Download or read book Theorizing Folklore from the Margins written by Solimar Otero and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of folklore has historically focused on the daily life and culture of regular people, such as artisans, storytellers, and craftspeople. But what can folklore reveal about strategies of belonging, survival, and reinvention in moments of crisis? The experience of living in hostile conditions for cultural, social, political, or economic reasons has redefined communities in crisis. The curated works in Theorizing Folklore from the Margins offer clear and feasible suggestions for how to ethically engage in the study of folklore with marginalized populations. By focusing on issues of critical race and ethnic studies, decolonial and antioppressive methodologies, and gender and sexuality studies, contributors employ a wide variety of disciplines and theoretical approaches. In doing so, they reflect the transdisciplinary possibilities of Folklore studies. By bridging the gap between theory and practice, Theorizing Folklore from the Margins confirms that engaging with oppressed communities is not only relevant, but necessary.
Download or read book Theorizing Folklore from the Margins written by Solimar Otero and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By bridging the gap between theory and practice, Theorizing Folklore from the Margins confirms that engaging with oppressed communities is not only relevant, but necessary.
Download or read book Theorizing Myth written by Bruce Lincoln and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Theorizing Myth, Bruce Lincoln traces the way scholars and others have used the category of "myth" to fetishize or deride certain kinds of stories, usually those told by others. He begins by showing that mythos yielded to logos not as part of a (mythic) "Greek miracle," but as part of struggles over political, linguistic, and epistemological authority occasioned by expanded use of writing and the practice of Athenian democracy. Lincoln then turns his attention to the period when myth was recuperated as a privileged type of narrative, a process he locates in the political and cultural ferment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here, he connects renewed enthusiasm for myth to the nexus of Romanticism, nationalism, and Aryan triumphalism, particularly the quest for a language and set of stories on which nation-states could be founded. In the final section of this wide-ranging book, Lincoln advocates a fresh approach to the study of myth, providing varied case studies to support his view of myth—and scholarship on myth—as ideology in narrative form.
Download or read book Archives of Conjure written by Solimar Otero and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Afrolatinx religious practices such as Cuban Espiritismo, Puerto Rican Santería, and Brazilian Candomblé, the dead tell stories. Communicating with and through mediums’ bodies, they give advice, make requests, and propose future rituals, creating a living archive that is coproduced by the dead. In this book, Solimar Otero explores how Afrolatinx spirits guide collaborative spiritual-scholarly activist work through rituals and the creation of material culture. By examining spirit mediumship through a Caribbean cross-cultural poetics, she shows how divinities and ancestors serve as active agents in shaping the experiences of gender, sexuality, and race. Otero argues that what she calls archives of conjure are produced through residual transcriptions or reverberations of the stories of the dead whose archives are stitched, beaded, smoked, and washed into official and unofficial repositories. She investigates how sites like the ocean, rivers, and institutional archives create connected contexts for unlocking the spatial activation of residual transcriptions. Drawing on over ten years of archival research and fieldwork in Cuba, Otero centers the storytelling practices of Afrolatinx women and LGBTQ spiritual practitioners alongside Caribbean literature and performance. Archives of Conjure offers vital new perspectives on ephemerality, temporality, and material culture, unraveling undertheorized questions about how spirits shape communities of practice, ethnography, literature, and history and revealing the deeply connected nature of art, scholarship, and worship.
Download or read book Afro Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World written by Solimar Otero and published by University Rochester Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World explores how Yoruba and Afro-Cuban communities moved across the Atlantic between the Americas and Africa in successive waves in the nineteenth century. In Havana, Yoruba slaves from Lagos banded together to buy their freedom and sail home to Nigeria. Once in Lagos, this Cuban repatriate community became known as the Aguda. This community built their own neighborhood that celebrated their Afrolatino heritage. For these Yoruba and Afro-Cuban diasporic populations, nostalgic constructions of family and community play the role of narrating and locating a longed-for home. By providing a link between the workings of nostalgia and the construction of home, this volume re-theorizes cultural imaginaries as a source for diasporic community reinvention. Through ethnographic fieldwork and research in folkloristics, Otero reveals that the Aguda identify strongly with their Afro-Cuban roots in contemporary times. Their fluid identity moves from Yoruba to Cuban, and back again, in a manner that illustrates the truly cyclical nature of transnational Atlantic community affiliation. Solimar Otero is Associate Professor of English and a folklorist at Louisiana State University. Her research centers on gender, sexuality, Afro-Caribbean spirituality, and Yoruba traditional religion in folklore, literature and ethnography. Dr. Otero is the recipient of a Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund grant (2013), a fellowship at the Harvard Divinity School's Women's Studies in Religion Program (2009 to 2010), and a Fulbright award (2001).
