During a semester (and a year, and a period) filled with woe, my graduate course was one of the most meaningful and rich educational experiences of my career. I jumped with my students into a deep and unfamiliar pool. Thankfully they were excellent swimmers, and everything turned out better-than-well.
For the past ten years I have been trying to learn the scholarly literature related to the mountain-dwelling peoples of Southwest China. More recently, that quest has expanded into concern for the peoples living in similar geographic and social circumstances in the uplands of Southeast Asia, Northeast India, and (not reflected in my course title), upland Bangladesh. I was not trained for work related to this large and complex region and I will never be a specialist, but my knowledge is growing, and the study is very meaningful and gratifying. Working with students—who are becoming specialists in this region—I took the plunge and offered a course to help them and to help myself grow in our knowledge. I am happy to note that that choice was richly rewarding.
The course, offered under the variable title “Highland Peoples of Southwest China/Southeast Asia/Northeast India” (FOLK-F 600 Asian Folklore / ANTH-E 600 Seminar in Cultural and Social Anthropology), gathered in more students that I had expected. I knew that there were enough students eager from the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, but the students from other departments, whom I did not previously know, contributed greatly to the success of the course, just as the folklore studies students whom I knew did.
The main reason that the course succeeded was the knowledge and enthusiasm brought to the course by the students, but a few other factors were also key. One of these was the participation of outstanding guest visitors: Jessica Anderson Turner (American Folklore Society), Mark Bender (The Ohio State University), Patawee Promsen (Naresuan University), Lijun Zhang (George Mason University), and Suvi Rautio (University of Helsinki). I greatly appreciate the contributions that these wonderful specialist colleagues made to our discussions and growth in the course. Another factor that worked well and that I highlight is the series workshops that I sprinkled across the course. In these, the course participants (myself usually included), researched and presented on new-to-us ideas, issues, and research writings of relevance to the course. These presentations were consistently excellent and greatly expanded my (/our) understanding of this vast region, including its peoples and their circumstances. Finally, and this is more familiar, but none-the-less relevant, the readings that we engaged with were excellent.
I will always remember this course. It now sits alongside the first instance of my graduate course on cultural heritage and cultural property (then [2004] variably titled Contesting Culture as Property). Like that course in that moment, this one taught me so much and approached what I think of as the ideal for a graduate seminar. As I research and write, and as I advise and collaborate, I will be constantly drawing upon the work that these students and I pursued together. I am profoundly thankful for their participation in a joint learning effort.
A sunset in Weishan Yi and Hui Autonomous County, China.
There are too many things needing to be written about. Many of them are grim. Here I want to begin the work week with positivity.
This past semester, I taught one wholly new graduate course and one substantively new undergraduate course. I do not yet have confirmation from course evaluations, but I think that they both turned out well. I will discuss the graduate course separately. The undergraduate course, which covered material that is very familiar to me, was FOLK-F 406 Museum Practice in Folklore Studies (a.k.a. ANTH-A 405 Museum Methods). ANTH-A 405 has been on the books for decades but has been very rarely offered. The parallel course in FOLK was created by me prior to the pandemic, but it was only this semester that I could offer first it. This course was thus substantively new, although I drew in presenting it on past museums courses that I have taught.
As I taught these two courses jointly, I was very pleased that the two sections (ANTH and FOLK) attracted equal numbers of students. Many the participants were major or minor students in both departments, thus they—like me—have a foot in both fields and an interest in their points of intersection. Museum ethnography is one of those points of intersection. This class met no general education requirements. Students were there because they wanted to learn the material and that made for a wonderful course. In twenty years on the Indiana University faculty, I have never taught a course that was comprised mainly of majors or minors in my fields. What a joy that was! Even the students distracted by the end of their senior year and their rapidly approaching graduation, were a pleasure to engage with each week. It is gratifying that a significant proportion of the students in the course were already gaining museum experiences in concurrent museum practicum and that many are now moving on to further work in museums or in museums-related graduate programs.
As I got acquainted with the students and rose to their level, the course changed as it went. As planned, the course included museum work basics and independent research with museum collections objects, but the final course session on critical practices in museum work and museum studies shifted considerably. The topics planned remained the same, but my method moved from lecture and lecture-discussion to freer discussion of key news stories about important or exemplary developments in the present-day museum work. Many of these came from the New York Times, which has been doing particularly good work related to museums in recent months. These were in areas such as repatriation and restoration, digital practices, heritage politics, museum censorship, the finances of museums, community consultation, museum audiences/visitorship, and museums and social change. It was a pleasure to discuss and debate the big issues with these students. They arrived in the course ready and able to engage and were nearly all eager to do so. I am proud of them and thankful for the opportunity to study and learn with them. I wish all of them well and I congratulate the graduating seniors among them.
