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Posts from the ‘Folklore Studies’ Category

Jul 14

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Opening Three More Established Folklore Studies Journals

More excellent news from the effort to make more of the scholarly literature in (and beyond) folklore studies freely available. This account comes from Simon Bronner (re-posted from his H-FOLK announcement), who led the effort to open up the three important titles discussed here. This effort was done in collaboration with the IUScholarWorks project in the context of broader efforts undertaken with the American Folklore Society. (More about these soon.)

The only point I would add to Simon’s account is that the content will not cease being available in Hathi Trust when it also becomes accessible via Google Books. This is reassuring and useful in a number of ways, including the fact that Hathi Trust is a major digital library managed in the public interest by a large and growing consortium of libraries and universities. Indiana University is a leading partner in it. Thus this content (and so much else from the digitization of the important IU Folklore Collection) is not solely being stewarded–and made useful and accessible online–by a corporation whose time horizons and motivations are understandably different from scholarly ones. That said, Google has been an invaluable partner by providing the digitization (or digital creation) of these resources and it will be very useful to be able to search and use such content in two contexts, each with different sets of digital tools and built for different purposes. Thanks go to Simon and the relevant scholarly organizations/communities for the years of effort that went into these titles and for the work of making them available to the world. Folklore studies is stronger for these efforts.

Penn State Harrisburg, which features a doctoral program in American Studies with a folk cultural area of study, in cooperation with Indiana University ScholarWorks and Google is happy to report the availability online of back issues for three important journals in folklore studies: Folklore Historian, Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review, and Keystone Folklore. The material is available at no cost in HathiTrust Digital Library at the moment until it migrates to Google Books (where it will still be available gratis). All the material is viewable as full-text with the exception of some issues of Keystone Folklore Quarterly, which are at present have limited search functionality.

The URLs are:

Keystone Folklore:
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000496431

Keystone Folklore Quarterly:
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006090454

(Keystone Folklore was the publication of the Pennsylvania Folklore Society and featured important early works in folklife and material culture, public folklore, and ethnic-urban folklore, many produced by students at the folklore and folklife program at the University of Pennsylvania).

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review:
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006931628

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Newsletter:
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006929769

(Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review was the publication of the Jewish Folklore and Ethnology section of the American Folklore Society, before the establishment of the Jewish Cultural Studies series published by Littman. It featured many special-themed issues, including Yiddish folklore, material culture, folk dance, foodways, pilgrimage, Israeli ethnography, folk literature, and Jews in the Heartland).

Folklore Historian:
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006811508

(Folklore Historian is the still active publication of the History and Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society. Back issues feature essays on the history of folklore studies globally as well as studies incorporating or reflecting on historical methodologies; special issues include “Theorizing Folklore,” “Symposium on the Contributions of Francis James Child to Folklore Studies,” “Martha Beckwith: The First American Chair of Folklore Studies.”

Sincerely,

Simon Bronner

Other folklore, ethnology, and ethnomusicology titles that have been made available through the work of the IUScholarWorks project include:  the Folklore Forum backfiles (see new content here), New Directions in Folklore, and the Folklore and Folk Music Archivist. In addition, IUScholarWorks Journals publishes (with its partners) the titles Museum Anthropology Review, Anthropology of East Europe Review, and the Inter-American Journal of Education for Democracy.

Jul 4

AFS Executive Board Issues Arizona Statement

[As noted in today’s AFS email newsletter] After a period of discussion and review, the American Folklore Society‘s Executive Board [on which I serve] has issued a public statement on recent Arizona immigration legislation. The Society will distribute this statement to relevant public officials and bodies in Arizona, and to other learned societies.

The statement reads:

The American Folklore Society, the US-based professional association for the field of folklore studies, with a membership of 2,000 people and institutions, and an annual meeting that draws more than 700 participants from around the world, has historically supported policies that prohibit discrimination based on ethnicity, gender, national origin, race, religion, or sexual orientation, and our field has long been concerned with the well-being of immigrant populations.

The Executive Board of the American Folklore Society takes notice of Arizona Senate Bill 1070, requiring all local law enforcement officials to investigate a person’s immigration status when there is a reasonable suspicion that the person is in the United States unlawfully, regardless of whether that person is suspected of a crime. We also take notice of Arizona House Bill 2281, that prohibits public schools in the state from offering, at any grade level, courses that advocate ethnic solidarity or cater to specific ethnic groups.

More than a century of research in the field of folklore studies (and in other fields in the humanities and social sciences) has detailed the cultural, political, and social impact of discrimination based on ethnicity, national origin, and race.  Based on that research, the Executive Board of the American Folklore Society considers these laws just identified, and the ways they may be implemented, to be discriminatory.

The Executive Board of the American Folklore Society resolves that the Society will not hold a scholarly conference in the State of Arizona until such time that Arizona Senate Bill 1070 and Arizona House Bill 2281 are either repealed or struck down as constitutionally invalid and thus unenforceable by a court.

