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Mar 29

Public/Private Conference

Congratulations to all of the organizers, funders, presenters, listeners, friends, performers, discussants and others who made the recent Public & Private conference at Indiana University a big success.  Held March 27-28, 2009, this was the second in a projected series of conferences jointly organized by the folklore students at The Ohio State University and the folklore and ethnomusicology students at Indiana University Bloomington. This year’s conference attracted students from a number of different U.S. graduate programs, featured excellent keynote presentations by Jim Leary of the folklore program at the University of Washington and Richard Bauman of Indiana University, and was concluded by a very memorable (sometimes hilarious) coffeehouse featuring a diversity of music, dance and poetry performances by members of the IU Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. There was a first rate poster presentation and undergraduate as well as graduate student participants did fine work with both paper and poster presentations.  There was plenty of food and good conversation. I am really appreciative of, and impressed by, all the hardwork that so many colleagues invested into this big event.

Theoretically, the conference also did significant work, as many of the papers and discussions focused tightly on the conceptual issues evoked by the meeting theme. Some smart brainwork was built upon good ethnographic and historical research and I think that all of the participants came away from the meetings with an improved tool kit with which to think critically about the nature of these productive but slippery conceptions.

The URL will surely no be stable, as information for what was an uncoming conference becomes legacy content, but the program can presently be found online here. Related material should appear eventually in IU ScholarWorks Repository.

Good work everyone.

Mar 21

Linguistic Diversity in the South: Changing Codes, Practices, and Ideology

Not long after the publication of Linguistic Diversity in the South: Changing Codes, Practices, and Ideology, I was asked by an anthropology journal to review the book. The subject interested me greatly and I was acquainted with the work of the editor and several of the volume’s contributors. In a relatively timely fashion, I submitted the brief review that follows here. At the time, the journal’s editors asked that I expand the review to focus on the contents of the volume in greater detail, thereby bulking what amounts to a book note up to the scale of a full scholarly review. I fully intended to give this a try, but in the constant flow of new tasks, the matter was delayed so long that it was lost sight of. Rediscovering the review today, in the course of organizing my writing-related files, I experienced regret that I did not follow through and see the review through to publication. Rather that attempt to expand it at this stage and secure journal publication for it, I offer it here for those who know my interest in Southern cultural studies and linguistic anthropology and for those web searching researchers whose queries may lead them to the book or my comments on it. I apologize to the volume’s editor, contributors, and publisher for my lack of follow through. Thanks go to all involved for assembling a valuable contribution to the literatures in these fields. The actual review follows.

Linguistic Diversity in the South:  Changing Codes, Practices, and Ideology.  Southern Anthropological Society Proceedings, No. 37.  MARGARET BENDER, editor.  Athens:  University of Georgia Press, 2004.  Pp. 141.  $19.95 (paper).

Reviewed by Jason Baird Jackson, Indiana University

Linguistic Diversity in the South is comprised of eight fine essays and a solid introduction contextualizing the volume’s contents and its place in contemporary sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology.  The papers gathered in the volume were originally delivered at the Southern Anthropological Society’s 2002 keynote symposium, which was organized by the volume’s editor, Margaret Bender.  Contributors range from enterprising graduate student researchers to distinguished senior scholars.  All offer brief, nuanced ethnographic or sociolinguistic treatments of language use in the southern United States.

0820325856A great strength of the volume is the manner in which it, without attempting to be a comprehensive survey, offers a rich sampling of Southern speech-communities, ways of speaking, and language ideologies.  The papers explore language in Native American [Lumbee (Walt Wolfram), Muscogee/Creek (Pamela Innes), Seminole (Susan E. Stans and Louise Gopher)], Mulungeon (Anita Puckett), Scotch Irish (Puckett), Cajun (Shana Walton), Appalachian (Kirk Hazen and Ellen Fluharty), Outer Banks (Wolfram), and North Carolina African American communities (Christine Mallinson).  Blair Rudes contributes a paper historically surveying multilingualism, linguistic complexity and change in the Carolinas since contact.  Bender’s introduction reflects experiences gained in her own work among the North Carolina Cherokee and links the volume’s contributions to contemporary theoretical concerns in linguistic anthropology, especially research on discourse, contact, maintenance, shift, and ideology.