A heuristic for assessing temporary exhibitions in museums relative to the place of museum collections within them, the relevance to institutional mission, and the role of research within the exhibition.
I am happy to be hosting a group of colleagues in Bloomington this week for a long-delayed (COVID…) writing workshop on “Textile Arts and Heritage Practices in Southwest China.” This grows out of the work of the “China-US Folklore and Intangible Cultural Heritage Project,” a joint project of the China Folklore Society and the American Folklore Society. Specifically, the effort arises from that project’s “Collaborative Work in Museum Folklore and Heritage Studies” sub-project (2017-2021), an effort now extended through the “Craft and Heritage in Upland Southwest China” project (2022-present) of the Material Culture and Heritage Studies Research Laboratory. The generous funders and partners for these various projects are discussed in Jackson 2023. This week’s workshop has been supported by the College Arts and Humanities Institute and the Institute for Advanced Study, both at Indiana University. Thank you to all of those who have supported these projects.
There will be a campus event associated with the workshop on Friday, May 19, 2023 at 2:30 pm. Read about it here at this calendar link and in the flyer posted below.
Today I published my final editorial as founding editor ofMuseum Anthropology Review. It may be that Museum Anthropology Review thus concludes with volume 17(1-2), now just published. Perhaps instead it will be revived someday by a new editorial team in partnership with the wonderful folks at the Indiana University Press and the IUScholarWorks Program at the IU Libraries. As of now, the search for a new editor or editorial team can be considered concluded unsuccessfully and the journal is either ceasing or pausing publication. I do not need to write a new version of the editorial here. I invite everyone interested in the journal and the fields that it serves to read it (always open access!) for a contextualized back story.
Here I just want to reiterate my thanks to all who contributed to, supported, and encouraged the journal as a project and who supported me as its editor. I also want to reiterate my thanks to the Indiana University Press for supporting my fields—folklore studies and cultural anthropology, including material culture studies—so well. Even though the journal—by design—was not a money making endeavor, the press stood by it and invested in its improvement and its success. Equal thanks go to the extraordinary IUScholarWorks program (now broadened as Open Scholarship) that helped launch the journal and supported it vigorously for its full run.
I am very pleased to share news of a new publication. It is an article appearing now in the Journal of American Folklore:
Jackson, Jason Baird. “Collaborative Work in Museum Folklore and Heritage Studies: An Initiative of the American Folklore Society and Its Partners in China and the United States.” Journal of American Folklore 136, no. 539 (2023): 48-74. muse.jhu.edu/article/877843.
The paper’s abstract is:
Since 2007, the American Folklore Society has pursued a partnership project with the China Folklore Society. Diverse in activities and extensively participated in, the endeavor is known as the China-US Folklore and Intangible Cultural Heritage Project. In this peer-reviewed report, one sub-project within this umbrella effort is reviewed. The Collaborative Work in Museum Folklore and Heritage Studies sub-project continued the project’s established exchange practices and added a program of material culture and heritage studies research.
Thanks to the generous terms of the American Folklore Society’s author agreement, a version of the article is now available in the Indiana University open access repository. Find that version online here: https://iu.tind.io/record/3333
More good news in terms of publication work. I am pleased to share that my article “Kultuuriline omastamine kultuurimuutusena” is now published in Estonian in the wonderful journal Studia Vernacula (see volume 14). This is a translation (minus the case studies) of my earlier paper “On Cultural Appropriation,” which appeared in English in the Journal of Folklore Research (volume 51, number 1 in 2021). Special thanks go to Elo-Hanna Seljamma for work translating the paper, to Kristi Jõeste for inviting me to contribute the paper, and to Madis Arukask for discussing my contribution in an editorial appearing in the new issue. Studia Vernacula is a wonderful open access journal beautifully produced in digital and print form. Even if you do not read Estonian, I urge you check it out with the help of Google Translate or a similar service. So much wonderful material culture studies work appears therein year after year.
