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Posts from the ‘Folklore’ Category

Aug 3

Folktales and Fairy Tales: OA Book Published in ScholarSpace at University of Hawaii at Manoa

A folklore essay collection has just been published in an open access institutional repository. The collection is Folktales and Fairy Tales: Translation, Colonialism, and Cinema edited by ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui, Noenoe Silva, Vilsoni Hereniko, and Cristina Bacchilega. It is available in ScholarSpace at University of Hawaii at Manoa at the following stable URL: http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/15609

In their Preface, the editors write:

We chose ScholarSpace as a publishing venue because it allows for wide accessibility to scholars across disciplines and because its reduced production timeline enables us to make the collection available in a more timely manner. We thank UHM librarian Beth Tillighast for her support.

Congratulations to the folklore minded editors, authors, and librarians involved in this significant project.

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

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 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 4

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Claude Lévi-Strauss as Museum Ethnologist

Claude Lévi-Strauss’ work is important to me and to the fields in which I work–Native American studies, folklore studies, cultural anthropology, social theory, etc.  On the occasion of his passing, I won’t say much more than I have already said, that I found his work to be inspiring and directly useful to my own studies. The topic on which we corresponded once–dual organization among the native peoples of the Southeastern United States–provides a very easy to grasp example. As a museum person and the editor of a journal in the field of museum-based anthropology and folkloristics, I thought it would be worthwhile to make a case for Lévi-Strauss as a museum anthropologist.  Of course, this was hardly his core identity and it won’t be how he is remembered, but here are three pieces of evidence that I would recall.

As the NYT obit. reminds us, he spent two years as a curator at the Musée de l’Homme (1948-1949) and he was instrumental, near the end of his long life, in its transformation in the context of the birth of the Musée du quai Branly. His role as a collector of artifacts and in the painful birth of the MQB (and the death or transformation of the Musée de l’Homme) has been discussed a great deal in the recent literature on these topics.

His book The Way of the Masks (University of Washington Press, 1982) provided a clear and accessible account of how his approach to structural anthropology could be applied to the study of visual art and material culture, in this case the carved masks of the native Northwest Coast of North America.  The book is also the place where his love of Northwest Coast carving and for the “Boas halls” at the American Museum of Natural History is most evident. It is, in part, a declaration of allegiance to the Boasian tradition of Native American art history and museum anthropology.

Also of interest to museum folks, particularly to students of photography and visual anthropology, is the collection of his ethnographic photographs from Brazil:  Saudades do Brasil:  A Photographic Memoir (University of Washington Press, 1995).

This is all just food for thought among my material culture and museum studies colleagues. As an ending to this note, here is a passage from my colleague Henry Glassie’s review of Way of the Masks:

Folkloristic critics who think Levi-Strauss’s textual emphasis prevents contextual understanding do not understand the theory of context and have not read much structuralism. This new work proves that structuralism is a variety of contextual analysis in that it recognizes all objects to be incomplete in themselves and therefore of necessity bound for meaning to things they are not. When Levi-Strauss studies masks, he studies them in their connections to myth, ritual, spiritual orientation, social organization, economic transaction, ecological situation, and historical development. In addition, and crucially, he argues that just as myths provide contexts for each other, becoming locked in the head through a system of transformation, so too are masks contexts for each other. This awareness that contexts, the associations that  breathe meaning into facts, are located not in the sensate world but in the heads of creators who when making a mask know of other masks, in their culture and in other cultures-this awareness is essential to the historian who studies texts in the context of other texts, to the ethnologist who must study people from the literature about them or consign vast numbers of societies to oblivion, and to the ethnographer whose responsibility does not end at the observation of discrete, situated actions. [Glassie 1984:483]

References Cited

Glassie, Henry

1984  Review of: The Way of the Masks by Claude Lévi-Strauss. The Journal of American Folklore. 97(386): 482-484.

Update (11/4/2009)

See the links gathered at antropologi.info here.

Nov 4

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Awesome, Wonderful News from Utah State University Press!

