JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE最新文献

{"title":"Strategic Skepticism: The Politics of Grassroots Participation in an Afro-Andean Nomination to the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Representative List","authors":"Rodrigo Chocano","doi":"10.5406/15351882.136.541.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/15351882.136.541.01","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article analyzes the grassroots participation politics in the nomination of a set of Afro-Andean musical and dance practices—atajo de negritos and pallitas—to the UNESCO Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage. These are performed during the Catholic celebration of Christmas in the Ica region in Peru. I suggest that the participation of grassroots practitioners in this case study featured a behavior pattern I label “strategic skepticism.” This behavior is a critical but passive form of grassroots engagement, alternative to both compliance and resistance, which allows a form of local agency that clashes with the neoliberal logics of the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage process. The article, based on fieldwork conducted in the region of Ica in Peru between 2017 and 2018, includes perspectives from grassroots practitioners and state Intangible Cultural Heritage officials.","PeriodicalId":46681,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135855914","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On the Trail of the Jackalope: How a Legend Captured the World's Imagination and Helped Us Cure Cancer","authors":"Moira Marsh","doi":"10.5406/15351882.136.541.17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/15351882.136.541.17","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46681,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135855917","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts","authors":"None Frog","doi":"10.5406/15351882.136.541.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/15351882.136.541.13","url":null,"abstract":"Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts is a masterful work by an outstanding scholar. This book is a rich resource that I recommend to anyone interested in orality, writing, and how their interaction relates to contemporary ways of thinking about “texts” in society. It offers the best discussion of “scribal performance” available. The work centers on Homeric poetry, its transition into a written medium, and what happened to these written texts when they were manually reproduced. A nuanced and thorough investigation aims to elucidate the agents and forces behind the text-artifacts of Homeric poetry and their countless verbal and formulaic variations. Ready balances extensive and detailed reviews of scholarship with theoretical perspectives and empirical analyses, moving comfortably between broad, synthetic perspectives and philological detail. His discussion is oriented to Homeric scholars, yet his aim is to raise their awareness of relevant research in other fields, which gives the entire work an important interdisciplinary dimension and simultaneously opens the work's accessibility to readers of other backgrounds. This is a book of tremendous value to several fields.The book is organized as a triptych, with three parts, a total of five chapters, and a short introduction and a conclusion. It paints a series of three portraits that render aspects of the Homeric epic tradition, beginning from the image of oral texts as things, followed by a portrayal of the transition of these oral objects into things of writing, and finally a rendering of the life of those written things as they are reproduced by one hand after the next. Each part argues for a comparative model and its application to the Homeric poetry, while the conclusion is a programmatic postscript advocating Homeric scholars to take advantage of multidisciplinary research for approaching traditions and social processes behind the texts.Part I comprises two chapters. The first offers a valuable overview of how oral texts operate as things in the world and how this relates to their reification through writing. Foregrounding the concept of “entextualization,” Ready examines texts attributed to characters as direct speech within the Homeric epics, exploring the metadiscourse of poetic representations as evidence of how texts as things were imagined in the tradition. The second chapter then explores texts presented by one epic character to a second that are then mediated by that character to a third, focusing on variations between them. When the empirical studies come forward, the level of detail may get rather heavy for readers not interested in the technical side of poetics.Part II comprises chapter 3, which is a revised and expanded version of a 2015 article. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the documentation of oral epics. Ready offers an extensive survey of the documentation of epics across especially the ","PeriodicalId":46681,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135855891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Esther Clinton (1971–2022)","authors":"Fernando Orejuela","doi":"10.5406/15351882.136.541.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/15351882.136.541.07","url":null,"abstract":"Esther Clinton passed away unexpectedly on July 16, 2022, in Bowling Green, Ohio—a devastating loss for those of us who knew her a little or a lot. She profoundly inspired countless young folklorists and ethnomusicologists to choose folklore and/or ethnomusicology as their chosen discipline in academia as well as in the public sector. She was first and foremost a proud folklorist who was devoted to folkloristics even before she started her MA/PhD program at Indiana University, having invented an undergraduate folklore program for herself at Hampshire College. An admirer of her work as a scholar, educator, and caring mentor, I am most proud to have called her my friend.I met Esther in 1994 when we both started the graduate program in folklore at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana (IU)—the very place where she was born, and where her father Nye Clinton began his graduate studies in chemistry. Her mother Millie Clinton told me that Esther fell in love with storytelling when very young and could sit for hours listening to her mother tell story after story. Once she learned to read, Esther became an insatiable reader of fiction, especially fantasy. The family left Bloomington soon after her birth, yet it made sense that Esther would make her way back to Bloomington as an adult to start her journey as a folklorist.Much of her early career was devoted to Old English and Old Norse language and literature, myth studies, Arthurian legends, and everything and anything J. R. R. Tolkien. Esther consumed stories and storytelling. Her enthusiasm and intellectually generous