Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition. By Yvonne P. Chireau. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. ix + 222, acknowledgments, photographs, illustrations, notes, index. $34.95 cloth) A professor of religion, Yvonne P. Chireau has focused her research for Black Magic on the religious life of the African American community, using a strong historical component. Yet folklorists and anthropologists will not be disappointed in the book, as its author has relied in large part upon texts produced by researchers in these fields. In its own right, however, the historical perspective shows that African American religiosity cannot be explained by methodologies ordinarily applied to studies of religion. In particular, the author shows that religious activity for African Americans has historically encompassed both "orthodox" church experiences and liminal experiences in non-institutional contexts. She argues that the academic distinction between magic and religion is of little use in an analysis of the lived religious experience of African Americans, and offers instead an experience-centered historical approach that bridges the worlds of religious ritual and magical practice-"Conjure," or "Rootworking" (in this book the author capitalizes the names of all Afro-diasporic religions and practices)-that shows why, in the case of the black community, the older dichotomy not only fails to explain a worldview of which both religion and magic were expressions, but fails also to see that when it came to African American spirituality, magic and religion were parts of a single complex. Other scholars who have studied African American spirituality have either largely failed to address, or have discounted the connection between, African American magical practice and African American Christianity. Chireau seeks to provide a corrective in chapters such as the provocatively titled "Our Religion and Superstition Was All Mixed Up': Conjure, Christianity, and African American Supernatural Traditions," which addresses this issue in detail and with thoughtfulness. Ambiguity of distinction between official religion and popular magic is at the heart of her contention that these two approaches to spiritual life among African Americans may not be separated. Appropriately, then, the historical interaction (and at times the difficulty in distinguishing) between Conjurer and minister is examined in the first chapters. Chireau's claim is that any attempt by observers to construct such historical distinctions is both artificial and unfaithful to actual understandings within the black community, not merely about these two figures-preacher and Conjurer-but about the very nature of Spirit. She tracks the careers of several Conjurers, showing how they moved, at times seamlessly, between the role of Conjurer and the role of minister, and showing that such individuals and their roles were often viewed within the community of worshipers as equal competit
黑魔法:宗教与非裔美国人的魔法传统。伊冯·p·奇罗著。伯克利:加州大学出版社，2003。Pp. ix + 222，致谢，照片，插图，注释，索引。伊冯·p·奇罗(Yvonne P. Chireau)是一名宗教教授，她在《黑魔法》一书中的研究重点是非洲裔美国人社区的宗教生活，使用了强烈的历史成分。然而民俗学家和人类学家不会对这本书感到失望，因为它的作者在很大程度上依赖于这些领域的研究人员所产生的文本。然而，就其本身而言，历史观点表明，非裔美国人的宗教信仰不能用通常用于宗教研究的方法来解释。作者特别指出，非裔美国人的宗教活动在历史上既包括“正统”教会经历，也包括非机构背景下的阈值经历。她认为，在分析非裔美国人的生活宗教经历时，魔法和宗教之间的学术区别几乎没有用处，相反，她提供了一种以经验为中心的历史方法，将宗教仪式和魔法实践的世界联系起来。或“根工作”(在这本书中，作者把所有散居的非洲人的宗教和实践的名字大写)——这说明了为什么，在黑人社区的情况下，旧的二分法不仅不能解释宗教和魔法都是表达的世界观，而且也没有看到，当涉及到非裔美国人的精神，魔法和宗教是一个复杂的组成部分。其他研究非裔美国人灵性的学者基本上没有提到非裔美国人的魔法实践与非裔美国人基督教之间的联系，或者对这种联系不以为然。Chireau试图在《我们的宗教和迷信完全混淆了:巫术、基督教和非裔美国人的超自然传统》等章节中提供纠正，该书详细而深思熟虑地阐述了这个问题。官方宗教和民间魔术之间的模糊区分是她争论的核心，她认为这两种非裔美国人的精神生活方式是不可分割的。因此，魔术师和牧师之间的历史相互作用(有时难以区分)在第一章中进行了适当的研究。Chireau的主张是，任何观察者试图构建这样的历史区别的尝试都是人为的，而且不忠实于黑人社区的实际理解，不仅仅是关于这两个人物——传教士和魔术师——而是关于精神的本质。她追踪了几位魔术师的职业生涯，展示了他们是如何在魔术师和牧师的角色之间无缝转换的，并展示了这些个人和他们的角色通常在崇拜者群体中被视为精神权威的平等竞争者。…
{"title":"Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition","authors":"E. C. Ballard","doi":"10.5860/choice.41-6470","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.41-6470","url":null,"abstract":"Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition. By Yvonne P. Chireau. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. ix + 222, acknowledgments, photographs, illustrations, notes, index. $34.95 cloth) A professor of religion, Yvonne P. Chireau has focused her research for Black Magic on the religious life of the African American community, using a strong historical component. Yet folklorists and anthropologists will not be disappointed in the book, as its author has relied in large part upon texts produced by researchers in these fields. In its own right, however, the historical perspective shows that African American religiosity cannot be explained by methodologies ordinarily applied to studies of religion. In particular, the author shows that religious activity for African Americans has historically encompassed both \"orthodox\" church experiences and liminal experiences in non-institutional contexts. She argues that the academic distinction between magic and religion is of little use in an analysis of the lived religious experience of African Americans, and offers instead an experience-centered historical approach that bridges the worlds of religious ritual and magical practice-\"Conjure,\" or \"Rootworking\" (in this book the author capitalizes the names of all Afro-diasporic religions and practices)-that shows why, in the case of the black community, the older dichotomy not only fails to explain a worldview of which both religion and magic were expressions, but fails also to see that when it came to African American spirituality, magic and religion were parts of a single complex. Other scholars who have studied African American spirituality have either largely failed to address, or have discounted the connection between, African American magical practice and African American Christianity. Chireau seeks to provide a corrective in chapters such as the provocatively titled \"Our Religion and Superstition Was All Mixed Up': Conjure, Christianity, and African American Supernatural Traditions,\" which addresses this issue in detail and with thoughtfulness. Ambiguity of distinction between official religion and popular magic is at the heart of her contention that these two approaches to spiritual life among African Americans may not be separated. Appropriately, then, the historical interaction (and at times the difficulty in distinguishing) between Conjurer and minister is examined in the first chapters. Chireau's claim is that any attempt by observers to construct such historical distinctions is both artificial and unfaithful to actual understandings within the black community, not merely about these two figures-preacher and Conjurer-but about the very nature of Spirit. She tracks the careers of several Conjurers, showing how they moved, at times seamlessly, between the role of Conjurer and the role of minister, and showing that such individuals and their roles were often viewed within the community of worshipers as equal competit","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2005-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71101493","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}
Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery. By Virginia L. Blum. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. x + 356, acknowledgments, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 cloth, $19.95 paper) Blum has written a provocative and thoughtful exploration of contemporary American interest in cosmetic surgery and its influence on identity. Her analysis is scholarly, but with a personal tone that is neither tangential nor overly confessional. She asserts that three cultural phenomena have profoundly shaped the experience of American life in the twentieth century: celebrity culture, psychoanalysis, and plastic surgery. Blum skillfully weaves these three threads together to develop an innovative picture of how identity is increasingly rooted in two-dimensional images. Her analysis includes examination of selected literature (including Frankenstein, of course) and films in which plastic surgery is key to transformation of identity, as well as interviews with several plastic surgeons and observations of surgeries. Regrettably, she provides little background about the interviews or how candidates were identified and selected for interviews, and no indication of an interview protocol. Blum briefly and knowledgeably rehearses some truisms of contemporary feminist theory-such as the way feminine identity is shaped by the male gaze so that woman becomes both an object and a subject to herself-to develop her thesis. She recognizes that it is widely assumed that people-especially women-are influenced to change their appearance by omnipresent images of impossible-to-achieve beauty. But Blum rejects the claim that surgery is on a continuum with other forms of body modification such as chemical hair straightening or curling, tooth bleaching, and starvation diets; among other criticisms, she notes that these practices have a comparatively low risk of fatality. Blum regards the acceptance of risk of death in exchange for beauty as indicative of the degree to which we identify with the two-dimensional. Blum focuses on the narrowing distinction between the human and the two-dimensional in our cultural definition of beauty and its pursuit. "We are immersed in visual culture to the degree that we become its embodied effects," making the specific content of the image thus less important than the general yearning for identification with the image per se. Cosmetic surgery ultimately transforms the patient's image as much as it transforms her body, as beauty comes to be defined as photogenicity. This identification with media images ultimately puts us at risk for "a lifetime of transformational identifications" because images are inherently changeable, two-dimensional, and technologically constituted. Blum notes, however, that critical demands for "more realistic" media images are ineffectual: "To imagine that there are people who could change the images if they wanted to is to misunderstand the embeddedness of the image producers in a cultural machinery
肉伤:整容手术的文化。维吉尼亚·l·布鲁姆著。伯克利:加州大学出版社，2003。Pp. x + 356，致谢，照片，注释，参考书目，索引。布29.95美元，纸19.95美元)布卢姆对当代美国人对整容手术的兴趣及其对身份的影响进行了发人深省的探索。她的分析是学术性的，但带有一种既不切题也不过度忏悔的个人语气。她断言，有三种文化现象深刻地塑造了二十世纪美国人的生活经历:名人文化、精神分析和整形外科。Blum巧妙地将这三条线索编织在一起，形成了一幅关于身份如何日益植根于二维图像的创新图景。她的分析包括对选定的文献(当然也包括《弗兰肯斯坦》)和将整形手术作为身份转变关键的电影的研究，以及对几位整形外科医生的采访和对手术的观察。遗憾的是，她几乎没有提供有关面试的背景信息，也没有说明候选人是如何被确定和选择参加面试的，也没有说明面试程序。布卢姆简要而睿智地复述了一些当代女权主义理论的老生常谈——比如女性身份是由男性的目光塑造的，因此女性既是自己的客体，也是自己的主体——以发展她的论文。她认识到，人们普遍认为，人们——尤其是女性——是受到无处不在的、不可能达到的美形象的影响而改变自己的外表的。但布卢姆驳斥了手术与其他形式的身体修饰(如化学头发拉直或卷曲、牙齿漂白和饥饿饮食)是一个连续体的说法;在其他批评中，她指出，这些做法的死亡风险相对较低。布卢姆认为，接受死亡的风险以换取美，表明了我们对二维世界的认同程度。布卢姆关注的是，在我们对美的文化定义和追求中，人类和二维空间之间日益缩小的区别。“我们沉浸在视觉文化中，以至于我们成为它的具体化效果”，因此，与对图像本身的认同的普遍渴望相比，图像的具体内容就不那么重要了。整容手术最终改变了病人的形象，就像它改变了她的身体一样，因为美丽被定义为上镜性。这种对媒体图像的认同最终将我们置于“一生的转型认同”的风险之中，因为图像本质上是可变的、二维的，并且是由技术构成的。然而，布卢姆指出，对“更真实”的媒体形象的批评要求是无效的:“想象有人可以改变图像，只要他们想，是误解图像生产者嵌入文化机器，他们不运行，而只是服务。…
{"title":"Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery","authors":"E. Kissling","doi":"10.5860/choice.41-4702","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.41-4702","url":null,"abstract":"Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery. By Virginia L. Blum. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. x + 356, acknowledgments, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 cloth, $19.95 paper) Blum has written a provocative and thoughtful exploration of contemporary American interest in cosmetic surgery and its influence on identity. Her analysis is scholarly, but with a personal tone that is neither tangential nor overly confessional. She asserts that three cultural phenomena have profoundly shaped the experience of American life in the twentieth century: celebrity culture, psychoanalysis, and plastic surgery. Blum skillfully weaves these three threads together to develop an innovative picture of how identity is increasingly rooted in two-dimensional images. Her analysis includes examination of selected literature (including Frankenstein, of course) and films in which plastic surgery is key to transformation of identity, as well as interviews with several plastic surgeons and observations of surgeries. Regrettably, she provides little background about the interviews or how candidates were identified and selected for interviews, and no indication of an interview protocol. Blum briefly and knowledgeably rehearses some truisms of contemporary feminist theory-such as the way feminine identity is shaped by the male gaze so that woman becomes both an object and a subject to herself-to develop her thesis. She recognizes that it is widely assumed that people-especially women-are influenced to change their appearance by omnipresent images of impossible-to-achieve beauty. But Blum rejects the claim that surgery is on a continuum with other forms of body modification such as chemical hair straightening or curling, tooth bleaching, and starvation diets; among other criticisms, she notes that these practices have a comparatively low risk of fatality. Blum regards the acceptance of risk of death in exchange for beauty as indicative of the degree to which we identify with the two-dimensional. Blum focuses on the narrowing distinction between the human and the two-dimensional in our cultural definition of beauty and its pursuit. \"We are immersed in visual culture to the degree that we become its embodied effects,\" making the specific content of the image thus less important than the general yearning for identification with the image per se. Cosmetic surgery ultimately transforms the patient's image as much as it transforms her body, as beauty comes to be defined as photogenicity. This identification with media images ultimately puts us at risk for \"a lifetime of transformational identifications\" because images are inherently changeable, two-dimensional, and technologically constituted. Blum notes, however, that critical demands for \"more realistic\" media images are ineffectual: \"To imagine that there are people who could change the images if they wanted to is to misunderstand the embeddedness of the image producers in a cultural machinery","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2005-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71100310","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}
Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote. By Janet Theophano. (New York: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. xviii +362, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 cloth, $18.95 paper) In Eat My Words, Janet Theophano offers theory and technique for reading cookbooks as primary documents, going well beyond obvious texts such as marginalia in individual copies and taking into account less-obvious texts, such as mass-produced works. She includes cookbooks that are both single-authored-Hopestill Brett's seventeenth-century housekeeping book or Buwei Yang Chao's 1945 volume, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese-and collectively authored, for example the 1972 Rochester Hadassah Cookbook. After providing theory and instruction on reading between the lines, as it were, Theophano demonstrates the technique on actual cookbooks, examining these as though they were personal journals. She shows that a cookbook, far more than simply a guide to roasting chicken or baking pound cake, is a primer of the woman who wrote it: we become acquainted with the woman as we experience her writings. We become aware that learning how to make a particular dish is not nearly so interesting as constructing the details of these cookbook writers' lives and the cultures that inform them, for their books are "maps of the social and cultural worlds they inhabit" (13). Each of the seven chapters introduces the reader to a variety of cookbook authors, with a documentary description of their lives and an exhaustive analysis of each woman's cookbook. Theophano looks at the cookbooks as a woman's way of identifying and defining herself in her culture: "As icons of cultural identity, a culture's cuisine may be used to mark the complex negotiations groups and individuals undertake in a new land" (50). In this way the past and the present merge as foodways are adapted and adopted depending on place of origin and current home region, the woman's willingness and ability to likewise adapt and adopt, and the availability of various ingredients. In chapter one, "Cookbooks as Communities," we are introduced to Hopestill Brett and her 1678 receipt book. Beyond collecting recipes, Brett used the book as a record of her household inventory and as a repository for home cures. Through this book we learn of Brett's status in society and her views on that status, as well as on her community, religion, and culinary and housekeeping abilities. In this chapter Theophano recounts also the story of Jane Janviers, whose mid-nineteenth-century collection includes the recipes of family, friends, and neighbors-this known because of the marginalia, as in, "Eliza melts the butter in the Molasses, then beats the eggs and milk in last," and "Mrs. Barre's Recipe for Citron Melon . …
{"title":"Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote","authors":"R. Weaver","doi":"10.5860/choice.40-1707","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.40-1707","url":null,"abstract":"Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote. By Janet Theophano. (New York: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. xviii +362, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 cloth, $18.95 paper) In Eat My Words, Janet Theophano offers theory and technique for reading cookbooks as primary documents, going well beyond obvious texts such as marginalia in individual copies and taking into account less-obvious texts, such as mass-produced works. She includes cookbooks that are both single-authored-Hopestill Brett's seventeenth-century housekeeping book or Buwei Yang Chao's 1945 volume, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese-and collectively authored, for example the 1972 Rochester Hadassah Cookbook. After providing theory and instruction on reading between the lines, as it were, Theophano demonstrates the technique on actual cookbooks, examining these as though they were personal journals. She shows that a cookbook, far more than simply a guide to roasting chicken or baking pound cake, is a primer of the woman who wrote it: we become acquainted with the woman as we experience her writings. We become aware that learning how to make a particular dish is not nearly so interesting as constructing the details of these cookbook writers' lives and the cultures that inform them, for their books are \"maps of the social and cultural worlds they inhabit\" (13). Each of the seven chapters introduces the reader to a variety of cookbook authors, with a documentary description of their lives and an exhaustive analysis of each woman's cookbook. Theophano looks at the cookbooks as a woman's way of identifying and defining herself in her culture: \"As icons of cultural identity, a culture's cuisine may be used to mark the complex negotiations groups and individuals undertake in a new land\" (50). In this way the past and the present merge as foodways are adapted and adopted depending on place of origin and current home region, the woman's willingness and ability to likewise adapt and adopt, and the availability of various ingredients. In chapter one, \"Cookbooks as Communities,\" we are introduced to Hopestill Brett and her 1678 receipt book. Beyond collecting recipes, Brett used the book as a record of her household inventory and as a repository for home cures. Through this book we learn of Brett's status in society and her views on that status, as well as on her community, religion, and culinary and housekeeping abilities. In this chapter Theophano recounts also the story of Jane Janviers, whose mid-nineteenth-century collection includes the recipes of family, friends, and neighbors-this known because of the marginalia, as in, \"Eliza melts the butter in the Molasses, then beats the eggs and milk in last,\" and \"Mrs. Barre's Recipe for Citron Melon . …","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2004-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71092186","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}
