Forums on Folklore

Congratuations to Professor Erika Brady

2011-10-24T09:44:00.001-04:00

Erika Brady, Professor of Folk Studies at Western Kentucky University, was awarded the 2011 Kentucky Governor's Awards in the Arts-Media Recipient. Congratulations, Erika!

County Music Legend Hazel Dickens dies at age 75

2011-04-22T20:09:00.000-04:00

I remember the first time I met Hazel Dickens. I was attending a screening of It's Hard to tell the Singer from a Song at an Appalshop fundraiser in Washington DC. It was 2001 and I was a new professor at George Mason University. I went forward to meet Hazel and get her autograph. During this brief encounter I told her I taught Appalachian Folklore at GMU and would love to have her come to campus to perform. I'll never forget her look of surprise.

Hazel died on Thursday evening in her sleep. May she rest in peace.

I'm reprinting the obituary from the Sunday Charleston Gazette:

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Country music legend Hazel Dickens, who grew up in poverty in Mercer County and sang her hard-hitting songs about working people, coal mining and West Virginia all over the world, died in her sleep Thursday night at age 75.

"She was a treasure, a musical pioneer in bluegrass music, a gifted songwriter, an activist and a very wise woman who saw the truth in things and spoke it freely," Goldenseal magazine editor and musician John Lilly said Friday. "She sang and wrote about mining issues and mine safety issues and women's issues in general, and spoke up in her songs and conversation for people who needed a voice."

Dickens was "an authentic voice of America's working class," The Washington Post said Friday.
She received a 2001 National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and has been honored by the mithsonian Institution, the International Folk Alliance, the International Bluegrass Music Association and many other organizations.

But she frequently said that no award meant more to her than her induction into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame.

"These rugged mountains and these coal-dusty mining towns and lonesome hollers have shaped my life," she said during her induction in 2007. "They shaped my music for all time."

Her songs were recorded by Dolly Parton, Kathy Mattea, Johnny Cash and scores of other musicians. Her song "West Virginia, Oh My Home" has become an unofficial West Virginia anthem, and "Mama's Hand" was an International Bluegrass Music Association song of the year. Her deep understanding of working women showed in songs like "Working Girl Blues" and "Don't Put Her Down, You Helped Put Her There."
Dickens' songs like "Black Lung," "They'll Never Keep Us Down" and "The Farmington Mine Disaster" chronicled West Virginia's coal mining history and were featured in the films "Matewan" and "Harlan County USA."

"Hazel was a real inspiration to coal miners everywhere," United Mine Workers of America President Cecil Roberts said Friday. "She was a strong, clear voice when we needed one and was never at a loss for words when it came to describing the hard lives miners and their families endured."

Dickens frequently sang on picket lines and at benefit concerts to raise money for miners on strike, Roberts recalled. "She was a sister to us all."

"She was an icon, not just for West Virginians, but for anyone who had a concern for labor and women's issues," said Michael Lipton, founder of the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame. "She entered bluegrass music when it was a man's world, and she didn't push open doors. She kicked them open and allowed many other women to follow."

Dickens was raised in a hardworking family of 11 children who sang and played music together at home. "Any day at my house, somebody was singing," she said. "It didn't cost a dime to sing. Sometimes people passing by on the road thought it was the radio, and they'd stop and listen."

Her father, Hillary (H.N.) Dickens, trucked timber to the mines during the week and was a Primitive Baptist preacher on Sundays.

"He taught me to love the old-time country way of singing," Dickens said in 2009. "I can't remember a time when I didn't sing. I'd just open up my mouth and let it roar."

"We should all have that visceral a connection to our music," Kathy Mattea said Friday. "I thought I knew what singing was until I started digging into Hazel's singing and her music. Listening to that voice challenged me to let go on another level. She had such a simple eloquence to her writing. There's just no gimmick to it. It takes you straight to the gut of your longing."

Dickens had agreed to be part of a June 5 rally to protest the strip mining of Blair Mountain. Organizer Mari-lynn Evans said the event also will now be a memorial service and concert in Dickens' honor at the state Culture Center in Charleston.

For more on Hazel Dickens, including some of her songs, visit www.wvmusichalloffame.com/Teachers/HazelDickens.html

Chupacabra in Texas?

2010-07-14T10:45:00.000-04:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

2010 Folklife Festival

2010-06-23T13:56:00.002-04:00

The festival begins on the mall tomorrow. Why are you sitting at that desk? Get out there and enjoy this celebration of American and international Folklife!

Chuck Purdue

2010-02-19T16:01:00.000-05:00

As part of the site's memorial for Virginia Folklorist Chuck Perdue, I am reprinting this article from the University of Virginia's UVA Profiles in 2007 that outlines much of Purdue's career:

U.Va. Profiles: Chuck Perdue Preserves, Documents Folk Culture from the Inside
Oct. 8, 2007-- Charles Perdue is a storyteller, a farmer's son, mechanic, cryptographer, folk singer and geologist who documents the lives of working people not unlike himself. His work will continue to benefit the University and the study of folklore and music for years to come.

Because Perdue’s interests defy the tidy compartments of the University, he simply carved out a singular niche on Grounds — one part anthropology department, one part English.

Perdue’s friend and colleague in the English department, Raymond Nelson, said, “Chuck has always puzzled people. Where do you put him?”

Throughout his professional life, Perdue’s consuming interest has been the lives of others — their stories, customs and songs. In particular, he has sought to document the lives of rural working people. When he isn’t recording oral histories on his own, he is compiling and editing records and interviews from other sources: narratives on the lives of Virginia slaves, Depression-era workers, dispossessed mountain folk.

“When I first knew him, I think he was attending a black congregation up there near Culpeper and listening to the music,” Nelson said. “That takes quite a bit of doing. It’s a matter of going there for a long period of time and sitting aside and behaving. But he had done that and recorded some of the music.”

An Ivy League-educated professor studying the lives of Depression-era poor or the worship habits of Southern African-Americans could easily have resulted in something full of saccharin and starch.

But Perdue is not a typical Ivy League-educated professor. As he said, he “came in with the Depression” and spent his childhood on a Georgia farm. “My mother sang ballads and folk songs, and I grew up being rocked to sleep with the ballad about the murder of Mary Phagan, which may account for my twisted personality.”

Even as a boy, Perdue felt that he didn’t fit in. “See, if you’re too smart, or not smart enough, you’re a behavior problem,” he said. “I was too smart. I was always getting into trouble.”

When Perdue graduated from high school, he faced stiff competition for jobs. “I got out in ’47, which more or less coincided with about 10 million servicemen having been released from all the services, filling every damn job in the country.”

Perdue worked at a grocery store, rebuilt carburetors and “one thing or another tried to figure out some way of making some money.”

At a military college in Georgia, Perdue soon found his earliest calling: troublemaker. “I set a record for walking off more hours of guard report for various incendiary offenses — conduct unbecoming a cadet, failure to salute an officer, goose-stepping in ranks. I couldn’t stand it. I goofed off.

"I shouldn’t have been in college. I wasn’t ready for that. So I had the good sense not to go back.”

Perdue ended up working as a cryptographer in the U.S. Army Security Agency in California, where he later attended Santa Rosa Junior College. This time, college focused Perdue’s intellect and turned the youthful mischief-maker into something of an iconoclast. He also met his future wife and collaborator, Nancy Martin, at Santa Rosa.

“I walked into French class, and Nan was sitting in there, and I decided that was it. All I had to do was get a date with her. Never asked her to marry me, just told her we were going to, and I guess she agreed.”

Nan and Chuck — rarely mentioned separately and then never called doctors or professors or even Nancy and Charles. It is always Nan and Chuck, and they are as much professional colleagues as husband and wife.

“I think that seems to be a key to both of them,” Nelson said. “They live their interests. It’s not something they sit down at night and write down. It’s their work. It’s their lives. That’s why it can’t be Charles Perdue and Nancy Perdue; it’s Chuck and Nan. They’re inseparable.”

Nan and Chuck married and moved in 1955 to University of California-Berkeley, where he earned a degree in geology. The young couple began singing in the local folk-music coffee houses. “The Kingston trio recorded ‘Tom Dooley.’ Nan and I heard it and said, ‘We can do that.’” Perdue called their performing “good therapy.” Soon they were holding “therapy” sessions at legendary venues like the Troubadour Club in Los Angeles and the Ash Grove in Hollywood.

The world’s only husband-and-wife-geologist-folk-singing duo soon found themselves in Washington, D.C., where Perdue worked for the U.S. Geological Survey. Perdue founded the Washington Folklore Society, while once again he and Nan were playing in clubs and living rooms in the metro area.

One of Perdue’s greatest collaborations began as a chance encounter. In 1964, he had stopped at a service station in Fairfax, Va., and ran into a musician named John Jackson.

“Jackson was holding a guitar, so I said, ‘Do you play that thing?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I can hit a couple of chords.’” Perdue asked him to hit a few, and the man played “Candy Man,” legendary bluesman Mississippi John Hurt’s signature song. Jackson went on to become a blues great. Nan and Chuck introduced him to the world, acting as his unofficial managers and promoters. They also became his close friends.

