May 11, 2010

Kenneth L. Untiedt, ed. Folklore: In All of Us, In All We Do.

Posted by folkpub under Book Review, Gender, History, Occupational Folklore
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Kenneth L. Untiedt, ed. Folklore: In All of Us, In All We Do. Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2006. Pp.xi+298, photos, illustrations, index. $34.95 cloth.

B. Grantham Aldred
Kendall College

At first blush, Folklore: In All of Us, In All We Do appears to be a straightforward collection of Texan folklore, a gathering of diverse materials under a regional banner.  And indeed, it serves well in this capacity.  However, the collection goes deeper than that and examines a more compelling question using these texts: the relationship between folklore and history.  Collected into five thematic sections, Folklore: In All of Us, In All We Do gives insight into the rich tapestry of Texas folklife from the eyes of its various contributors. (more…)

 

May 3, 2010

Heroes Are Over With: Possibilities for Folk Hybridity in “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog”

Posted by folkpub under Internet, Participatory Culture, Popular Culture
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Heroes Are Over With: Possibilities for Folk Hybridity in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

Katie L. Ramos
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Abstract:

Folklorists have long sought to illuminate the blurry boundary between contemporary popular culture and folk culture, and in the information age that boundary is fuzzier than ever.  The internet provides tools for the folk to produce creative works and disseminate them widely while remaining mostly anonymous.  These tools have also allowed greater interaction between producers of popular media and their fan (folk) base.  Camille Bacon-Smith and Henry Jenkins have identified a “participatory culture” in which fans produce their own creative works (on and offline) in response to popular film and television.  The more recent phenomenon of internet-based high-budget programming has led to an even greater level of interaction between media producers and their fans.  One example is Joss Whedon’s 2008 web production Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.  Whedon was known for friendly interaction with his fans, but when he developed Dr. Horrible he encouraged them to engage actively in creative play with the musical, partly through a contest that asked viewers to create their own video responses to the musical.  The ten best were included on the DVD release.  This paper examines how the producers and fans of Dr. Horrible entered into a (lopsided) reciprocal performance, inventing and re-inventing a shared, creative event. (more…)

 

April 26, 2010

Stephen Benson, ed. Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale.

Posted by folkpub under Book Review, Folktales
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Stephen Benson, ed. Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008. Pp. 209, index.

Jeana Jorgensen
Indiana University

Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale is a timely contribution to the growing body of scholarship on contemporary fairy tales. The seven essays in the book focus on contemporary fiction authors who utilize the tropes, structures, and intertexts of fairy tales in their writing. Time itself is also one of the topics of discussion, from the artistic “lateness” in Robert Coover’s writing to the non-linear narratives found in A. S. Byatt’s tales. The theoretical and cultural contexts of this book range from postmodernism to postcolonialism, second-wave feminism to post-feminism—all of which are situated in time and space, occurring after or continuing beyond their originary impulses. The aims of this book, described by Benson in his introduction, are to explore the works of the “fairy-tale generation” of writers (including Robert Coover, Margaret Atwood, A. S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, and others), to probe the contemporaneity of fairy tales despite their archaic origins, and ultimately to “account for the considerable time spent by contemporary fiction in the company of the fairy tale” (15). Time is thus a major structuring element of this book, and each chapter contributes to a nuanced understanding of the creative intermingling of fairy tales, fiction, and values. (more…)

 

April 19, 2010

Public, Private; Contemporary, Traditional: Intersecting Dichotomies and Contested Agency in Mainline Protestant Worship Music

Posted by folkpub under Belief, Music, North America
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Public, Private; Contemporary, Traditional: Intersecting Dichotomies and Contested Agency in Mainline Protestant Worship Music

Deborah Justice
Indiana University

Abstract:

