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Posts from the ‘Folklore Studies’ Category

Dec 7

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Fund for Folk Culture Publications Available Online Through Indiana-AFS Partnership

From an AFS news release on behalf of the Fund for Folk Culture:

The Indiana University Bloomington Libraries and the American Folklore Society, in partnership with The Fund for Folk Culture and the Indiana University Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, are pleased to announce the availability of a series of policy publications created by The Fund for Folk Culture.

The Fund, which was created in 1992 and suspended its programs in early 2009, supports the creation, conservation, innovation, and value of traditional culture and folk arts in community life through grantmaking, convenings, the creation of networks, and research and publications, all focused on issues critical to artists, tradition bearers, and the organizations supporting their work. Its goal is to “create a world in which diverse cultural heritages are honored and all people have the right and resources to exercise preservation of their cultural traditions and to create new traditions for the times.”

The body of Fund for Folk Culture publications now available includes a three-part Issues in Folk Arts and Traditional Culture Working Paper series; reports on three meetings devoted to the examination of issues facing refugee and immigrant communities, and individual folk artists, in the US; a report on the “Folklore’s Futures: Scholarship and Practice” symposium sponsored by the Fund and the American Folklore Society in 2006; and two monographs, Culture and Commerce: Traditional Arts in Economic Development and Envisioning Convergence: Cultural Conservation, Environmental Stewardship and Sustainable Livelihoods. Other Fund publications will be made available in the near future.

These published works are being made available in digital form as part of the IUScholarWorks Repository.  In this form, each published work has a durable URL (web address) that will remain stable, insuring that future citations to this work will lead back to the full source itself.  This published work is fully open access and documents are provided in PDF format.  The IUB Libraries are committing to the migration of these materials to future file formats so as to preserve the availability of these works.  The IUScholarWorks Repository uses standard metadata protocols, insuring that the works included in it are easily findable through such services as Google Scholar and OAIster, the Open Archives Initiative database, a union catalog containing records for millions of digital scholarly resources.

Now available and searchable in IUScholarWorks Repository, the publications of The Fund for Folk Culture join a growing corpus of fully accessible publications in folklore studies, including the full back files of The Folklore and Folk Music Archivist and Folklore Forum.  The IUB Libraries and the American Folklore Society are exploring the possibility of other partnerships to create greater accessibility for important classes of publication in our field that are presently without a long-term digital home.

Find the publications of The Fund for Folk Culture online here:  https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/3850

Dec 3

CFP: Contact: The Dynamics of Power and Culture

from the conference organizers:

Contact: The Dynamics of Power and Culture
The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH
April 2-3, 2010

We are happy to announce the 2009-2010 collaborative conference between The Ohio State University Folklore Student Association and the Folklore and Ethnomusicology Student Associations at Indiana University. This conference aims to create a space for graduate and undergraduate students to share their research in folklore, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, material culture, performance studies, and related disciplines connected to the study of academic and vernacular interpretation of everyday life.

This year’s conference seeks to explore the following questions:
(1) How should we or could we define, describe, and theorize contact?
(2) What happens when people, ideas, cultures and styles of expression make contact?
(3) In what ways can we explore the boundaries of these categories?
(4) What politics are inherent in and result from contact?
(5) In what ways can we explore the concept of contact in our respective fields?

*Abstracts exploring other themes will also be accepted.

We are seeking papers and posters that engage the following topics/themes as they relate to “Contact”:

Identity
Tradition
Narrative
Culture
Space
History
Performance
Power
Boundary/ies
Memory
Transmission
Diversity

We also welcome submissions of papers and posters on other topics. The conference will have three opportunities for participation: paper presentations, poster sessions, and a discussion forum for all attendees. We will be accepting 250-word abstracts for 20-minute papers and poster presentations. We highly encourage poster submissions, particularly for research projects in progress, as there will be opportunities for active dialogue.

Abstracts must be submitted by January 4, 2010. Please email submissions to osu.iu.2010conference@gmail.com.

Please see the OSU FSA website for details on submissions: http://cfs.osu.edu/fsa/default.cfm or follow us on Facebook (search: OSU Folklore Student Association) and Twitter.
Register for this event for free at http://osuiu2010conference.eventbrite.com/.
For more information on the details of the conference (lodging, location, etc.) visit http://cfs.osu.edu/fsa/studentconference.cfm in the coming months.

Nov 20

Mayer Kirshenblatt (1916-2009)

I just learned that Mayer Kirshenblatt, a remarkable human being and the father of folklorist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has passed away. If you have not seen it yet, I strongly recommend their jointly composed book They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust (University of California Press, 2007). The paintings and stories gathered therein (and in the companion exhibition) are simply amazing. (The book was reviewed in Museum Anthropology Review here.)

My condolences go to Barbara and to everyone whose life Mr. Kirshenblatt touched. His memory, and his memories, will live forever.

Nov 20

Arthur Lawton: Music on the Goshenhoppen Landscape

Congratulations go to IU Folklore doctoral student Arthur Lawton, whose latest article “Music on the Goshenhoppen Landscape” has just appeared in The Bulletin of the Historical Society of Montgomery County.

