WESTERN FOLKLORE最新文献

{"title":"Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie","authors":"G. Logsdon","doi":"10.5860/choice.45-0198","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.45-0198","url":null,"abstract":"Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie. By Mark Allan Jackson. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Pp. ? + 310, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustrations, notes, index. $50.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.)Mark Allen Jackson's study, Prophet Singer: The Voice and. Vision of Woody Guthrie, brings together important information about many of Woody Guthrie's songs. The prologue's subtitle, \"Giving a Voice to Living Songs,\" states the author's theme, and he discusses different opinions about Woody's influence in literature. This is not a biography, although much information about Woody's background and life is provided. In his thorough examination of the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York City, the Folklife Archives in the Library of Congress, the Ralph Rinzler Archives in the Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural History, and other collections, the author has identified the historical and political settings of specific song genres (two not included are children's songs and cowboy songs), which are taken up chapter by chapter and exemplified by particular Guthrie songs. The author does not, however, attempt to touch upon each of the thousands of songs Woody wrote, and throughout the book are illustrations by Woody, along with historic photographs.The opening chapter offers a detailed account of \"This Land Is Your Land,\" Woody's best-known song - it is \"the main means through which the American people have encountered Guthrie's voice and vision\" (21 ) . Irving Berlin's patriotic song \"God Bless America\" had been made into an immensely popular 1938 recording by Kate Smith. Woody did not like \"God Bless America,\" perceiving that it excluded the poor, the disenfranchised, and the working man, so in early 1940 he wrote \"God Blessed America,\" with \"God blessed America for me\" as the last line in each verse. Jackson says that the tune possibly came from a popular Carter Family gospel song, \"This World Is On Fire.\" I have collected and studied Woody's songs and writings for more than fifty years, and I can vouch for that. The tune is an adaptation of the Carter Family song. Jackson shows in his coverage of other songs that Woody did not compose melodies; he adapted melodies. After writing the lyrics, Woody set \"God Blessed America\" aside until Moses Asch encouraged him to change the line \"God blessed America for me\" to \"This land was made for you and me,\" and the result was worldwide popularity for the song.In the chapter titled \"Busted, Disgusted, Down and Out,\" on Woody's portrayal of the problems and dismal life many agricultural workers and their families experienced during the 1930s, Jackson shows how songs heard by Woody during his childhood (traditional and country songs sympathetic to working folks) became the foundations for many of the songs he wrote in the Dust Bowl period and later. …","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2010-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71117489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America's Cultural Life/The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State","authors":"Lisa L. Higgins, Teresa K. Hollingsworth","doi":"10.5860/choice.46-0973","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.46-0973","url":null,"abstract":"Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America's Cultural Life. Edited by Steven J. Tepper and Bill Ivey. (New York: Routledge, 2007. Pp. viii + 398, acknowledgments, introduction, tables, graphs, figures, chapter notes, chapter bibliographies, contributors, index. $125.00 cloth, $34.95 paper.); The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State. Edited by Casey Nelson Blake. (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, and Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. xvi + 362, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustrations, chapter notes, contributors, index. $49.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.)Is public art in the United States in afin de siecle or a renaissance? Two new anthologies provide ample means for reflection upon its past, present, and future: Engaging Art, edited by Steven J. Tepper and Bill Ivey, and The Arts of Democracy, edited by Casey Nelson Blake. Both volumes address the \"[v]igorous argument about the public life of artistic experience\" (Blake 2). The sociologists whose essays appear in Tepper and Ivey's collection examine \"arts participation\" in the twentieth century, from active to passive, and (they argue) back again. The historians and sociologists of Blake's collection take the concept to a more abstract plane as they consider the role of art and culture in \"the State.\" Both collections are recommended to folklorists, especially as we imagine how the policies of our recently inaugurated President and his policies may influence arts and culture.Engaging Art addresses two fundamental questions: \"I) What is the state of cultural participation and engagement in the United States; and 2) How is participation changing?