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of American Folklore and Folklife Studies written by Simon J. Bronner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 1033 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of American Folklore and Folklife Studies surveys the materials, approaches, concepts, and applications of the field to provide a sweeping guide to American folklore and folklife, culture, history, and society. Forty-three comprehensive and diverse chapters delve into significant themes and methods of folklore and folklife study; established expressions and activities; spheres and locations of folkloric action; and shared cultures and common identities. Beyond the longstanding arenas of academic focus developed throughout the 350-year legacy of folklore and folklife study, contributors at the forefront of the field also explore exciting new areas of attention that have emerged in the twenty-first century such as the Internet, bodylore, folklore of organizations and networks, sexual orientation, neurodiverse identities, and disability groups. Encompassing a wide range of cultural traditions in the United States, from bits of slang in private conversations to massive public demonstrations, ancient beliefs to contemporary viral memes, and a simple handshake greeting to group festivals, these chapters consider the meanings in oral, social, and material genres of dance, ritual, drama, play, speech, song, and story while drawing attention to tradition-centered communities such as the Amish and Hasidim, occupational groups and their workaday worlds, and children and other age groups. Weaving together such varied and manifest traditions, this handbook pays significant attention to the cultural diversity and changing national boundaries that have always been distinctive in the American experience, reflecting on the relative youth of the nation; global connections of customs brought by immigrants; mobility of residents and their relation to an indigenous, urbanized, and racialized population; and a varied landscape and settlement pattern. Edited by leading folklore scholar Simon J. Bronner, this handbook celebrates the extraordinary richness of the American social and cultural fabric, offering a valuable resource not only for scholars and students of American studies, but also for the global study of tradition, folk arts, and cultural practice.
Download or read book The Resonance of Unseen Things written by Susan Lepselter and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An interdisciplinary study of how conspiracy theories and stories persist and resonate among different Americans
Download or read book Advancing Folkloristics written by Jesse A. Fivecoate and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unprecedented number of folklorists are addressing issues of class, race, gender, and sexuality in academic and public spaces in the US, raising the question: How can folklorists contribute to these contemporary political affairs? Since the nature of folkloristics transcends binaries, can it help others develop critical personal narratives? Advancing Folkloristics covers topics such as queer, feminist, and postcolonial scholarship in folkloristics. Contributors investigate how to apply folkloristic approaches in nonfolklore classrooms, how to maintain a folklorist identity without a "folklorist" job title, and how to use folkloristic knowledge to interact with others outside of the discipline. The chapters, which range from theoretical reorientations to personal experiences of folklore work, all demonstrate the kinds of work folklorists are well-suited to and promote the areas in which folkloristics is poised to expand and excel. Advancing Folkloristics presents a clear picture of folklore studies today and articulates how it must adapt in the future.
Download or read book Dialogues with a Trickster written by Phillip McArthur and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2024-10-31 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “We joked often—laughed to the point of crying (that deep visceral laughter)—not just about the subversive antics of Letao, but to all the allusions to how he, my friend, and I, were tricksters in our own right, moving between our cultural worlds, illuminating ambiguities and celebrating them.” This rich, experimental ethnography plays within the margins of mythology and ethnographic practice to pursue a decolonizing method of inquiry and intercultural engagement. Through a range of mischievous narratives about the mythological trickster Letao, a riM̧ajeļ (Indigenous Marshall Islander) storyteller takes the author on a journey into a deep cosmological and epistemological past and back into the colonial and imperial present. Transcribed in this book, the simultaneously effortless and pointedly deliberate conversations between author Phillip H. McArthur and respected riM̧ajeļ elder Kometo Albōt subvert and dismantle boundaries of time, culture, and religion. Through lighthearted dialogue, Kometo explores serious histories of imperial abuse, war, atomic bomb testing, ideologies of social power, decolonization, Christianity, magic, sex, and death. He plays upon a range of ambiguities such as the slipperiness of mythic discourse, ethnographic entanglements, ambivalent analogies about Americans, cosmological musings about Western and Indigenous deities, the complexities of matrilineal kinship and modern manifestations of power, the interplay of magic within politics and religion, the social efficacy of ideologies of deception and revelation through divination, the way by which risky topics and profane stories bring the sacred into relief, and prophecies that presage the end of culture and the death of the trickster. In this way of relating, the boundaries blur between ethnographer and subject and the theories of myth and folklore—all become part of the dialogic process. The author critically attends to his positionality, as well as to how Kometo slyly positions them through his jokes and in drawing the author into trickster mythologies. Written in a narrative style that combines transcribed dialogue, poetic ethnographic descriptions, applied theory and sharp analysis, and storytelling, this book grants us insight into a decade-long friendship and honors the wisdom of a trickster.