spirit drew established scholars, young students, and fans-on-the-streets to engage in entertaining and enlightening conversations that problematized heroes’ and antiheroes’ deeds, the undermining of women's roles in traditional narratives, or the underappreciated tricksters like Loki (a particular favorite). Esther always invited and encouraged everyone—scholar to novice—to join in having a good chat regardless of their status. That was her gift: to make people feel important and knowledgeable, and to recognize that their ideas and their presence mattered.After graduating with a doctorate in folklore and a minor in Old English and German Philology from IU, Esther juggled adjunct teaching positions at Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis, Bergen County Community College, Hudson County Community College, West Virginia State University, and Marshall University, until landing a long-term instructorship in the Department of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) in Bowling Green, Ohio, where she further mastered her pedagogical skills. She taught students about the world of heroes and tricksters; folktales, legends, and myths; popular literature; belief and world religions; and graduate courses in advanced theory.Teachers who have fallen in love with the craft—as Esther did—know that research and writing are part and parcel","PeriodicalId":46681,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135855893","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Covid-19 Conspiracy Theories: QAnon, 5G, the New World Order and Other Viral Ideas","authors":"Timothy R. Tangherlini","doi":"10.5406/15351882.136.541.21","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/15351882.136.541.21","url":null,"abstract":"In an exceptionally timely book, the authors—two folklorists (John Bodner and Ian Brodie), a historian (Donald Leech), two public health experts (Anna Muldoon and Wendy Welch), and an attorney and policy expert (Ashley Marshall)—combine intellectual forces to explore the complexities of the conspiracy theories that gained enormous traction during the COVID-19 pandemic. The team marshals the perspectives of these diverse fields to provide historical and folkloristic anchoring for the narratives, memes, and other expressive forms that “went viral” across various platforms during the first months of the pandemic. The folkloristic perspective of Bodner and Brodie ensures that the stories themselves are not glossed over, but rather form the backbone of the ensuing investigations of this dynamic narrative ecosystem.The first of the volume's 10 chapters, “Conspiracy Theory 101: A Primer,” stands as a useful primer on the study of narrative in general, and conspiracy theory in particular. Conspiracy theories (unfortunately abbreviated as CT throughout the book) are presented as “vital idea expressions that purport to explain how the world truly works” (p. 10). For the authors, the concept of a “kernel narrative” is essential to the dynamics of conspiracy theory creation. The discussion of how these kernel narratives, rumors, and legends get linked together in a dynamic narrative ecosystem, and how a reliance on low-probability links between existing narratives can create a dense web of meaning-making, could perhaps have been expanded to include a clearer characterization of the genre as a whole. Nevertheless, the typology of conspiracy theories is particularly helpful, and one that informs a great deal of the rest of the work: (a) “event conspiracies,” (b) “systemic conspiracies,” and (c) “super-conspiracies,” where (c) are often comprised of links between conspiracy theories of type (a) and (b) (p. 14). This relatively dense first chapter ends with two important, albeit brief, considerations of bias and amplification.The second chapter, “The ‘Wuhan Virus’: A Cautionary Tale of Origin Conspiracy Theories,” explores narrative elements, such as foodways and origin tales, that played important roles in the emergent conspiracy theory narratives at the start of the pandemic. It also introduces the conspiratorial notion of “problem-reaction-solution” (PRS) that provides a map for the explanatory aspects of conspiracy theories: (1) A problem is clandestinely manufactured by malign actors for which they have already devised a self-serving solution; (2) the problem is then amplified by the media; (3) in reaction, there is public outcry calling for action; (4) allowing the initial malign group to implement its predesigned solution (p. 44). The various examples of conspiracy theories in this chapter, including the “virus-as-hoax,” are among the most engaging of the entire volume. In this context, the authors explain several important ideas, including that the layer","PeriodicalId":46681,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135855896","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"It Can Be This Way Always: Images from the Kerrville Folk Festival","authors":"Joe W. Specht","doi":"10.5406/15351882.136.541.20","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/15351882.136.541.20","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46681,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135855916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"John Michael Vlach (1948–2022)","authors":"Simon J. Bronner","doi":"10.5406/15351882.136.541.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/15351882.136.541.04","url":null,"abstract":"John Michael Vlach, who made major contributions as an author, editor, and curator to folklife scholarship with illustrious studies of traditional architecture, craft, and art, died on October 30, 2022, in Washington, DC. He was also an educational leader who, as founding director of the graduate program in folklife at George Washington University (GW), inspired many budding folklorists. Not one to shy away from controversy, he boldly cut against the academic grain with his research and leadership, and his masterful studies of material folk culture changed the ways that people think about the historic African American experience—and American life in general.John was born on June 21, 1948, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Billie Katherine Kauiokamo'onohu Wond and Richard Reed Vlach, of Hawaiian and Czech backgrounds, respectively. A structural engineer working on maritime bridges and piers, Richard moved his family during John's youth first to Alaska and then to various locations in California until ultimately settling in Berkeley. John attended the University of California, Davis, and while still an undergraduate, served as a research assistant to anthropology professor Daniel J. Crowley, who specialized in sub-Saharan African and Caribbean folklife. Afflicted with polio, Crowley relied on John's help with field research in Togo, Senegal, Mali, Liberia, Haute-Volta (now Burkina Faso), République du Dahomey (now Benin), Niger, Cote