I am a folklorist and Utah State University Press has long been an important scholarly publisher in this field. I am also a scholarly communications activist who is committed to the view that research libraries will play an expanding and crucial role in building a better and more open scholarly communications system. For me, this news is the best imaginable outcome for Utah State University Press. Congratulations to everyone involved.  My willingness to help the press succeed has gone from a diffuse and general interest to a focused and specific commitment. I am totally enthused. I learned this news at the 2009 AFS meetings last week and thrilled to see yesterday’s announcement.  Yea! Here is the press release:

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS MERGES WITH MERRILL-CAZIER LIBRARY

LOGAN — Joining a growing national trend, Utah State University Press will merge with the administrative structure of Merrill-Cazier Library at Utah State University. The transition has begun, with the arrangement officially taking effect at the start of fiscal year 2010-11.

The move was recently approved by USU’s Executive Vice President and Provost Raymond T. Coward, following a proposal from Richard Clement, dean of USU Libraries, and Michael Spooner, director of USU Press.

The merger of a scholarly press with a university library has been used at other institutions to innovatively address a number of trends in scholarly publication, Clement and Spooner said.
Digital publishing, for example, will play an important part in the future of scholarly publication, and university libraries and presses are both deeply interested in its potential for transforming the way research is distributed.

“Many university presses are moving toward open access, often under the administration of the library,” Clement said. “The most conspicuous example in the recent past is the University of Michigan Press which moved into the library and is now focusing on OA and other forms of digital publication. We propose to move the USU Press along the same path.”

In its simplest definition, open access publishing (OA) provides access to material via the Internet that is free for all users to read and use.

“Among universities with presses, there is an emerging trend in this direction, and Utah State University Press now joins the first dozen or so university presses to pursue this relationship,” Spooner said.

While the decision to move USU Press to Merrill-Cazier Library was not completely budget-driven, it will result in significant savings, Clement said. With a larger staff in place, the library will assume a number of support activities for the press, including accounting, IT support, graphic design and public relations.

“We are truly integrating USU Press into the library family of programs,” Clement said. “We will be able to do some exciting things together.”

Both Clement and Spooner see the move as positive, creating a synergy where the sum of the two units coming together is greater than the individual parts.

USU Press will adopt a new publication model, with open access as a central component and will move toward increased digital delivery of books. The library’s position will be enhanced as well, as academic libraries nationally take on a stronger role in the evolution of scholarly publishing.

“This move directly serves the needs of the university,” Clement said. “Open access allows us to go back to where university presses began — to publish work by all faculty in every discipline.”

At the same time, USU Press remains a refereed scholarly press, with the standards of rigorous peer review appropriate to a university publisher.

“This is a work in progress, and we are taking it one step at a time,” Clement said. “Utah State University Press has an established reputation that we want to preserve, yet we see exciting possibilities ahead.”

During the coming months, the staff and physical operation of USU Press will move to Merrill-Cazier Library, with the transition scheduled to be complete by July 1, 2010. “The staff at USU Press looks forward to this move,” said Spooner, who, as director of the press, will become a department head within the library’s administrative structure. “We see this as a significant institutional commitment by USU to provide a secure home for its press, and we look forward to working with our new colleagues there.”

Aug 8

Scholarly Society-Library Partnerships Webcast Now Online

The video archive version of the recent Association for Research Libraries (ARL) webcast on “Reaching Out to Leaders of Scholarly Societies at Research Institutions” to which I contributed is now available online.  It can be gotten to for free, all that is required is signing in for ARL headcounting purposes.  Watching it in this way provides the same content experienced when the program was being done live.  The event lasted one hour.  Jennifer Laherty and I were the first of two pairs of speakers.  We present after about five minutes of introduction from the ARL staff organizers who spoke on the general goals of the initiative of which the program was a part.  Q&A follows the second presentation on data projects in astronomy (by Sayeed Choudhury and Robert Hanisch). Find the webcast via a link available here:  http://www.arl.org/sc/faculty/coi/COIwebcast2009.shtml.

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