After Perdue completed his Ph.D. in folklore at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971, he drew the attention of U.Va. English department professor and chairman E.D. Hirsch, who was interested in socio-linguistics, then a new field of theory being taught at Perdue’s alma mater.

Perdue said, “I had just come from Penn and could rattle off all the latest, hot bibliography and stuff that was happening. Hirsch hired me on the spot. I didn’t send in a vita. I didn’t interview with anybody else in the English department.”

Nelson remembers there being some concerns about where to put Perdue, but Hirsch was clearly impressed. Nelson recalls Hirsch saying, “We’ll worry about where to put him later. Let’s just get him here.”

The University was fortunate to get him. Perdue has been a prolific writer and a wise teacher. His books, “Talk about Trouble: A New Deal Portrait of Virginians in the Great Depression,” “Pigsfoot Jelly & Persimmon Beer: Foodways from the Virginia Writers’ Project” and “Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves,” are considered classics and standard issue in history, anthropology and folklore classes.

The University was also fortunate to get Nan Martin-Perdue in the bargain. When Chuck came aboard in 1971, appointments for professor’s spouses were considered nepotism. (Today, the practice is commonplace). Over the years, Nan served as a de facto scholar-in-residence for the University, although she received no salary and no pension.

In 1980, the Perdues established the Kevin Barry Perdue Folklore Archive at the University. Named for their son who died in 1979, the archive is a collection of folk songs, histories and documents from the Depression-era Virginia Writer’s Project.

“Talk about Trouble,” which they co-edited, won the National Oral History Association Award for best book on oral history for 1997. It consists of oral histories recorded by members of the Virginia Writer’s Project, which Chuck and Nan discovered hidden in the Virginia State Archives. By copying them, they saved these narratives from imminent disintegration due to age, moisture and acidic ink.

Edward D.C. Campbell Jr., editor of the Virginia state library’s Virginia Cavalcade history journal, said, “‘Talk about Trouble’ is a remarkably moving testimonial. No other first-person collection reveals as much about how ordinary Virginians, and by extension Southerners and other Americans, confronted the palpable threats raised every day by the Great Depression.”

While Perdue’s writing established his scholarly reputation, Nelson believes that teaching has been an equally important part of Perdue’s legacy. “The really dangerous thing about academics is they get very lofty in their interests and concerns, but Chuck’s very earthy. He teaches people to be curious and that’s the best thing you can teach someone.”

Perdue’s earthy beginnings and his own curiosity have taken him from a Georgia dirt farm to legendary folk clubs, to the University of Pennsylvania and finally to the University. In “Talk about Trouble,” Chuck and Nan wrote, “Life as an academic in a university setting was not, then, among the options either [editor] recognized as desirable or thought to be attainable. But both editors were also products of the same changing cultural values and rising expectations with regards to higher education that affected so many of the people interviewed as part of the New Deal life history projects in Virginia.”

The lives of the ex-slaves and Depression-era workers Perdue wrote about were much like his own. Sometimes — like folk songs and blues — out of the chaos and struggle of individual lives, something unique and artful emerges.

— Written by Tim Arnold

Remembering Chuck Perdue

2010-02-15T11:05:00.000-05:00

Folklorists Chuck Perdue, Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia, died at home in Twyman's Mill, VA today after a long battle with cancer. I will post obituaries and other recollections of his life and work as they are available.

Sugar and Snow

2010-02-11T10:56:00.000-05:00

This essay from the Washington Post discusses a family's revived food tradition, made possible by the blizzard of 2010.

Diana Parker's Retirement

2010-01-28T12:26:00.003-05:00

Diana Parker has retired as Festival Director after 35 years of leadership at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. During her tenure she hosted many memorable festival programs featuring the cultures of foreign lands such as Mali, Bhutan, Scotland; the diverse cultures within our own borders from Texas border music to the watermen of the Chesapeake to New York fashion designers and U.S. Forest Service rangers. Though most of the festivals, which falls annually for two weeks over fourth of July, were hot and humid, they were also memorable, moving, exciting and informative. Through it all Diana's hair never seemed to frizz and she kept the show going, despite electrical storms, escaped camels, and the inevitable malfunctions and miscommunications that come with such a big event. In the midst of the crowds and the craziness, Diana was always cool.

Folklorists & Musician Bess Lomax Hawes dies at 88

2009-11-30T06:56:00.002-05:00

From the LA Times:

Bess Lomax Hawes, a musician and folklorist who tapped into the legacy of her influential family of archivists and became a prominent anthropologist at what is now Cal State Northridge, has died. She was 88.

Hawes, who directed folk and traditional arts programs at the National Endowment for the Arts from 1977 to 1992, died of natural causes Friday in Portland, Ore., where she had been living the last two years, her daughter Naomi Bishop said.

CSUN houses the Bess Lomax Hawes Student Folklore Archive, a collection of student research projects that Hawes oversaw. She was particularly interested in children's folklore; among her documentary films is “Pizza Pizza Daddy-O,” showing black schoolgirls singing and clapping on a Pacoima playground in 1967. With Bessie Jones she made another film, “Georgia Sea Island Singers,” and they co-wrote "Step It Down: Games, Plays, Songs and Stories from the Afro-American Heritage" (1972).

"To me, it's another way of getting to the human mystery -- why people behave the way they do," Hawes said in a 2000 Times interview in explaining the value of studying folklore.

Steeped in folk music from birth, she was the youngest child of John A. Lomax and Bess Bauman Brown. Born Jan. 21, 1921, in Austin, Texas, she was home-schooled by her mother, who also taught her to play piano. Her father and her brother, Alan Lomax, collected seminal field recordings of traditional songs that had been sung by cowboys, prisoners and slaves.

After her mother died in 1931, the family moved to Washington, D.C., and Hawes assisted her father's pioneering research compiling the folk song archive at the Library of Congress.

She graduated with a bachelor's degree in sociology from Bryn Mawr College in 1941 and worked during World War II as a radio programmer for the Office of War Information. She was also one of a rotating crew of vocalists in the Almanac Singers folk ensemble, along with Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and her future husband, Baldwin "Butch" Hawes.

The couple married in 1943 and moved to Cambridge, Mass., where Hawes co-wrote the folk song "M.T.A." that later became a hit for the Kingston Trio.

She also began a successful career as a music instructor.

"Everyone wanted to sing and play guitar like Bobby Dylan," Hawes told the Daily News in 2002. "Folk music was a real postwar phenomenon. Everyone had either been tromped over or was out tromping over someone else during the war, and people were anxious to get back a sense of their roots."

In 1952 Hawes and her husband, an artist, moved to California and settled with their children in Topanga Canyon, immersing themselves in the bohemian community anchored by actor Will Geer.

Besides performing in coffeehouses and at music festivals, Hawes taught guitar, banjo, mandolin and folk singing through UCLA Extension courses, at the Idyllwild summer arts program and, starting in 1963, at San Fernando Valley State College. She expanded her instruction to folklore, folk music and ethnomusicology and, after receiving a master's in folklore from UC Berkeley studying under Alan Dundes, became head of the anthropology department at what is now CSUN.

Hawes began shifting from teacher to arts administrator in 1975 when she led a group of folk music and arts performers from California in a program on the National Mall presented by the Smithsonian Institution. The next year she participated in a bicentennial event staged by the Smithsonian, and in 1977 she joined the NEA.

She directed the national arts agency's folk and traditional arts program and created the agency's National Heritage Fellowships, which recognize traditional artists and performers from across the country. She retired in 1992 and the next year was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Clinton.

To Hawes, folk art was "an identifier . . . a public statement of what a hell of a fine thing it is to be a Lithuanian or a Greek or a Comanche Indian . . . so that you feel good and people looking at the work will say, 'That's good,' or 'That's beautiful,' or 'That's different.' "

All three of Hawes' children followed in her footsteps professionally. Her daughter Naomi Bishop of Portland, Ore., is a retired CSUN anthropology professor; another daughter, Corey Denos of Bellingham, Wash., is a teacher; and her son, Nicholas Hawes of Portland, Ore., is a folk musician.

Besides her children, Hawes is survived by six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Her husband died in 1971.

Services will be private.

Why are the Quileute people werewolves in 'Twilight'?