Rap Music and Street Consciousness. By Cheryl Keyes. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Pp. xxv + 303, preface, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, musical notation, glossary, notes, discography, bibliography, indices. $34.95 cloth) As a reader whose commitment to the study of folklore is rooted in a fascination with African American oral folk poetry-from toasts to rap to hip hop-I have been alert to Cheryl Keyes' previous writings on this subject (1993, 1996, 2000). Here, in her first full-length treatment of rap, published as part of the distinguished Music in American Life series of the University of Illinois Press, Keyes succeeds in comprehensively approaching rap "from the perspectives of ethnomusicology, folklore, and cultural studies" (ix). The book covers rap from its beginnings until 2000. Written for a general audience, Rap Music and Street Consciousness details the geographic, cultural, and economic settings from which this music emerged, in addition to providing a thorough analysis of the music itself, and it is a pleasure to read. The author situates herself-student outsider, musician not in the industry, African American, woman-and discusses the problematics of these multiple identities in her role as participant-observer. Of many subjects covered in this wideranging work, especially noteworthy are the origins and present social location of rap, the current public controversy over rap language and culture, and the role of women in rap. Keyes' historical overview begins, of course, in Africa. African poetic speech and performance (including antecedents of jive) are shown to have provided an artistic and cultural matrix for formal and stylistic developments in America black performance. Bringing the subject into the present, the author covers new versions of the rap genre that have developed over the past decade and generally entwines recent musical and social developments in an interesting and relevant way. Gang culture, a major context for rap performance, grew out of poverty worsened by the flight of wealth to the suburbs and resultant inner-city decay. The forced migration and involuntary isolation of African American community segments amid gentrification caused by the construction of superhighways such as the Cross Bronx Expressway in New York are further example of social dislocation whose effects are expressed in rap. Generalized apprehension about the oppressor, often expressed in widespread conspiracy rumors-for instance, that African Americans have been the target of intentional spreading of AIDS and crack-cocaine addiction (Turner 1993)-is also expressed in rap poetry and music. In the face of oppressive conditions, however, many rappers have become mainstream, achieving a high degree of commercial success, some artists starting their own labels and becoming moguls. Rap music videos, another popular format, display visually as well as musically the cultural messaging so intrinsic to rap, though the entry
{"title":"Rap Music and Street Consciousness","authors":"Jordan Rich","doi":"10.5860/choice.40-5128","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.40-5128","url":null,"abstract":"Rap Music and Street Consciousness. By Cheryl Keyes. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Pp. xxv + 303, preface, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, musical notation, glossary, notes, discography, bibliography, indices. $34.95 cloth) As a reader whose commitment to the study of folklore is rooted in a fascination with African American oral folk poetry-from toasts to rap to hip hop-I have been alert to Cheryl Keyes' previous writings on this subject (1993, 1996, 2000). Here, in her first full-length treatment of rap, published as part of the distinguished Music in American Life series of the University of Illinois Press, Keyes succeeds in comprehensively approaching rap \"from the perspectives of ethnomusicology, folklore, and cultural studies\" (ix). The book covers rap from its beginnings until 2000. Written for a general audience, Rap Music and Street Consciousness details the geographic, cultural, and economic settings from which this music emerged, in addition to providing a thorough analysis of the music itself, and it is a pleasure to read. The author situates herself-student outsider, musician not in the industry, African American, woman-and discusses the problematics of these multiple identities in her role as participant-observer. Of many subjects covered in this wideranging work, especially noteworthy are the origins and present social location of rap, the current public controversy over rap language and culture, and the role of women in rap. Keyes' historical overview begins, of course, in Africa. African poetic speech and performance (including antecedents of jive) are shown to have provided an artistic and cultural matrix for formal and stylistic developments in America black performance. Bringing the subject into the present, the author covers new versions of the rap genre that have developed over the past decade and generally entwines recent musical and social developments in an interesting and relevant way. Gang culture, a major context for rap performance, grew out of poverty worsened by the flight of wealth to the suburbs and resultant inner-city decay. The forced migration and involuntary isolation of African American community segments amid gentrification caused by the construction of superhighways such as the Cross Bronx Expressway in New York are further example of social dislocation whose effects are expressed in rap. Generalized apprehension about the oppressor, often expressed in widespread conspiracy rumors-for instance, that African Americans have been the target of intentional spreading of AIDS and crack-cocaine addiction (Turner 1993)-is also expressed in rap poetry and music. In the face of oppressive conditions, however, many rappers have become mainstream, achieving a high degree of commercial success, some artists starting their own labels and becoming moguls. Rap music videos, another popular format, display visually as well as musically the cultural messaging so intrinsic to rap, though the entry ","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2004-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71095529","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}
"Deep Play": John Gay and the Invention of Modernity. By Dianne Dugaw. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001. Pp. 322, acknowledgments, prologue-epilogue, illustrations, musical notation, charts, notes, bibliography, index. $48.50 cloth) Once upon a time, literature professors really knew what college students really did not know. They knew how to read literature in Latin and Greek. The study of literature written in the vernacular-English-gained a toehold in university curricula only at the end of the nineteenth century. But by the mid-twentieth century the designers of the English canon had all but banished both Classics and oral literature, and subsequently introduced a panoply of critical methodologies that reinvented the wheel. Bringing it all back home, fortunately, is Dianne Dugaw's "Deep Play": John Gay and the Invention of Modernity. In jargon-free language, Dugaw applies and expands folklore methodology in order to analyze the work of a dead white British male author. Bertrand Bronson likewise brought to eighteenth-century literature a wide-ranging expertise in matters of folklore, music, visual art, social science, and indeed Classics (1968), but Bronson published his insights only in discrete essays, where Dugaw has here arranged hers sequentially into a unified whole that sets the standard for future scholarship at this interstice of academic