Jan 3
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.
Two excellent people were recently awarded the Society for Visual Anthropology’s Jean Rouch Award. Amber Ridington and Kate Hennessy were recognized for Dane Wajich: Dane-zaa Stories and Songs – Dreamers and the Land, an outstanding Vrtual Museum of Canada sponsored website project on the culture of the Doig River First Nation in Northern British Columbia. Get all the details here. I am sorry that I did not get more of a chance to chat with Amber and Kate at the AAA meetings (or to see Amber at all at the AFS meetings). Congratulations to them and to their many collaborators among the Dane-zaa.
The winners of the Savage Minds OA Anthropology Awards have just been announced in the run up to tomorrow night’s award’s ceremony in the SF Hilton Lobby at 6 pm. Cultural Analysis, a fine OA folklore journal on whose editorial board I serve has taken the runner up spot in an excellent field. The journal Anthropology Matters has won the first place spot. Learn about all the nominees on Savage Minds here and who the winners in all three categories are here. Congratulations to the winners and thanks to those who voted.
Spearheaded by Chris Kelty, the key anthropology weblog Savage Minds is organizing a grassroots awards effort for open access (and open access-spirited) publishing efforts in (and near) the field of anthropology. There are three categories–best OA journal, best weblog, and best digital media project. Several projects that I nominated, or that I am a big fan of, are on the short list and can now be considered in the voting that will determine who wins big during the upcoming AAA meetings. Everyone should vote for their own favorites, but I would like to highlight three folkloristics-meets-ethnology journals on the list: Cultural Analysis (on whose editorial board I serve), Asian Ethnology and Oral Tradition. It is exciting that they are under consideration. In the digital project category is the Digital Ethnography project, which I really like, and the wonderful work of my friend Kim Christen and her collaborators: The Mukurtu Archive (An Indigenous Archive Tool). If you care about supporting open access and/or open source (and open minded) projects such as these, please visit Savage Minds (here) and cast your vote.
The student editors and publishers in the Folklore and Ethnomusicology Publications Group (a.k.a. FolkPub) have been very busy in recent months. An enterprise of the graduate students in IU’s Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, FolkPub is the publisher of the venerable journal Folklore Forum and of books under the Trickster Press imprint. Much of their work has been migrating online in recent days and I wanted to note some highlights.
Current articles and reviews–in open full-text– in Folklore Forum are appearing at a new website: http://folkloreforum.net/ . The new site offers an RSS feed, so you can easily keep up with new content in a feed reader. Earlier this year, the new site and format debuted with an issue on folklore studies in East Asia in honor of Roger L. Janelli. In recent days, several new reviews have been added to the site and new contributions are expected on a continuing basis. Several special issues are in the works.
The entire back run of Folklore Forum back to its beginnings in 1968 have been made freely and fully available in the IUScholarWorks Repository service here at Indiana University. Find the whole collection, in searchable form here.
Work on the book side continues as well. At the recent American Folklore Society meetings, the FolkPub crew were an active presence, selling backlist titles and unveilling both a new title and a new business model. They were proud to release a a new, enhanced edition of Sandra Dolby’s classic work Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative. This title returns to print re-typeset with a new preface by the author and a foreward by Richard Bauman. Unlike past Trickster Press titles, this work has been published using a Print-on-Demand approach which means that it can be offerred at modest cost, that it should be available forever and that the students will not need to worry about managing complex shipping and storage problems. Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative is available directly from Amazon.com here. Also available in this new format is Trickster Press’ best-selling textbook The Emergence of Folklore in Everyday Life: A Fieldguide and Sourcebook, edited by George H. Schoemaker. It too is now available via Amazon.com. Find it here.
Information on the entire Trickster Press backlist can be found on the Press’ website at: https://www.indiana.edu/~folkpub/trickster/
One Trickster Press book title has already joined Folklore Forum as an open access resource in IUScholarWorks Repository. The book The Old Traditional Way of Life: Essays in Honor of Warren E. Roberts edited by Robert E. Walls and George H. Schoemaker and published in 1989 can not be found in its entirity here. (Find its open worldcat record here.)
Congratulations to the current FolkPub staff on all this good work. Well-wishes go as well to FolkPub staff who served in recent years. Their efforts provided a significant foundation for present accomplishments.
I wanted to share a short film produced by my friends Liora and Shai Sarfati. It derives from Liora’s doctoral work on the material culture of Korean Shamanism. Liora is a student in East Asian Languages and Cultures and in Folklore at Indiana University.
