Showing papers in "Journal of American Folklore in 2000"

The Ambiguity of Play

Abstract: Every child knows what it means to play, but the rest of us can merely speculate. Is it a kind of adaptation, teaching us skills, inducting us into certain communities? Is it power, pursued in games of prowess? Fate, deployed in games of chance? Daydreaming, enacted in art? Or is it just frivolity? Brian Sutton-Smith, a proponent of play theory, considers each possibility as it has been proposed, elaborated, and debated in disciplines from biology, psychology, and education to metaphysics, mathematics, and sociology. Sutton-Smith focuses on play theories rooted in seven distinct rhetorics - the ancient discourses of fate, power, communal identity, and frivolity and the modern discourses of progress, the imaginary, and the self. In an analysis that moves from the question of play in child development to the implications of play for the Western work ethic, he explores the values, historical sources, and interests that have dictated the terms and forms of play put forth in each discourse's objective theory. This work reveals more distinctions and disjunctions than affinities, with one striking exception: however different their descriptions and interpretations of play, each rhetoric reveals a quirkiness, redundancy, and flexibility. In light of this, Sutton-Smith suggests that play might provide a model of the variability that allows for natural selection. As a form of mental feedback, play might nullify the rigidity that sets in after successful adaption, thus reinforcing animal and human variability. Further, he shows how these discourses, despite their differences, might offer the components for a new social science of play.

The object of memory : Arab and Jew narrate the Palestinian village

Abstract: There was a village in Palestine called Ein Houd, whose people traced their ancestry back to one of Saladin's generals who was granted the territory as a reward for his prowess in battle. By the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, all the inhabitants of Ein Houd had been dispersed or exiled or had gone into hiding, although their old stone homes were not destroyed. In 1953 the Israeli government established an artists' cooperative community in the houses of the village, now renamed Ein Hod. In the meantime, the Arab inhabitants of Ein Houd moved two kilometers up a neighboring mountain and illegally built a new village. They could not afford to build in stone, and the mountainous terrain prevented them from using the layout of traditional Palestinian villages. That seemed unimportant at the time, because the Palestinians considered it to be only temporary, a place to live until they could go home. The Palestinians have not gone home. The two villages-Jewish Ein Hod and the new Arab Ein Houd-continue to exist in complex and dynamic opposition. The Object of Memory explores the ways in which the people of Ein Houd and Ein Hod remember and reconstruct their past in light of their present-and their present in light of their past. Honorable Mention, 1999 Perkins Book Prize, Society for the Study of Narrative

Empowering self, making choices, creating spaces: Black female identity via rap music performance

Abstract: Critics and scholars have often associated rap music with urban male culture. However, females have been involved in the history of this music since its early years. The A. explores Black women's contribution to and role in shaping rap music. In examining female rappers, she engages an interdisciplinary model that employs cultural studies, feminist theory, and mass mediation theory of popular culture, and she employs an ethnographic concept, the interpretive community, in her analysis.

Following tradition : folklore in the discourse of American culture

Abstract: This is an expansive examination of the history of tradition "one of the most common as well as most contested terms in English language usage" in Americans' thinking and discourse about culture. Tradition in use becomes problematic because of "its multiple meanings and its conceptual softness". As a term and a concept, it has been important in the development of all scholarly fields that study American culture. Folklore, history, American studies, anthropology, cultural studies, and others assign different value and meaning to tradition. It is a frequent point of reference in popular discourse concerning everything from politics to lifestyles to sports and entertainment. Politicians and social advocates appeal to it as prima-facie evidence of the worth of their causes. Entertainment and other media mass produce it, or at least a facsimile of it. In a society that frequently seeks to reinvent itself, tradition as a cultural anchor to be reverenced or rejected is an essential, if elusive, concept. Simon Bronner's wide net captures the historical, rhetorical, philosophical, and psychological dimensions of tradition. As he notes, he has written a book "about an American tradition arguing about it". His elucidation of those arguments makes fascinating and thoughtful reading. An essential text for folklorists, Following Tradition will be a valuable reference as well for historians and anthropologists; students of American studies, popular culture, and cultural studies; and anyone interested in the continuing place of tradition in American culture.

The "Storylistening" Trance Experience

Abstract: This article addresses the experience of people who listen to stories, with particular attention to the trancelike quality of that experience. Interviews and observations at organized storytelling events provide the data, which are analyzed for content and theme. The results show that people listening to stories often do enter a qualitatively diferent state of consciousness. This article explores the character of and influences on this state and presents a theoretical model.

