Search

This Gedenkschrift honors the passing of our good friend and colleague Denise Kozikowski and the loss of a program, UCLA Folklore & Mythology. Like folklore itself, the contents of this volume are also characterized by continuity and change. They span a range from traditional (though unusually innovative) scholarly research and theoretical articles to personal reflections, dreamwork, and even a graphic essay building on the influences of the academic Program and Denise herself. KEYWORDS: memory, mindfulness, creative action, temporality, legacy., When we first conceived of this special Gedenkschrift (1) issue of Western Folklore, we were immersed in memories, but just as consumed with the idea of them; memory and memorial [...]

Older records report that the mills of preindustrial Norway and Sweden were especially haunted by a beastie that liked to interfere with the business of milling. Voices and music played by unseen hands could also be heard in some of them. This essay argues that these accounts reflected folk belief in the supernatural and not just Active narrative tradition. Much points to the water mills of Scandinavia having been an ideal environment for the generation and maintenance of supernatural narrative as explored by Lauri Honko and David J. Hufford. Their approaches are different, but both illuminate parts of the tradition. That tradition appears grounded in memorates, some based in perception interpreted in light of cultural models and some in what Hufford calls Core Spiritual Experiences. In some places and at some times, it is likely that folk belief conditioned perception. In others, experience may have generated folk belief., The mills of the traditional rural landscape of Norway and Sweden were especially haunted by a beastie that liked to interfere with the business of milling--in Norwegian, the kvernknurr or [...]

Looking to answer ancient questions about the similarities and differences between humans and nonhuman animals, animal cognition scientists have deployed a traditional Aesopian fable, the Crow and the Pitcher, as narrative frame and structural precedent for experimental investigation. Herein, I consider the theoretical implications of this peculiar intersection between folklore and science in the contexts of Alan Dundes's notion of folk ideas (1971) and folkloristic genre theory. Ultimately, I gauge whether the so-called Aesop's Fable Paradigm is simply a folkloric cameo in science or a more complicated case of genuine scientific folklore., In a 2009 issue of Current Biology, scientists Christopher David Bird and Nathan John Emery published a compelling study on birds' problem-solving behaviors: 'Rooks use Stones to Raise the Water [...]

This article examines two cases of folklorization led by teachers in Peru between 1939 and 1971, and characterized by the participation of the indigenous and mestizo subjects whose local cultures were transformed into folklore. These cases show teachers as active agents of cultural change in Andean schools, who were responding to de-Indianization by promoting a serrano (pertaining to the Sierra) regional identity among their students. In this fashion, teachers were reinventing 'local traditions' to produce a new popular identity based on a common regional bond, through which indigenous and mestizo populations could negotiate new waves of cultural interaction with modernity and national society. The first case analyzes the projects of Jose Maria Arguedas and Emilio Barrantes to bring local folklore to the school curriculum and to promote an Andean popular culture. The second case explores school folklore competitions organized autonomously by provincial teachers, in which traditional dances were folklorized and turned into a popular spectacle. While framing both folklorization cases within the study of teachers as local intellectuals, the article also highlights the importance of a magisterial culture in Peru that, drawing from the progressive education movement, viewed teachers as agents of sociocultural change and nationalism. Este articulo estudia dos casos de folklorizacion realizados por maestros peruanos entre 1939 y 1971, y caracterizados por la participacion de los individuos indigenas y mestizos cuyas culturas estaban siendo transformadas en folklor. Estos casos muestran a los maestros como agentes activos de cambio cultural en las escuelas andinas, respondiendo a la desindianizacion al promover una identidad regional serrana entre los estudiantes. De tal manera, los maestros estaban reinventando las tradiciones locales con el fin de producir una nueva identidad popular basada en un vinculo regional comun, y a traves de la cual las poblaciones indigenas y mestizas pudieran negociar nuevas maneras de interaccion cultural con la modernidad y la sociedad nacional. El primer caso analiza los proyectos de Jose Maria Arguedas y Emilio Barrantes para integrar el folklor local en el curriculo escolar. El segundo explora los concursos folkloricos escolares organizados por maestros provinciales, en los cuales las danzas tradicionales eran folklorizadas y convertidas en espectaculo popular. Aunque ambos casos de folklorizacion se enmarcan en el estudio de los maestros como intelectuales locales, este articulo tambien subraya la importancia de una cultura magisterial en el Peru que, influenciada por el movimiento de la Escuela Nueva, concibio a los maestros como agentes de cambio sociocultural y de nacionalismo., Introduction Studies on Peruvian education have widely explored various institutional, sociological, and cultural aspects of its history during the twentieth century. Scholars have examined education reforms and the role of [...]

