May 4
I am pleased to note the openning of the “One Hundred Summers: A Kiowa Calendar Record” exhibition at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in Norman. I have not yet heard how the openning events have gone, but I look forward to seeing the exhibition myself this summer. Learn more about the show here. Find the associated book, authored by Candace Greene and published by Nebraska, here.
Congratulations to Teri Klassen on the publication of her review of the book A Cherokee Woman’s America: Memoirs of Narcissa Owen, 1831-1907. Her review appears in the latest issue of the (print only, but not-for-profit) journal Material Culture*. Well done.
*Volume 41, No. 1, Pp. 92-96.
I am so pleased to note that my friend and collaborator Mary Linn (Associate Curator of Native American Languages at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History) has been named as one of five 2009 DaVinci Fellows by the DaVinci Institute. Mary is the founding curator of the museum’s Native American Languages program and has done amazing outreach work with American Indian communities across Oklahoma and the whole of the United States. Among the innovative efforts that she has stewarded is the museum’s annual Native American Youth Language Fair, which, each spring, attracts close to 1,000 American Indian students to the museum for two days of programs in which they make public presentations in the languages of their home communities.
Thanks to Indian Country Today for getting out the news of this well-deserved award. Find their story here. Congratulations Mary! An honor well bestowed.
The new (April 2009) issue of Anthropology News features an exceptionally large amount of interesting material. I have not digested it all, but I want to point to the first two articles. Leading the issue is a piece by Kimblery Christen titled “Access and Accountability: The Ecology of Information Sharing in the Digital Age. It is a great short and accessible summary of her key arguements about possibility and responsibility in collaborative ethnographic work. It builds on the remarkable range of practical, technical and theoretical projects that she has been pursuing for a number of years. (These have been a regular topic on this site and her own website provides a rich introduction.)
The second paper–a wonderful companion to the first–is “Virtual Repatriation and Digital Cultural Heritage” by Kate Hennessy. I builds on collaborative media projects that she and Amber Ridington have been pursuing with a Canadian First Nations community. This piece is a powerful complement to the Dane Wajich site and other projects that they have pursued because it offers a glimpse behind the scenes at the kinds of challenges these efforts can entail.
I recommend both of these contributions highly. They showed up in my mailbox on Monday and I was teaching with them on Tuesday. Kim and Kate (and their project partners) are doing amazing work.
I am happy to note the publication of a book chapter by my friends Amber A. Neely and Gus Palmer, Jr. Titled “Which Way Is the Kiowa Way? Orthography Choices, Ideologies, and Language Renewal,” their paper appears in the new volume Native American Language Ideologies: Beliefs, Practices, and Struggles in Indian Country edited by Paul V. Kroskrity and Margaret C. Field (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2009). I was lucky enough to read the paper in manuscript and can report that it is a valuable and insightful account of language revitalization efforts among the Kiowa people of Oklahoma undertaken in light of contemporary work on language ideology and language politics in Indigenous communities.
I am happy to report that Kimberly Christen’s new book Aboriginal Business: Alliances in a Remote Australian Town has just been released by The School for Advanced Research Press. Rather than go on and on, I’ll just say that it is really, really great and that you can get the details on Kim’s super website/weblog Long Road. For the long haul, find it in Open World Cat (and your local library) here. Congratulations Kim!
[Kim and I work together on Museum Anthropology Review, for which she is the Associate Editor. She is also an Assistant Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University.]
Mar 19
Recently, I had a unique and wonderful opportunity to participate in a small conference and workshop hosted by the Center for Folklore Studies at The Ohio State University (in partnership with the Berkeley Folklore Program). Titled “The Form of Value in Globalized Traditions,” the workshop continued an ongoing series of discussions that were inaugurated in 2007 by Charles L. Briggs at the University of California, Berkeley. The program for the public presentations (which were held on Friday, March 6, 2009), along with paper abstracts, can be found online at here. The overview summary describing what we were up to read:
This international working group considers the career of vernacular traditions under globalization. As cultural forms circulate ever more widely, recycled, restructured, and hybridized as they travel, regimes of value insist increasingly on point of origin. Since economic value is predicated upon scarcity, in a global framework cultural objects are marked—and marketed—as local. Form itself is fetishized as social interaction becomes attenuated. Rather than contesting the reification of culture into exchangeable goods, the resistance of impoverished groups and social movements increasingly takes shape as a struggle for control over the manner of commodification and the profits thereof. In the face of restructurings of value initiated by the World Trade Organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, free trade agreements, and transnational corporations, intellectual property rights become a key locus of contention between distributors and cultural producers. The public component of this year’s group meeting will explore form and value as both categories of action and tools of analysis. We hope that attendees will help us with the work of comparison and synthesis.
