The following is the IU Bloomington press release sharing news of my colleague Dick Bauman’s AFS Lifetime Achievement Award, which was presented at the recent Society meetings in Louisville. Congratulations to Dick on an honor well deserved.
Honor culminates more than 40 years of scholarly research
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Indiana University folklore professor Richard Bauman has studied the acts of speaking and of silence as communicative modes among 16th century Quakers and Medieval Icelanders. He’s also taken a keen ear to coon dog traders in East Texas and researching practical jokesters.
“There’s a kind of widespread notion that coon hunters lie about their dogs,” noted Bauman, an IU faculty member since 1986, whose 1981 article about them was titled, “Any Man Who Keeps More’n One Hound ‘ll Lie to You.”
“My work centered around a trade day in Canton, Texas,” he recalled. “On the Friday-Saturday-Sunday preceding the first Monday of the month, you had these guys gathering with their dogs. For the sociability of it, for visiting with other coon hunters, they’d go out and hunt, shoot dice, get drunk, but tell a lot of stories about dogs.
“The stories,” he observed, “offered me a wonderful vantage point on the tension between truth and lying in everyday life and the role of stories in calibrating and recalibrating that tension.”
Bauman, Distinguished professor emeritus of folklore and ethnomusicology at IU, recently was presented with the Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award by the American Folklore Society. This is the highest honor that the society bestows and it is bestowed upon a living senior scholar in recognition of outstanding scholarly achievement over the course of a career.
He is the fourth person to receive the honor and the first of his generation so recognized. Linda Dégh, also a Distinguished professor emeritus of folklore at IU, was a recipient of the award, which is presented every two years.
“There were some major paradigm shifts that went on with my generation,” Bauman explained. “The previous winners were transitional in a sense. They were trained in an older approach to folklore that was very item-oriented and very historical in its focus. I had a hand in introducing perspectives that were much more anthropological, much more linguistic and much more ethnographic.”
He is describing a revolution that the field of folklore went through during the 1960s. As an example, instead of looking at the comparative, textual history of individual folk tales or folk songs, Bauman and his folklore colleagues began to branch out and study the social context of such tunes, proverbs and riddles. He has observed how “these things have currency in their communities,” he said.
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