disciplines. Dugaw's prologue establishes the ramifications of the phrase deep play. Clifford Geertz analyzes deep play in reference to Balinese cockfighting (1973), with no apparent awareness that highwayman Macheath uses the same phrase to summon thieves to high-stakes gambling. Throughout Dugaw's book, each chapter focuses on one work or a few related works by John Gay, in each case establishing methodology applicable beyond Gay and beyond the eighteenth century. Dugaw structures the book not chronologically but rather in an order that both engages specialists in Gay's milieu and also welcomes readers who, say, merely know Beggar's Opera and would like to know more. Chapter one compares Gay's breakthrough ballad opera to three twentieth-century reworkings including, of course, the one by Bertolt Brecht inevitably recalled as The Mack the Knife Play, demonstrating that comparative analysis in terms of texture, text, and context, so basic to folklore methodology, lies behind "reception aesthetics" familiar to contemporary literary scholars (Jauss 1982, Holub 1984). In chapter two, Dugaw provides nonspecialists with Gay's full biography, tracing its metamorphosis across two centuries in words and also in visual portraits of the author, especially the atypical one in which Gay appears whimsically, boyishly, coyly . . . well, gay. Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets (1779-1781) gave wide circulation to this visual image and to a biography that trivialized Gay's accomplishments. Chapter three brings readers to folklore genres: Gay's references to proverbs, games, customs, riddles, beliefs, an
{"title":"\"Deep Play\": John Gay and the Invention of Modernity","authors":"B. Bowden","doi":"10.5860/choice.38-6026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.38-6026","url":null,"abstract":"\"Deep Play\": John Gay and the Invention of Modernity. By Dianne Dugaw. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001. Pp. 322, acknowledgments, prologue-epilogue, illustrations, musical notation, charts, notes, bibliography, index. $48.50 cloth) Once upon a time, literature professors really knew what college students really did not know. They knew how to read literature in Latin and Greek. The study of literature written in the vernacular-English-gained a toehold in university curricula only at the end of the nineteenth century. But by the mid-twentieth century the designers of the English canon had all but banished both Classics and oral literature, and subsequently introduced a panoply of critical methodologies that reinvented the wheel. Bringing it all back home, fortunately, is Dianne Dugaw's \"Deep Play\": John Gay and the Invention of Modernity. In jargon-free language, Dugaw applies and expands folklore methodology in order to analyze the work of a dead white British male author. Bertrand Bronson likewise brought to eighteenth-century literature a wide-ranging expertise in matters of folklore, music, visual art, social science, and indeed Classics (1968), but Bronson published his insights only in discrete essays, where Dugaw has here arranged hers sequentially into a unified whole that sets the standard for future scholarship at this interstice of academic disciplines. Dugaw's prologue establishes the ramifications of the phrase deep play. Clifford Geertz analyzes deep play in reference to Balinese cockfighting (1973), with no apparent awareness that highwayman Macheath uses the same phrase to summon thieves to high-stakes gambling. Throughout Dugaw's book, each chapter focuses on one work or a few related works by John Gay, in each case establishing methodology applicable beyond Gay and beyond the eighteenth century. Dugaw structures the book not chronologically but rather in an order that both engages specialists in Gay's milieu and also welcomes readers who, say, merely know Beggar's Opera and would like to know more. Chapter one compares Gay's breakthrough ballad opera to three twentieth-century reworkings including, of course, the one by Bertolt Brecht inevitably recalled as The Mack the Knife Play, demonstrating that comparative analysis in terms of texture, text, and context, so basic to folklore methodology, lies behind \"reception aesthetics\" familiar to contemporary literary scholars (Jauss 1982, Holub 1984). In chapter two, Dugaw provides nonspecialists with Gay's full biography, tracing its metamorphosis across two centuries in words and also in visual portraits of the author, especially the atypical one in which Gay appears whimsically, boyishly, coyly . . . well, gay. Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets (1779-1781) gave wide circulation to this visual image and to a biography that trivialized Gay's accomplishments. Chapter three brings readers to folklore genres: Gay's references to proverbs, games, customs, riddles, beliefs, an","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2004-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71086700","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}
Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations. By Sharla M. Fett. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 304, preface, acknowledgments, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper) Opening her prize-winning cultural history of healing within the power structures of slavery, Sharla Fett invokes the United States Public Health Service study of 1932-1972 under which hundreds of Alabama black men and their families were allowed to suffer untreated syphilis, purportedly for medical research. The Tuskegee Experiment was not merely unconscionable behavior in the name of bad science: Fett demonstrates that the Public Health Service's malfeasance was historically founded in establishment medical philosophy and practice regarding enslaved Africans. Extending Todd Savitt's groundbreaking work in the study of medicine and slavery (1978), Fett shows that not only were slaves doctored with minimum expense and effort, but they were routinely subjected to medical experimentation meant to affirm a racial concept of differential health needs between whites and enslaved blacks. Yet "enslaved communities nurtured a rich health culture . . . , a constellation of ideas and practices related to well-being, illness, healing, and death, that worked to counter the onslaught of daily medical abuse and racist scientific theories" (2) that were vital to slavery. Fett's purview-plantation settings in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia-provide a multi-generational depth of engagement between African American and "Anglo-American systems of medicines" within slavery (8). Fett discusses the differential health belief systems of slaveholders and slaves, grounding each in respective worldviews, amply illustrated from slaveholders' diaries and letters, physicians' handbooks and journals, and (folklorists will note) records of the spoken word and life experiences documented in slave narratives and WPA collections. The slaveholder's notion of soundness defined the health and cash value of enslaved Africans and their descendant generations and restricted attentions to slaves' medical needs. By contrast, the philosophies and cultural memories of healing in relational contexts that force-migrated with Africans represented powerful visions of physical and spiritual health from different regions of the African continent. Enslaved communities operated with knowledge that collective relationships influenced each individual's well being. "The midwife's touch, the conjurer's roots, and the herb doctor's pungent teas addressed the sufferer's pain as well as her or his standing within an extensive web of relationships" (36). Plant materials for teas, poultices, inhalants, or food were the mainstay of unofficial medicine in the antebellum Atlantic region. Cross-cultural networks for exchange of such herbal medicines were uncharacteristically free from class strictures among Native Americans, enslaved