Belief and the American Folk

Abstract: The history of folklore scholarship has come under increasing scrutiny in terms of cultural representations of the folk, but the role of folk belief in the construction of the folk has not been thoroughly examined. An investigation into American folklore scholarship of the last one hundred years reveals that folk belief has been used to justify both romantic images of the folk as wise and natural and scientific rationalistic images of the folk as pathological, with complex combinations of the two extremes. More recently, reflexive ethnography and cultural politics have offered ways of escaping the restrictions of these older paradigms in folk belief studies, although problems still remain.

Tourists and Religion at Temple Square and Mission San Juan Capistrano

Abstract: A comparative investigation of Temple Square in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Mission San Juan Capistrano in southern California explores experience, authenticity, and authority at religious places that are also sites of intense tourist activity. This study of the Mormon holy site and the former Catholic mission established during the Spanish colonial era includes a contemplation of their respective strategies of allurement, proselytization efforts, economic exchange on the sites, efforts at preservation and restoration, ownership and control of these places, and official interpretations of their histories and meanings. The A. concludes by noting how the claims and counterclaims made at hybrid places of religion and tourism rely on the authority of experiences regarded as authentic.

The Education of the Folk: Peasant Schools and Folklore Scholarship

Abstract: The history of intellectual interaction in the 19th and early 20th centuries between scholars of vernacular culture and educational reformers remains a lacuna in the discipline of folklore. This examination of educational reforms brought on by the introduction and spread of schooling for peasant children raises issues of how folklorists should intervene and how to judge the complicated effects of those interventions.

Pierced by Murugan's Lance: Ritual, Power, and Moral Redemption among Malaysian Hindus

Abstract: An analysis of the Thaipusam festival of the Hindu Tamils of Malaysia and the vows they make to the god Murugan. It explores the meaning of vow fulfilment as reflected in social, economic and political divisions in the Tamil community, and the practice of ritual as a form of symbolic action.

Sacred arts of Haitian vodou

Abstract: Le catalogue de l'exposition sur les arts sacres du vaudou a Haiti, organisee par le Musee d'Art de Baltimore (Baltimore Museum of Art, USA) a pour objectif d'explorer l'influence profonde des religions et des systemes spirituels africains dans les religions afro-americaines nees avec la dispora. Cette exposition presente des objets provenant de l'Afrique de l'Ouest, des Antilles, du Bresil et des Etats-Unis, soulignant par ce choix le dialogue culturel et spirituel entre les societes plurielles de ces pays. Cette exposition offre l'interet de presenter le vaudou de Haiti dans sa dynamique actuelle et passee : syncretisme religieux, cycles spirituels, expressions artistiques naviguant du passe au present et vice versa, entre l'histoire et la fiction, l'art et le rituel, la spiritualite et la culture populaire, les influences africaines et occidentales.

Folklore in schools and multicultural education: Toward institutionalizing noninstitutional knowledge

Abstract: Analysis of published materials from the Folk Arts in Education/Folk Arts in Schools movement (FAIE) reveals common themes: valuing nonprofessional artistry, instilling local pride, challenging the dominance of elite and popular culture, acknowledging indigenous teachers, and promoting collaborative action. After reviewing codified approaches to multicultural education, I suggest that explicating and building on parallels between FAIE and critical emancipatory multiculturalism will take FAIE work in promising directions while increasing its relevance for multicultural educators.

I'm a Folklorist and You're Not Expansive versus Delimited Strategies in the Practice of Folklore

Abstract: As advocates for the discipline in the public sector and the academy, folklorists have practiced both expansive and delimited strategies in promulgating the field. The delimited stance carefully defines and limits the discipline, studies its own history, strives for professionalization, and creates a justification for an autonomous field. The expansive posture, on the other hand, tries to establish alliances and explores other disciplines freely, asserting that other arts and humanities fields have as much right to practice folklore asfolklorists have to practice those fields. Expansive positions often reach out to new members, constituencies, and audiences; delimited strategies often insist on criteria and standards for inclusion in the field. In the history of folklore studies and public programs, both strategies have proven effective in particular situations and contexts. In fact, the two strategies often work together tofurther the discipline. When successful, they disseminate and advance the core ideas of the field.

Performance and Practice : Oral Narrative Traditions Amongst Teenagers in Britain and Ireland

Abstract: Part 1 Introduction: definitions, parameters and methodologies. Part 2 Issues: aspects of performance in teenage storytelling fashionability, believability and circulation the rebellious spirit - violence and the supernatural the influence of other media. Part 3 The stories: the glutton's errand "The Singing Bone" - a traditional tale in a modern context the personal experience narrative riddles and the riddling process conclusions appendices.

Serial Logic: Folklore and Difference in the Age of Feel-Good Multiculturalism

Abstract: The serialization of products and events appeals to consumer desires in ways that also influence folkloristic paradigms for sharing cultural knowledges and presenting cultural arts. This article seeks to identify the logic of serialization and to problematize its relationship to our marketing of folk practices in the social context of feel-good multiculturalism.

