies' later promotion of Zhang, have mutually and multiply intersected through ongoing discourse and practice over the last seven decades. This case illustrates the central role played by collector-editors and their anthologies in the construction of traditions and in the dissemination of values. Viewing collector-editors and anthologies as participants in long-term creative communicative processes, this article emphasizes the communal and intertextual nature of both. It argues they are constructed through social interactions within particular contexts as they draw from resources of the past while negotiating the needs of the present. They, in turn, produce materials and ways of knowing and doing to be used by those after them.","PeriodicalId":44620,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH","volume":"55 1","pages":"113 - 148"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2018-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46563834","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-03-16DOI: 10.2979/JFOLKRESE.55.1.03
L. Gibbs
Abstract:This article explores the function of Chinese singing competitions as "mechanisms of traditionalization" where singers, judges, and other individuals interact with and reconfigure performance traditions. Focusing on case studies of professional folksingers from northern China who became famous after appearing on national singing competitions, I argue that participating in contests not only raises the status of individual performers, but also repositions songs, singing styles, and regions within particular performance traditions and the national mediascape as a whole. In addition, narratives of participation and success in contests sometimes connect singer-contestants to other more established singers in mutually beneficial ways. I urge us to view competitions in a singer's career as a series of liminal spaces—rather than as simple contests between individual artists—where the singer and other individuals negotiate choices between continuity and change in representing performance traditions.
{"title":"Chinese Singing Contests as Sites of Negotiation Among Individuals and Traditions","authors":"L. Gibbs","doi":"10.2979/JFOLKRESE.55.1.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/JFOLKRESE.55.1.03","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores the function of Chinese singing competitions as \"mechanisms of traditionalization\" where singers, judges, and other individuals interact with and reconfigure performance traditions. Focusing on case studies of professional folksingers from northern China who became famous after appearing on national singing competitions, I argue that participating in contests not only raises the status of individual performers, but also repositions songs, singing styles, and regions within particular performance traditions and the national mediascape as a whole. In addition, narratives of participation and success in contests sometimes connect singer-contestants to other more established singers in mutually beneficial ways. I urge us to view competitions in a singer's career as a series of liminal spaces—rather than as simple contests between individual artists—where the singer and other individuals negotiate choices between continuity and change in representing performance traditions.","PeriodicalId":44620,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH","volume":"55 1","pages":"49 - 75"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2018-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49580394","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-03-16DOI: 10.2979/JFOLKRESE.55.1.04
Emily E. Wilcox
Abstract:This article examines the creative process through which particular dance techniques and aesthetic styles originally derived from folk forms are transformed and integrated into the conservatory dance tradition in the People's Republic of China. I propose the term "dynamic inheritance" to describe this officially prescribed sequence of activities, which was first formalized during the period of early socialist culture (1937–1965) and continues to be the dominant creative method followed by state-sponsored Chinese dance artists today. The most common phrase used to describe this process is "to inherit and develop" (jicheng yu fazhan). It suggests that individual artists act as agents or stewards in the handing down of tradition, by following a process whose success is measured not by how strictly existing forms are preserved, but, rather, by how well they are made to speak to and be appreciated by contemporary audiences. In this process, the "representative work" (daibiaozuo) becomes the crucial medium through which artists carry out this process of dynamic inheritance and authorship of tradition.
{"title":"Dynamic Inheritance: Representative Works and the Authoring of Tradition in Chinese Dance","authors":"Emily E. Wilcox","doi":"10.2979/JFOLKRESE.55.1.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/JFOLKRESE.55.1.04","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines the creative process through which particular dance techniques and aesthetic styles originally derived from folk forms are transformed and integrated into the conservatory dance tradition in the People's Republic of China. I propose the term \"dynamic inheritance\" to describe this officially prescribed sequence of activities, which was first formalized during the period of early socialist culture (1937–1965) and continues to be the dominant creative method followed by state-sponsored Chinese dance artists today. The most common phrase used to describe this process is \"to inherit and develop\" (jicheng yu fazhan). It suggests that individual artists act as agents or stewards in the handing down of tradition, by following a process whose success is measured not by how strictly existing forms are preserved, but, rather, by how well they are made to speak to and be appreciated by contemporary audiences. In this process, the \"representative work\" (daibiaozuo) becomes the crucial medium through which artists carry out this process of dynamic inheritance and authorship of tradition.","PeriodicalId":44620,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH","volume":"55 1","pages":"111 - 77"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2018-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44155688","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-03-16DOI: 10.2979/JFOLKRESE.55.1.02
C. D’Evelyn
Abstract:This article considers the role of recorded music albums in mediating the position of the individual folk musician in Inner Mongolia, China, in the context of increased scholarly efforts throughout the past decade to collect dying oral traditions and catalog regional cultural diversity in Inner Mongolia. This discussion focuses on the scholarly impetus behind the CD series "Inner Mongolia Ethnic Music Classics—Great Masters Series," which seeks to transform the Intangible Cultural Heritage of oral repertoires into a tangible CD format that can be transmitted to future generations. Highlighting one album of collected recordings featuring the long-song singer Badma, I examine how Badma's designation as a cultural transmitter from Alasha, Inner Mongolia offers a case study of the changing politics of recognition in Inner Mongolia and China over the past decade and a half.