Continuing research on the recently recognized genre of folk illusions, the authors (re)consider folk illusions' eliciting conditions in the context of two newly analyzed forms, Ping Pong and What Did I Say? In both forms, verbal characterization of the illusion is neither prevalent nor necessary--a fact that does not align with the original description of the genre. The implications of these newly considered eliciting conditions shed light on how folk illusions activate communal knowledge about embodiment--especially perceptual processes., The study of human embodiment requires the study of people as they live and interact as a part of their everyday comings and goings. In the past two decades, scholars [...]

Croatian tongue-twisters are defined by the lack of euphony, and the abundance of sound patterns that lead to speech errors. The major feature that contributes to this anti-euphonious patterning is the significant presence of consonant clusters in the syllable onset. This research combines a phonostylistic approach, computational analysis, and statistical methods in order to detect and differentiate sound patterning and its effect on euphony in tongue-twisters. The paper presents the results from research that focuses on the computational analysis of these features and their comparison with other similar folklore genres (counting-out rhymes, lyric and epic poetry, proverbs, and narratives). Keywords AFS ETHNOGRAPHIC THESAURUS: Speech play, tongue-twisters, analysis, phonology, childlore, Introductory Remarks Tongue-twisters, a highly recognizable folklore genre in many cultures, are seldom systematically studied from the point of view of their linguistic structure. This statement is generally true if [...]

Researchers of traditional storytelling are largely limited to existing indices for the discovery of stories. These indices rarely include geo-indexing, despite a fundamental premise of folkloristics that stories are closely related to the physical environment. Consequently, it is often difficult for folklore researchers to address questions that relate story topics to geographic location. To address this problem, we propose WitchHunter, a suite of tools for the geographically based exploration of a large folklore corpus (>30,000 stories). WitchHunter presents visual representations of the latent semantic connections between stories in a map-based navigation and discovery environment. These visualizations of the relationship between places and a first-level approximation of story topics can be used by researchers to build and refine research questions. We illustrate the usefulness of this environment through a series of experiments related to legends about witches, cunning folk, ghosts, revenants, hidden folk, and other supernatural phenomena. Keywords AFS ETHNOGRAPHIC THESAURUS: Space and place, publications, World Wide Web, language, IN MAY OF 1898, THE DANISH FOLKLORIST Evald Tang Kristensen collected the following story from Jens Peter Pedersen, an impoverished lathe-turner from the small town of Ilbjaerge in northern Jutland: [...]

Growing recognition of the contested nature of heritage has prompted critical reassessments of official heritage discourses and the demand for more inclusive heritage processes. Field research in Surin, Thailand, reveals the challenges of implementing participatory approaches in a context in which the concept of cultural heritage is employed to domesticate the nation's ethnic Others. The history of state-sponsored, folklorized performances of the ethnic Khmer genre of kantruem demonstrates the ways in which the recent listing of kantruem on Thailand's national registry of 'intangible culture' elides histories of cross-border linkage with Cambodia and meanings of kantruem as a site of memory and affect. Keywords: kantruem, intangible cultural heritage, folklorization, ethnic Identity, Northern Khmer, Northeastern Thailand., Since its inception in nineteenth-century romanticism and historicism, heritage has been inextricably implicated in the territorialization of the nation-state. Premised upon foreclosures and exclusions, heritage as a field of practice [...]

