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May 10

(Double) Ph.D. Success: Kimberly Marshall Edition

Congratulations to Kimberly Marshall on the successful defense of her Ph.D. dissertation today. Up until today, Dr. Marshall was a doctoral student in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology and the Department of Anthropology, both at IU. Her doctoral fields are ethnomusicology and cultural anthropology (she has a folklore M.A. already!)  and her research is focused on the expressive and religious lives of Navajo Christians. As noted previously, Kim will soon begin work as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma. Congratulations Kim!

May 10

M.A. Success: Rachel Biars Edition

Congratulations to Rachel Biars on the very successful completion of her M.A. degree in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University. Rachel has also completed her concurrent work on her M.L.S. degree in the IU School of Library and Information Science. Rachel did a fine job in her folklore M.A. exam a week ago last Friday. Her M.A. project was a public folklore/exhibition project pursued collaboratively with artisans of the Miami Tribe of Indiana. Well done Rachel!

May 6

Ruth Finnegan’s New Book on Quotations Available in Gratis OA Form

Ruth Finnegan’s book Why Do We Quote? The Culture and History of Quotation has just been published by Open Book Publishers, a not-for-profit, academic run publisher that combines no-cost online access to published works with the sale at modest cost paper and PDF versions. The no-cost online version is (interestingly) accessible via the Google Books platform. I highlight this book both because it is a contribution to the fields in which I work by a very senior and well respected scholar and because it is the first instance of an Open Book Publishers title that I have learned about and have had an chance to study. The business model, goals, and production framework of the publisher are all noteworthy and worth further study. It is important to note that the World Oral Literature Project, a “Friend of Open Folklore” organization is announced as a partner on the Open Book Publishers website where a new Oral Literature Series is announced.  These are major developments for the Open Folklore and open anthropology communities. Congratulations to everyone involved in these efforts.

(Thanks to D.N. for the tip.)

Apr 29

Job Openning: Executive Director of the Institute of Texas Cultures

Did everyone notice that the position of Executive Director of the Institute of Texas Cultures is open? This is a major position for someone with the right public folklore and/or museum work background. See: http://chronicle.com/jobs/0000677703-01/

Apr 27

New Jobs: Carrie Hertz Edition

I am thrilled to have more happy job news to report. Carrie Hertz has just been appointed to the post of Curator of Folk Arts at the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University. This is a great curatorial position for a great museums and material culture scholar in folklore studies and anthropology. Carrie is also a doctoral candidate in folklore studies (major field) and anthropology (minor field) at Indiana University.  In her research, her special emphasis is on dress and adornment in the United States.  For her dissertation, she is completing conducting an ethnographic study of wedding dresses in the Midwest. She has held a range of museum posts previously and also served with me as editorial assistant for Museum Anthropology and Museum Anthropology Review. The Castellani Art Museum has excellent collections and a remarkable track record of research and exhibition work on folk and vernacular arts. Congratulations to both Carrie and the museum!

Apr 23

New Jobs: Michael Jordan Edition

In still more great job news, friend and collaborator Michael Jordan (a Ph.D. student in anthropology at University Oklahoma) has just accepted a tenure track job in anthropology at Texas Tech University.  Mike is a native Texan and he collaborates in his research with the Kiowa people. The Kiowa live today in not-too-distant Southwestern Oklahoma and Texas Tech is in their ancestral homeland, thus from the point of view of family life, research work and easy and sensible travel/geography, this is a perfect fit.  It looks like an ideal job in many other ways.  Mike is a hardworking scholar and I am so happy for him and his family. Congratulations to Mike and to all of this season’s other job getters and job changers.

Mar 28

The Zoot Suit Kid Goes Global: From Tango to Hip Hop

The Indiana University Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology has recently announced the 1st Annual Richard M. Dorson Memorial Lecture with Dr. Roger Abrahams.

“The Zoot Suit Kid Goes Global: From Tango to Hip Hop”

Tuesday, April 5th
6:00 – 8:00 pm
Wells House, 1321 E. 10th St.

The lecture series is named for Richard M. Dorson, who is credited with establishing folklore studies as an academic discipline in the United States through his many years directing the IU Folklore Institute, beginning in 1956. He later chaired the Folklore Department, until his death in 1981. For these efforts, he has been called the “father of American Folklore.”

In this lecture, Roger Abrahams brings into focus the development throughout the post-emancipation era of high-flash street-corner groups that have emerged in virtually every port of call in the commercial Atlantic world. Abrahams argues that there is a pattern linking these manifestations, though they are commonly regarded as being unique to one metropolitan area or another. Each has founding legends, stories of the great song-makers, dancers, stick-fighters, and so on. This research tests the argument between those who have argued for the retention of African cultural traits and those who have argued for culture-loss under enslavement conditions. The West Indian performers with whom Abrahams has worked maintain that their repertoires are played not only for enjoyment but more importantly, as embodiments of the history and the strength of ties within the community. The burden of the argument, at last, is that doing folklore involves both extensive live-there field work and comparative study to situate what it is that you have collected.

Roger D. Abrahams is a prominent folklorist whose work focuses on the expressive cultures and cultural histories of the Americas, with a specific emphasis on African American peoples and traditions. He is the Hum Rosen Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, at the University of Pennsylvania where he taught in the Department of Folklore and Folklife. He is the author of a large number of books, among which Everyday Life: A Poetics of Vernacular Practices is a recent title.