{"title":"Grasping Intangible Heritage and Reimagining Inner Mongolia: Folk-Artist Albums and a New Logic for Musical Representation in China","authors":"C. D’Evelyn","doi":"10.2979/JFOLKRESE.55.1.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/JFOLKRESE.55.1.02","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article considers the role of recorded music albums in mediating the position of the individual folk musician in Inner Mongolia, China, in the context of increased scholarly efforts throughout the past decade to collect dying oral traditions and catalog regional cultural diversity in Inner Mongolia. This discussion focuses on the scholarly impetus behind the CD series \"Inner Mongolia Ethnic Music Classics—Great Masters Series,\" which seeks to transform the Intangible Cultural Heritage of oral repertoires into a tangible CD format that can be transmitted to future generations. Highlighting one album of collected recordings featuring the long-song singer Badma, I examine how Badma's designation as a cultural transmitter from Alasha, Inner Mongolia offers a case study of the changing politics of recognition in Inner Mongolia and China over the past decade and a half.","PeriodicalId":44620,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH","volume":"55 1","pages":"21 - 48"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2018-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42282293","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-03-16DOI: 10.2979/JFOLKRESE.55.1.01
L. Gibbs
Abstract:The following introduces a special issue of the Journal of Folklore Research (55–1) examining the roles played by individuals in the development of traditional Chinese performing arts and how "faces of tradition" have come to represent and reconfigure broader fields of cultural production. The authors look at the performance, scholarship, and teaching of instrumental music, folksong, and classical dance, focusing on ways in which CD albums, singing competitions, representative works, and textual anthologies come to serve as discursive spaces where individuals engage with and redefine larger traditions and themselves. Here I, the issue's guest editor, introduce concerns about representation and individual agency as they relate to studies of the mutual relationship between individuals and traditions—a topic that has (re)emerged in recent years among the disciplines of ethnomusicology, folklore studies, and dance ethnology. By focusing on specific mechanisms through which multiple individuals have made their marks, the articles in this special issue point to tangible ways in which individuals and traditions interact.
{"title":"Faces of Tradition in Chinese Performing Arts","authors":"L. Gibbs","doi":"10.2979/JFOLKRESE.55.1.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/JFOLKRESE.55.1.01","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The following introduces a special issue of the Journal of Folklore Research (55–1) examining the roles played by individuals in the development of traditional Chinese performing arts and how \"faces of tradition\" have come to represent and reconfigure broader fields of cultural production. The authors look at the performance, scholarship, and teaching of instrumental music, folksong, and classical dance, focusing on ways in which CD albums, singing competitions, representative works, and textual anthologies come to serve as discursive spaces where individuals engage with and redefine larger traditions and themselves. Here I, the issue's guest editor, introduce concerns about representation and individual agency as they relate to studies of the mutual relationship between individuals and traditions—a topic that has (re)emerged in recent years among the disciplines of ethnomusicology, folklore studies, and dance ethnology. By focusing on specific mechanisms through which multiple individuals have made their marks, the articles in this special issue point to tangible ways in which individuals and traditions interact.","PeriodicalId":44620,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH","volume":"55 1","pages":"1 - 19"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2018-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42460067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-10-12DOI: 10.2979/JFOLKRESE.54.3.02
Elizabeth R. Bell
Abstract: The Maya hip hop scene that is currently growing around Lake Atitlán, Guatemala seeks to educate Maya youth about their culture by way of lyrics in Mayan languages as well as references to historical Maya texts such as the Popol Wuj and the Chilam Balam. This musical genre combines ancestral local knowledge, accessed by way of pre-Colombian texts and sacred fire ceremonies, with popular music in a manner that attracts Maya youth who may otherwise receive little formal education about their own Maya culture. Through the use of storytelling in hip hop, these songs construe meaning through a combination of the text and their context, empowering Maya youth to reflect upon and critically consider their social, economic, and cultural milieu. By adapting an international music form to a local context, a characteristic endemic to hip hop across the globe, Maya hip hop produced by MC Tz’utu Kan and the group Balam Ajpu is an indicator of a cultural resilience that subverts traditional power structures and offers otherwise disenfranchised youth an opportunity to exercise agency.