2009-11-21T08:45:00.001-05:00

It turns out Stephanie Meyer's Twilight saga is based on some documented folklore--at least when it comes to werewolves.

in reference to:

"The Quileute Nation has lived on the Olympic Peninsula for thousands of years. Today, the Quileute Tribe is located in La Push, Washi., on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. La Push is not far from Forks, Wash., where the "Twilight" series takes place. Author Stephanie Myers references Quileute folklore in her decision to create Quileute characters in her story that transform into werewolves. The actual "origin" story of the Quileute people, as documented in "Quileute Religion: What the Old People Believed," prepared by the Quileute Tribal School in 1989, reads: "There was a kixi' (elder/knowledge carrier) that tells how k'w a'-ti (the transformer) was on First Beach when the wolves came down to run on the beach. The k'w a'-ti often had trouble with the strong and fierce wolves. So the transformer decided to be free from the wolf problem once and for all. He transformed the pack of wolves into the Kwo' li' yot, the people who live at the village, which came to be called La Push. …That is how the Quileutes of La Push came to be.""
- Why are the Quileute people werewolves in 'Twilight?' (view on Google Sidewiki)

Dell Hymes Obituary

2009-11-18T06:30:00.002-05:00

Dell Hathaway Hymes Dell Hathaway Hymes, 82, a founding figure in the field of sociolinguistics and Commonwealth Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, at the University of Virginia, died Friday, November 13, 2009. An innovative thinker, an energetic researcher and writer, and a tireless intellectual advocate, Hymes worked for more than five decades at the intersection of linguistics and anthropology, exhorting linguists to move beyond treating language as a purely formal system and to study its mutual interactions with culture and society. His work has had an impact not only on his own dual fields of anthropology and linguistics but on the study of folklore, literature, and education. Hymes, the son of Howard Hathaway Hymes and Dorothy Bowman Hymes, was born and grew up in Portland, Oregon, where he first developed his lifelong interest in the study of Native American language and culture, conducting his first field research on the Warm Springs Reservation in Oregon while he was still an undergraduate at Reed College, and beginning friendships and collegial relationships with members of the Wasco, Wishram, and Sahaptin peoples that he would maintain throughout his life. Interrupting his college education, Hymes served in the army in American-occupied Korea, working as a decoder and reaching the rank of staff sergeant, and returned to Reed to graduate in 1950. Hymes and his close friend the poet, Gary Snyder, were the first two Reed students to combine majors in literature and anthropology. Hymes went on to graduate work in linguistics at Indiana University, where he met fellow student Virginia Wolff, nÂ‚e Dosch, whom he married in 1954. He earned his Ph.D. in 1955 with a dissertation on the Kathlamet language, formerly spoken near the mouth of the Columbia River. Between 1955 and 1987 Hymes taught successively at Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a member of the departments of Anthropology and Folklore and then served as Dean of the Graduate School of Education for 12 years. In 1987, Hymes moved to Virginia, taking up a joint appointment in anthropology and English, and remained at Virginia until his retirement in 1998. Throughout his life Hymes was a writer of poetry alongside his academic work, and many of his poems have been published. He was also a man of strong political views and engagements, a lover of music and amateur pianist, an excellent joke-teller, and an avid reader across a multitude of fields, in his later years especially including theology and the history of religion. Since he arrived in Charlottesville 22 years ago, he has been a congregant of St. Paul Memorial Church and more recently of Peace Lutheran Church. His love of his native Pacific Northwest was a deep theme not only in his work but in his life, and for more than three decades, while living and working in Philadelphia and then Charlottesville, he spent every summer on Mt. Hood, which lies between Portland where he was born and Warm Springs where he did his fieldwork. He is survived by his wife of 55 years, Virginia Dosch Hymes, a researcher and teacher in her own right in linguistics, anthropology, and the study of narrative; a brother, Corwin Hymes; and by four children, Vicky Unruh, Robert Hymes, Alison Hymes and Kenneth Hymes; as well as five grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. A memorial service will take place 1 p.m. Saturday, November 21, 2009, at Peace Lutheran Church, Charlottesville. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations to the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice (CCPJ) or a charity of choice.

Fellowships in honor of Archie Green

2009-11-16T16:33:00.000-05:00

Archie Green Fellowships

Current application deadline: November 30, 2009

Background

To honor the memory of Archie Green (1917-2009), the pioneering folklorist who championed the establishment of the American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress and was a scholar and advocate for the documentation and analysis of the culture and traditions that arise from and are passed on by American workers, a fellowship program has been established at the American Folklife Center. The Archie Green Fellowships will support new documentation and research into the culture and traditions of American workers and will create significant digital archival materials (audio recordings, photographs, motion pictures, field notes) that will be preserved in the Folklife Center's archive and made available to researchers and the public.

Program Description

The American Folklife Center will award up to three fellowships for the period February 2010 – February 2011 that will support new, original, independent field research into the culture and traditions of American workers and/or occupational groups found within the United States. Applicants must develop a project plan detailing the subject of the research and methods of digital documentation. The original documentary materials generated during the course of the fellowship will become part of the Folklife Center's Archie Green America Works Collection.

Applicants must submit proposals to be received by the American Folklife Center no later than November 30, 2009. The term of each fellowship will be limited to a period of one year and will be supported with funds up to $45,000.

Eligibility Requirements

U.S. citizens are eligible to submit applications for a fellowship to support their new, original research on and documentation of occupational culture. Applicants may include individuals, organizations or groups. Occupational groups, labor unions or organizations may wish to involve folklife researchers for the purpose of undertaking fieldwork projects on their behalf.

Selection

Proposals for the Archie Green Fellowships will be evaluated by a committee that is composed of the Director of the American Folklife Center, Head of Research and Programs for the American Folklife Center, Head of the American Folklife Center archive, the Chair of the American Folklife Center Board of Trustees, and the Associate Librarian for Library Services at the Library of Congress. A summary of the proposals and a recommendation for selection will be provided to the Librarian of Congress, who will make the final selections.

Expectations

Fellows will provide the American Folklife Center with the original versions of documentary materials created during the course of the fellowship research. All documentation must be in digital formats as outlined below. The cost of creating secondary copies may be factored into the applicants’ research budgets. Fellows will submit completed informant releases and biographical data forms (provided by the American Folklife Center) as well as electronic logs for audio/video recordings and still photographs. Fieldnotes describing daily research activities through the course of the project will be submitted in digital form. These materials will become part of the Archie Green America Works Collection. Fellows will submit a final report and financial accounting to the American Folklife Center upon completion of the fellowship. In addition, Archie Green Fellows will offer a public lecture or presentation at the Library of Congress at the end of their fellowship year, to become part of the Archie Green Fellows Lecture Series. These lectures or presentations will be recorded to become part of the Archie Green America Works Collection. Fellows' travel expenses related to the lectures will be covered separately by the American Folklife Center.

Request for Proposals

Applicants for the 2010 Archie Green Fellowships at the American Folklife Center should submit the following materials by November 30, 2009

* Project Description (1-3 pages)
* Project Budget, which, if necessary, may include the cost of purchasing professional-quality documentation equipment
* List of documentation equipment to be used
* Project Timeline
* Statement of agreement/letter from occupational group to be documented
* Resume (for individuals) or Organization Description (for 501.c.3 orgs.)

Digital Document Requirements & Specifications:

All fellows must comply with the AFC/LOC digital standards and, therefore, provide documentation in the following specifications:

Digital audio: 96khz/24bit bwf (or .wav) file, or 44.1khz/16bit .wav file.

Digital video: high-resolution digital video format (consult with AFC)

Digital images: high-resolution digital images (consult with AFC)

Text files (for logs, fieldnotes, final report, etc.): Microsoft Word

Databases, spread sheets, etc.: consult with AFC

Application Process and Deadlines:
November 30, 2009 2010 Proposals due to AFC
December 15, 2009 2010 Adjudication final and awards announced
February 15, 2010 2010 Awards final and fellowships begin

October 20, 2010 Request for Proposals released by AFC for 2011 Fellowships
November 30, 2010 2011 Proposals due to AFC
December 15, 2010 2011 Adjudication final and awards announced
February 15, 2011 2010 Fellowships final reports and documentation submitted
February 15, 2011 Plans for 2010 Fellows lectures finalized
February 15, 2011 2011 Awards final and fellowships begin
Submit Materials to:

Please email or FAX your submission, do not send via U.S. Postal Service.

Email to: Archie Green Fellows Committee at mabu@loc.gov

FAX to: Archie Green Fellows Committee at 202-707-2076

Questions? Call Mary Bucknum at 202-707-5354

Food, Folklore and Hurston

2009-11-16T10:41:00.001-05:00

This article features the D.C. restaurant "Eatonville," dedicated to the hometown and heritage of Zora Neal Hurston. Folklorists everywhere should cheer.

Remembering Dell Hymes

2009-11-16T07:45:00.002-05:00

This is the first of what will be many remembrances of Dell Hymes:

Remembering Dell Hymes
by Jason Baird Jackson

While no obituary has appeared yet, there seems to be conclusive understanding via the moccasin telegraph that Dell Hymes has passed away. So soon after the death of Claude Lévi-Strauss, this is another significant loss in the fields of Native American studies, anthropology and folklore studies. Dell Hymes was a amazingly influential folklorist, anthropologist, and linguist who revolutionized the study of language in (/and) culture in general, and of Native American narrative traditions in particular. He made important contributions to the history of anthropology, to descriptive and theoretical linguistics, to sociolinguistics, to folkloristics, and to Native American studies. He essentially created the areas on inquiry known as (1) the ethnography of speaking and (2) ethnopoetics and he played a key role reshaping linguistic anthropology from the 1960s onward. His work is at the root of the performance orientation central in contemporary folklore studies and he directly influenced the work of a great many folklorists, including Richard Bauman, Henry Glassie, and Lee Haring, among many others. His influence in the field as practiced in the United States is pervasive.

