Jun 16
I am happy to note that my book Concept Work: Constructing Frameworks for Folklore Studies is in press with Indiana University University. Look for it in October and learn more about it on the press website here: https://iupress.org/9780253074317/concept-work/ . The flyer is below.
I am happy to announce the opening of a small exhibition titled Shoulder Bags and Ethnic Identity in Southern Yunnan, China. For such a small exhibition, the project has gathered in a large team of collaborators. Thanks go to all of them!
The exhibition is now open in the Scholars’ Commons at the Wells Library on the Indiana University Bloomington campus. The exhibition presents a purchased collection made by Wuerxiya and I in Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture and Pu’er Prefecture-Level City in Southern Yunnan, China during December 2023. Learn more about the exhibition at: https://libraries.indiana.edu/shoulder-bags-ethnic-identity-southern
Accompanying the exhibition is a thirty-five-page color catalogue co-authored by Wuerxiya, Jackson, and Touhidul Islam and designed by Emily Bryant. Published by the Material Culture and Heritage Studies Laboratory, it can be downloaded for free from the IUScholarWorks Repository: https://hdl.handle.net/2022/33339
The exhibition will close May 19th 2025. Special thanks to IU Libraries for hosting it!
Good news is scarce in my world right now, but I am really very pleased to share that Lijun Zhang’s latest book Living in Heritage: Tulou as Vernacular Architecture, Global Asset, and Tourist Destination in Contemporary China has now been published by Indiana University Press in the Material Vernaculars series. It has to be auspicious that Lijun’s important book was officially published on September 17, 2024, which this year was the Mid-Autumn Festival or Moon Festival (did you see that moon?!?). I may share more about the book later, but for today, here is the description and the link to its page at IU Press.
Yongding County in southeast China is famous for its large, multistory communal vernacular buildings known as tulou, translated “rammed earth building.” These structures were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008. Living in Heritage introduces readers outside of China to this classic example of local Chinese architecture in the context of contemporary heritage preservation and tourism.
Focusing on the Yongding Hakka Tulou Folk Culture Village, which is part of Hongkeng Village, author Lijun Zhang examines the on-the-ground processes and effects of heritage-making, UNESCO-inspired tourism, and how locals negotiate the dramatic transformation of their daily, social, and economic lives. Within an age of cultural change beginning at the start of the 21st century, Living in Heritage explores how the tulou phenomenon as heritage has and continues to be transformed into cultural, economic, or political capital. Through her careful study, Zhang reveals how the blurring of formerly distinct domains—private and public, local and global—gives rise to a living museum that now relies on insiders and outsiders to preserve their way of life.
Living in Heritage offers an in-depth ethnographic account of the people dwelling and working within traditional tulou architecture in the 21st century.
Lijun Zhang is Assistant Professor of Folklore at George Mason University. She is author of Chinese Folk Art and Crafts and editor (with Marsha MacDowell) of Quilts of Southwest China and (with Ziying You) of Chinese Folklore Studies Today: Discourse and Practice.
Please consider purchasing a copy from IU Press here https://iupress.org/9780253070975/living-in-heritage/ (or wherever you get your books). Doing so supports not only the press in general but the free-to-readers versions of Material Vernacular titles. (More on that when the free version becomes available.)
“But at the laste, as every thing hath ende…”
Today I published my final editorial as founding editor of Museum Anthropology Review. It may be that Museum Anthropology Review thus concludes with volume 17(1-2), now just published. Perhaps instead it will be revived someday by a new editorial team in partnership with the wonderful folks at the Indiana University Press and the IUScholarWorks Program at the IU Libraries. As of now, the search for a new editor or editorial team can be considered concluded unsuccessfully and the journal is either ceasing or pausing publication. I do not need to write a new version of the editorial here. I invite everyone interested in the journal and the fields that it serves to read it (always open access!) for a contextualized back story.
Here I just want to reiterate my thanks to all who contributed to, supported, and encouraged the journal as a project and who supported me as its editor. I also want to reiterate my thanks to the Indiana University Press for supporting my fields—folklore studies and cultural anthropology, including material culture studies—so well. Even though the journal—by design—was not a money making endeavor, the press stood by it and invested in its improvement and its success. Equal thanks go to the extraordinary IUScholarWorks program (now broadened as Open Scholarship) that helped launch the journal and supported it vigorously for its full run.
More good news in terms of publication work. I am pleased to share that my article “Kultuuriline omastamine kultuurimuutusena” is now published in Estonian in the wonderful journal Studia Vernacula (see volume 14). This is a translation (minus the case studies) of my earlier paper “On Cultural Appropriation,” which appeared in English in the Journal of Folklore Research (volume 51, number 1 in 2021). Special thanks go to Elo-Hanna Seljamma for work translating the paper, to Kristi Jõeste for inviting me to contribute the paper, and to Madis Arukask for discussing my contribution in an editorial appearing in the new issue. Studia Vernacula is a wonderful open access journal beautifully produced in digital and print form. Even if you do not read Estonian, I urge you check it out with the help of Google Translate or a similar service. So much wonderful material culture studies work appears therein year after year.
I am very happy to note a new co-authored article titled “A Survey of Contemporary Bai Craft Practices in the Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan, China.” It was jointly written with Wuerxiya (first author), C. Kurt Dewhurst (third author) and Cuixia Zhang (fourth author) and it appears in Museum Anthropology Review volume 16, numbers 1-2. This is the special double issue published in honor of Daniel C. Swan, as noted in an earlier post on Shreds and Patches. The article is based on work undertaken by a much larger bi-national team within the “Collaborative Work in Museum Folklore and Heritage Studies” sub-project of the broader “China-US Folklore and Intangible Cultural Heritage Project,” a collaboration (2007-present) of the American Folklore Society and the China Folklore Society. In particular, it describes work undertaken through the auspices of, and in partnership with, The Institute of National Culture Research at Dali University. Special thanks go to the Institute and its leadership.