Jun 8

Berlinger’s Chapter in the Collection-Jews at Home

Congratulations to Gabrielle A. Berlinger on the publication of her article “770 Eastern Parkway: The Rebbe’s Home as Icon” in Jews at Home: The Domestication of Identity, volume two in the Jewish Cultural Studies series edited by Simon J. Bronner and published by Littman. The book is beautifully made and carefully edited. Gabi’s article is a fine study of Jewish architecture in a complex context. Find the book on the publisher’s website here.

May 28

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Our Circulatory System (or Folklore Studies Publishing in the Era of Open Access, Corporate Enclosure and the Transformation of Scholarly Societies)

The following essay is adapted from a talk given on March 6, 2009 as part of the symposium “The Form of Value in Globalized Traditions” organized by the Center for Folklore Studies at the Ohio State University, Columbus Ohio. At the time, I discussed my participation in this event here. This essay builds upon three reviews of open access issues in folkloristics that I authored for the weblog Open Access Anthropology in winter 2008 (Jackson 2008a, 2008b, 2008c). Inspired this week by the Hacking the Academy project and by Ted Striphas’ recent examination of scholarly communications issues within the field of cultural studies (Striphas 2010a, 2010b), I decided not to leave the essay sitting on the back-burner. In lieu of doing something more formal with it later, I am publishing it here in the hope that it will prove useful to a colleagues in folklore studies and neighboring fields.

Our Circulatory System (or Folklore Studies Publishing in the Era of Open Access, Corporate Enclosure and the Transformation of Scholarly Societies)

Jason Baird Jackson
Indiana University, Bloomington

The system of scholarly communication in which folkloristics is a small but important part is quickly changing in some dramatic ways. The phenomena falling under this rubric become more diverse and interconnected everyday and the good and bad news seems to come at an every quicker rate. To begin with a tangible example, a key publisher in our field and the home to three of its four main English-language introductory textbooks is Utah State University Press. When I prepared this essay in the spring of 2009, our field feared that the press would cease operations in the context of its university’s response to the current global economic crisis (Howard 2009; Jaschik 2009; Spooner 2009). On the brink of disappearance, Utah State University Press was instead made a unit of its university library (Utah State University 2009). It is not unique in undergoing such a dramatic transition. The present economic climate will almost certainly accelerate further various processes of change that were well already underway. Many of these shifts are positive, but whether for the good or for the bad, they are prompting some fundamental reconsiderations of: (1) of the genres of scholarly production, (2) of the paths down which we circulate our work, (3) of the publics whom we seek to address, (4) of the hierarchies of value that we used to judge and reward good work, (5) of the partners with whom we collaborate, (6) of the technologies that we harness, and (7) of the means by which we pay the bills.
Read more

May 25

Dr. Arle Lommel

Congratulations to Arle Lommel on the successful defense today of his Ph.D. dissertation in folklore. His dissertation is titled Semiotic Organology: A Peircean Examination of the Bagpipe and Hurdy-Gurdy in Hungary. His innovative project unfolds at the intersections of Hungarian ethnography and general ethnomusicology, organology, folklore studies (especially of “folk revivals”), material culture studies, and semiotic theory. It was a pleasure to be member of Arle’s dissertation committee.

May 6

Janice Frisch on T-shirt Quilts

A note of congratulations for Janice Frisch on the completion of her M.A. in Folklore. Her M.A. Thesis, recently accepted by the faculty, is titled Scrapbooks in Fabric: Memory, Identity, and the T-shirt Quilt. It is a wonderful study utilizing ethnographic methods in the study of contemporary U.S.  material culture. It is particularly valuable in the ways that it situates t-shirt quilts relative to the areas of (1) dress and adornment, (2) quilts and quilt history, and (3) scrapbooking and other practices associated with hand-made memory objects. In her abstract, she writes:

Historically, in the United States, clothing that was worn beyond repair was used in quilts in order to salvage the still usable parts while creating another useful item. Modern quilters, however, generally purchase new cloth to use in their quilts rather than cutting up old clothing. Fairly recently there has been a trend towards constructing quilts out of still wearable clothing items, such as t-shirts. This form of quilting is both a continuation of past practices and an innovation. In today’s society these quilts are a medium for the expression of personal identity and memories. This thesis draws upon existing literature on body art, material culture, memory, and identity as well as original fieldwork to examine the rapidly growing phenomenon of t-shirt quilts and connect them to the larger history of quilting, dress, and collecting in the United States. [Frisch 2010:vi]

Looking ahead to her Ph.D. work, Ms. Frisch will be continuing her studies of quilting this summer at the Smithsonian and several European museums. Congratulations to her on the completion of an important M.A. study.

Mar 15

Cultural Property Research Group, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Very happily, I have begun a week-long visit to Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, Germany. I am very fortunate to be the guest of the Cultural Property Research Group. This is a major interdisciplinary project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). I very much recommend their research weblog (here) and the project website (here).