Dell Hymes was an especially central figure for his fields of study at Indiana University, where I earned my Ph.D. and to which I returned in 2004 to join the faculty in Folklore and Ethnomusicology. At Indiana, Hymes earned his Ph.D. in 1955, studying under Carl Voegelin, a student of Alfred Kroeber and Edward Sapir, both themselves students of Franz Boas. He was deeply immersed in the Americanist tradition and he took the task of understanding, enriching, and conveying that tradition to new generations to be a key task. When he left Indiana for jobs at Harvard, California, Pennsylvania and Virginia, his impact and influence kept flowing back and influencing the faculty and students here. At Pennsylvania in particular, he worked closely with scholars that have gone on to play a key role in shaping the IU Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. Evidence of the breadth of his influence and his commitment to the Boasian vision for the study of language, culture and society can be seen in the fact that he served as president of the American Folklore Society, the American Anthropological Association, and the Linguistic Society of America.

More coherent and elaborate remembrances will be written by scholars and friends who knew him well, but I wanted to acknowledge his passing and record my appreciation for his many contributions that have enriched the fields of study in which I work.

Luto for Dell Hymes

2009-11-15T11:41:00.001-05:00

Dell Hymes, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and English at UVA, passed away on Friday, November 13, 2009 at the age of 82. I will post links to his obituaries as they are published.

Havana to host international Folklore Conference

2009-11-08T06:48:00.001-05:00

Havana will host the 39th Conference of Organizations for Folklore Festivals November 8-15. Representatives from 40 countries will be on hand. UNESCO and the International Council of Organizations for Folklore Festivals will co-sponsor the event.

in reference to: Cuba to host international folklore conference (view on Google Sidewiki)

What's the role of Narrative in a point and click world?

2009-10-29T06:31:00.000-04:00

The article linked here from today's Washington Post explores the role of storytelling an a world of twitter and other snippet reading alternatives. Is there a role for the narrative (especially the long narrative) in this world of short attention spans and 120 character limits?

According to this author, there are many reasons to believe that a well-told story is still worth most people's time. He writes, "Narrative isn't merely a technique for communicating; it's how we make sense of the world. The storytellers know this."

He goes on to discuss new digital forms of storytelling (not in the traditional sense)
that have evolved recently. It turns out (no surprises for folklorists) that people love a good story. Even if it is longer than 120 characters long.

Folklorist Sabina Magliocco lectures on the Folklore of Harry Potter

2009-10-28T19:17:00.002-04:00

Sabrina Magliocco, a Folklorist and professor of anthropology at Cal State Northridge, gave a lecture on the ancestors of Harry Potter and the history of witchcraft and folklore on Monday Oct. 26. Follow the link to the full story above.

Missouri State University Folklore Students to give Campus "haunted" tours

2009-10-28T19:12:00.000-04:00

Members of Missouri State University’s Folklore Club will give guided tours of campus tonight, sharing little known tales and spooky stories about the Springfield campus. KSMU’s Missy Shelton reports.

The Missouri State students who will serve as tour guides tonight will share legends and stories collected from students and alumni. Dr. Rachel Gholson is faculty advisor of the Folklore Club, which is presenting tonight’s Haunted Tours.

Gholson says, “Students will be sharing narratives that have been collected from other students across campus for the last eight years that are all about various mysterious events, strange bits of information you may not know about campus, such as underground basketball courts that you can reach through tunnels that exist in specific places or ghosts that are in various buildings. There will be all kinds of haunting narratives and then little bits of interesting information they’ll share.”

Tours begin at 7 tonight and groups will leave every 20 minutes from Plaster Student Union. Tickets are required but can be purchased on site this evening. Just to get you “in the spirit,” Dr. Gholson shares a story that will not only be told this evening but will be reenacted by students from the Missouri State Theatre and Dance Department.

Gholson says, “There is the young woman who is purported to have been studying in the library one evening. She had a bit of a scary experience where a young man was walking around and she felt uncomfortable. She picked up her books and she disappeared into the restroom and hung out for a while. She came back out and saw that he was gone. Everything was fine and she continued her studying. But when the library closed just before midnight when she was leaving, she happened to run into him again. I wont’ give away the narrative but I will tell you that the fountain out front has not always been the best place to get your feet wet.”

You can hear the conclusion of this story tonight during the Haunted Tours that the Missouri State University Folklore Club will be hosting beginning at 7 outside the Plaster Student Union.

IU Professor and Alumnus Share Chicago Folklore Prize

2009-10-27T19:24:00.000-04:00

The American Folklore Society (AFS) and the University of Chicago have awarded Michael Dylan Foster, an IU assistant professor in the departments of folklore and East Asian languages and cultures, and Ray Cashman, an associate professor of folklore at Ohio State University who earned his doctorate at IU The Chicago Folklore Prize

Egyptian Folklore Conference

2009-10-26T10:20:00.002-04:00

Delegation heads to Egypt for folklore conference
[25/October/2009]

SANA'A, Oct. 25 (Saba) – Yemen is set to take part in the special conference on Muslim and Arab folklore' present circumstances and prospective horizons' that would be organized by the High Cultural Council in Egypt.

The meeting will take place on 26-29 October, with more than 17 Arab states expected at it.

Deputy Culture minister for Yemen Folklore Njaiba Hadad, head of the Yemeni delegation to the meeting, said on Sunday Yemen will present a work paper on its cultural heritage and visions over the heritage as well as the role of the ministry of Cultural in protecting it.

Hadada will deliver the opening speech that will highlight visions over protecting the Muslim and Arab identity under current difficult challenges and the negatives of the media while tackling crucial issues concerned by the Muslim and Arab nations.

The conference will discuss several issues including activating the dialog on the reality of the Muslim and Arab nations, the challenges and political crises in the Muslim and Arab worlds and how to preserve their fading folklore, she said.

Oral History Opportunity with the Smithsonian

2009-10-26T10:16:00.002-04:00

Next year marks the 100th anniversary of the opening of the National Museum of Natural History. The Museum plans to mark this occasion with a Centennial Celebration-a year-long series of events that will highlight the Museum's scientific contributions, as well as the lasting impact that their exhibitions and educational programs have had on visitors over the past one hundred years.

The Centennial Celebration will kick-off on March 17th, 2010, with the opening of the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins. Throughout 2010 the Museum will implement a targeted media and public outreach effort that will include a Centennial exhibit, television programming, a website, social media experiences, family festivals, and a lecture series.

A key component of the Centennial Celebration will be an Oral History Project - to be conducted in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution Archives - that will tell the history of the Museum through the stories of staff members and volunteers. The Museum's plan is to document the reminiscences and contributions of twenty interview subjects, representing the wide range of the work conducted at NMNH over past decades. These interviews will be placed in the Smithsonian Institution Archives to serve as a lasting resource and documentation of its history. Excerpts from the interviews will also be featured on the Centennial website.

The Museum is seeking volunteers who would like to participate in the production of the Oral History Project. If you are interested in volunteering, please e-mail: Paula Cardwell, Public Programs Specialist, Cardwell@si.edu

Storytelling is a Gift

2009-10-26T07:06:00.002-04:00

This article from the Times-West Virginian highlights the work of Ruth Ann Musick, who collects local folklore in WV. Her work will be featured next week at the ninth annual Frank and Jane Gabor West Virginia Folklife Center Gala, which will will take place Saturday, Oct. 31, at Fairmont State University.

How important is Tradition?

2009-09-02T08:11:00.002-04:00

Folklorists understand that tradition is extremely important. How that importance translates into everyday life is something that folklorists regularly examine. This article from today's Inside Higher Ed looks at the re-emergence of the university convocation as a way to boost retention of incoming freshmen and graduation rates. The idea is that convocations mark a rite of passage for new students. Convocations invoke ritual that allows students to see themselves as part of the idea of the university.

The Folk Value of "American Idol"

2009-08-31T08:18:00.005-04:00

This article in Sunday's Washington Post explores the acquisition and display of the judges desk from American Idol. The desk was donated and is currently on exhibit at the Smithsonian Castle. The accompanying text situates American Idol as part of a long tradition of amateur talent shows that have been part of American culture since the inception of the republic.

What I love about this article is the way it problematizes the acquisition of the desk and whether it really is an authentic piece of folk culture worthy of display at the Smithsonian. It's the type of discussion I like to introduce with undergraduate and graduate students when we're working on a definition of folklore early in the semester.

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings

2009-08-10T15:31:00.001-04:00

A good number of Smithsonian Folkways recordings are available as free downloads through itunes. You can also check out the website here.

The Passing of Mike Seeger

2009-08-10T15:20:00.002-04:00

Mike Seeger,a singer and multi-instrumentalist who is best known among folklorists and others for his role in the folk revival of the 1950s and ’60s, died on Friday at his home in Lexington, Va. at the age of 75. The full obituary from the New York Times is reproduced here with the following correction: Mr. Seeger's final album with Smithsonian Folklways recordings is entitled Early Southern Guitar Styles.

The cause was multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer, said his wife, Alexia Smith.

