Apr 30
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.
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.]
Congratulations to Ray Cashman, who has just published an article in the Journal of Folklore Research (JFR) interpreting the verbal and visual culture of Northern Ireland. JFR is as toll access journal, but I can pass on the abstract and encourage everyone to track the article down in print or behind the pay wall.
Murals, graffiti, flags, and annual commemorative parades are common in urban Northern Ireland where Irish Catholic nationalists and British Protestant unionists use these vernacular forms of custom and material culture to reiterate their differential identities in terms of ethnicity, denomination, and politics. Rural areas, on the other hand, present a very different visual scene with far fewer public visual displays broadcasting political messages and affiliations. Nevertheless, this lack does not necessarily signify that rural dwellers are somehow less politically minded or more peacefully integrated in comparison to their urban counterparts. Moving beyond the visual scene alone, we must pay attention to how rural dwellers contextualize their seemingly unmarked environment through oral legendary and personal narrative. In particular, the oral traditions of one rural, majority-nationalist community in County Tyrone demonstrate significant differences between urban and rural ways of imagining and internalizing the Irish Catholic nationalist cause. Many urban murals, for example, focus outward, gesturing to a secular, cosmopolitan, and international consciousness, while the Tyrone landscape—as contextualized by oral tradition—focuses inward on the local, autochthonous, and sacred. Despite advances in an on-going peace process, this rural, radically emplaced vision of the Irish nationalist cause may well have significant staying power.
Ray Cashman (2008 ) “Visions of Irish Nationalism.” Journal of Folklore Research: An International Journal of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. 45(3):361-381.
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.
Congratulations to Flory Gingging who has attracted attention from antropologi.info for her paper on headhunting heritage in Sabah, Malaysia. Her paper was published in Cultural Analysis and Lorenz has provided an engaging description and discussion of it on the antropologi.info weblog. Check it out.
Dec 28
An ambitious gold open access journal publishing effort for folkloristics and neighboring fields (ethnomusicology, tribal studies, regional studies, and performance studies) is underway in India. The National Folklore Support Centre is using Open Journal Systems to host fourteen journals, both new and established. Some have been publishing for some time, others have launched with inaugural issues, others are announced but still in the works. The journal editorial offices seem to span India, with a diversity of editorial teams and research concerns. See what the effort looks like at the NFSC portal, here. Congratulations to all involved.
Dec 13
Here is a quick note to celebrate the publication of my friend Ray Cashman’s new book Storytelling on the Northern Irish Border, which has just been released by Indiana University Press. Here is the blurb:
Folklore is crucial to life in Aghyaran, a mixed Catholic-Protestant border community in Northern Ireland. Neighbors socialize during wakes and ceil (informal nighttime gatherings) regardless of religious, ethnic, or political affiliations. The witty, sometimes raucous stories swapped on these occasions offer a window into community and identity in the wake of decades of violent conflict and change. Through local character anecdotes, participants explore the nature of community and identity in ways that may transcend exclusively Catholic or Protestant sectarian histories and identities.
IUP would be happy to sell you a copy here. Coming soon to a library near you here.
Congratulations Ray!
Shreds and Patches 