Download or read book Folklore 101 written by Jeana Jorgensen and published by Dr Jeana Jorgensen LLC. This book was released on 2021-10-31 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When's the last time you got to pick a folklorist's brain? Did you know memes count as folklore? Or that folklorists assign numbers to fairy tales to keep track of them all? The field of folklore studies is over two centuries old, and it's full of amazing insights about human behavior, creativity, and community. Folklore studies is as interdisciplinary as it gets, squished somewhere between anthropology and linguistics and religious studies and comparative literature and more. It’s all about the informal human interactions, the million tiny acts and stories and beliefs and arts that function as social glue even if they seem beneath notice. Do traditional holiday foods have a deeper meaning? Yep. Same with folk music, ballads, proverbs, jokes, urban legends, body art, and a ton more genres covered in this book. Is the whole book as easy to read and irreverent as this description? Yep. This fun, accessible guide to the academic study of folklore packs in a college class's worth of material, from basic concepts and major folklore genres to special topics based on identity, fancy theories, and more. If you've always wanted to take a folklore class, or you're a writer or artist using folklore in your work, or you're just generally interested in the topic, this is the book for you! “This wonderfully insightful book introduces the reader to folklore with warmth and good humor. Students and others interested in folklore will love it!” - Libby Tucker, Distinguished Service Professor of English, Binghamton University and author of Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses “Dr. Jeana Jorgensen knows her stuff and, just as importantly, knows how to communicate it. Folklore 101 is a treasure trove of knowledge, the kind it would take years of college courses to accumulate yourself. If you're curious about academic folklore, this clear, engaging book is where you want to start." – Dr. Sara Cleto, co-founder of The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic
Download or read book Folk Illusions written by K. Brandon Barker and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-22 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wiggling a pencil so that it looks like it is made of rubber, "stealing" your niece's nose, and listening for the sounds of the ocean in a conch shell– these are examples of folk illusions, youthful play forms that trade on perceptual oddities. In this groundbreaking study, K. Brandon Barker and Claiborne Rice argue that these easily overlooked instances of children's folklore offer an important avenue for studying perception and cognition in the contexts of social and embodied development. Folk illusions are traditionalized verbal and/or physical actions that are performed with the intention of creating a phantasm for one or more participants. Using a cross-disciplinary approach that combines the ethnographic methods of folklore with the empirical data of neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology, Barker and Rice catalogue over eighty discrete folk illusions while exploring the complexities of embodied perception. Taken together as a genre of folklore, folk illusions show that people, starting from a young age, possess an awareness of the illusory tendencies of perceptual processes as well as an awareness that the distinctions between illusion and reality are always communally formed.
Download or read book Out of Turmoil written by Dean P. Vesperman and published by IAP. This book was released on 2023-01-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is not difficult to argue that the social sciences are in a period of transition. Our day-to-day lives have been marked by uncertainty as our social lives have vacillated wildly between highs and lows, tensions between fellow citizens have heightened along ideological fault lines, and educators have been placed squarely at the center of public discourses about what—and how—we should be teaching. By any measure, we are living in a time where every moment seems to be rife with high stakes realities that must be navigated. Ladson-Billings (2020) called on educators to reimagine education and contest the notion of a “return to normal.” In the current highly polarized context where we see multiple competing narratives, rather than promoting a “return to normal” or “business as usual” approach, we argue that educators must use the lessons of the last two years, as well as draw on what we have learned from history and the social sciences. By asking ourselves how we might interrogate and inform current social landscapes and the challenges that arise from them, we have the opportunity to take leadership in fostering innovation, building solidarity, and re-imagining the teaching and learning of history and the social sciences. We recognize that humans live in multiple complex communities that include intersectional identities; relationships with power, agency, and discourses; and lived realities that are as unique as they are divergent. Consequently, the task of educators, and the goal of this volume, is to provide a clarion voice to a dynamic, relational, and undeniably human social world.