Although a quieter voice on the national stage than his politically outspoken, older half-brother, Pete, Mike Seeger was a significant force in spreading the music of preindustrial America during an increasingly consumerist era. In 1958 he helped found the New Lost City Ramblers, whose repertory came from the 1920s and ’30s, and in his career he recorded or produced dozens of albums of what he called the “true vine” of American music, the mix of British and African traditions and topical storytelling that took root in the South.

Mr. Seeger’s dedication had a strong effect on the young Bob Dylan, who wrote fondly of him in his 2004 memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One.” Although only eight years his junior, Mr. Dylan called Mr. Seeger a father figure — for helping the under-age Mr. Dylan with his paperwork — and rhapsodized about him as the embodiment of a folk-star persona.

“Mike was unprecedented,” Mr. Dylan wrote, adding: “As for being a folk musician, he was the supreme archetype. He could push a stake through Dracula’s black heart. He was the romantic, egalitarian and revolutionary type all at once.”

But Mr. Seeger made his mark less as a star than as a careful, steady student of his beloved Southern music. He was born in New York to a prominent musical family. His father, Charles Seeger, was a well-known ethnomusicologist, and his mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, a composer and folk-song collector. Besides Pete, Mr. Seeger’s sister Peggy also became a noted singer.

The intellectual pursuit of folk music was part of Mike Seeger’s life from an early age. At 5 he made a recording of the old British folk ballad “Barbara Allen,” his wife said in an interview on Sunday.

Mr. Seeger played banjo, guitar, autoharp and other instruments, which he learned from old records and in some cases from the musicians who played on them. A dogged researcher, he sought out musicians who had been lost for decades and introduced them to an eager (and young) new audience. One was Dock Boggs, a banjo player from western Virginia whose records were prized by folklorists. Mr. Seeger brought him to the American Folk Festival in Asheville, N.C., in 1963.

Mr. Seeger’s most recent album was “Early Southern Guitar Sounds” (Smithsonian Folkways), in 2007, and he played autoharp on Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’s Grammy Award-winning album “Raising Sand” (Rounder), also released in 2007. In his career Mr. Seeger was nominated for six Grammys.

In addition to his wife, his half-brother Pete, of Beacon, N.Y., and his sister Peggy, of Boston, Mr. Seeger is survived by three sons, Kim, of Tivoli, N.Y., Chris, of Rockville Centre, N.Y., and Jeremy, of Belmont, Mass.; four stepchildren, Cory Foster of Ithaca, N.Y., Jenny Foster of Rockville, Md., Joel Foster of Silver Spring, Md., and Jesse Foster of Washington; another sister, Barbara Perfect of Henderson, Nev.; another half-brother, John Seeger of Bridgewater, Conn.; and 13 grandchildren and step-grandchildren.

Remembering Sandy Ives

2009-08-04T07:46:00.006-04:00

It is with great sadness that I announce the passing of Folklorist Sandy Ives. Most of the GMU undergrad community is familiar with Sandy's work on the logistics of fieldwork (The Tape Recorded Interview).
The following obituary is re-posted from the American Folklore Society Newsletter.

Edward D. ("Sandy") Ives, 1925-2009

Folklorist Sandy Ives passed away Sunday evening, August 2,
at home in Maine. Sandy received his PhD in folklore from Indiana
University in 1962 and was a professor of folklore at the University
of Maine from 1964 to his retirement in 1998. He founded the
Maine Folklife Center and the Northeast Archives of Folklore
and Oral History, both at the University.

Among his major publications were Larry Gorman: The Man Who Made the Songs (Indiana University Press, 1964), Folksongs and Their Makers (co-editor; Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1970), Joe Scott: The Woodsman Songmaker (University of Illinois Press, 1978), and
George Magoon and the Down East Game War (University of Illinois Press, 1988). In 2000, Ives received a festschrift issue
of the journal he founded, Northeast Folklore, entitled Essays in Honor of Edward D."Sandy" Ives and edited by Pauleena MacDougall and David Taylor (University of Maine Press).

He was elected to the Fellows of the AFS in 1980, and received
the Society's Kenneth Goldstein Award for Lifetime Academic Leadership in 2003.

To grade or not to grade

2009-08-03T08:18:00.002-04:00

I've linked this article on grading. Or not grading. An English professor at Duke has decided to hand over the work of grading to her students by composing a simple list of tasks that students must complete to receive an "A", "B" etc. To determine whether the students have adequately completed the assignments, she allows small groups of students to grade one another.

This sounds fine for a standard English literature class where students are majors and well aware of the difference between adequate and work well done. But what about in other types of classes, such as folklore, where it make take students weeks to grasp the concept of what is and isn't folklore?

I welcome your thoughts here.

Corridos at the Folklife Festival

2009-07-21T11:38:00.007-04:00

On March 25th, 2009 I wrote a post about the U.S. Border Patrol commissioning Spanish corridos to deter immigration. This past month at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, I got a chance to chat with Aldalberto "Don Beto" Cruz Alvarez and Jesus Garcia who are corridos musicians and performed in this summer's Las Americas section.

Don Beto Cruz is 84 years old and has been playing traditional music since he was a child. He is accompanied by Jesus Garcia, a younger generation musician who has been learning Don Beto's vast repertory of songs. At the festival, they presented corridos as a narrative song form that has traditionally acted almost like a newspaper, reporting real events, and expressing sentiments that could be interpreted as subversive and rebellious. When I asked them to share their thoughts about the U.S. Border's migra-corridos they had an interesting reaction. They were not upset that a traditional song form was being packaged and sold to push a government agenda. If anything, they simply smiled and seemed like they were up for the challenge.

Jesus Garcia:

Corridos are about telling the truth. They can act as an ongoing conversation.

Someone may write a corrido, expressing an opinion, and someone else can write a song as a reaction, or arguing back. I would be interested in listening to those songs (migra-corridos) and I'm sure,,,,there are other corridos being written and played back.

Both Don Beto Cruz and Jesus Garcia are from Sonora, Mexico. To hear some of their music, visit http://www.festival.si.edu/2009/las_americas/cruz.aspx

Folklore and the Style Invitational

2009-07-18T13:35:00.003-04:00

In honor of the Smithsonian's Folklife Festival, the Washington Post ran a Style Invitational asking for possible exhibits that might be part of the Folklife Festival. I enjoyed reading these simply because it highlights something I'm always trying to teach students in my intro to Folklore class: what is and is not folklore.

As you can see from this list, a number of these simply play on the idea of folklore as any old or outdated custom (like licking stamps), while others are truly humorous imaginings of things that could tickle a folklorist's fancy.

I'm actually thinking about using this as part of an exam in my intro class this fall.

Remembering Archie Green

2009-03-26T15:18:00.001-04:00

From Today's Washington Post:

Folklorist Celebrated Working Americans

By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 26, 2009; B05

Archie Green, 91, a former shipwright and carpenter who became one of the most influential folklorists of the past half-century and who was acknowledged as the founding father of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, died of renal failure March 22 at his home in San Francisco.

While teaching labor folklore and other subjects at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the 1960s and 1970s, Dr. Green began a 10-year lobbying effort to persuade Congress to officially recognize America's folk heritage.

The effort culminated on Jan. 2, 1976, when President Gerald R. Ford signed the American Folklife Preservation Act, establishing the American Folklife Center to preserve, collect and present the vast diversity of cultural offerings from ordinary people living everyday lives.

The center's collections include Native American song and dance, tales of Br'er Rabbit told in the Gullah dialect of the Georgia and Carolina sea islands, and songs and stories from the lives of cowboys, farmers, fishermen and other working people, among many other expressions of folk culture from all 50 states.

In addition, Dr. Green began organizing programs featuring workers' traditions at the Smithsonian Institution's Festival of American Folklife on the Mall. Those programs continue.

A gregarious man and an engaging storyteller in the tradition of Studs Terkel, he was Archie to all who knew him, never Dr. Green. A shipwright's apprentice in the San Francisco area in the 1930s, he served as a carpenter's mate in the Navy during World War II. Returning to San Francisco after the war, he worked in the building trades for 15 more years. He was a 68-year member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America.

He developed the habit of listening, observing and asking questions of laborers and craftspeople, and he eventually realized that he had a passion for "laborlore," a term he coined to describe the expressive culture of working people.

He went back to school and received a master's degree in library science from the University of Illinois in 1960 and a doctorate in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968. (He had received his undergraduate degree in political science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1939.)

He began collecting songs, stories, customs, beliefs and craft traditions -- laborlore -- of sheet metal workers and sailors, millworkers and miners. He explored how work gave texture and meaning to working-class Americans and to the culture as a whole. He contended, for example, that the origins of rock-and-roll can be traced to the rhythmic, coordinated sounds of 19th-century steel-drivin' men laying rail with hammer and drill. His first book was "Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal-Mining Songs" (1972).

In 2007, the Library of Congress awarded him its Living Legend medal for devoting his life to "studying the creativity of ordinary, working Americans" and for his role in forming the American Folklife Center.

He was born Aaron Green on June 20, 1917, in Winnipeg, Canada, to Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine. His father was a harnessmaker by trade who escaped czarist Russia after participating in the 1905 Revolution. In about 1922, the family moved to Los Angeles, where "Archie" discovered working people and radical politics.