The current ‘contemporary’/’traditional’ worship music controversy, although cloaked in the guise of novelty, illustrates how the historical  interplay between embracing and abandoning black-and-white oppositions is unfolding within post-millennial Western Christianity. Over the past forty years, mainline Protestant churches have used worship music to negotiate a culturally-relevant space for themselves within the contemporary reconfiguration of American religious practice. As such, many North American and Western European Christians have come to conceptualize their current religious practices through the ‘traditional’/'contemporary’ dichotomy. Praise-band-led ‘contemporary’ worship contrasts with organ-and-choir-based ‘traditional’ worship in visible and audible ways: musical style, text, instrumentation, dress, and physical space. This ‘contemporary’/’traditional’ binary’s pervasive themes resonate with previous dichotomous models applied to religious study, such as Weber’s routinized/charismatic, Benedict’s Apollonian/Dionysian, Sachs’ logogenic/pathogenic, and sociologist Mark Chaves’ intellectual/emotional. Yet, while current mainline Protestant organizational and expressive behavior resonates with these historical dichotomies, it also moves beyond explanation by any of these theories alone (as well as moving beyond the fundamentally group-defining “us” versus “them” opposition). This paper suggests the public/private opposition as an analytical tool to cut in a slightly different direction against the grain of the oft-dichotomized sphere of mainline Protestant religious musical practice. While no single dichotomy can explain current mainline Protestant practice – subjectively, emergently employing overlapping dichotomies to create and negotiate meaning – the public/private binary probes fundamental points of differentiation. (more…)

 

April 12, 2010

Elizabeth Tucker. Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses

Posted by folkpub under Book Review, Legends
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Elizabeth Tucker. Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. $50.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

Jeffrey Tolbert
Indiana University

Popular volumes dedicated to ghosts and the supernatural typically consist of little more than anthologies of ghastly tales, divorced from the contexts in which they are told and presented uncritically as sources of frightening entertainment. This pattern echoes a broader trend of popular engagement with folkloric material, a textual obsession characteristic of earlier days of folklore studies that contrasts starkly with contemporary scholarly attitudes toward folklore, which focus on such concepts as context, performance, and other theoretical issues that deemphasize the bounded text.

In Haunted Halls, Elizabeth Tucker presents a collection of ghost stories gathered from American college students through interviews and emails. Unlike many popular anthologies, Tucker makes an appreciable effort to position each tale within a broad context (US college campuses), to elaborate on the history surrounding many of the stories, and to provide some commentary on the social and cultural implications of the tales. (more…)

 

April 5, 2010

Negotiations in Performance: The Storytelling Performance of Two Adolescent Afghan Narrators

Posted by folkpub under Central Asia, Identity, Jokes, Performance
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Negotiations in Performance: The Storytelling Performances of Two Adolescent Afghan Narrators

Benjamin Gatling
The Ohio State University

Abstract:

This paper examines the storytelling performance of two adolescent male Afghan narrators.  In the summer of 1976, the two narrators, Jalaludin and Mohammed Asef, sat down with Margaret Mills and her tape recorder in Kabul, Afghanistan.  Their performance encompassed items across the spectrum of oral, Persian fictive genres, from conventional stories similar to those found across the Islamic world to obscene märchen.   During the performance, the narrators repeatedly parsed notions of identity, ethnic, linguistic, and otherwise, within in a joke cycle.  This paper illustrates how their ambiguous handling of issues of identity in the performance is reflective of the boys’ ambiguous relationship to the categories named in real life. (more…)

 

March 29, 2010

Lovesick Blues: Music and Nostalgia on Lower Broadway, Nashville, Tennessee

Posted by folkpub under Music, North America
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Lovesick Blues: Music and Nostalgia on Lower Broadway, Nashville, Tennessee

Timon Kaple
Indiana University

Abstract:

There are a handful of city blocks in Nashville, Tennessee, that constitute the area known as “Lower Broadway” on Broadway Avenue. Known as the city’s premier hotspot for live music, this area attracts a wide variety of patrons: regulars, locals, and tourists.  What brings them together is a mental concept of “Old Nashville,” rooted in feelings of nostalgia and romanticization for the city’s golden era, which I broadly define as the mid-1920s through mid-1960s.

The most important reason why I chose Lower Broadway as a research area, and the one that is most relevant to this study, is that it is a crossroads for listeners’ musical and bodily interpretations of authenticity in country music.  In other words, Lower Broadway is site where it is important for performers to look and sound like the real thing.  What is the real thing, and how does one perform this ideal authenticity?  Additionally, who is in search of this Nashville authenticity? (more…)

 

March 29, 2010

From the Editor

Posted by folkpub under Editor Remarks
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Dear Reader,

Folklore Forum is pleased to present in this issue proceedings from the second annual collaborative conference between the Indiana University Folklore and Ethnomusicology Student Associations and The Ohio State University Folklore Student Association. The 2009 conference took place at Indiana University on March 27-28 and featured papers and posters centered on the theme of the negotiation of the public and the private.

In this second issue based upon the proceedings of the IU/OSU graduate student conference, Folklore Forum will bring its readers more of the exciting and innovative work of today’s graduate students in folklore and will continue to explore the possibilities provided by our online publishing model.

