Sandra L. Beckett. Red Riding Hood for All Ages: A Fairy-Tale Icon in Cross-Cultural Contexts. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008. Pp. ix+244, color prints, index. $29.95, paper.

Sara Cleto
George Mason University

Sandra L Beckett’s book, Red Riding Hood for All Ages: A Fairy-Tale Icon in Cross-Cultural Contexts, provides an indepth and informative critique of retellings of a familiar fairy tale. This is Beckett’s second book on Little Red Riding Hood retellings; her first volume, Recycling Red Riding Hood, was devoted to contemporary revisions intended for children. Red Riding Hood for All Ages, however, has a wider scope, addressing retellings targeted at children, adolescents, and adults, as well as crossover works intended for more than one age group. (more…)

Variation of Manufactured Folk Drama: A Case Study of The Ellettsville House of Prayer Hell House

Mary Mesteller
Indiana University

A version of this paper received the prize for Best Poster at the 2010 IU/OSU Student Folklore Conference

Abstract:

Local Variation of Manufactured Folk Drama: A Case Study on the Ellettsville House of Prayer Hell House analyzes The Hell House Outreach, an Evangelical Christian outreach tool, a folk drama that has become widespread in churches throughout the United States during the Halloween season. The Hell House Outreach’s popularity and traditional aspects are because of the The Hell House Outreach, which became available for purchase in the 1990s. Variation exists in content as well as context in individual hell houses, though a traditional form is maintained. It is within the adaptability where the producers of The Hell House Outreach believe the power of the ministry lies. The Ellettsville House of Prayer Hell House in Southern Indiana is an excellent example of a hell house that altered the The Hell House Outreach Kit in order to highlight controversial moral and political issues unique to Monroe County of Southern Indiana. (more…)

Patrick R. McNaughton.  A Bird Dance Near Saturday City: Sidi Ballo and the Art of West African MasqueradeBloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.  Pp. xvii+300, photographs, notes, index.  $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Nichole Tramel
Indiana University

Patrick McNaughton’s work, A Bird Dance Near Saturday City: Sidi Ballo and the Art of West African Masquerade, chronicles and investigates a particularly resonant masquerade performance of Sidi Ballo’s decades ago in a small town near Saturday City, Mali, as the text’s title implies.  For years, the author struggled with how to accurately and fairly depict this powerful experience, the product of Sidi Ballo’s genius and the other talented dancers, singers, and community members that contributed to the performance.  This book is the result of his journey.  Accordingly, A Bird Dance Near Saturday City devotes equal attention to Sidi Ballo’s virtuosity, elements of bird dance performance, the performance itself, and the forms and functions of aesthetics.  Examining both the particular and the general, McNaughton provides a useful and engaging account of Sidi Ballo’s June 1978 Dogoduman bird dance performance; in so doing, he examines its components and contributors, and Sidi Ballo as a performer and artist.  Additionally, the author discusses artistry, aesthetics, and performance theory, both philosophically and practically.  He looks at each of these in terms of the bird dance(s), Mande culture, and society in general. (more…)

Rama for Beginners:  Bridging Indian Folk and Comics Cultures

Jeremy Stoll
Indiana University

Abstract:

In the boom of recent comics scholarship, the comic art of India has received little attention compared to that of other nations, the United States, France, and Japan in particular. Through a basis in religious and folk narratives, Indian comics narratives, especially those published by the Amar Chitra Katha series, have worked to update folk tales, retelling them in a modern medium. By looking at the figure of Rama in the Amar Chitra Katha and other Indian comics, this paper will analyze the process and implications of this transformation. In particular, the analysis of Rama as contemporary hero will reveal how these stories help people to deal with daily life at the same time that they affirm another, older way of understanding the world. This paper will thus demonstrate how comics creators in India have adapted the comic book to effectively re-maneuver traditional tales as a modern, folkloric inheritance to future generations.     (more…)

Karen Dodge Tolstrup. “If Maine Had a Queen”: The Life of Brownie Schrumpf. Orono, ME: The Maine Folklife Center, 2008. Pp. 96, black and white photographs, appendix of recipes. $15.00 paper.