d'Ivoire, and The Gambia. John gained additional valuable experience on the African continent with a study abroad semester in Ghana. After obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1970, John moved on for his graduate studies to Indiana University, Bloomington, where he focused on folklife and material culture studies with Africanist Roy Sieber and folklorists Warren Roberts and Henry Glassie.At Indiana University, John continued his work on the African diaspora with a dissertation (co-chaired by Roberts and Glassie) on the West African roots of the shotgun house, whose transmission he was the first to trace from West Africa, through Haiti, into New Orleans, and up the Mississippi River. John received his PhD from Indiana University in 1975, and articles drawn from his groundbreaking dissertation were published the next year to many accolades. He had already made a name for himself by mobilizing his student colleagues to draw attention to African folklore with a volume he edited for Folklore Forum titled “Studies in Yoruba Folklore,” to which he contributed “The Functions of Proverbs in Yoruba Folktales” (1973). The title indicates his ethnographic interest in functionalism, to which he added queries into cultural diffusion within the African diaspora that resulted in another article for Folklore Forum on folktale diffusion across the Sahara. In 1972, he published his first material culture study in Pioneer America on a saddlebag log house in Indiana. He branched out into American children's folklore with a functional analysis of t","PeriodicalId":46681,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135855899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Cultural History of Fairy Tales","authors":"Sarah Allison, Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Abigail R. Heiniger, Sarah N. Lawson, Veronica Schanoes","doi":"10.5406/15351882.136.541.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/15351882.136.541.08","url":null,"abstract":"The six-volume set A Cultural History of Fairy Tales seeks to provide a transnational history of the forms of the fairy tale and their adaptations from 500 BCE to the present. Although there are occasional gaps in its coverage of world literature, the set as a whole should prove invaluable to current and future fairy-tale scholars. Each volume could serve as an excellent teaching tool for courses on specific histories of the fairy tale or in a broader examination of themes in the fairy-tale genre overall.Volume 1, A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in Antiquity, edited by Debbie Felton, is especially good in its examinations of ancient analogues to modern fairy tales. Felton's introduction asks whether stories like “Rhodopis” or “Cupid and Psyche” are true fairy tales. The difficulty in agreeing on the definition of fairy tales complicates the task of tracing their history. In the chapter “Forms of the Marvelous,” Graham Anderson examines fantastical creatures, places, and objects in Greek and Roman literature. Emanuele Lelli's “Adaptations” deals with the circulation of fables and fairy tales throughout ancient Greece and Rome. In “Gender and Sexuality,” Serinity Young examines a range of Asian stories beginning with the swan maiden tale type. In “Humans and Non-Humans,” Kenneth Kitchell explores the depiction of animals in Greek and Roman fables. Felton's “Monsters and the Monstrous” section examines mythical monsters from the Near East and the Mediterranean, such as Medusa. Julia Doroszewska and Janek Kucharski's “Spaces” focuses on how borders and distance play into Greek and Roman stories. Dominic Ingemark and Camilla Asplund Ingemark's “Socialization” examines fairy tales as moral messages, particularly in Roman works. Finally, Felton's “Power” looks at societal attitudes toward power in Roman, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern myths and fables.This volume gathers in-depth examinations of ancient fairy tales, identifying parallels in content to modern equivalents and comparing their relationships to the overlapping categories of myths and fables. While many questions remain, such as the debate over whether fairy tales inspired myth or vice versa, the chapters are deep and illuminating.Noticeably, most of the chapters focus on Greek and Roman works. Certain names quickly become familiar, such as Apuleius, Aesop, Perseus, Gyges, and Psyche, which makes the volume's ventures into other geographical areas all the more conspicuous. Young's excellent piece on gender roles in Asian fairy tales particularly stands out, examining materials touched on by none of the other chapters, such as the Rig Veda. More material like this might have significantly enhanced the six-volume set.Not surprisingly, fairies are the primary theme in Volume 2, A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in the Middle Ages, edited by Susan Aronstein, as the series reaches a point where beings by that name began appearing in written literature. It really is a study of tales about fair","PeriodicalId":46681,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135855906","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Folklore 101: An Accessible Introduction to Folklore Studies","authors":"Jack Daly","doi":"10.5406/15351882.136.541.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/15351882.136.541.10","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46681,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135855911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gender and Legend in Rural Iceland in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries","authors":"Júlíana Th. Magnúsdóttir","doi":"10.5406/15351882.136.540.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/15351882.136.540.02","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The folk narrative archives, with their large amounts of source material, can provide valuable new insights into the narrative traditions of the past. This also applies to the legend traditions of women in former times and their relationship with women’s experiences and social reality. This article examines common features found in the legend repertoires of 200 Icelandic women born in the late nineteenth century, which are kept in the Icelandic sound archives. These features are compared to those observed in the repertoires of a small sample of men found in the same archives; the aim is to establish whether and how the legends told by men and women differ. The key findings are that certain elements clearly differ significantly across gender lines, including preferences for different types of narratives, subjects, and choice of characters, highlighting the very different social realities of men and women in the past.","PeriodicalId":46681,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45350276","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}