有效疗法:南方奴隶种植园的治疗、健康和力量。作者:Sharla M. Fett教堂山:北卡罗来纳大学出版社，2002年。第xii + 304页，序言，致谢，插图，注释，参考书目，索引。(布45.00美元，纸19.95美元)Sharla Fett在她获奖的关于在奴隶制的权力结构中治愈的文化史中，引用了1932-1972年美国公共卫生服务的研究，在该研究中，数百名阿拉巴马州黑人及其家人被允许患有未经治疗的梅毒，据称是为了医学研究。塔斯基吉实验不仅仅是以伪科学的名义进行的不道德行为:费特证明了公共卫生服务的渎职行为在历史上是建立在关于被奴役的非洲人的现有医学哲学和实践之上的。费特延续了托德·萨维特(Todd Savitt)在医学和奴隶制研究方面的开创性工作(1978年)，他表明，奴隶不仅以最低的费用和努力接受治疗，而且他们经常接受医学实验，旨在确认白人和被奴役的黑人之间存在不同健康需求的种族概念。然而，“被奴役的社区孕育了丰富的健康文化……这是一系列与幸福、疾病、治疗和死亡有关的思想和实践，旨在对抗日常医疗滥用和种族主义科学理论的冲击，这些理论对奴隶制至关重要。费特的研究范围——弗吉尼亚、北卡罗来纳、南卡罗来纳和乔治亚州的种植园环境——提供了非裔美国人和奴隶制下的“英美医学体系”之间几代人的深度接触(8)。费特讨论了奴隶主和奴隶不同的健康信仰体系，以各自的世界观为基础，从奴隶主的日记和信件、医生的手册和期刊中充分说明了这一点。以及(民俗学家会注意到的)奴隶叙述和WPA收藏中记录的口头语言和生活经历的记录。奴隶主的健康观念定义了被奴役的非洲人及其后代的健康和现金价值，并限制了对奴隶医疗需求的关注。相比之下，与非洲人一起被迫迁移的关系背景下的治疗哲学和文化记忆代表了来自非洲大陆不同地区的身体和精神健康的强大愿景。被奴役的社区知道集体关系会影响每个人的福祉。“助产士的触摸，魔术师的根，草药医生的辛辣茶，解决了患者的痛苦，以及她或他在一个广泛的关系网络中的地位”(36)。茶、药膏、吸入剂或食物的植物材料是南北战争前大西洋地区非官方药物的主要成分。在印第安人、被奴役的非裔美国人和盎格鲁-美洲种植园家庭之间，交换这种草药的跨文化网络不受阶级限制，这是不同寻常的。草药治疗是奴隶主和被奴役的黑人寻求共同目标的交汇点，至少看起来是这样。费特指出，被奴役的治疗师在一个以非洲为基础的药物学中工作，在这个药物学中，神圣和世俗被融合在一个完全充满神圣意义的世界里。在这个世界里，精神力量既具有伤害能力，也具有治疗能力，表现出“非裔美国人巫术文化”的双重特征(39)，在这种文化中，草药医生和他们的知识受到高度重视，同时也受到奴隶主的怀疑。…
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Out in Theory: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Anthropology. Edited by Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Pp. χ + 329, foreword, acknowledgments, introduction, notes, index. $44.95 cloth, $19.95 paper) As a gay folklorist, I was eager to review Out in Theory because of my knowledge of gay and lesbian worlds, not as a formal researcher but as a participant. I have long been fascinated by culturally patterned communicative behavior in gay settings-from nonverbal coding in cruising areas to verbal dueling at dinner parties-and I was curious to explore the theoretical perspectives that anthropologists would bring to bear in scrutinizing the various dimensions of gay and lesbian experience. It was a fortunate impulse. Out in Theory is rich in provocative thinking, not only about homosexual cultures and alternative gender identities, but ultimately about the study of sexuality and gender themselves. Out in Theory contains eleven essays which variously survey the course of twentieth-century research on sexual minorities, explore competing models for the study of alternative sexualities, probe the implications of the study of sexuality and gender in the context of such anthropological subfields as linguistics and archaeology, and chart the challenges of future research. The volume is a companion to Out in the Field: Reflections of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists (1996), also edited by Lewin and Leap. Out in Theory takes the work a step farther, presenting gay and lesbian anthropology as an emerging field of specialization, identifying its scope and subject matter and laying out its defining theoretical issues. I use the phrase "gay and lesbian" advisedly because, as the writers in this volume assert, the explanatory power of these terms is linked to a particular place, moment, and politically-located idea that elucidates some experiences and obscures others. A central theme across the essays is in fact the need to scrutinize such fundamental organizing concepts as male and female, heterosexual and homosexual, gay and lesbian, and even such seemingly unproblematic categories as gender and sex. This level of scrutiny is necessary to ensure that anthropologists' analytical tools not distort or erase the range of experiences that they endeavor to see clearly. Euro-American culture presumes the binary opposition of biologically determined male and female bodies and an exact correspondence between sex and gender. Because this mapping of sex and gender is believed to reflect an order that is "natural" and therefore absolute, everything outside the model is marked deviant. As our writers make clear, however, this assumption is a cultural artifact without currency everywhere in the world and without consistency across time even in the Euro-American sphere. …
在理论上:同性恋人类学的出现。Ellen Lewin和William L. Leap编辑。厄巴纳:伊利诺伊大学出版社，2002。Pp. χ + 329，前言，致谢，引言，注释，索引。布料44.95美元，纸19.95美元)作为一名同性恋民俗学家，我渴望在《出柜理论》中发表评论，因为我对同性恋世界的了解，不是作为正式的研究者，而是作为参与者。长期以来，我一直对同性恋环境中文化模式的交流行为着迷——从巡航区域的非语言编码到晚宴上的语言决斗——我很好奇地探索人类学家在仔细研究男女同性恋经历的各个方面时所带来的理论视角。这是一种幸运的冲动。《出理论》充满了挑衅性的思考，不仅涉及同性恋文化和另类性别认同，而且最终涉及对性和性别本身的研究。《理论》包含了11篇文章，这些文章以不同的方式调查了20世纪对性少数群体的研究过程，探索了另类性行为研究的竞争模式，探讨了在语言学和考古学等人类学分支领域中性和性别研究的含义，并描绘了未来研究的挑战。该卷是一个同伴在外地:女同性恋和男同性恋人类学家的反思(1996年)，也由Lewin和Leap编辑。在《理论》一书中，我们又向前迈进了一步，将男女同性恋人类学作为一个新兴的专业领域呈现出来，确定了它的范围和主题，并列出了它的定义性理论问题。我特意使用“男同性恋和女同性恋”这个词，因为正如本书作者所断言的那样，这些术语的解释力与特定的地点、时刻和政治定位的观念有关，这些观念阐明了一些经历，掩盖了另一些经历。事实上，这些文章的一个中心主题是，有必要仔细审视男性和女性、异性恋和同性恋、同性恋和女同性恋等基本的组织概念，甚至是性别和性等看似没有问题的类别。这种程度的审视是必要的，以确保人类学家的分析工具不会扭曲或抹去他们努力清楚地看到的经验范围。欧美文化假定生理上决定男性和女性身体的二元对立，以及性别和性别之间的精确对应。因为性别和社会性别的映射被认为反映了一种“自然”的秩序，因此是绝对的，模型之外的一切都被标记为偏差。然而，正如我们的作者明确指出的那样，这种假设是一种文化产物，在世界各地都没有流通，即使在欧美范围内也没有一致性。…
{"title":"Out in Theory: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Anthropology","authors":"Gregory Sharrow","doi":"10.5860/choice.40-4699","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.40-4699","url":null,"abstract":"Out in Theory: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Anthropology. Edited by Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Pp. χ + 329, foreword, acknowledgments, introduction, notes, index. $44.95 cloth, $19.95 paper) As a gay folklorist, I was eager to review Out in Theory because of my knowledge of gay and lesbian worlds, not as a formal researcher but as a participant. I have long been fascinated by culturally patterned communicative behavior in gay settings-from nonverbal coding in cruising areas to verbal dueling at dinner parties-and I was curious to explore the theoretical perspectives that anthropologists would bring to bear in scrutinizing the various dimensions of gay and lesbian experience. It was a fortunate impulse. Out in Theory is rich in provocative thinking, not only about homosexual cultures and alternative gender identities, but ultimately about the study of sexuality and gender themselves. Out in Theory contains eleven essays which variously survey the course of twentieth-century research on sexual