{"title":"“This Isn’t Underground; This Is Highlands”: Mayan-Language Hip Hop, Cultural Resilience, and Youth Education in Guatemala","authors":"Elizabeth R. Bell","doi":"10.2979/JFOLKRESE.54.3.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/JFOLKRESE.54.3.02","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The Maya hip hop scene that is currently growing around Lake Atitlán, Guatemala seeks to educate Maya youth about their culture by way of lyrics in Mayan languages as well as references to historical Maya texts such as the Popol Wuj and the Chilam Balam. This musical genre combines ancestral local knowledge, accessed by way of pre-Colombian texts and sacred fire ceremonies, with popular music in a manner that attracts Maya youth who may otherwise receive little formal education about their own Maya culture. Through the use of storytelling in hip hop, these songs construe meaning through a combination of the text and their context, empowering Maya youth to reflect upon and critically consider their social, economic, and cultural milieu. By adapting an international music form to a local context, a characteristic endemic to hip hop across the globe, Maya hip hop produced by MC Tz’utu Kan and the group Balam Ajpu is an indicator of a cultural resilience that subverts traditional power structures and offers otherwise disenfranchised youth an opportunity to exercise agency.","PeriodicalId":44620,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH","volume":"54 1","pages":"167 - 197"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2017-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48326200","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-10-12DOI: 10.2979/JFOLKRESE.54.3.04
D. Christensen
Abstract: Like most political engagements, handcrafted book genres may share broad common goals but differ in philosophies of action and articulation—how they take shape matters. Two distinct orientations emerge from scrapbooks at the turn of the millennium. In the 1990s and early 2000s many scrapbook makers embraced material durability and aesthetic regularity, favoring a workmanship of certainty that ensured a maximally stable, coherent, and coordinated arrangement of commodities. Soon, other makers pushed back with an alternate approach, advocating the kind of ephemeral presence and risky workmanship associated with third-wave zines. This mode of making asserts meaning through the unexpected encounter, the intentional chaos that frames the viewing moment as a mode of “occasion.” Despite rhetorical differences that emerge from these philosophies of workmanship and aesthetic expression, neither “traditional” scrapbooks nor those modeled on zines entirely jettison the comfort associated with the everyday content they document. In fact, in the act of claiming regard for perspectives and activities not generally considered noteworthy, the makers of these books question—by means of material choices—dominant systems of attention and interaction.
{"title":"Materializing the Everyday: “Safe” Scrapbooks, Aesthetic Mess, and the Rhetorics of Workmanship","authors":"D. Christensen","doi":"10.2979/JFOLKRESE.54.3.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/JFOLKRESE.54.3.04","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Like most political engagements, handcrafted book genres may share broad common goals but differ in philosophies of action and articulation—how they take shape matters. Two distinct orientations emerge from scrapbooks at the turn of the millennium. In the 1990s and early 2000s many scrapbook makers embraced material durability and aesthetic regularity, favoring a workmanship of certainty that ensured a maximally stable, coherent, and coordinated arrangement of commodities. Soon, other makers pushed back with an alternate approach, advocating the kind of ephemeral presence and risky workmanship associated with third-wave zines. This mode of making asserts meaning through the unexpected encounter, the intentional chaos that frames the viewing moment as a mode of “occasion.” Despite rhetorical differences that emerge from these philosophies of workmanship and aesthetic expression, neither “traditional” scrapbooks nor those modeled on zines entirely jettison the comfort associated with the everyday content they document. In fact, in the act of claiming regard for perspectives and activities not generally considered noteworthy, the makers of these books question—by means of material choices—dominant systems of attention and interaction.","PeriodicalId":44620,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH","volume":"54 1","pages":"233 - 284"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2017-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47026715","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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