After graduating from Berkeley, he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps and then became a shipwright on the San Francisco waterfront -- primarily, he told historian Kieran Taylor, because he hoped to impress a young woman who admired waterfront labor organizers.

Leaving the trade, he told Taylor, "was the most dramatic thing in my life. I felt like a traitor. . . . I revered being a shipwright."

Teaching, unlike the dangerous, physically demanding shipwright's life, "was like taking candy from a baby." His academic career included a stint at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was fascinated by the live music scene, which he referred to as a musical coming together of what he called "goat ropers and liberated freaks, of superkickers and isolated intellectuals."

At his death, he was working on a collection of essays, tentatively titled "Been on the Job Too Long."

He also was lobbying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to include a cultural component in the economic stimulus legislation before Congress. The cultural component would document the work the stimulus package funds, in the spirit of the Federal Writers' Project of the New Deal.

Survivors include his wife of 65 years, Louanne Green of San Francisco; three children, David Green of San Francisco, Derek Green of Montara, Calif., and Deborah Green of Boone, Iowa; a sister; and four grandchildren.

Migra Corridos

2009-03-25T16:09:00.006-04:00

On February 15, 2009 BBC Mundo reported on the U.S. Border Patrol commissioning Spanish songs to deter immigration. Currently being played at border radio stations, these songs have become known as migracorridos. The corrido is a particular style of Mexican folklore narrative ballad, with themes that typically range from love to war. The U.S. Border Patrol however, paid for a CD of six songs in the style of corridos that have very specific and targeted themes. Migracorridos sing of the perils and dangers of crossing the border, usually with the protagonists facing agonizing endings-murdered, jailed, or left for dead in the middle of the desert. The Border Patrol commissioned these from Elevacion, a Washington DC based Hispanic ad agency. While the rate of arrests, deaths, and overall incidents at the border have not declined drastically in the last year (and in the BBC article, author Carlos Ceresole points out that any decline is due to the worsening U.S economy and an increase in border agents.) the Border Patrol has claimed these songs as highly successful and popular. Apparently, one song has been nominated for an award in Mexico.

Government sanctioned art is not new. Whether it is nationalist music, or war monuments, art and government agenda is at times, a symbiotic relationship. Unfortunately what is particularly offensive about migracorridos is that, the U.S. Border Patrol has stolen a Mexican folk medium, to try and keep Mexican immigrants out.

This March 15th New York Times Opinion article is about Saul Linares, a factory worker and immigrant rights advocate who wrote his own corrido. Linares wrote about Maricopa County Sherriff Joe Arpaio, who has come under federal investigation for racial profiling and police brutality. While Linares’s song will probably not get the kind of airplay that the migracorridos have, it was well received by his colleagues and he was asked to make a recording. It is in this simple act, that perhaps Linares took the medium back.

If the U.S. Border Patrol thinks that it’s clever to use a folk medium against the folk that they are trying to keep out, it is probably because they think they have more control then they do. But corridos are structured to be subversive. They are short, concise, and as Linares states in the NY Times Opinion article, he was simply “[with his] left hand...... eating, and with my right hand I was writing it down.” He did not need to be paid or pay an ad agency to send his message. He was inspired, he wrote, was heard, and the audience wanted more. Linares’s corrido was not packaged and sold, but irreverent and passionate. This is part of what makes corridos a folk medium. The U.S. Border Patrol can try to use corridos for its agenda, but it can’t stop people from writing songs back.

This is Your Life (and How you Tell it)

2007-05-23T20:59:00.000-04:00

Calling all Folklorists:

This article from Sunday's New York Times addresses oral history and the life story in the context of psychotherapy. Yet another example of others re-creating the analytical work that we do. What do you think?

By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: May 22, 2007
NY Times

For more than a century, researchers have been trying to work out the raw ingredients that account for personality, the sweetness and neuroses that make Anna Anna, the sluggishness and sensitivity that make Andrew Andrew. They have largely ignored the first-person explanation — the life story that people themselves tell about who they are, and why.

Stories are stories, after all. The attractive stranger at the airport bar hears one version, the parole officer another, and the P.T.A. board gets something entirely different. Moreover, the tone, the lessons, even the facts in a life story can all shift in the changing light of a person’s mood, its major notes turning minor, its depths appearing shallow.

Yet in the past decade or so a handful of psychologists have argued that the quicksilver elements of personal narrative belong in any three-dimensional picture of personality. And a burst of new findings are now helping them make the case. Generous, civic-minded adults from diverse backgrounds tell life stories with very similar and telling features, studies find; so likewise do people who have overcome mental distress through psychotherapy.

Every American may be working on a screenplay, but we are also continually updating a treatment of our own life — and the way in which we visualize each scene not only shapes how we think about ourselves, but how we behave, new studies find. By better understanding how life stories are built, this work suggests, people may be able to alter their own narrative, in small ways and perhaps large ones.

“When we first started studying life stories, people thought it was just idle curiosity — stories, isn’t that cool?” said Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and author of the 2006 book, “The Redemptive Self.” “Well, we find that these narratives guide behavior in every moment, and frame not only how we see the past but how we see ourselves in the future.”

Researchers have found that the human brain has a natural affinity for narrative construction. People tend to remember facts more accurately if they encounter them in a story rather than in a list, studies find; and they rate legal arguments as more convincing when built into narrative tales rather than on legal precedent.

YouTube routines notwithstanding, most people do not begin to see themselves in the midst of a tale with a beginning, middle and eventual end until they are teenagers. “Younger kids see themselves in terms of broad, stable traits: ‘I like baseball but not soccer,’ ” said Kate McLean, a psychologist at the University of Toronto in Mississauga. “This meaning-making capability — to talk about growth, to explain what something says about who I am — develops across adolescence.”

Psychologists know what life stories look like when they are fully hatched, at least for some Americans. Over the years, Dr. McAdams and others have interviewed hundreds of men and women, most in their 30s and older.

During a standard life-story interview, people describe phases of their lives as if they were outlining chapters, from the sandlot years through adolescence and middle age. They also describe several crucial scenes in detail, including high points (the graduation speech, complete with verbal drum roll); low points (the college nervous breakdown, complete with the list of witnesses); and turning points. The entire two-hour session is recorded and transcribed.

In analyzing the texts, the researchers found strong correlations between the content of people’s current lives and the stories they tell. Those with mood problems have many good memories, but these scenes are usually tainted by some dark detail. The pride of college graduation is spoiled when a friend makes a cutting remark. The wedding party was wonderful until the best man collapsed from drink. A note of disappointment seems to close each narrative phrase.

By contrast, so-called generative adults — those who score highly on tests measuring civic-mindedness, and who are likely to be energetic and involved — tend to see many of the events in their life in the reverse order, as linked by themes of redemption. They flunked sixth grade but met a wonderful counselor and made honor roll in seventh. They were laid low by divorce, only to meet a wonderful new partner. Often, too, they say they felt singled out from very early in life — protected, even as others nearby suffered.

In broad outline, the researchers report, such tales express distinctly American cultural narratives, of emancipation or atonement, of Horatio Alger advancement, of epiphany and second chances. Depending on the person, the story itself might be nuanced or simplistic, powerfully dramatic or cloyingly pious. But the point is that the narrative themes are, as much as any other trait, driving factors in people’s behavior, the researchers say.

“We find that when it comes to the big choices people make — should I marry this person? should I take this job? should I move across the country? — they draw on these stories implicitly, whether they know they are working from them or not,” Dr. McAdams said.

Any life story is by definition a retrospective reconstruction, at least in part an outgrowth of native temperament. Yet the research so far suggests that people’s life stories are neither rigid nor wildly variable, but rather change gradually over time, in close tandem with meaningful life events.

Jonathan Adler, a researcher at Northwestern, has found that people’s accounts of their experiences in psychotherapy provide clues about the nature of their recovery. In a recent study presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in January, Mr. Adler reported on 180 adults from the Chicago area who had recently completed a course of talk therapy. They sought treatment for things like depression, anxiety, marital problems and fear of flying, and spent months to years in therapy.

At some level, talk therapy has always been an exercise in replaying and reinterpreting each person’s unique life story. Yet Mr. Adler found that in fact those former patients who scored highest on measures of well-being — who had recovered, by standard measures — told very similar tales about their experiences.

They described their problem, whether depression or an eating disorder, as coming on suddenly, as if out of nowhere. They characterized their difficulty as if it were an outside enemy, often giving it a name (the black dog, the walk of shame). And eventually they conquered it.

“The story is one of victorious battle: ‘I ended therapy because I could overcome this on my own,’ ” Mr. Adler said. Those in the study who scored lower on measures of psychological well-being were more likely to see their moods and behavior problems as a part of their own character, rather than as a villain to be defeated. To them, therapy was part of a continuing adaptation, not a decisive battle.

The findings suggest that psychotherapy, when it is effective, gives people who are feeling helpless a sense of their own power, in effect altering their life story even as they work to disarm their own demons, Mr. Adler said.

Mental resilience relies in part on exactly this kind of autobiographical storytelling, moment to moment, when navigating life’s stings and sorrows. To better understand how stories are built in real time, researchers have recently studied how people recall vivid scenes from recent memory. They find that one important factor is the perspective people take when they revisit the scene — whether in the first person, or in the third person, as if they were watching themselves in a movie.