Politics on the Pavement Haitian Rara as a Traditionalizing Process

Abstract: Rara is a Haitian Lenten festival that features exuberant dancing and singing as well as strong connections to the Haitian traditional religion known as Vodou. This article examines Rara as a traditionalizing process that creates discursive space for lower-class Haitians to include themselves as agents in Haitian history and politics. By analyzing the products of Rara performances-song texts, street performances, and narratives about past Rara celebrations-in their complex social and historical contexts, it is possible to see Rara performances not merely as entertaining diversions but as shaping influences on Haitians' understanding of their political reality. ON 20 JUNE 1988, HAITIAN GENERAL HENRI NAMPHY, dressed in military fatigues, sporting a combat helmet and gripping an automatic rifle, posed in the National Palace for the cameras of the Haitian state television station. In his most stentorian tone, Namphy told the television audience that he and members of his command had seized power from Leslie Manigat, the reigning Haitian president who had been put in power just five months before by Namphy's military regime. Namphy declared that deceased Haitian heroes Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Henri Christophe were all present with him in the National Palace and that it was on their behalf, as well as for the good of the Haitian people, that he had seized power from Manigat. Namphy claimed that these ancestral Haitian spirits had implored him to intercede in the affairs of state because they, like he, were all Haitian military figures and ultimately responsible for the fate of the Haitian nation. Namphy's inclusion of the principal protagonists in the 1791-1804 Haitian war for independence in his coup d'6tat announcement was no surprise to Haitian audiences. Toussaint, Dessalines, and Christophe are frequently invoked when matters of the Haitian nation are at stake, especially when the speaker is trying to support the legitimacy of his or her claim. After all, Toussaint, the first leader of Haitian independence, has been eulogized as a brave and selfless defender of the Haitian nation; Dessalines led the Haitian army to victory in 1804 and ruled as the country's first president; and Christophe built La Citadelle Laferriere, a mountaintop fortress designed

Otomi Rituals and Celebrations Crosses, Ancestors, and Resurrection

Abstract: In the case presented in this article, an elderly residentfrom a rural community inundated by a large dam built in the late 1960s in central Mexico continues to celebrate a variety of rituals and ceremonies throughout the year. With hisfamily and afew closefriends, he venerates the community'sfounding ancestors and sacred images in his home on the outskirts of San Miguel de Allende. As a result, despite the loss of the original community and the dispersal of its inhabitants, the traditions, values, and beliefs conforming to a general Mesoamerican pattern with a particular Otomi configuration-which emphasizes the worship of crosses, Saint Michael the Archangel, Saint James, the four cardinal directions and winds, sacrifice, military conquest, and the ancestors-are transmitted to the extendedfamily members who reside together. The article proposes, therefore, that popular religion in Mexico, while retaining a central core ofprehispanic elements and beliefs thatforms the basisfor its ideology and cosmology, is not necessarily conservative or static. It is continually created and re-created as traditions are transmitted both orally and through participation in rituals and ceremonies, while it simultaneously responds and adjusts to changes caused by external and internalfactors that constantly restructure the relationships and patterns of participation of individuals and groups throughout the region. THROUGHOUT THE YEAR, LIFE IN THE CITY OF SAN MIGUEL DE ALLENDE and the surrounding area in central Mexico is continuously punctuated by religious celebrations. Participants in these celebrations are mainly peasants and residents of traditional urban

Food Gifts: Ritual Exchange and the Production of Excess Meaning

Abstract: Food exchanges often produce excesses of meaning, and those excesses can be spaces for maintaining or renegotiating social relationships. The Jewish festival of Purim enacts symbolic inversions of everyday cultural practices that produce excesses of food and food exchanges that symbolically threaten religious, social, and interpersonal social categories. Building on theories of gift exchange, from Marcel Mauss to Annette Weiner, the A. explores the limits and capacities of reciprocity to negotiate social relationships.

Fluid subjectivities : Intertextuality and women's narrative performance in North India

Abstract: An investigation of intertextual gaps located in utterances offers a useful strategy for feminist interpretations of narrative performances. In order to complicate the notion of a gendered consciousness, intertextual analysis forces encounters with the interfused, split meanings that grow in the permeable spaces of women's words and enables the A. to confront contradiction and ambiguity involved in verbal identifications with subject positionings.