 Danielle Quales
Indiana University

Tolstrup’s very accessible and readable book chronicles the life of famous Mainer, Mildred Greeley Brown Schrumpf.  Schrumpf truly seemed to be a woman ahead of her time in the early to mid-twentieth century.  Known by her family, friends, and readers as simply “Brownie,” she was perhaps best known for her weekly newspaper column that ran from 1951 to 1994 in the Bangor Daily News.  Following her popular columns, her readers became familiar with her rural upbringing (to which many eagerly made connections with fond memories of their own childhoods).  They also received homemaking tips from her, and generally came to feel a real affinity for the writer.  Tolstrup shows how Brownie was a popular, relatable personality for so many women of her time because she was a role model for women successfully balancing domestic and professional or community interests. (more…)

Dear Reader,

In this issue Folklore Forum is pleased to present, after some delay, proceedings from the third annual collaborative conference between the Indiana University Folklore and Ethnomusicology Student Associations and The Ohio State University Folklore Student Association.  The 2010 conference was held April 2-3, 2010 at The Ohio State University in the brand new Ohio Union.  Drawing students from universities as diverse as Arizona State University, the Eastman School of Music, and University of Jyväskylä in Finland as well as the two schools involved in planning the conference, the 2010 conference focused on the theme of contact.  Diane Goldstein delivered the keynote address “The Power of the Personal:  Appropriation and the Narrative Gaze.”

Participants in the IU/OSU graduate student conference have often remarked on the productive discussions produced through the small size of the conference and the high caliber of the work presented.  We hope that this third issue highlighting the conference will help to continue those discussions. (more…)

Power, Natsu Onoda. God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga. University of Mississippi, 2009. Print. 208 pp, 6 x 9 inches, 53 b&w illustrations, filmography, bibliography, index. $50.00 unjacketed cloth; $25.00 paper

Jeremy Stoll
Indiana University

In God of Comics, Natsu Onoda Power uses the framework of intertextuality to analyze one of the most important figures in Japanese comics and his work within the form. In the Introduction, the author points out the divide between English and Japanese-language studies of manga as pivoting on understandings of manga as either culturally unique or an evolving art. Overcoming this tension serves as the focus of Power’s analysis of Osamu Tezuka’s unique genius in the context of manga’s evolution as a form. (more…)

Dorson, Richard. Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers: Folk Traditions of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, 3rd edition, edited by James P. Leary. Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008 [1952]. pp. 371, index.  Paper $24.95.

Jodine Perkins
Indiana University

Based on five months of fieldwork conducted in 1946, Richard Dorson brings together a collection of folklore from the diverse inhabitants of Michigan’s Upper Pennisula (U.P.): young and old, lumbermen and miner, Ojibwa, Finn, and French. He selected this place, in part, because it was relatively close to his home in Lansing, although still a ferry ride away. He also chose the U.P. because of its isolation from much of the U.S., its cultural distinctiveness, and because both American Indians and European immigrants of many nationalities lived there. Furthermore, the U.P. was still fairly rural and poor due to the decline of timber harvesting and mining. To Dorson, it seemed that all of these conditions made this area fertile ground for finding folklore, particularly oral narratives, and indeed he did discover a “storyteller’s paradise” (2). (more…)

Representing Valerie Solanas:  Productions of Gender and Sexuality in The Factory

Sayo Yamagata
City University of New York

Abstract:

This essay explores the musical and artistic reactions to Valerie Solanas’s shooting of Andy Warhol in order to demonstrate how acts of violence, artistic representation, and constructions of gender not only inform, but also enforce one another.  The present analysis also intends to understand how attempts to represent Solanas within the context of her violent act, as a political tool for radical feminist or anti-feminist ends, can become the occasion for additional violence.  Pivotal examples that activate the discussion of gender construction in Warhol’s Factory scene include Lou Reed’s and John Cale’s song “I believe” as well as Solanas’s writings on violence, gender and sex in her SCUM Manifesto. (more…)

William Lynwood Montell. Tales from Kentucky Doctors. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2008. pp256 cloth $24.95, ebook $24.95.

Donald E. Clare

In today’s modern world of advancing electronic technology and data management, health care delivery, compared to that of one or two generations ago, has changed just as much as automobile design and manufacturing has changed since Henry Ford’s first Model T replaced the horse and buggy. But not all change is good. Sometimes change neglects to preserve the human element and, in so doing, forfeits such characteristics as caring, dedication, vocation, commitment, and sacrifice. (more…)

Beneath the Outrage: 2009 Task Force Recommendations Undermine Online Breast Cancer Community

Christal Seahorn
University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Abstract:
In November of 2009, the United States Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF) released medical recommendations suggesting a significant reduction in the use of mammography and self exams in breast cancer diagnosis. This paper examines forum threads from the Susan G. Komen message board that captures the immediate outrage and confusion of a group of breast cancer survivors. Analyzing this online communication reveals the ways in which the USPSTF announcement threatened the community’s trusted rituals, traditions and belief systems and aims to bring the unique values of the breast cancer community into a larger academic awareness. This study demonstrates how the mishandling of the 2009 announcement highlights the importance of moving beyond strictly scientific methodology to a greater use of applied folklore and ethnographic analysis to better respect the unique needs of patient groups.

  (more…)

Next Page »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.