In a 2005 study reported in the journal Psychological Science, researchers at Columbia University measured how student participants reacted to a bad memory, whether an argument or failed exam, when it was recalled in the third person. They tested levels of conscious and unconscious hostility after the recollections, using both standard questionnaires and students’ essays. The investigators found that the third-person scenes were significantly less upsetting, compared with bad memories recalled in the first person.

“What our experiment showed is that this shift in perspective, having this distance from yourself, allows you to relive the experience and focus on why you’re feeling upset,” instead of being immersed in it, said Ethan Kross, the study’s lead author. The emotional content of the memory is still felt, he said, but its sting is blunted as the brain frames its meaning, as it builds the story.

Taken together, these findings suggest a kind of give and take between life stories and individual memories, between the larger screenplay and the individual scenes. The way people replay and recast memories, day by day, deepens and reshapes their larger life story. And as it evolves, that larger story in turn colors the interpretation of the scenes.

Nic Weststrate, 23, a student living in Toronto, said he was able to reinterpret many of his most painful memories with more compassion after having come out as a gay man. He was very hard on himself, for instance, when at age 20 he misjudged a relationship with a friend who turned out to be straight.

He now sees the end of that relationship as both a painful lesson and part of a larger narrative. “I really had no meaningful story for my life then,” he said, “and I think if I had been open about being gay I might not have put myself in that position, and he probably wouldn’t have either.”

After coming out, he said: “I saw that there were other possibilities. I would be presenting myself openly to a gay audience, and just having a coherent story about who I am made a big difference. It affects how you see the past, but it also really affects your future.”

Psychologists have shown just how interpretations of memories can alter future behavior. In an experiment published in 2005, researchers had college students who described themselves as socially awkward in high school recall one of their most embarrassing moments. Half of the students reimagined the humiliation in the first person, and the other half pictured it in the third person.

Two clear differences emerged. Those who replayed the scene in the third person rated themselves as having changed significantly since high school — much more so than the first-person group did. The third-person perspective allowed people to reflect on the meaning of their social miscues, the authors suggest, and thus to perceive more psychological growth.

And their behavior changed, too. After completing the psychological questionnaires, each study participant spent time in a waiting room with another student, someone the research subject thought was taking part in the study. In fact the person was working for the research team, and secretly recorded the conversation between the pair, if any. This double agent had no idea which study participants had just relived a high school horror, and which had viewed theirs as a movie scene.

The recordings showed that members of the third-person group were much more sociable than the others. “They were more likely to initiate a conversation, after having perceived themselves as more changed,” said Lisa Libby, the lead author and a psychologist at Ohio State University. She added, “We think that feeling you have changed frees you up to behave as if you have; you think, ‘Wow, I’ve really made some progress’ and it gives you some real momentum.”

Dr. Libby and others have found that projecting future actions in the third person may also affect what people later do, as well. In another study, students who pictured themselves voting for president in the 2004 election, from a third-person perspective, were more likely to actually go to the polls than those imagining themselves casting votes in the first person.

The implications of these results for self-improvement, whether sticking to a diet or finishing a degree or a novel, are still unknown. Likewise, experts say, it is unclear whether such scene-making is more functional for some people, and some memories, than for others. And no one yet knows how fundamental personality factors, like neuroticism or extraversion, shape the content of life stories or their component scenes.

But the new research is giving narrative psychologists something they did not have before: a coherent story to tell. Seeing oneself as acting in a movie or a play is not merely fantasy or indulgence; it is fundamental to how people work out who it is they are, and may become.

“The idea that whoever appeared onstage would play not me but a character was central to imagining how to make the narrative: I would need to see myself from outside,” the writer Joan Didion has said of “The Year of Magical Thinking,” her autobiographical play about mourning the death of her husband and her daughter. “I would need to locate the dissonance between the person I thought I was and the person other people saw.”

Folklore process under a different name?

2007-05-16T09:10:00.000-04:00

During the spring my graduate students and I read about the nature and history of folkloristics, and joined the debate about what constitutes folklore. This article from today's Washington Post addresses Jonathan Lethems's essay on "plagiarism" as a form of creativity. Lethem is enthralled by "the mysteries of authorship -- the idea that things arise in culture that don't quite belong to anyone."

Excuse me sir, but that's called folklore.

Take a look at the linked article. This is one of those moments when I believe the public folklorist should respond, to clarify and engage in the debate. And we should encourage Mr. Lethem to not use the sign that represents intellectual theft to describe the creative process of communities and groups. Calling it "plagiarism" is a shameless attempt to grab headlines (which of course, worked).

Sharing the Forum

2007-05-11T16:21:00.000-04:00

Dear contributors,

I just wanted to let you know I have made a feed link to this blog from Facebook. So that anyone who visits it through Facebook knows the original writer of each post, you may want to include your names in the post. Seemed like a good idea to give the blog more exposure. I hope that was all right!

Erica

Community folklore in changing communities

2007-04-29T02:14:00.000-04:00

Today I performed (well briefly before injuring my foot and spending the rest of the afternoon sitting with my foot elevated and iced) at Belvedere Planation in Spotsylvania called "Take a Walk through out Past and into Our Future." The event was planned by Spotsylvania county and intended to showcase Spotsylvania's past. The reality is that it was a conglommeration of various reenactment groups representing the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Virginia Renaissance Faire. There was also a group of Native reenactors, although I'm not sure if they were representing a particular tribe or time in history. Ironically the Renn Faire was there to represent Spotsylvania's future as the county hopes to turn it into a tourism draw, it doesn't really have much to do with the county's past.

What caught my attention though was that all the staff from the plantation that I saw were Latinos. Judging by the carneceria, Latin grocery store, and "Se Habla Espanol" signs I saw, Spotsylvania, like many locales, has a growing Latino population. Latinos were nonexistant as patrons, however, and there were certainly no groups representing Latinos as part of the county's past or future.

This reminded me of a conversation I had with a man who ran a museum in Manasses; he said they were often criticized for not involving the local population in activities, but he was having a hard time gathering public interest in Civil War battlefields, because the demographics of the area had changed so much with the influx of immigrants. He didn't know how to interest the new community in a past that was not really thir own.

I'm wondering how this affects public sector folklorists--if you're struggling to maintain the cultural traditions of an area, what do you do when the population changes? How do you keep the community involved?

Authenticity and Value

2007-04-25T10:14:00.000-04:00

In class on Monday we discussed Regina Bendix's book on authenticity, its relation to the commodification of culture, and its legitimizing powers, both for culture and for folklore as a discipline. I ran across an item on an arts e-marketing blog that touches on authenticity from a different angle. The blogger, Gene Carr, reported on a Poynter Institute study that said the following:
Live, documentary news photos -- photos of real people doing things in real time -- got more attention than staged photos. Studio or staged photos received little attention. [emphasis in original]
Carr encouraged marketers to use action, candid, or backstage images instead of publicity stills, adding that online, "Authenticity is more important than almost anything else."

Why is that? Authenticity, or at least the perception of authenticity, clearly adds value. I think that for one thing, people want to feel knowledgeable, to feel like insiders. That includes getting a peek behind the slick, packaged images that we see everywhere. We like being able to know the difference between reality and virtuality. It's that eternal quest to be (or seem!) smart enough to get at the truth. More than that, however, maybe it's another way that we look for connection. We've talked in class about how folklore has been seen as an antidote to the alienation of the modern world, and that latching on to tradition - any tradition - simulates community and a sense of being grounded in time or place with other people. Seeing a candid photo of an artist gives the illusion of really knowing him or her as a person, of being a part of that community (though this feeling is as artificial as the staged publicity photos). And it seems that this feeling of connection, of being one of the savvy few, adds value to a cultural experience.

What do you think?

"He loves me..., He loves me not..."

2007-04-19T09:52:00.000-04:00

“He loves me..., He loves me not…” Some thoughts on the authenticity issue.

I have not finished the reading for this week yet but I wanted to pull together a few thoughts on the authenticity issue as I understand (?) it at this point. Regina Bendix writes, of folklore studies at the turn of the century, that:

“The marginality of the field institutionally, however, sharply contrasts with the deep attraction of folklore across society, an attraction not least to be explained by the connections of folklore to diverging searches for authenticity. Ultimately, it may be the poorly verbalized spectrum of authenticity cravings, from the treasured to the spiritual, from the purifying to the existential, that have allowed for the subject’s maverick status.” (153)

As I was thinking about this I was reminded of that game we used to play as kids, you know the game where you pick a daisy and pluck off the petals one by one, chanting while plucking the first petal: “He loves me..” and, while plucking the next: “He loves me not…”, and so on, until all the petals have been plucked. The idea being that whichever of the statements coincides with the last petal plucked must in some secret way coincide with the way the other person feels. The poor flower, as we know when we are quite rational, cannot actually have anything to do with how someone feels about us, but love is not quite rational. It seems to me that there is an element of this lover’s perspective in the folk song collecting that was being done outside of the academy by people like the Lomaxs. There is a certain sincerity, a kind of emotional authenticity, to this way of plucking at culture. It is understandable even if it is destructive of both the flower (the songs) and of the beloved (the people), as both are supposedly joined in and to the lover by this process. Do you suppose that it was a matter of indifference to the singers that their songs were actually inspiring to those who came collecting?