Find the article online at Museum Anthropology Review: https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/mar/article/view/34101
I am very happy to note the publication of “Basketry among Two Peoples of Northern Guangxi, China” in the latest double issue of Asian Ethnology. This article is one that I co-wrote with my friends and collaborators Lijun Zhang (first author), C. Kurt Dewhurst (third author), and Jon Kay (fourth author) and it is based on work undertaken by a much larger bi-national team within the “Collaborative Work in Museum Folklore and Heritage Studies” sub-project of the broader “China-US Folklore and Intangible Cultural Heritage Project,” a collaboration (2007-present) of the American Folklore Society and the China Folklore Society.
I am a huge fan of Asian Ethnology, a wonderful open access journal now in its 81st year. Check out the huge volume that our paper is a part of, Find Asian Ethnology online here: https://asianethnology.org/ and also in JSTOR
Find our article here: https://asianethnology.org/articles/2386
Find Jon Kay’s companion article here: https://asianethnology.org/articles/2387
His project is distinct from ours, but find William Nitzky’s article (also) on the Baiku Yao people today here: https://asianethnology.org/articles/2384
I am happy to report that my article “Towards Wider Framings: World-Systems Analysis and Folklore Studies” was published in the Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics earlier this year. Readers will have the judge the article for itself, but I can’t say enough good things about JEF. Its a wonderful open access journal doing wonderful work in, and at the intersection of, my two fields. Thanks to everyone at the Estonian Literary Museum, the Estonian National Museum, and the University of Tartu who work to make the journal a success.
Find the article in two places online. In Sciendo here: https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/jef-2022-0002 and in the JEF OJS instance here: https://www.jef.ee/index.php/journal.
Social media is changing again and it seems like a good time to give Shreds and Patches more love and attention.
My collaborator and special issue co-editor Michael Paul Jordan and I are very pleased to announce the publication of a new double-issue of Museum Anthropology Review titled Studies in Museum Ethnography in Honor of Daniel C. Swan
Find the new collection in honor of Dan in Museum Anthropology Review online here: https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/mar/issue/view/2153 Thanks to all of the authors, production staff, publishers, peer-reviewers, and helpers who made this collection possible.
Hi all. I am happy to note that a new paper, co-authored with Johannes Müske and Lijun Zhang, has just been published in the Journal of Folklore Research. I will try to find ways to share a version of it outside the paywall. For now (for those with interest and access) here are the Project MUSE and JSTOR versions.
Jackson, Jason Baird, Johannes Müske, and Lijun Zhang. “Innovation, Habitus, and Heritage: Modeling the Careers of Cultural Forms Through Time.” Journal of Folklore Research 57, no. 1 (2020): 111-136. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/751220.
Jackson, Jason Baird, Johannes Müske, and Lijun Zhang. “Innovation, Habitus, and Heritage: Modeling the Careers of Cultural Forms Through Time.” Journal of Folklore Research 57, no. 1 (2020): 111-36. Accessed March 14, 2020. doi:10.2979/jfolkrese.57.1.04.
My co-authors want to share our appreciation for the editorial staff, peer-reviewers, and audiences who helped make this paper possible. For anyone interested, I paste the abstracts below (look before the page one image):
Abstract
Since the 1990s, folklorists have become more deliberate in their use of the concept of heritage, with the term now standing at the center of our theoretical and policy debates. Heritage is both a phenomenon in the world that folklorists think about and a concept that we think with. In this article we build on classic and recent work, presenting an ideal type model of heritage that locates it within the flow of time and in relationship to other modes of culture—particularly innovation and normative culture or, in a somewhat different framework, habitus. The heuristic offered emphasizes the different degrees of metacultural salience characteristic of a cultural form in a particular social, cultural, and historical context and aims to supplement critical perspectives that are particularly focused on formal heritage policies.
Abstract
Seit den 1990er Jahren wird das Konzept Kulturerbe in den volkskundlichen Kulturwissenschaften zuneh-mend reflektiert. Der Begriff ist zentral für heutige Theorie- und Policy-Debatten im Fach: Kulturerbe ist sowohl ein Phänomen über das als auch ein Konzept mit dem KulturwissenschaftlerInnen nachdenken. In diesem Artikel entwerfen wir, aufbauend auf klassischen und aktuellen Studien, ein idealtypisches Modell von Kulturerbe, welches Kulturerbe zeitlich und in Relation zu anderen kulturalen Modi anordnet—insbesondere zu Innovation und kulturellen Normen (in anderer theoretischer Lesart auch Habitus). Die vorgeschlagene Heuristik betont den metakulturellen Charakter einer kulturellen Form und die unterschiedlichen Grade der Bewusstheit in einem bestimmten sozialen, kulturellen und historischen Kontext und möchte kritische Perspektiven auf Kulturerbe-Politiken ergänzen.
Abstract
自20世纪90年代以来，民俗学者对遗产概念的使用变得更具思考性，现在这一术语已经成为我们理论和政策辩论的焦点。遗产即是民俗学者思考的全球现象，也是我们用于思考的一个概念。本文以经典研究和近期成果为基础，提出一个遗产的理想型模型。该模型把遗产置于时间之流中和与其他文化模式的关系之中，特别是与创新和惯常文化的关系之中，惯常文化在某种不同的框架里也被称为惯习。本文的启发性在于强调在特定社会、文化和历史语境中文化形式的元文化程度是不同的，本文也意在补充那些侧重于官方遗产政策的批判性观点。
Shreds and Patches 