Download or read book International Folkloristics written by Alan Dundes and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 1999-08-01 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: International folkloristics is a worldwide discipline in which scholars study various forms of folklore ranging from myth, folktale, and legend to custom and belief. Twenty classic essays, beginning with a piece by Jacob Grimm, reveal the evolving theoretical underpinnings of folkloristics from its nineteenth century origins to its academic coming-of-age in the twentieth century. Each piece is prefaced by extensive editorial introductions placing them in a historical and intellectual context. The twenty essays presented here, including several never published previously in English, will be required reading for any serious student of folklore.
Download or read book Magic written by Ernesto De Martino and published by Hau. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though his work was little known outside Italian intellectual circles for most of the twentieth century, anthropologist and historian of religions Ernesto de Martino is now recognized as one of the most original thinkers in the field. This book is testament to de Martino's innovation and engagement with Hegelian historicism and phenomenology--a work of ethnographic theory way ahead of its time. This new translation of Sud e Magia, his 1959 study of ceremonial magic and witchcraft in southern Italy, shows how De Martino is not interested in the question of whether magic is rational or irrational but rather in why it came to be perceived as a problem of knowledge in the first place. Setting his exploration within his wider, pathbreaking theorization of ritual, as well as in the context of his politically sensitive analysis of the global south's historical encounters with Western science, he presents the development of magic and ritual in Enlightenment Naples as a paradigmatic example of the complex dynamics between dominant and subaltern cultures. Far ahead of its time, Magic is still relevant as anthropologists continue to wrestle with modernity's relationship with magical thinking.
Download or read book Spirited Diasporas written by Martin Tsang and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2023-08-29 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First-person accounts that show the expanding demographics of African-descended religions In this focused portrayal of global dispersal and spiritual sojourning, Martin Tsang draws together first-person accounts of the evolving Afro-Atlantic religious landscape. Spirited Diasporas offers a glimpse into the frequently misunderstood religions of Afro-Cuban Lucumí, Haitian Vodou, and Brazilian Candomblé, adding to the growing research on the transnational yet personal nature of African diasporic religions. In these accounts, practitioners from many origins illustrate the work and commitment they undertook to learn and become initiated in these traditions. They reveal in the process a variety of experiences that are not often documented. Their perspectives also show the expanding contemporary demographics of African-descended religions, many of whose members identify as LGBTQIA+ or are part of other minoritized populations, and they counter inaccurate and often racialized portrayals of these religions as being antimodern and geographically limited. Through the voices of the professionals, scholars, and activists gathered here, readers will appreciate the purpose and belonging to be found in the far-reaching communities of these Latin American and Caribbean spiritualities. As the seekers in these stories discover and come home to their new religious families, Spirited Diasporas displays the relevance and generative power of these traditions. Contributors: Morgan M. Page | Michael Atwood Mason | Eugenia Rainey | Alex Bettencourt | Solimar Otero | Yoshiaki Koshikawa | Belia Mayeno Saavedra | Sue Kucklick-Arencibia | Ivor Miller | Terri-Dawn González | Dr. Martin A. Tsang | Giovanna Capponi | Philippe Charlier
Download or read book Genre text interpretation written by Kaarina Koski and published by Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents current discussions on the concept of genre. It introduces innovative, multidisciplinary approaches to contemporary and historical genres, their roles in cultural discourse, how they change, and their relations to each other. The reader is guided into the discussion surrounding this key concept and its history through a general introduction, followed by eighteen chapters that represent a variety of discursive practices as well as analytic methods from several scholarly traditions. This volume will have wide appeal to several academic audiences within the humanities, both in Finland and abroad, and will especially be of interest to scholars of folklore, language and cultural expression.
Download or read book Am frica in Letters written by Jennifer Carolina Gómez Menjívar and published by Vanderbilt University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditional histories of Black letters in Latin America have delimited their geographic scope to the Caribbean while also omitting intertwined Afro-Indigenous discourses. Inspired by the legacy of Amefrican thinker Lélia Gonzalez, Améfrica in Letters highlights the Black poets, songwriters, novelists, essayists, and bloggers who have created a counter-multiculturalist literary history on the Latin American mainland. To capture a sense of the variety of their contributions, this book spans Mexico, Central America, the Andes, and the Southern Cone—highlighting the transcontinental nature of the legacy of Black writing and its impact beyond national boundaries. The writers examined in the volume engage with regional intellectual frameworks while putting into circulation a demand for a recalibration of the Hispanophone and Lusophone contexts in which they and other Afrodescendants reside.