Today I spent time talking to some of the doctoral students in law and in cultural anthropology/European ethnology/folklore studies who are pursuing dissertation projects within the larger research group. They’re all wonderfully smart and very generous in their patience with an American who has never spoken a word of German in his life. In addition to beginning discussions of their interesting projects, they taught me a bit about the changing nature of academic life in Germany and showed me around their beautiful campus and city.

While I will hopefully have something from my own work to offer my hosts, I am enjoying learning about their studies and connecting them with the work of favorite (and very relevant) colleagues back home who are working on similar issues. I was reassured by the familiarity of the topics that we discussed today.  In the usual one-thing-leads-to-another fashion we jumped from geographic indicators to WIPO policy, open source software, cultural appropriation, human rights, heritage lists, and open access.

Thanks to everyone involved in my visit possible.

Jan 11

Call For Book Proposals: Mellon Funded Project for First Books

[from an AFS announcement]

Call for Book Proposals

The University of Illinois Press, the University Press of Mississippi, and the University of Wisconsin Press, in cooperation with the American Folklore Society and with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, are collaborating to host an author’s workshop at the 2010 conference of the American Folklore Society for authors working on their first book. Up to six authors will be selected to participate in a full day of intensive activities devoted to critiquing and developing their individual projects. Workshop activities will include one-on-one mentoring sessions with editors and senior scholars and group discussions of revision and editing strategies, publishing processes, and project critiques. A modest stipend will be provided to participants to help defray the costs of attending the workshop.

This opportunity is open only to authors preparing their first books. Projects must be single-authored, nonfiction books based on folklore research. Edited volumes, photography collections with minimal text, and memoirs will not be considered.

Projects selected for the workshop will be candidates for publication in the Presses’ new collaborative series, Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World, which aims to publish exceptional first books that emphasize the interdisciplinary and/or international nature of the field of folklore. Within the series, each Press will focus on specific aspects of folklore studies related to its areas of expertise: Illinois on gender and queer studies, world folk cultures, and multiculturalism as manifested in forms of vernacular expression such as music, dance, and foodways; Mississippi in folk art, American folk music, African American studies, popular culture, and Southern folklife; and Wisconsin in folklore studies that intersect with Upper Midwest cultures, Irish/Irish-American studies, Jewish studies, Southeast Asian studies, gay/lesbian studies, foodways, and travel. Applicants may indicate in their proposal whether they have a preference of publisher.

Proposals should be submitted via e-mail between January 1, 2010 and April 1, 2010, to fsmw@uillinois.edu. For submission guidelines, please see http://folklorestudies.press.illinois.edu/guidelines.html.

Dec 20

Congratulations to Dr. Liora Sarfati

I am pleased to report that Dr. Liora Sarfati recently and successfully defended her dissertation on the material culture of contemporary Korean Shamanism, thereby earning her Ph.D. in from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University. I was honored to be a part of her committee and I look forward to seeing her fine and innovative work published and discussed in the years ahead.

Dec 16

European Ethnology Job at Göttingen

A job notice circulated for the good of the anthropology, ethnology and folklore studies community.

The Department of Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology within the Philosophical Faculty of Georg-August University in Göttingen, Germany, seeks a

W2 – Professor in Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology
to begin on April 1, 2010.

We are seeking a scholar who knows the subject in its entire breadth and has done exceptional work in research as well as methodology. Expertise in the analysis of local, region and national everyday culture is desirable as well as in the field of cultural exchange and migration in Europe and its regions. In terms of teaching, in depth knowledge and experience are expected in the central methods and theories of the discipline. In addition to the regular teaching duties, the position also requires readiness to carry out empirical projects with students in the masters program.

Applicants should be interested in interdisciplinary work, participate actively also in the Center for Modern Humanities and show openness toward research cooperation in national and international dimensions. An active interest in the work of the Göttingen Max Planck Institute for the study of religious and ethnic diversity is also desirable.

The precondition for application is the ”habilitation“ or equivalent achievements (such as tenure and/or a second monograph) as well as adequate teaching experience. Also desirable is experience with research planning and grant writing.

Getting appointed to a professorship is based on the conditions set out in §25 of the Law for Higher Education of the State of Lower Saxony (NHG). Particulars will be explained upon inquiry.

Further information is available at http://www.uni-goettingen.de/de/119119.html

We explicitly welcome applications from abroad. Women are underrepresented in academic teaching at the University of Göttingen. Applications from women holding the requisite qualifications are thus especially welcome and will be treated favorably within the framework of legal possibilities. Severely handicapped applicants of equal aptitude will be privileged.

Part-time employment can be made possible, depending on the circumstances.

Please send applications including a curriculum vitae, a publications list as well as an accounting of scholarly development including a detailed description of teaching experiences and research plans within 6 weeks of the appearance of this advertisement to:

Dekanin der Philosophischen Fakultät der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen Humboldtallee 17, D-37073 Göttingen, Germany.

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