Nov 16

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Dell Hymes’ Passing

While no obituary has appeared yet, there seems to be conclusive understanding via the moccasin telegraph that Dell Hymes has passed away. So soon after the death of Claude Lévi-Strauss, this is another significant loss in the fields of Native American studies, anthropology and folklore studies. Dell Hymes was a amazingly influential folklorist, anthropologist, and linguist who revolutionized the study of language in (/and) culture in general, and of Native American narrative traditions in particular. He made important contributions to the history of anthropology, to descriptive and theoretical linguistics, to sociolinguistics, to folkloristics, and to Native American studies. He essentially created the areas on inquiry known as (1) the ethnography of speaking and (2) ethnopoetics and he played a key role reshaping linguistic anthropology from the 1960s onward. His work is at the root of the performance orientation central in contemporary folklore studies and he directly influenced the work of a great many folklorists, including Richard Bauman, Henry Glassie, and Lee Haring, among many others. His influence in the field as practiced in the United States is pervasive.

Dell Hymes was an especially central figure for his fields of study at Indiana University, where I earned my Ph.D. and to which I returned in 2004 to join the faculty in Folklore and Ethnomusicology. At Indiana, Hymes earned his Ph.D. in 1955, studying under Carl Voegelin, a student of Alfred Kroeber and Edward Sapir, both themselves students of Franz Boas. He was deeply immersed in the Americanist tradition and he took the task of understanding, enriching, and conveying that tradition to new generations to be a key task. When he left Indiana for jobs at Harvard, California, Pennsylvania and Virginia, his impact and influence kept flowing back and influencing the faculty and students here. At Pennsylvania in particular, he worked closely with scholars that have gone on to play a key role in shaping the IU Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. Evidence of the breadth of his influence and his commitment to the Boasian vision for the study of language, culture and society can be seen in the fact that he served as president of the American Folklore Society, the American Anthropological Association, and the Linguistic Society of America.

More coherent and elaborate remembrances will be written by scholars and friends who knew him well, but I wanted to acknowledge his passing and record my appreciation for his many contributions that have enriched the fields of study in which I work.

Nov 13

Google Books Meets Stith Thompson

Craig Fehrman has published an essay in Nuvo: Indy’s Alternative Voice that looks at the state of the Google Books project through the lens of the Indiana University Library’s wonderful and legendary Folklore Collection. (Much of) the Folklore Collection has been digitized in partnership with the Google Book project. Its greatness as a collection stems from the efforts of long-serving Distinguished Service Professor Stith Thompson (1885-1976), the founder of what is today the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. Fehrman uses the story to make a case for copyright reform and is particularly disturbed by the way that vernacular culture becomes enclosed through publication.

Nov 11

Henry Glassie Named Haskins Prize Lecturer

Great news for my Department in the form of a ACLS press release circulated today.

 

Henry Glassie, College Professor Emeritus of Folklore at Indiana University, Bloomington, will deliver the 29th Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture at the 2011 ACLS Annual Meeting in Washington D.C.

Named for the first chairman of ACLS (1920-26), the Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture series, entitled “A Life of Learning,” celebrates scholarly careers of distinctive importance. The lectures are published in the ACLS Occasional Paper series. The list of previous lecturers includes John Hope Franklin, Gerda Lerner, Helen Vendler, Peter Brown, Clifford Geertz, and William Labov. Historian of science Nancy Siraisi will deliver the 2010 Haskins Prize Lecture at the ACLS Annual Meeting on May 7th in Philadelphia. Read more

Nov 11

Footprints in the Stars

I am very pleased to welcome IU Folklore alumnus George Lankford to campus. Information on his lecture “Footprints in the Stars” is available in this IU Press Release: http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/12512.html

Nov 8

HFS Meetings Were Great!

I was unable to attend William “Bert” Wilson’s opening Joseph S. Schick Lecture last night at Indiana State University (due to an Indiana University award’s banquet), but I completely enjoyed today’s Hoosier Folklore Society Meetings. The papers were diverse and very interesting and the public library in Nashville, Indiana was a wonderful venue. My lunch companions and I even had some pretty good barbeque just a block from the library on Nashville’s famous main drag.  Professor Wilson gave a moving talk on the significance of family stories, the other presentations were all first rate, and there was a great reception at the Traditional Arts Indiana gallery (also just a block or so from the library).

Congratulations to everyone who made this great event a big success!

Nov 8

Western States Folklore Society Meetings

Having been asked to do so, I am very pleased to help spread news of next spring’s Western States Folklore Society Meetings, which are slated to be held at Willamette University (WU) in Salem, Oregon. The dates are April 16-17, 2010. Details on the meeting follow the break and more information on the society and its meetings is also found on the WSFS website, at: http://www.westernfolklore.org . Founded in 1941, WSFS in an important professional society for folklorists and is the publisher of Western Folklore, a key journal that is widely read in the field.
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