Chinese funerals in San Francisco Chinatown: American Chinese expressions in mortuary ritual performance

Abstract: The public performance of funeral rituals in San Francisco Chinatown is a viewing lens through which the cultural identity of this famous ethnic community and tourist attraction is exposed. While the varied range of mortuary performances reveals the heterogeneous composition of a multiethnic Chinese place, the majority of funerals are of a standard ritual type that identifies the self-image of Chinatown as being modernized, urban Chinese. Modified and formulated in the U.S. context, the Chinatown funeral is a hybrid composite of traditional Chinese and Western cultural and religious elements. Crafted and constituted by Chinatown, these syncretic, Americanized funerals are American Chinese cultural expressions of a localized Chinatown culture.

Authentic audience in P'ansori, a Korean storytelling tradition

Abstract: In labor and in leisure, the concept of p'an is an imagined frame of wholehearted participation, where performance is sublimated as a processual ritual of flow. P'ansori, a storytelling tradition of folk origin, is a p'an whereby performer and audience engage in a mutually reflexive communion of performance and reception. Removed from its cultural context and designated as national treasure, its theater assumes a ritual of tradition making.

Otherness and otherworldliness : Edward W. Lane's ethnographic treatment of The Arabian Nights

Abstract: The A. traces the conceptions of textual and national character that shaped Edward W. Lane's early Victorian edition of the Arabian Nights. Lane sought to locate Alf Layla wa- Layla in a broad cultural and oral discursive context for a newly widened English readership. His treatment of the Nights offers vantage points on the interrelationship of ethnographic and fantasy genres and on the emergence of folkloristic and Orientalist discourses in popular publications.

The Inupiaq Eskimo Messenger Feast : Celebration, demise, and possibility

Abstract: The Messenger Feast was an institutionalized festival event in historic times among both Inupiaq and Yup'ik Eskimos through which rival groups, as well as allies, maintained formalized means of sharing, trading, gaming, courting, and exchanging information. Similar activites took place during summer trade fairs. Contrary to popular notions, northern Eskimos were extremely competitive and often engaged in warfare. Messenger Feasts and other such institutions afforded relief from these social and intercultural tensions. The A. examines the historic purposes of and the activities staged during Messenger Feasts and demonstrates why the festivals ceased in the Inupiaq north, primarily through the intervention of missionaries and educators. Today, the festival is being revitalized in some areas.

Grief at seeing a daughter leave home : Weeping and emotion in the Tuareg techawait postmarital residence ritual

Abstract: This article examines the relationship between subjective experience and ritual process: the meaning of nonverbal weeping laments in a ritual called techawait among the Tuareg, a seminomadic, traditionally stratified, Muslim people of Niger, West Africa. This ritual is held when a married couple moves away from the wife's parents after approximately two years of marriage to bring the wife to the home of the husband's family. Although officially defined as a celebration, this event has emotional undertones suggesting sorrow and conflict in the weeping of the female relatives of the wife. The article analyzes these emotions against the backdrop of a rite of passage-but not solely as social control, linear transition, or status change. Rather, it analyzes this expression of ambiguous yet profound sentiments in relation to the wider contexts of cultural constructions of emotional expression and gender and social dynamics evoked by the central symbols of techawait: tent and camel. The conclusion explores the implications of these datafor theories of emotion, gender, and rites of passage.

Digression and Insertion in a Belizean Folktale

Abstract: In folk stories, digressions and insertions can embody information about the narrator's storytelling strategy. A recently collected Belizean folktale demonstrates this. In a digression, the narrator leaves the narrative context. An insertion is where one part of the narrative intrudes on another. A digression may clarify the narrator's job, provide commentary, or explain the story. An insertion may reinforce a point or increase suspense while elaborating on setting.

A tale of two carnivals : Esoteric and exoteric performance in the Fasnet of Elzach

Abstract: The folkloric costumes and processions presented during the carnival celebration in the Black Forest town of Elzach have been much studied and honored by German folklore scholars and enthusiasts. Yet carnival in Elzach consists of much more than thesefolkloric displays. The festival also includes a series of original, text-based performances intended primarily for reception by local residents. The costumed folkloric events and the original performances form two distinct sets of enactments within the three-day celebration, each emerging in response to different historical developments and contemporary impulses. A close reading of the performed texts reveals their role in constructing local identity. ABOUT 25 MILES NORTHEAST OF FREIBURG in Breisgau, Germany, lies Elzach, a small town well known to German folklorists and regional folklore enthusiasts. For the most part, Elzach is a typical, pleasant southern German town, nestled in the valley of the Elz River. Its lovely Black Forest setting, narrow streets, local brewery, and stone buildings correspond well to an American notion of German quaintness. Yet, in Germany, the town's primary, indeed only, source of notoriety is its carnival celebration known locally as Fasnet.1 Public celebration of Fasnet in Elzach lasts for three days-the Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday preceding Lent-and features the photogenic redsuited, wooden-masked Schuttig.2 Festivities begin with customary German punctuality at noon on Sunday when two colorfully decorated horse-drawn chariots driven by the executive council of the