It is exciting that the volume provides evidence that a critical mass of contextual research on language use in the Southern United States has been reached.  Because of the conference proceedings format shared by all Southern Anthropological Society volumes, the papers contained within Linguistic Diversity in the South represent short, accessible samplings of broader, more detailed research programs.  In this instance, this is a virtue, as, for instance, scholars consulting the book for its studies of language in Native American communities, easily also gain concise accounts of other Southern peoples and varieties.  While many interesting and important communities are not treated in the volume, as Bender is quick to note, it does offer a clear picture of how linguistically and cultural complex the contemporary South is.  The book thus counters conventional assumptions of Southern linguistic homogeneity at the same time that it proves to the fields of linguistics and linguistic anthropology that key general issues can be very productively examined from the perspective of the region’s ethnography.

Mar 20

Christen on Alliances in [and Beyond] a Remote Australian Town

untitledI am happy to report that Kimberly Christen’s new book Aboriginal Business: Alliances in a Remote Australian Town has just been released by The School for Advanced Research Press. Rather than go on and on, I’ll just say that it is really, really great and that you can get the details on Kim’s super website/weblog Long Road.  For the long haul, find it in Open World Cat (and your local library) here.  Congratulations Kim!

[Kim and I work together on Museum Anthropology Review, for which she is the Associate Editor. She is  also an Assistant Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University.]

Mar 19

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The Form of Value in Globalized Traditions

Recently, I had a unique and wonderful opportunity to participate in a small conference and workshop hosted by the Center for Folklore Studies at The Ohio State University (in partnership with the Berkeley Folklore Program).  Titled “The Form of Value in Globalized Traditions,” the workshop continued an ongoing series of discussions that were inaugurated in 2007 by Charles L. Briggs at the University of California, Berkeley.  The program for the public presentations (which were held on Friday, March 6, 2009), along with paper abstracts, can be found online at here. The overview summary describing what we were up to read:

This international working group considers the career of vernacular traditions under globalization. As cultural forms circulate ever more widely, recycled, restructured, and hybridized as they travel, regimes of value insist increasingly on point of origin. Since economic value is predicated upon scarcity, in a global framework cultural objects are marked—and marketed—as local. Form itself is fetishized as social interaction becomes attenuated. Rather than contesting the reification of culture into exchangeable goods, the resistance of impoverished groups and social movements increasingly takes shape as a struggle for control over the manner of commodification and the profits thereof. In the face of restructurings of value initiated by the World Trade Organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, free trade agreements, and transnational corporations, intellectual property rights become a key locus of contention between distributors and cultural producers. The public component of this year’s group meeting will explore form and value as both categories of action and tools of analysis. We hope that attendees will help us with the work of comparison and synthesis.

My own presentation considered the current reshaping of the system of scholarly communications in which folklorists and ethnologists circulate (and find expanded publics for) their work in an era of corporate enclosure, media consolidation, and library crises on the one hand and open source technologies and open access movements on the other. The participants were a great group. In addition to many wonderful students and faculty members from the OSU folklore program, the participants were: Sadhana Naithani (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi), Lee Haring, City College, CUNY), Mbugua wa-Mungai (Kenyatta University, Nairobi), Galit Hasan-Rokem (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Candace Slater (University of California, Berkeley), Amy Shuman (The Ohio State University), Dorothy Noyes (The Ohio State University), Javier León (Indiana University), Diarmuid Ó Giolláin (University College Cork), and Charles L. Briggs (University of California, Berkeley).

Thanks to everyone who helped bring this great event into existence. Thanks especially to the OSU folklore students who brought great energy (and a great Saturday lunch) to the event.