Aurelio Espinosa (1880-1958) studied folklore in the American Southwest and Spain. Espinosa was one of the first academic folklorists to work with American materials and the first scholar to write about Mexican American culture. This paper is an attempt to re-insert this forgotten figure into the history of folklore studies. At the same time, drawing on new archival sources, this study will show that Espinosa's active support of Franco in Spain contributed to his theory of cultural transmission in the American Southwest. Keywords AFS ETHNOGRAPHIC THESAURUS: FOLKLORISTS, ETHNICITY, HISTORY, AMERICAN STUDIES, And what is the significance of folklore in the field of history? History, the materials that historians have documented over the ages, are coming to be in general solely the [...]

In the early 1930s, the anthropologist Paul Radin hired Jon Lee to collect Chinese American folk narratives in Oakland's Chinatown. These were later published as The Golden Mountain: Chinese Tales Told in California. Despite being lead field-worker for the project, Lee's contributions have been largely overlooked. This paper examines Lee's important folkloristic work and opens up a wider discussion about the role that professional aspirations play in shaping the field methodologies of folklorists. Keywords: AFS ETHNOGRAPHIC THESAURUS: Folklorists, fieldwork, professionalism, ethnicity, 'I WAS GLAD,' ZORA NEALE HURSTON WROTE in her 1935 work Mules and Men, 'when somebody told me, 'you may go and collect Negro folk-lore'' (Hurston 1995:9). Part of her [...]

On January 2, 1940 Heinrich Himmler's SS Ancestral Inheritance established a so-called Kulturkommission, then sent 14 working groups into South Tyrol, Italy. Special, over-proportional emphasis was put on collecting the full range of the Volkskunde canon and conducting dialect studies, by professionally trained folklorists, dialectologists, photographers, and filmmakers. For the Nazi 'scholars'--many of whom were SS--the underlying assumption was that these were survivals of ancient Germanic traditions and language. Arguably, it is one of the largest folklore/linguistic field investigations in history. This present study addresses one particular aspect of this enormous undertaking: the underlying ideology, the search for Nordic sources in South Tyrol. The project has not been overlooked in Germany and Austria, but there seems to be little or no knowledge of it outside the German world. Keywords AFS ETHNOGRAPHIC THESAURUS: Folklorists, historiography, fieldwork, cultural policy, DEDICATED TO ELISABETH BOCKHORN--March 28, 1944-January 24, 2013 Between 1940 and 1943, the German Reich carried out a massive folklore fieldwork campaign in German-speaking South Tyrol (Italy). The material gathered [...]

Slippings and Crossings I have shown you ideal types or analytical foci; we know that reality is messier. Without altogether surrendering the beauty of my schema--for genres crystallize social intentions [...]

IN JANUARY OF this year, Jason Baird Jackson handed me the editorial reins of the Journal of Folklore Research. A common convention after such a handoff is for the new [...]

This essay examines children's folklore scholarship from the late nineteenth century to the present, tracing key concepts from the Gilded Age to the contemporary era. These concepts reflect significant social, cultural, political, and scientific changes. From the 'savage child' to the 'secret-keeping child' the 'magic-making child' the 'cerebral child' the 'taboo-breaking child' the 'monstrous child' and others, scholarly representations of young people have close connections to the eras in which they developed. Nineteenth-century children's folklore scholarship relied on evolutionism; now evolutionary biology provides a basis for children's folklore research, so we have re-entered familiar territory., SINCE 1977, WHEN THE American Folklore Society decided to form a new section for scholars interested in young people's traditions, I have belonged to the Children's Folklore Section. It has [...]

The author argues for folkloristic recognition of a 'ritualesque' dimension in public events aimed at transforming the attitudes or behaviors of participants or spectators. Drawing on Bakhtins concept of the 'carnivalesque' as a parallel and source of comparison, the author explores the transformative mechanisms of public events such as Earth Day gatherings and antiwar demonstrations. Where the carnivalesque is recognizable in its festivity, the ritualesque becomes realized in the performative use of symbols--including images, music, and movement--to effect social change. Ethnographic examples include Gay Pride parades, Northern Irish Orange Order parades and Bloody Sunday commemorations, and American anti-drunk driving programs., RITUAL HAS LONG OCCUPIED a central place in folkloristic and anthropological inquiry, along with festival, calendrical custom, and rough music. In fact, festival is sometimes conflated with ritual and sometimes [...]