I am very happy to note a new co-authored article titled “A Survey of Contemporary Bai Craft Practices in the Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan, China.” It was jointly written with Wuerxiya (first author), C. Kurt Dewhurst (third author) and Cuixia Zhang (fourth author) and it appears in Museum Anthropology Review volume 16, numbers 1-2. This is the special double issue published in honor of Daniel C. Swan, as noted in an earlier post on Shreds and Patches. The article is based on work undertaken by a much larger bi-national team within the “Collaborative Work in Museum Folklore and Heritage Studies” sub-project of the broader “China-US Folklore and Intangible Cultural Heritage Project,” a collaboration (2007-present) of the American Folklore Society and the China Folklore Society. In particular, it describes work undertaken through the auspices of, and in partnership with, The Institute of National Culture Research at Dali University. Special thanks go to the Institute and its leadership.
Presented as an image is the first page of the journal article “A Survey of Contemporary Bai Craft Practices in the Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan, China.”
I am very happy to note the publication of “Basketry among Two Peoples of Northern Guangxi, China” in the latest double issue of Asian Ethnology. This article is one that I co-wrote with my friends and collaborators Lijun Zhang (first author), C. Kurt Dewhurst (third author), and Jon Kay (fourth author) and it is based on work undertaken by a much larger bi-national team within the “Collaborative Work in Museum Folklore and Heritage Studies” sub-project of the broader “China-US Folklore and Intangible Cultural Heritage Project,” a collaboration (2007-present) of the American Folklore Society and the China Folklore Society.
I am a huge fan of Asian Ethnology, a wonderful open access journal now in its 81st year. Check out the huge volume that our paper is a part of, Find Asian Ethnology online here: https://asianethnology.org/ and also in JSTOR
A image of page one of the typeset version of the scholarly article “Basketry among Tow Peoples of Northern Guangxi, China” published in Asian Ethnology.
Page one of the article “Towards Wider Framings” as typeset for the Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics.
I am happy to report that my article “Towards Wider Framings: World-Systems Analysis and Folklore Studies” was published in the Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics earlier this year. Readers will have the judge the article for itself, but I can’t say enough good things about JEF. Its a wonderful open access journal doing wonderful work in, and at the intersection of, my two fields. Thanks to everyone at the Estonian Literary Museum, the Estonian National Museum, and the University of Tartu who work to make the journal a success.
I am very happy to share this guest post by Tim Lloyd.
The American Folklore Society’s annual meeting is the high point of the professional year for the Society and for many of us this is evidenced by the amount of time we spend discussing present and past meetings and by the intensity of some of those discussions. In the hallways, lobbies, and bars near the rooms in which AFS annual meeting sessions happen, and in living rooms, offices, and coffee shops back home, it’s common for folklorists to discuss, interpret, and rate or rank the most recent annual meeting in light of our experience there, and to compare that experience to our recollections of the way things used to be. Each of us rapidly builds a body of such recollections which, as we know, can form the foundation of professional beliefs.
One of the more frequent beliefs that I have heard about AFS annual meetings is customarily expressed in two parts: one, that in recent decades the number of sessions devoted to academic papers has decreased as a proportion of the program; and two, that paper sessions have been replaced on the program by workshops and forums devoted to public folklore, as that part of the field has grown. But is either of these beliefs supported by the data?
Luckily, there is a rich and easily available source of data to which we can turn to support or challenge these professional beliefs: the American Folklore Society collection in the Indiana University ScholarWorks (IUSW) open online institutional repository (https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/9004). The collection is also accessible through the AFS-IU Library online portal Open Folklore at https://openfolklore.org/.
AFS staff and volunteers and Indiana University librarians worked together to create and populate this collection starting in 2009. It contains large back runs of the journals of AFS sections and of AFS newsletters and the more recent AFS Review; a collection of syllabi and teaching resources provided by Society members; reports and other publications from AFS-sponsored professional development consultancies and workshops; AFS annual reports; and indexes to the contents of the Journal of American Folklore from 1889 to 1994.
This means that extensive information about every AFS annual meeting is openly accessible online, offering an important way to track developments in folklore scholarship and public practice—and the timelines along which they first arose, since conference paper and session topics can evidence those trends well before they reach print.
Here is a brief report on a quick survey of just a bit of the annual meeting data contained in this collection.