Meanwhile the academics take a different look at the relationship. While acknowledging the emotional attraction (at least of the white race toward the customs and peoples of other races deemed, by them, to be somehow more authentic than their own) they strive to be more rational about the whole affair. I wonder if any studies have been done concerning the attraction of the “primitive” person to the cultures and articles of (or even to the individual) outsiders who come to study them. The academics want to question the beloved himself, to hear from his own mouth some profession of love or at least a confession to the fact that he has in fact plucked a daisy and chanted this chant as we once did, or would like to do, except that we know better now. Instead of asking if we are loved in return we ask to see the daisy field, and to watch the rituals, to record the chanting and photograph the whole process. Does this protect the beloved from our love while leaving him pure in his, or does it perhaps destroy his love while we somehow get to keep ours; by having renounced it in exchange for the privilege of collecting evidence of “belovedness” from others? I’m not sure Bendix will address these questions but I am looking forward to reading her next chapters.

Jeanne

Nomination and Name

2007-04-17T00:54:00.000-04:00

Hi everyone,

I hope I’m doing this right. I’ve never created a blog before. I’m very sorry I missed our class tonight.

In light of our reading for the past week and in lieu of an opportunity to participate in discussion I wanted to share a few thoughts with you regarding the term “folklore” as a name for a subject, discipline and practice.

What happens if we consider “biology” alongside “folklore?” We can study biology and we can study folklore but we don’t usually think of biology as a thing in itself except as we think of it as a field of study. We don’t go out and collect biology as we do (or have thought we could do) with folklore. We do study the biology and folklore of various places and things. We understand that we are biological but, when it comes to folklore, we have thought that only some of us, sometimes, are “folklorical.” That seems to be changing with the shift in emphasis toward performance based studies.

I can understand the material importance of the debate over folklore as a name. Many people’s careers hinge on the field’s chances for funding at universities, and certain names, like folklore, can have a negative connotation. The authors we read for tonight point out the importance of folklore scholarship to other departments like anthropology, sociology and linguistics (and more recently to the business world) while folklore departments themselves seem to languish. Some of this languishing is attributable to the name but I wonder if the debate over the name improves this situation for university folklore departments. On one level I think it does. BKG quotes Raymond Williams on the value of explicating keywords not as a means of resolution but as a means of attaining an extra "edge of consciousness."

BKG concludes that the issue for folklore is “what our future might look like as a postdisciplinary formation informed by a distinctive intellectual history whose character we more fully embrace.” She says that: “As we bring that formation into focus, we will find its name.” I get the impression that she is saying we shouldn’t dwell on the name too much, that folklorists will do more for their field (whatever it ends up being called) if they get on with their work wherever they find it. She seems to be nominating folklore – not the name “folklore” but the entity – almost like nominating someone for office. From the perspective of the nominator the name of a candidate is not so significant as a belief in her abilities. If the candidate is a person named Folklore does she decide she can never be president because her name is odd? Does she have to change her name to get funding or to get elected? BKG seems to be saying that, if Folklore found herself nominated for president and got there by being who she is, she ought to consider her name but ultimately trust her nomination and look to her campaign. After all, her definition only exists, and is only going to continue to be effective, interactively.

I wonder if others read this the same way. I would be interested in hearing your perspectives if you have time to respond.

Jeanne

Film and Folklore

2007-04-16T09:17:00.000-04:00

We've discussed the use of fairy tales and fairy tale themes in the movies in class. There are the Disney "classics" that forever cement one version of a tale in the collective minds of late modern consumers, and there are films that play with fairy tale genres to varying degrees. Julia Robert's Pretty Woman (Cinderella) is such an example.

In many of these films, the fairy tale references are very obvious or even commented upon by the the characters (Julia Robert's character does just that). I saw the DVD Just Like Heaven over the weekend, and I was surprised to find that this film is clearly an adaptation of Sleeping Beauty.

The film stars Reese Witherspoon (clearly the Beauty) and Mark Ruffalo, two people who need to be loved and saved from themselves. Sleeping Beauty is eventually awakened by Ruffalo's kiss, yet the film made no other direct references to the fairy tale. It is one of the best film adaptations of Beauty and the Beast that I have watched, however.

Folklore, Fairy Tales, and the Market

2007-04-10T06:40:00.000-04:00

The link above will take you to a product promotion site by Caress body wash. They are promoting a new line of "exotic oil infusions," and to promote their products they've created fairy tale variants of Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast. There is even a link to upload your photo (and your prince charming!) so you, too, can be part of the Caress on-line fairy tale.

This is the use of folklore that would make Richard Dorson scream fakelore! It is an interesting use of fairy tale form, although there are too many puns and mixed metaphors. I particularly loathe Carson (of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy fame) as the "fairy" god mother.

Thanks, Christina, for bringing this site to my attention.

Folklore.org.net.com.edu

2007-04-07T07:15:00.001-04:00

One of the more interesting uses of folklore on the web is the site I have linked above, Folkore.org. When I first came upon it, I thought it must be a mulit-topic site dedicated to occupational or workplace folklore. I was right, sort of. The site is actually subtitled "The Original Macintosh," and chronicles the development of Apple's original Macintosh computer through a number of stories and anecdotes about the process and the people who were involved.

The Folklore.org site is in some ways a surprise. The Mac founders get it in a way that most folklorists can tell you a lot of people do not: they seem to understand that folklore is linked with storytelling and storytelling is linked to people who share at least one common feature. Also surprising is that they decided to name their blog "folklore.org" as opposed to any other number of names that might have been more accurate or precise to fit their site's content. MacLore, for instance, is the first thing that comes mind, but that would probably raise copyright and other issues.

Another cursory web search will show that the understandings of the term "folklore" are pretty broad, and in many cases, imprecise. For instance, the site Living Folklore is the business site for a company of the same name. The site does not offer much in the way of information about the organization, although it is clear that they have theatrical productions that include clowns. When i wrote to Jacob Devany about the groups connection to folklore, he responded saying,

Our connection to folklore is more traditional than academic, though we have a lot of academic viability. Clowns and tricksters are in every culture around the world, and often relate cultural wisdom through humor, metaphor. We came to our work as artists, performers because of the need to make the stories live through art. In that way we are participants in evolving culture, sharing it, etc. instead of looking at culture in a box like traditional academics often do. We picked the name Living Folklore to remind people that life is a story, and it is our responsibility to live that story with respect to past and future generations, and the web of life on earth. We felt that too many people are disconnected from the life-blood that stories and myths share about who we are.

There is a lot to consider in this statement. My first response is, "well, they must never have worked with folklorists in the field," as it has been a long time since folklorists looked at folklore as "culture in a box." But more importantly, it isn't clear from the site that Living Folklore (the organization) has much to do with folklore at all. They are a performing arts troupe, they do base their work on characters and motifs associated with folklore, and they do cite connections with Native American groups. Yet none of this is necessarily folklore--depending on how you define it.

My question this morning is, what are the associations of the word folklore for others, those "civilians" and others who have not dedicated their lives to the study of folklore? Should folklorists be more involved with the use of the term, and if so, how should we interface with the world, particularly those who feel a strong connection to the idea of folklore, but might not have a connection to folklore in its varied professional contexts?

Folklore on the Web

2007-04-02T09:31:00.000-04:00

If you do a basic Google search on "folklore," you will hit thousands of websites, many of which are published by amateur folklorists. The content and quality of these sites vary greatly (like all web material), but if the web is any indication, there is more than a casual interest in folklore at the moment.

The result of one of these searches was the discovery of "Home Town Tales," a public access cable television show dedicated to folklore and stories of unexplained or bizarre events across the nation. The voice over at the start of the show rattles off a number of folklore genres with the slogan, "We call them Hometown Tales, because every town has one."

The shows are all brief,about 6 minutes in length, and appear to be filmed with hand held cameras and edited with lots of special effects to make the creepy stories seem a wee bit creepier, darker, and mysterious.

The Hometown Tales creators definitely document community folklore, as the episode below, "The Legend of La Llorona" demonstrates. What is missing here is context, particularly the fact that the Santa Fe legends presented are not the only location of the La Llorona legend, that there are many variants of this tale and that it originated in Mexico.

Nevertheless, Hometown Tales is one example of amateur folklore, or as I prefer to refer to it, folklore collected by the folk. The broader question I would like to pose here is how should professional folklorists respond to folklore by the folk? There is a move within public sector folklore to train community member to collect their own folklore. That level of collaboration empowers communities to make decisions about their traditions regarding what should be collected and preserved, which is (I believe) the heart of folklore scholarship. We are collaborators; the material belongs to the people who produce it.

But what of the web-based collections? Some of these are not necessarily community based projects collected from local insiders. Similarly, a number of folklore books written by non-folklorists effectively divorce the content from its creators.

I encourage you to take a look at, and comment upon, the "Legend of La Llorona" presented here.