\" (Tepper 364) . Commissioned to examine statistics and explore implications of the NEA Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, the volume explores the impact of the arts on the lives of Americans. The contributors provide an extensive historical overview of arts participation in the United States; employ quantitative and qualitative resources to illustrate growth and decline in major arts disciplines; and introduce discussions about art making, art consumption, and choice.Section Two, Investigating Non-traditional Audiences, Places, and Art Forms, explores arts participation in everyday life, focusing on religious groups, immigrant communities, and youth. Tepper and Ivey note that these constituencies are vigorous arts participants who blur the lines between audiences and artists. (This blurring, and its impact upon numbers, was illustrated when the present reviewers attended Tepper's September 2008 lecture in Chattanooga at a national meeting of state arts agency workers, in which some of those present lamented decreases in participation in fine-arts productions; shortly afterwards we squeezed into a packed concert of local old-time and bluegrass musicians. The juxtaposition highlighted for us key differences in definition of the terms audience, artist, and participation.) An ","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2010-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71122531","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Beyond the Good Death: The Anthropology of Modern Dying","authors":"Elinor Levy","doi":"10.5860/choice.46-0381","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.46-0381","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2010-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71121585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Chinese American Death Rituals: Respecting the Ancestors","authors":"Juwen Zhang","doi":"10.5860/choice.43-6088","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.43-6088","url":null,"abstract":"Chinese American Death Rituals: Respecting the Ancestors. Edited by Sue Fawn Chung and Priscilla Wegars. (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2005. Pp. ? + 308, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustrations, figures, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $88.00 cloth, $36.95 paper) After two decades of sporadic efforts from different disciplinary perspectives, studies of Chinese American rituals are at last well represented here. Chinese American Death Rituab, a broad survey covering a wide range of history and geography from largely archaeological and historical perspectives, is meant to help break down stereotypes that Americans have about their Chinese American neighbors. For this fact alone, the present volume, well-designed and well-illustrated (though the bibliography is a few years behind), is worth cheering. It must be noted, however, that the introduction seems a broad historical mosaic presented at the cost of both clarity and scholarly accuracy. It is misleading to state that Chinese funerary practices \"fascinated nineteenth-century English anthropologists\" (3), because not only does Western interest in Chinese funerals predate the nineteenth century, but the English anthropologists played a much lesser role in Sinology - the study of Chinese culture - than did missionaries from other countries before and during the nineteenth century. The identity of J. J. M. de Groot, mentioned early and without explanation (3), will doubtless be a mystery to the uninitiated (he was a Dutch Sinologist who lived from 1854 to 1921 [Honey 2001:xiii]). In describing the practice of seeking a geomancer, or fengshui expert, it is not correct to use the word \"scientist\" (5), since the practice and concept of fengshui has always been an art (shu), not a science (xue) (Zhang 2004), and is moreover called \"pseudo-science\" by Joseph Needham ([1954] 1988). Similar problems of clarity and accuracy are found in the first essay, which sets out to provide a broad history of the death ritual in China and California. This ambitious goal is hampered by the simplification and hybridization of different interpretations and is achieved at the sacrifice of academic insight. To say that \"Confucianism embraced the concept of Ii, or ritual, and reinforced the importance of rites\" (21) is to oversimplify Confucianism, a practice scholars are trying to avoid nowadays (Ames and Rosemont 1998:51). The next three articles present three cases, starting with a history of the Chinese worship of ghost-spirits as revealed through examination of local records of various public rites conducted by the Chinese in Maryville, California from the mid-nineteenth century to recent years. The first case study presents a quite peaceful and integrative picture prior to World War I, then suggests that in later decades the Chinese practiced fewer and fewer Chinese rites and that their death ritual gradually \"transformed into dying American.\" The second report draws a meaningful connection between ","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2009-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71112114","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Becoming Two-Spirit: Gay Identity and Social Acceptance in Indian Country","authors":"J. Whitesel","doi":"10.5860/choice.45-1751","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.45-1751","url":null,"abstract":"Becoming Two-Spirit: Gay Identity and Social Acceptance in Indian Country. By Brian Joseph Gilley. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Pp. xiv + 214, preface, acknowledgments, notes, bibliography, index. $16.95 paper) \"Two-Spirit\" represents nowadays an empowering, self-claimed identity. This book explores how Two-Spirit men occupy and renegotiate membership between multiple identities including native, gay, and traditional. It draws on the author's four years of participant observation of and interviews with Two-Spirit men in Colorado and Oklahoma. Gilley gives the reader an intimate look at a group of gay men searching for \"self- and social acceptance.