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Posts from the ‘Scholars to Know’ Category

Feb 5

Cashman on the Visual Culture of Northern Ireland

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.

Dec 13

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Storytelling on the Northern Irish Border

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!



Dec 13

Gabrielle Berlinger Defends M.A. Thesis

Congratulations to Gabrielle Berlinger who completed her M.A. in Folklore in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University today with a very successful oral exam covering her studies in general and her thesis project “Ritual Interpretation: The Sukkah as Jewish Vernacular Architecture” in particular. Her well recieved thesis is an ethnography of Sukkot observance in Bloomington, Indiana, with an emphasis of the physical structures built and used by families and community organizations here. A significant contribution to research on Jewish material culture and to the study of Jewish life in the smaller communities of North America, the study is also a pilot project for future examinations of the topic in other communities elsewhere in the world. Her committee was uniformly pleased with her efforts and I am very proud to have served as her chair. Well done.

Dec 12

On The Grace of Four Moons

IU media relations has distributed a press release profiling my colleague Pravina Shukla’s fine ethnography of dress and adornment in India, The Grace of Four Moons, recently published by Indiana University Press. Find the release online here. (Image: Courtesy of Indiana University.)

The Grace of Four Moons (cover)

The Grace of Four Moons (cover)

Dec 4

Religion among the Folk in Egypt

Heartfelt congratulations to my colleague Hasan M. El-Shamy on the publication of his brand new book Religion Among the Folk in Egypt.

Dec 4

Suzanne Ingalsbe Earns M.A. with Thesis Exhibition and Paper on Indiana Instrument Builders

Continuing with a theme… Congratulations to Suzanne Ingalsbe on the completion of her M.A. in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University. Suzanne’s thesis project centered on the building of a gallery exhibition exploring the work and works of a large number of Indiana makers of musical instruments. This exhibition, which was staged last spring at the John Waldron Arts Center, was an extension of a long term research and interpretation project pursued by Traditional Arts Indiana. (Learn more about the broader project here.) The exhibition was attractive, lively, well-researched, and well-received. In her accompanying paper, Suzanne documented the behind the scenes work that went into the exhibition and set it within the larger contexts of scholarship related to the history of artistic and ethnographic museum display and conceptual debates within folklore studies. Great job Suzanne.

Nov 29

Congratulations to Amber Ridington and Kate Hennessy on Winning the SVA’s Jean Rouch Award

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.

Nov 29

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The Anthropologist as Hero: Claude Lévi-Strauss on his 100th Birthday

A brief note to celebrate the life and work of Claude Lévi-Strauss on the occassion of his 100th birthday. Lévi-Strauss was born on November 28, 1908. As a graduate student I had the good fortune to have excellent teachers–especially Joelle Bahloul, Henry Glassie and Ray DeMallie–who encouraged me to engage with Lévi-Strauss in a serious way and I wound up reading a great deal of his work during the time of my training. In my fieldwork I have had the honor of living among peoples who practice forms of dual organization and Lévi-Strauss’ work on this theme was exceptionally useful to me in a very grounded ethnographic sense. (I sometimes think that some of the difficulty experienced by readers of Lévi-Strauss who came of age in the post-structuralist era is attributable to the fact that few among them have first-hand experiences in societies like those that figure so centrally to his work.) Among my earliest published works is an article that explores dual organization in Southeastern Native North America. A high point in my career is the kind note that Lévi-Strauss wrote to me expressing satisfaction that my account supported his position. This paper appeared not long after the English translation of The Story of Lynx, in which Lévi-Strauss returned to the problems of dualism and dual organization in Native America. The book remains one of my favorite works in anthropology. I continue to draw upon the full range of Lévi-Strauss’ writings regularly in my own research.

In the teaching of anthropology and folklore graduate students in North America, I fear that Lévi-Strauss’ work has moved into the precarious liminal zone that my colleague Richard Bauman and I have come to refer to as “theories of the middle age” (a play on Robert K. Merton’s theories of the middle range). In the teaching of “core” theory courses in these disciplines (and this must surely be true in sociology and other fields as well), historical courses start with, and work forward from, classic social theory of the 19th century (or earlier), which means careful attention to Marx, Weber, Durkheim, the Grimms, Herder, Freud, etc. These courses seemingly always seem to run out of time and/or steam before attending to the post-World War II era. If such classes must come to the present, they skip the middle 20th century and take up, often in rushed fashion, the contemporary scene.  In classes that are not historical in frame, this same post-World War II era work is also often neglected. It is frequently only glimpsed through its impact on more recent scholars. This dynamic is regretable to me and is something that I have tried to address in my own work as a teacher of graduate students.

With respect to Lévi-Strauss’ work, I often teach The Way of the Masks in my Theories of Material Culture course and The Story of Lynx in my Native American Folklore and Folk Music course. I have taught the later book in a general folklore theory course as well, combing it with key essays from Structural Anthropology I and Structural Anthropology II. If I were teaching a different set of courses, I could easily see teaching The Savage Mind and Triste Tropiques. A discussion of the Elementary Structures of Kinship would remain, for me, essential to a class on kinship and social organization. These are all works that I hope that the students withwhom I work will become acquainted.

To reach 100 is a heroic accomplishment for any human being. In this spirit, I drew, in my post title, upon the subtitle of a collection of essays–well known in its day–dealing with the work of Lévi-Strauss–Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Anthropologist as Hero. May we all live as long and as productive lives as Claude Lévi-Strauss. Happy birthday Professor.

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