Wanting to know more about the ways in which the “shape” of AFS annual meetings—as measured by the types of sessions that make up the program—may have changed in recent decades, I reviewed the programs from five sample meetings (the most recent “normal” one in 2019, plus every ten years before that for 40 years: 2009, 1999, 1989 [the second of the Society’s two centennial meetings], and 1979) and counted up the numbers of various kinds of sessions, in six categories:
Paper sessions
Workshops or forums on non-public folklore subjects (as defined, on the fly, by me)
Workshops or forums on public folklore subjects (ditto)
Media sessions
Plenary sessions
Sessions to attend to some matter of AFS business
I’ve shown the numbers—and, more importantly, the percentages of each kind of session on that year’s program—in Figure 1, with the most significant percentage increases from the previous decade’s program shown in green and the most significant decreases in red. My tracking excluded all social events and all events held by non-AFS organizations (like university presses). I also did not include section business meetings in my overall tally, though I did count them separately and have included them on the spreadsheet to note the growth in the number of AFS sections over these decades.
My main takeaways from this quick look?
1. The percentage of paper sessions did decrease by about 22 percentage points during this 40-year period, most notably (I’m assuming for the moment) in the 2000s. (Note: “Paper sessions” includes those on all topics, including a small number—I’d say no more than 10% in any year—of paper sessions on public-folklore topics.)
2. This decrease has been slightly more than offset by increases in the percentage of workshops and forums of all kinds. Contrary to what I understand to be popular belief, since 2000 only a minority of those workshops and forums have covered public folklore subjects; that is, in 2009 and 2019, most of them were devoted to topics outside public folklore.
3. The greatest growth in the public-folklore workshop and forum part of the program, in fact, took place during the 1980s and 1990s. This makes sense, as this was the period when the field’s current public front was undergoing its initial periods of growth and development. (I believe that the first modern-day public folklore forum session at AFS was in Salt Lake City in 1978.) The percentage of these sorts of sessions continued to increase, though at a slower rate, in the 2000s and 2010s.
My smaller takeaways?
4. The percentage of AFS-sponsored or AFS business-related sessions increased most significantly in the 2000s. Having been around (and to some extent responsible) for almost all of those years, I’m not surprised.
5. The numbers suggest that the primary growth era for the AFS section universe was the 1980s.
And two smaller notes: Neither the number of media sessions nor that of plenaries showed much growth or decline during these 40 years. There were also three poster sessions at Boise in 2009, and one diamond session at Baltimore in 2019, but I didn’t include them in the spreadsheet because those numbers didn’t really seem material.
So on the basis of the work described here, it appears clear that over the last 40 years the percentage of the program devoted to sessions of academic papers has significantly decreased. It also appears clear that this decrease has been offset by an increase in the percentage of the program devoted to workshops and forums. But this increase is more complicated than it is widely believed to be, and appears to have two eras: one during the 1980s and 1990s that saw an increase in the number of public-folklore-related workshops and forums, and one that has taken place in the first two decades of the present century that saw an increase in the number of non-public-folklore-related (sorry for this infelicitous name) workshops and forums.
It might be pointed out that these decreases and increases could be attributed to patterns in the selections and choices made by the program committees who review, accept, and reject annual meeting proposals, rather than patterns in what prospective meeting attendees propose in the first place. However, the fact is that for many years the great majority of proposals have been accepted for annual meeting programs, which has the effect of taking those committees’ decisions largely out of this equation.
This is a small project, undertaken quickly with just a few data points from just five years of annual meetings. Please take it in the spirit in which I share it: as indicative rather than definitive. I undertook it because of my curiosity about whether perceptions of changes in the annual meeting over time matched what the programs would tell us, and because I wanted to carry out a small test of the utility of the AFS IUSW annual meeting collection for helping us answer questions about the history of the field.
The data—including abstracts of all AFS annual meeting presentations and sessions for the last several decades—exist in the AFS IUSW collection to support deeper and more extensive research. We could, for example, ask several forms of the “Why?” question about the data I’ve presented here, or examine in greater detail the topics of workshops and forums of all kinds looking for patterns of subject or theme. We could look more closely at the growth or decline over time of particular topics, approaches, sub-fields, or keywords in annual meetings generally. Or we might focus more tightly on every year in a decade to be able to craft a more complete picture of it, perhaps extending it forward, backward, or both (e.g., might there have been a “long 1980s” in folklore studies and if so, what was it and why does it matter?).
Thanks for your attention. I invite your responses and comments, but more emphatically I encourage you to pursue your own investigations using these remarkable, openly accessible online resources.
Figure 1. Data related to five annual AFS meetings staged over the past five decades.
Shreds and Patches 