minorities, explore competing models for the study of alternative sexualities, probe the implications of the study of sexuality and gender in the context of such anthropological subfields as linguistics and archaeology, and chart the challenges of future research. The volume is a companion to Out in the Field: Reflections of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists (1996), also edited by Lewin and Leap. Out in Theory takes the work a step farther, presenting gay and lesbian anthropology as an emerging field of specialization, identifying its scope and subject matter and laying out its defining theoretical issues. I use the phrase \"gay and lesbian\" advisedly because, as the writers in this volume assert, the explanatory power of these terms is linked to a particular place, moment, and politically-located idea that elucidates some experiences and obscures others. A central theme across the essays is in fact the need to scrutinize such fundamental organizing concepts as male and female, heterosexual and homosexual, gay and lesbian, and even such seemingly unproblematic categories as gender and sex. This level of scrutiny is necessary to ensure that anthropologists' analytical tools not distort or erase the range of experiences that they endeavor to see clearly. Euro-American culture presumes the binary opposition of biologically determined male and female bodies and an exact correspondence between sex and gender. Because this mapping of sex and gender is believed to reflect an order that is \"natural\" and therefore absolute, everything outside the model is marked deviant. As our writers make clear, however, this assumption is a cultural artifact without currency everywhere in the world and without consistency across time even in the Euro-American sphere. …","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2004-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71094772","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}
Place, Language, and Identity in Afro-Costa Rican Literature. By Dorothy E. Mosby. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. Pp. xiii + 248, preface, acknowledgments, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 cloth) In her preface to Place, Language, and Identity in Afro-Costa Rican Literature, Dorothy E. Mosby notes that the Creole saying, "me navel-string bury dere," articulates an intersection of place, identity, and belonging. Persons of African descent have not been in Costa Rica from the time of earliest European settlement but were brought in as workers relatively recently, at the turn of the twentieth century. Afro-Costa Rican creative writers, whom Mosby identifies as first, second, third, and fourth generation, demonstrate through their literary works how the location of "home, "nation," and "belonging" has evolved according to the generation to which particular writers belong. Those born early, close to the turn of the twentieth century, located home firmly within a West IndianAnglophone construct and tended to have a more intimate connection with Jamaica, Barbados or Trinidad than with Costa Rica, even if only through parents who were born in the islands. The creative writings of these earliest residents of African descent in Costa Rica identify their culture as West Indian, their national affiliation with Britain as former subjects, and their language as English. They tended to consider their sojourn in Costa Rica as temporary, believing they would make money and return to their islands of origin. Instead, economic circumstances deriving from the advancements of capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, along with the caste system, relegated Caribbean workers of African descent to the bottom of the economic ladder in Costa Rica. Political and social circumstances, then, combined with thwarted opportunities, prevented the early migrant laborers from returning home and negated their desire to "do better." Later AfroCosta Rican creative writers evinced a sense of longing and of loss in their writing through evocations both of the injustices meted out to them as Blacks denied formal legal status until the civil war in Costa Rica in 1948 and of the racial prejudice Blacks have experienced there from the beginning and on into the twenty-first century. Mosby deftly analyzes Afro-Costa Rican literature published between 1938 and 1999. The introduction gives a thorough analysis of the historical background, provides a review of relevant literature, and describes her use of scholarship by Edward Said, Ian Smart, Donald Gordon and others to provide a framework for examining how language, the fluidity of identity with regard to place and displacement, and the notion of diaspora have become central to the fiction and poetry of Costa Rican writers of African descent. …
非裔哥斯达黎加文学中的地域、语言和身份。多萝西·e·莫斯比著。(哥伦比亚:密苏里大学出版社，2003。第xiii + 248页，序言、致谢、引言、注释、参考书目、索引。多萝西·e·莫斯比(Dorothy E. Mosby)在《非裔哥斯达黎加文学中的地方、语言和身份》一书的序言中指出，克里奥尔语中的一句谚语“me navell -string bury dere”清楚地表达了地方、身份和归属的交集。从最早的欧洲人定居开始，非洲人后裔就没有来到哥斯达黎加，而是在相对较近的时候，在二十世纪之交，作为工人被带进来的。莫斯比将非裔哥斯达黎加创作作家划分为第一代、第二代、第三代和第四代，他们通过文学作品展示了“家”、“国家”和“归属”的位置是如何根据特定作家所属的一代而演变的。那些出生较早、接近20世纪之交的人，他们的家牢牢地位于西印度英语区，与牙买加、巴巴多斯或特立尼达的联系往往比与哥斯达黎加的联系更密切，即使他们的父母出生在这些岛屿上。哥斯达黎加这些最早的非洲裔居民的创造性著作表明，他们的文化是西印度文化，他们作为前臣民与英国的民族关系，他们的语言是英语。他们倾向于认为他们在哥斯达黎加的逗留是暂时的，相信他们会赚到钱，然后回到他们的原籍岛屿。相反，19世纪末和20世纪初资本主义的发展所带来的经济环境，加上种姓制度，使非洲裔加勒比工人在哥斯达黎加的经济阶梯上处于最底层。然后，政治和社会环境，加上受挫的机会，阻止了早期农民工返回家园，并打消了他们“做得更好”的愿望。后来，非裔哥斯达黎加创作作家在他们的作品中表现出一种渴望和失落感，他们回忆起1948年哥斯达黎加内战前黑人被剥夺正式法律地位所遭受的不公正待遇，以及黑人从一开始一直到21世纪所遭受的种族偏见。莫斯比巧妙地分析了1938年至1999年间出版的非裔哥斯达黎加文学。引言对历史背景进行了全面的分析，对相关文献进行了回顾，并描述了她对爱德华·赛义德、伊恩·斯玛特、唐纳德·戈登等人的学术研究的运用，为研究语言、关于地点和流离失所的身份流动性以及散居的概念如何成为哥斯达黎加非洲裔作家小说和诗歌的核心提供了一个框架。…
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Storytelling and singing continue to be a vital part of community life for Native peoples today. "Voices from Four Directions" gathers stories and songs from thirty-one Native groups in North America - including the Inupiaqs in the frigid North, the Lushootseeds along the forested coastline of the far West, the Catawbas in the humid South, and the Maliseets of the rugged woods of the East. Vivid stories of cosmological origins and transformation, historical events remembered and retold, as well as legendary fables can be found in these pages. Well-known Trickster figures like Raven, Rabbit, and Coyote figure prominently in several tales as do heroes of local fame, such as Tom Laporte of the Maliseets. The stories and songs entertain, instruct, and recall rich legacies as well as obligations. Many are retellings and reinventions of classic narratives, while others are more recent creations. Award-winning poet and critic Brian Swann has gathered some of the richest and most diverse literatures of Native North America and provides an introduction to the volume. In addition, each story is introduced and newly translated. Brian Swann is on the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. His many works include "Coming to Light: Contemporary Translations of the Native Literatures of North America".