The WFHB radio program Interchange recently did an excellent long-format interview with my colleague Pravina Shukla. Using her book Grace of Four Moons: Dress, Adornment, and the Art of the Body in Modern India as a springboard, Pravina and host Dave Stewart engage in a lively, interesting and very substantive discussion of body adornment practices worldwide. The interview is an engaging overview of Pravina’s work and an excellent introduction to folkloristic perspectives on adornment as an expressive and material culture phenomena. Find the interview online here.
I want to call attention to a new project in which I played a part. “Played a part” fits especially because the document at the project’s center looks and acts a bit like a play script. The journal Cultural Anthropology has just published (volume 23, issue 3, 2008) a contribution titled “Anthropology of/in Circulation: The Future of Open Access and Scholarly Societies.” The article-length document was co-created by Christopher Kelty, Michael M. J. Fisher, Alex Golub, Kimberly Christen, Michael F. Brown, Tom Boellstorff and myself. In it, we use an interview/group discussion format to discuss changes in scholarly communication, professional societies, digital technologies, and the broader social contexts that are impacting the work of anthropology and neighboring fields (such as folklore and ethnomusicology, in which I work).
While the piece has the appearance of a transcribed discussion, it is actually a co-authored work in which we each contributed, in varying degrees, to the authoring of the whole. In other words, we “play” ourselves in the text (with relatively high fidelity to our “true” selves). It was written online using Google Docs over the course of about a month last spring. While much of what is attributed to any one participant is, or at least began as, “their own words” participants were able to make changes throughout the text as a whole. In the end, no one was pressured to “say” things that they were not comfortable saying, but the process, I think, tightened and enlivened the language as well as sharpened arguements and weeded out misunderstandings. While it lacks the halmarks, and perhaps some of the strengths, of a single authored work, I think that it is a lively and interesting piece in which the generic experiment is in keeping with the emergent topics about which we conversed. (Those who find value in the work of the Bahktin Circle and in contemporary linguistic anthropological work on voice, authorship, and participant roles should at least find the idea of this piece of interest.)
More important than the way that we put it together are the issues that we are seeking to explore. Here is the abstract:
In a conversation format, seven anthropologists with extensive expertise in new digital technologies, intellectual property, and journal publishing discuss issues related to open access, the anthropology of information circulation, and the future of scholarly societies. Among the topics discussed are current anthropological research on open source and open access; the effects of open access on traditional anthropological topics; the creation of community archives and new networking tools; potentially transformative uses of field notes and materials in new digital ecologies; the American Anthropological Association’s recent history with these issues, from the development of AnthroSource to its new publishing arrangement with Wiley-Blackwell; and the political economies of knowledge circulation more generally.
The best part is that you can now join the conversation. While it appears online conventionally in two toll access services (see here for AnthroSource and here for Wiley InterScience), it is also available, for those who lack access to these resources, in article form in IUScholarWorks Repository here. Most importantly for my purposes, it has been published in a full accessible CommentPress version in which readers can comment on, question, critique, and discuss the text as a whole or in a paragraph-by-paragraph function. I am a huge fan of CommentPress and I hope that this project will introduce new folks to this very useful software tool. Please visit the CommentPress version here (http://blog.culanth.org/incirculation/) and join the conversation. Tell your friends, tell your colleagues, tell your professors, tell your students.
For the record, these reuses were made possible because we utilized a SPARC author addendum. This is a valuable resource everyone should know about. See here and here and in the video here.
For my part, I really appreciated having the the opportunity to participate in this project. I want to thank the other contributors for their efforts and to acknowledge Kim and Mike Fortun the visionary co-editors of Cultural Anthropology who encouraged this project and saw it into existance.
Reasonable (and unreasonable) differences of opinion exist regarding the future of open access in anthropology and beyond. The other contributors and I share a hope that this project will help advance the conversation in a useful way. See you on the CommentPress site.
Check out the informational website for the new Plateau Peoples Web Portal project being undertaken at Washington State University by my friend and collaborator Kimberly Christen. It is an awesome new project that builds on the work that she and colleagues have been doing developing open source community cultural archive tools. Learn more about the broader effort on her website, on the site for the Mukurtu project, and at the new Plateau Peoples Web Portal project site. Congratuations to the whole project team.
Aug 8
Just a moment ago, I watched a short video produced by my colleague Jon Kay and his collaborators at Traditional Arts Indiana, the public folklore research and programming unit associated with the IU Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology in which we both work. The film is a very nice introduction to John Schoolman, an (almost 100 year old) carver of walking sticks. It is a worthy token of a larger ethnographic project. What I want to observe out loud is the fact that my viewing of the clip was the 2699th. As open access advocates and research librarians could quickly note, very few scholarly works published in print-only or toll access venues every achieve such audiences. Congratulations to Jon and his team for making the valuable work of TAI available in a way that is clearly being valued by many stakeholders
Shreds and Patches 