In addition to papers from this conference, this issue includes a poster with an extended contextualizing abstract, which we hope will provide the basis for involved discussion of the fieldwork being presented as a kind of continuation of the poster session in which it was presented.

We hope that papers will engender as much discussion on this forum as posters and offer a study of the negotiation of performance in terms of genre and ethnic and linguistic identity by two Afghan storytellers as a particularly stimulating basis for such discussion. A version of this study won the 2009 Dan Crowley Memorial Research Prize from the Storytelling Section of the American Folklore Society.

The theme of the public and the private is taken up most strongly in an ethnomusicological paper about dichotomies in mainline protestant worship music. This paper examines the public/private dichotomy alongside others such as traditional/contemporary, routinized/charismatic, and Appolonian/Dyonisian, which have been brought to bear on the study of religion through one church’s musical choices in its two weekly services.

New media publishing is brought to the fore in an article about fan response and specifically fan-produced videos that arose in response to 2008′s Internet-circulated Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Forum is pleased to provide its readership with not only descriptions of the videos at issue, but the videos themselves.

We here at Folklore Forum had hoped to bring to our readers an experience of the conference beyond the papers and posters prepared specifically for it. Unfortunately, our efforts to include the roundtable discussion with which the conference closed and the keynote address were plagued with technical difficulties and cannot be presented. We are already working to remedy these problems with regards to the issue that will be based on the third iteration of this conference that will take place at The Ohio State University on April 2 and 3, 2010.

Once again we invite our readers to make use of our forum to continue the dialogue that these articles initiate.

Monica Foote
Editor, Folklore Forum

 

September 28, 2009

Testimony and Truth after Auschwitz

Posted by folkpub under Europe, Narrative
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Testimony and Truth After Auschwitz

Sarah Gordon
Indiana University

Abstract:

Survivor testimony of the Holocaust often deviates from historical fact.  Postmodern theory allows for the near nihilation of that testimony by arguing that history is nothing but a version of events.  This paper seeks to authenticate survivor testimony in a postmodern context through the exploration of an ethics of testimony, concluding that factual truth and testimonial truth are members of fundamentally different categories, the latter dependent not on accuracy but on the social, ethical mandate to respect the memory of people who suffer and die so that others may live to tell the story. (more…)

 

May 1, 2009

“Ten Little Niggers”: The Making of a Black Man’s Consciousness

Posted by folkpub under African American, Children's Folklore, North America, Race
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“Ten Little Niggers”: The Making of a Black Man’s Consciousness

Tiffany M.B. Anderson
The Ohio State University

Abstract:

During Reconstruction in the 1860s, the proud Confederate states found themselves in a place of subordination.  Forced to concede their free slave labor, the former citizens of the Confederacy refused to fold their ideology of the inferiority of the freed slaves.  A “comic” song titled “Ten Little Niggers” circulated through the United States in Minstrel shows and children’s nursery rhyme books in keeping with this ideology.

This paper explores how the ballad shapes social and cultural race consciousness. While the purpose of its widespread popularity was to refute the competency and human qualities of the black freedmen to white audiences, the ultimate legacy that the rhyme leaves behind is the mental conditioning of following generations of black males. The white population who circulated the song intended to define the black freedmen as barbaric and ignorant, yet the song also connected the white-constructed definition of ‘nigger’ to the black man’s consciousness. (more…)

 

May 1, 2009

Edward M. Bruner. Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel

Posted by folkpub under Book Review, Tourism
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Edward M. Bruner. Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel. University of Chicago Press, 2004. 312 pages, 48 halftones. $62.50 cloth, $25.00 paper.

Tracy Musacchio
Knox College

Tourism has a profound effect not only on tourists but also on the cultures visited, as heritage is adapted to the demands of tourism and the historical narrative begins, even, to be reshaped. In this volume Edward M. Bruner, a noted field anthropologist, studies the phenomenon of cultural tourism. He focuses on touristic narratives and, in his words, “the difference between a touristic and an ethnographic sensibility” (1). Bruner’s interest in cultural tourism first developed when he served as a tour guide on a trip to Indonesia. His attempts to educate the group of travelers about the phenomenon of tourism and its interactions with local cultures (for example, that the “native” dance shows they were witnessing were actually modern performances created for the tourist industry) were thwarted by the trip’s coordinator, and he was effectively fired. (more…)

 

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