A light reception will follow Dr. Abrahams lecture.

Mar 22

AFS Meeting Program Proposals: Final Reminder

From an email circulated by Lorraine Cashman, AFS Associated Director:

This is your final reminder: the deadline for all proposals for the AFS 2011 annual meeting program is March 31.

If you intend to submit a proposal, please do so as soon as possible. The high volume of submissions increases the likelihood of difficulties in the final days of March. Please allow extra time for our part-time administrative staff to respond to your questions during business hours.

Remember, submitting your proposal requires registration, and to receive the members’ registration rate, you will have to Sign In at www.afsnet.org.

If you don’t know your password, you can reset it from the Sign In screen. If you don’t know your username, use the “Forgot your password?” link and enter your email address. If that address matches the one we have on file, you will still be able to sign in. If you have any trouble, please use the website to “Contact Us” — http://www.afsnet.org/general/?type=CONTACT.

When you are ready to submit your proposal, you will start the registration/submission process on the 2011 Annual Meeting page — https://afsnet.site-ym.com/?page=2011AM

Finally, please note that you can use the 2011 Annual Meeting Forum (www.afsnet.org/forums/) for meeting-related discussions. In particular, you can use the “Accommodations” forum topic to coordinate housing, transportation, childcare, or other local arrangements. If you have any suggestions for new annual meeting forum topics that will be useful later this year for those attending the meeting, please let me know.

Thank you for your support of our field and Society.

Lorraine Cashman
Associate Director

Mar 22

Collection Manager for Nation American Languages Collection (SNOMNH)

From Mary S. Linn, Curator of Native American Languages, Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History

Hello Friends and Colleagues,

I am writing you to announce the that we are taking applications for the position of Collection Manager (CM) for the Nation American Languages collection at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK. This is one of only a few digital and physical archives of endangered languages in a museum setting in the US. We are partnering with many different Oklahoma and regional tribes and tribal people as the collection grows, and we are involved in collaborative efforts to make the collection significant to revitalization work. The CM is directly responsible for the processing, care (of both digital and analog collections), and accessibility issues. In addition, we sponsor programming in language documentation, revitalization, and conservation, and the CM makes the collection available and user-friendly to patrons, and makes it up-to-date as technology and user-needs change. A proactive CM will also help shape the future growth areas of the department. So, this position is unique and exciting, and a great opportunity for someone starting their career.

I encourage you to pass this information on to students and others you know with a BA or MA degree and experience in language media.

Here are the instructions to get to the application:

http://hr.ou.edu//

left Quick Links: Job Postings

left: Search Listings

Job Listing Number: 11275 (this is enough to get you the full listing and application)

Title: Curator/Archivist I
For more information on the Sam Noble Museum, please go to : http://www.snomnh.ou.edu/
For a brief introduction to the NAL Collections, please go to: http://www.snomnh.ou.edu/collections-research/nal.htm
You can search our catalog at: http://www.snomnh.ou.edu/db2/nal/index.php

Thank you all,
Mary
Mary S. Linn
Associate Curator, Native American Languages
Associate Professor, Anthropology
Adjunct Associate Professor, Native American Studies

Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History
University of Oklahoma
2401 Chautauqua Avenue
Norman, OK 73072
405-325-7588 (voice) 405-325-7699 (fax)

Mar 20

2 Comments

Anthropologies

Thanks to everyone who is working to create new ways of communicating and discussing the pressing issues of our time. As has been discussed by Kerim at Savage Minds and Daniel at Neuroanthropogy, a new project in anthropology has just debuted:  Anthropologies edited by Ryan Anderson. It is blog based magazine focused on exploring:

contemporary anthropology through essays, short articles, and opinion pieces written from diverse perspectives.  There is no single way to define the field, hence “anthropologies.”  By presenting various viewpoints and positions, this site seeks to highlight not only what anthropology means to those who practice it, but also how those meanings are relevant to wider audiences.

I have just begun my reading of the first issues with Keith Hart’s “Kant, Anthropology and the New Human Universal.” It is a an accessible, compelling, valuable, and brief essay that builds upon the key arguments about the promise/necessity of anthropology that he has been developing in recent work, including The Human Economy, which I am now reading. It certainly has motivated me to remedy my failure to have read Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.

Thanks Keith and the other authors. Thanks to the editor and everyone else who is fostering this project.

I would like to offer one suggestion, by way of a coda. Having been down a similar path before, I know how handy blog software like blogger is for getting such a project off the ground quickly and cheaply. All to the good. The only costs are that there is no built in preservation framework and the site does not allow for Open Archives Initiative Protocols for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Without an OAI compliant framework, broadly used tools like Google Scholar will not be able to harvest metadata and, along the way, put works published in Anthropologies on scholarly radar. More specifically, OAI-PMH allows more topically focused projects, such as the Open Folklore project on which I work, to harvest and thereby promote the discovery of, content published in places like Anthropologies. There are many ways to address this matter inexpensively. A place to begin would be UKnowledge, the University of Kentucky Institutional Repository, which appears to be gearing up to support journal like projects, among other things. Such repositories make materials available in harvestable ways while also insuring longterm preservation. It would be possible to deposit PDF copies of Anthropologies content after the fact without giving up the basic blogger-based format.

 


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