My own presentation considered the current reshaping of the system of scholarly communications in which folklorists and ethnologists circulate (and find expanded publics for) their work in an era of corporate enclosure, media consolidation, and library crises on the one hand and open source technologies and open access movements on the other. The participants were a great group. In addition to many wonderful students and faculty members from the OSU folklore program, the participants were: Sadhana Naithani (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi), Lee Haring, City College, CUNY), Mbugua wa-Mungai (Kenyatta University, Nairobi), Galit Hasan-Rokem (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Candace Slater (University of California, Berkeley), Amy Shuman (The Ohio State University), Dorothy Noyes (The Ohio State University), Javier León (Indiana University), Diarmuid Ó Giolláin (University College Cork), and Charles L. Briggs (University of California, Berkeley).
Thanks to everyone who helped bring this great event into existence. Thanks especially to the OSU folklore students who brought great energy (and a great Saturday lunch) to the event.
From a Dear Colleague Letter from Candace Greene, Director of the Smithsonian Institution Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology (SIMA):
Dear Colleagues – I am pleased to announce a new research training initiative being launched by the Smithsonian Department of Anthropology with support (pending) from the National Science Foundation.
The Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology is an intensive four-week training program that will teach graduate students how to use museum collections in research, incorporating Smithsonian collections as an integral part of their anthropological training. Support from the Cultural Anthropology Program at NSF will cover full tuition and living expenses for 12 students each summer.
Please help us get the word out on this program, which will begin in June 2009 and is already accepting applications. Full information including application instructions and dates is available at http://anthropology.si.edu/summerinstitute.
Candace Greene
Director, Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology
Ethnologist, Collections and Archives Program
Department of Anthropology
National Museum of Natural History
Smithsonian Institution
I am pleased to note that One Hundred Summers: A Kiowa Calendar Record, a book by my friend Candace S. Greene, has just been released by the University of Nebraska Press. Candace’s study is an important outcome of a project that I initiated while serving as Assistant Curator of Ethnology at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. Through text and color images, the book presents and interprets a remarkable pictoral calendar by the Kiowa artist Silver Horn. Covering 100 years of Kiowa tribal history, the calendar was donated to the museum during my tenure at SNOMNH. With IMLS funding, teaching materials have been prepared to faciliate use of the calendar in K-12 contexts. In addition, my friend Daniel Swan, the current SNOMNH curator of ethnology is preparing an exhibition focused on the calendar. In the period since the project began, the fragile calendar has been completely conserved and stabilized with funding provided by the Save America’s Treasures program. My friend Victoria Book, SNOMNH’s conservator supervised this effort working with paper conservation specialist Ellen Livesay-Holligan.
The University of Nebraska Press has done an exceptional job in designing the book. It is really beautiful. Check it out and help spread the word.
Congratulations to Teri Klassen on the publication of her new paper “How Depression-Era Quiltmakers Constructed Domestic Space: An Interracial Processual Study” in the journal Midwestern Folklore (Klassen 2008). This fine peer-reviewed paper draws upon research reported in her M.A. thesis (Klassen 2007) exploring neglected aspects of the wider social history of quilting in the United States.
Klassen, Teresa Christine
2007 Historical Ethnographies of Quiltmaking. M.A. Thesis, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University.
Klassen, Teri
2008 How Depression-Era Quiltmakers Constructed Domestic Space: An Interracial Processual Study. Midwestern Folklore. 34(2):17-47.
Shreds and Patches 