\" They want a useful, positive role within contemporary Native society where tradition has cultural currency and homophobia now co-opted represents a traditional value. The multiple meanings of the term \"Two-Spirit\" celebrate both the male and female spirit and highlight the flexibility of gender identity. Maintaining a foothold in the gay and Indian worlds is the most challenging part of being Two-Spirit. Some anthropologists argue that Two-Spirit people have historically held valued social roles in Native culture having little to do with their sexual identity. Yet homophobia, originating from European Christian colonization, takes on a life of its own within present-day Native communities, actively constraining Two-Spirit men's power to meld gay and Native identities. It at once alienates them from their own people and leaves them susceptible to racism and the deleterious effects of bar culture in the Anglo gay community. Thus, \"cultural compromise\" becomes a vital identity-building process as these men struggle to reintegrate Two-Spirit as \"a form of personhood\" among contemporary American Indians. Simplicity of design and the author's well-written text make this book an easy, straightforward read. However, two faults invite comment. First - though I realize authors do not have much say about a publisher's marketing techniques, including cover art - the reader can be put off by the cover illustration: a stock photo of feathers, two yellow, one violet and one green against a white background. This image, which I searched out online, is tided \"Dyed Turkey Feathers.\" In Native American regalia-making, feathers, turkeys and specific colors do have symbolic value, but on this book cover the feathers seem to be playing on gay stereotypes in the Anglo world. In Chapter Five the author shows that Two-Spirit people perfect material art traditions as part of their social role and are unsurpassed in their beadwork. For cover art, a picture of a dress, beaded buckskin, medallion, fan, staff, or drum and rattle actually made by a Two-Spirit person would have been far more appropriate. Second, though Chapter One, \"Seeking Self- and Social Acceptance,\" properly explains the limitations of Gilley's sample, the preliminaries portraying his researcher role and the ambiguities surrounding it lack releva","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2009-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71118509","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sing It Pretty: A Memoir","authors":"Burt Feintuch","doi":"10.5860/choice.46-0183","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.46-0183","url":null,"abstract":"Sing It Pretty: A Memoir. By Bess Lomax Hawes. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Pp. 182, photographs, chronology, index. $65.00 cloth, $19.95 paper) In her retirement, Bess Lomax Hawes can look back on an extraordinarily rich life. As a musician, an educator, an administrator, and an arts advocate - not to mention a winner of the National Medal of Arts - she casts a long shadow. As a member of a remarkable family, populated with some very strong personalities, she more than holds her own. Sing It Pretty is her autobiography, told in a largely straightforward, sometimes disarming, way. Born in Austin in 1921, she was John Avery Lomax and Bess Bauman Brown's fourth, and last, child. Her mother home-schooled her, and her education ranged widely, from traditional academic subjects to sewing and quilting, to music-making. After her mother's death in 1931, life changed, and schooling became institutional. Hawes describes her father, who was in his old age by then, as feeling liminal professionally, wanting to be a \"real scholar.\" This was at the moment that John Lomax was doing some of his most significant musical field research, bringing Leadbelly home, making field recordings to disks rather than impermanent media. One of the values of a memoir such as this, where the characters are widely known, is that they help us comprehend those subjects as flesh and blood, with their ambivalences, their values, their contradictions. Subjects - figures - become human beings. \"Folkloring in those days,\" Hawes writes, \"was a family affair, and I learned early never to appear unoccupied for there was no end of work to do copying notes, song lyrics, and miles of correspondence on the typewriter\" (15). It continued to be a family affair throughout her life. The family left Texas, landing in Washington, where the Lomax and Seeger families worked together on editing Our Singing Country, an influential volume published first in 1941 (and still in print in a Dover edition, as well as available in an online version). Ruth Crawford Seeger did the musical transcriptions for that book, and Hawes was often the messenger, carrying paper back and forth between the Lomax house on Capitol Hill, their office in the Library of Congress, and the Seeger household in the suburbs. The principals - John and Alan, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Charles Seeger - were passionate in working out editorial processes and criteria, many of which resonate today. Whose voices should be privileged? How does one best represent the sound of singing and music? What is the primary audience for a book of grassroots song and music? Our Singing Country was published to a disappointing initial reception. The family left for a grand tour of Europe, and Bess began her undergraduate days at Bryn Mawr College. There's a lovely anecdote here about Carl Sandburg, who outed her as a Lomax while giving a singing lecture at Bryn Mawr during her student days. This is a life of intersecting circles. Politics, art","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2009-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71121742","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination","authors":"Michele Hartley","doi":"10.5860/choice.43-5356","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.43-5356","url":null,"abstract":"Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination. By Julie Cruikshank. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. Pp. xii + 316, acknowledgments, introduction, maps, photographs, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $25.00 paper) Do Glaciers Listen? The title's very question pulls the reader in. By the end, it is clear that the answer lies with the reader, with the environment itself, and with narratives yet untold. Author Julie Cruikshank weaves a complex and engaging work that explores the intersections of history, culture, science, environmental change, theory, and methodology. She introduces the work with narratives dating from the later stages of the Little Ice Age (which lasted roughly between 1550 and 1850) of individual and group relationships to and encounters with the glacial landscape of the St. Elias Range, which traverses the borders of the Yukon, British Columbia, and Alaska. Cruikshank expresses hope that her book will \"contribute to literature about environmental change, local knowledge, and human encounters\" (9) . Yet in its exploration of how narrative not only reflects who we are, but shapes our perspectives and influences our decisions as we relate to the landscapes in which we live, her book does much more. After the introduction, the book is divided into three parts. The first provides geological and historical background as well as glacier narratives from three female Native Alaskan elders, born between 1890 and 1902, with whom the author had worked since the 1970s. Here and throughout the book, Cruikshank propounds theories of oral history, ethnography, and anthropology that inform the stories and continue to influence their interpretation. This academic deliberation makes the book especially attractive to oral history practitioners and to workers in interdisciplinary academic fields concerned with the study of culture, narrative, and social memory, of which folklore is one. Part Two shifts to oral and written narratives about glacier exploration and cross-cultural encounters between indigenous peoples and among indigenous peoples, Europeans, and Americans. Cruikshank presents the evolution of emerging concepts of nature and culture by tracing the compartmentalization dividing nature from culture common among Westerners while simultaneously presenting native peoples' relationships to nature. Cruikshank speculates about transformative moments that have occurred and may continue to resonate in encounters between groups that have differing concepts of their relationship to nature. But in disentangling these moments, the author is careful neither to romanticize nor to polarize the groups. Part Two also examines, in light of current knowledge, John Muir's account of his Alaska expeditions (1879, 1880). Though hailed as a founding father of environmental preservation, Muir is here seen to have romanticized nature and to have been a","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2009-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71111996","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film","authors":"Jacqueline L. Mcgrath","doi":"10.5860/choice.44-6143","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.44-6143","url":null,"abstract":"Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film. By M. Elise Marubbio. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. Pp. xiv + 298, preface, introduction, photographs, illustration, notes, filmography, bibliography, index. $50.00 cloth) This sophisticated and careful analysis of the \"Celluloid Maiden\" character type in film is an important and much-needed extension of earlier scholarly work on images of Native American people in mass media. M. Elise Marubbio exhaustively dissects the representation of Indian women in films, dating from the silent period up to the twenty-first century, and this book is responsibly rooted in the specific racial history of Native American people, as well as in the intersections between theories about race, sex, gender, colonialism, culture, and film. In six persuasive chapters, Marubbio argues that the representation of Native American women and the Celluloid Maiden character type is \"a vehicle through which to explore and express American ambiguity over Native American-white relations and interracial mixing\"(225) and suggests that analyzing these images may help us understand \"how deeply imbedded the Native American woman is in violent and romantic images of nation building,\" (225) unpacking the extent to which even seemingly \"pro-Indian\" films and images perpetuate racial/sexual stereotypes and nationalist narratives. Marubbio's nimble, highly readable prose makes this a well-paced, reader-friendly book - one that will prove to be required reading for both beginning students and long-time scholars of Native American studies, film history, and postcolonial theory. Marubbio defines the Celluloid Maiden as a \"paradoxical\" and complex symbol that manifests somewhat differently during each decade of American film, a cultural marker and stereotype for playing out whatever the nation's cultural tensions are at the time. The Celluloid Maiden can be divided into two sub-categories: the Celluloid Princess, a romantic symbol of innocence, purity, and \"authentic\" Indianness, who (always) ultimately dies tragically, and the Sexualized Maiden, whose exotic sexuality poses some measure of danger to white male protagonists and who also (always) ultimately dies (but \"deserves\" her fate because she proves to be a \"bad\" Indian). The author rapidly but satisfactorily surveys historical and political events that contributed to the containment of Indian people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She engages with mainstream American cultural and social history in parallel with Native American history, arguing that filmed images are fundamentally rooted in the dominant cultural narratives. The ongoing representation of the Celluloid Maiden in film \"reframes nationalist and racist agendas around the Native woman's body\" in a way that \"validates and perpetuates cultural genocide as a by-product of progress and assimilation\" (20). Marubbio points to images ranging from 1908 to 1931 as symbols that prov","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2009-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71116901","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Miracles of the Spirit: Folk, Art, and Stories from Wisconsin","authors":"M. Branch","doi":"10.5860/choice.43-5065","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.43-5065","url":null,"abstract":"Miracles of the Spirit: Folk, Art, and Stories from Wisconsin. By Don Krug and Ann Parker. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Pp. xxvi + 315, acknowledgments, foreword, introduction, photographs, maps, bibliography, index. $65.00 cloth) As a child, I can remember driving with my family past the old witch's house along the shores of Lake Michigan. There were all kinds of stories about her, which my parents always corrected, but to our youthful minds the yard environment that Mary Nohl had created was a playground for the imagination. It was not until I read Miracles of the Spirit: Folk, Art, and Stories from Wisconsin that I knew her name, or even that she had passed away in 2001, but I recognized the photograph of her yard in an instant. Aldiough avoiding the term \"outsider\" in the tide of their book, authors Don Krug and Ann Parker have nonetiieless collected all twentysix of their interviews from Wisconsin artists chosen because of histories that would label them outsider artists by most definitions, seeking \"to include only living artists / makers who were not artistically schooled when they began their art Odysseys\" (xxvi). They eschewed artists who had appropriated the styles of other \"outsider artists\" as well as \"folk artists\" who followed the traditions of their ethnic backgrounds (xx-xxi). The audiors' approach brings up one of the most important issues we must face when examining folk art and outsider art: how should a researcher interact widi the boundaries of genre? The authors seem to play with the notion that outsider artists are a type of folk artists, but do not develop tins theme. At the end of the book, they address larger issues surrounding the concept of \"outsider art,\" and touch on the history of the field (bodi locally and in academia), in three brief theoretical pieces: \"The Life of Ideas\" (253), \"Miracles of the Spirit of Art\" (275), and \"Artistic Individualism in the United States and Europe (289). These theory pieces, though doubdess illuminating for an entry-level reader, do not break any new ground. The strengdi of the book lies in the main body, the interviews of the artists organized into five geographical areas across the state. The book could serve as a sort of travel guide for those interested in visiting outsider artists in Wisconsin; each of the five sections begins with a glowing overview of that part of the state, highlighting some of the folk-art and outsider-art attractions of the region. …","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2008-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71111776","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Witchcraft and Magic: Contemporary North America","authors":"Mary Koegel","doi":"10.5860/choice.43-5596","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.43-5596","url":null,"abstract":"Witchcraft and Magic: Contemporary North America. Edited by Helen A. Berger. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Pp. 207, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95 cloth) Witchcraft and Magic sets out to clear up public misunderstandings about magical religions in America today. Editor Helen A. Berger's introduction briefly mentions areas of misunderstanding - social and political issues, diversity among magical religions, and modern manifestations which the essays in the collection are to address. Berger seeks to convey a clearer image of Neopaganism in this volume, as well as to illustrate similarities and differences among at least a few of the many distinct neopagan practices that have developed and seem to enjoy a growing popularity in North America. The book contains seven essays in addition to Berger's introduction. Though the editor has not explicidy separated these seven into thematic sections, three general divisions emerge as one reads the book: history and development, cultural manifestations of practices in North America, and representations of practices in contemporary mass media. The initial three essays discuss the development of the practice of magical religions in North America. While other essays in the volume include at least a brief historical overview, these three provide a politically and socially solid historical context for the entire work. Michael York, in \"New Age and Magic,\" looks at the New Age Movement in a generic sense, though widi a focus on North America. Helen A. Berger, in \"Witchcraft and Neopaganism,\" examines spiritual paths that have emerged in North America, such as Druidism and Odinism, acknowledging the New Age Movement in England and its influence on North American developments. The diird essay, \"Webs of Women: Feminist Spiritualities,\" by Wendy Griffin, addresses the feminist perspective and its influence upon developments in North America over the past several decades. Perhaps unavoidably these essays, despite their different emphases, become a bit repetitive in places. Michael York's \"Shamanism and Magic\" leads beautifully into the middle theree chapters, which focus on specific manifestations of magical religions and serve to show that magical religions comprise not only witchcraft and Neopaganism, but include distinct stand-alone variations such as Shamanism (as opposed to \"shamanism,\" witheout the capital letter) , Lucumi (a term preferred by contributor Ysamur M. Flores-Pena to the more commonly known Santeria, which she says carries racist connotations), and Satanism. Stuart A. Wright's essay, which analyzes mass-media portrayals of Satanism and public reactions to these portrayals, provides a comfortable segue to the seventh and final essay in the anthology. Tanice G. Foltz's \"The Commodification of Witchcraft\" rounds out the volume with an elaborate description and analysis of representations of witchcraft and magic in contemporary North American media, and assesses th","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2008-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71112068","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}