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American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 1927-1957. By Richard A. Reuss with JoArme C. Reuss. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000. Pp. xviii + 297, foreword, preface, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $55.00 cloth); Labor's Troubadour. By Joe Glazer. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, [2001] 2002. Pp. xvii + 299, preface, acknowledgments, photographs, discography, index. $34.95 cloth, $18.95 paper); Tin Men. By Archie Green. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Pp. xv + 203, acknowledgments, prologue, illustrations, photographs, appendix, bibliography, index. $29.95 cloth) These three fine books deal with laborlore, a vast, esoteric, and mostly neglected body of art created in the context of the blue-collar workplace. The three operate in different ways to recontextualize particular expressions of laborlore in the social issues of the workplace that gave them form. Richard Reuss's book details tensions between the international Communist movement of the 1930s and 1940s and the often unpredictable "folksong" community that grew up around it in America. Joe Glazer picks up the story by discussing his own career as an entertainer for labor and liberal movements from the early 1950s into the 1990s. Archie Green's task is more difficult, for while the general message of labor songs can be understood by outsiders, the folk art of sheet metal communicates in detail only to other craftsmen who can appreciate virtuoso fabrication techniques. All three books offer the folklorist ways to move past a purely aesthetic appreciation of art in order to try to comprehend the social worlds behind the art. Of the three, American Folk Music and Left Wing Politics is the most conventional work of scholarship and will be of most immediate use to folklorists. A revision and updating of the late Richard A. Reuss's dissertation, it addresses relations between the American Communist Party of the 1930s and 1940s and the central figures of the folk revival movement, a wide range of Anglo- and African-American artists that included (among others) Alan Lomax, Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Aunt Molly Jackson, and Lead Belly. These artists have been amply treated elsewhere, but the value of Reuss's account is in its extensive direct interviews with principals, along with previously unpublished letters and print ephemera. Reuss does not whitewash the Communist associations and activities of what he terms "the Lomax performers"-nor is there any need to, for the leaders of the American Communist Party did not understand what Lomax's circle was trying to do with vernacular music and so missed the opportunity to use their creations as propaganda. In their turn, the revivalists "had little or no consciousness of theoretical debates on culture in the international communist movement" (271). Valuing the clever and tuneful over the orthodox, they transcended arcane political discussion. This intellectual disconnect protected the Lomax p
{"title":"American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 1927-1957","authors":"B. Ellis","doi":"10.5860/choice.39-0224","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.39-0224","url":null,"abstract":"American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 1927-1957. By Richard A. Reuss with JoArme C. Reuss. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000. Pp. xviii + 297, foreword, preface, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $55.00 cloth); Labor's Troubadour. By Joe Glazer. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, [2001] 2002. Pp. xvii + 299, preface, acknowledgments, photographs, discography, index. $34.95 cloth, $18.95 paper); Tin Men. By Archie Green. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Pp. xv + 203, acknowledgments, prologue, illustrations, photographs, appendix, bibliography, index. $29.95 cloth) These three fine books deal with laborlore, a vast, esoteric, and mostly neglected body of art created in the context of the blue-collar workplace. The three operate in different ways to recontextualize particular expressions of laborlore in the social issues of the workplace that gave them form. Richard Reuss's book details tensions between the international Communist movement of the 1930s and 1940s and the often unpredictable \"folksong\" community that grew up around it in America. Joe Glazer picks up the story by discussing his own career as an entertainer for labor and liberal movements from the early 1950s into the 1990s. Archie Green's task is more difficult, for while the general message of labor songs can be understood by outsiders, the folk art of sheet metal communicates in detail only to other craftsmen who can appreciate virtuoso fabrication techniques. All three books offer the folklorist ways to move past a purely aesthetic appreciation of art in order to try to comprehend the social worlds behind the art. Of the three, American Folk Music and Left Wing Politics is the most conventional work of scholarship and will be of most immediate use to folklorists. A revision and updating of the late Richard A. Reuss's dissertation, it addresses relations between the American Communist Party of the 1930s and 1940s and the central figures of the folk revival movement, a wide range of Anglo- and African-American artists that included (among others) Alan Lomax, Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Aunt Molly Jackson, and Lead Belly. These artists have been amply treated elsewhere, but the value of Reuss's account is in its extensive direct interviews with principals, along with previously unpublished letters and print ephemera. Reuss does not whitewash the Communist associations and activities of what he terms \"the Lomax performers\"-nor is there any need to, for the leaders of the American Communist Party did not understand what Lomax's circle was trying to do with vernacular music and so missed the opportunity to use their creations as propaganda. In their turn, the revivalists \"had little or no consciousness of theoretical debates on culture in the international communist movement\" (271). Valuing the clever and tuneful over the orthodox, they transcended arcane political discussion. This intellectual disconnect protected the Lomax p","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2003-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71087384","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}
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