{"title":"Radical Reciprocity: The Work and Research Methods of Elaine J. Lawless","authors":"Jacqueline L. Mcgrath","doi":"10.2979/jfolkrese.59.2.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfolkrese.59.2.02","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores the impact of reciprocal ethnography on research participants based on the published works of Elaine J. Lawless. The methodological impact of reciprocal ethnography is under analyzed throughout Lawless's books and articles, even though there are glimpses into how the research participants are affected within each project. Initially, reciprocal ethnography offered an approach that might shape a parallel relationship between the researcher and her research participants, creating insights and ideas that resulted because of reciprocity and dialogue. Later, it evolved into a process with the potential for shared power in the construction of meaning, the possible creation of some social awareness for individual research participants, as well as change in a larger sense. Ultimately, reciprocal ethnography is a methodology that structures opportunities for participants to engage in dialogue with other research participants and with the researcher—and to engage in (self) analysis—that can yield new insights, revised beliefs, and changed relationships, all methodological outcomes worth recognizing and analyzing more extensively.","PeriodicalId":44620,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH","volume":"59 1","pages":"24 - 9"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47136565","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Five Times I Wasn't a Folklorist, and One Time I Was","authors":"S. Ingram","doi":"10.2979/jfolkrese.59.2.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfolkrese.59.2.07","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay thinks deeply about the wide variety of responses the author receives when she when she tells people outside the discipline what she does for a living. Following Elaine Lawless's call to write personally and creatively, the essay recounts five specific instances in which the author was told that what she studied was either \"too much\" or \"not enough\": too urban, too white, not white enough, too young, too insubstantial, too literary. Five times, that is, that she was told she needed to go study real folklore. The small case studies she explores engage discussions of class, race, and cultural privilege to delve into the complicated questions surrounding the tension between public and academic understandings of the field of folklore.","PeriodicalId":44620,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH","volume":"59 1","pages":"81 - 99"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47380958","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reciprocal Fieldwork: Public Folklorists Teaming with Community Scholars","authors":"Lisa L. Higgins","doi":"10.2979/jfolkrese.59.2.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfolkrese.59.2.03","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:A community scholars' project was initiated in Missouri to increase local participation in the state's folk arts infrastructure. While the project was adapted from successful models in sister states, the project is also consciously informed by reflexive ethnographic methodologies as imagined and reimagined in the academy and applied with modifications in the public sector. The author examines the ways in which a cadre of community scholars—local experts with keen interests in documenting, promoting, and sharing their traditions—informed the content of workshops, fieldwork, and the statewide public sector organization. This essay is dedicated to community scholar Sarah Denton, who died unexpectedly in 2019.","PeriodicalId":44620,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH","volume":"59 1","pages":"25 - 36"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41407689","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Ethnographer as Witness, as Writer: The Poetics and Politics of Reciprocal Ethnography","authors":"Kristen C. Harmon","doi":"10.2979/jfolkrese.59.2.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfolkrese.59.2.05","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Elaine J. Lawless demonstrates a deep and abiding concern for the ethical questions posed by narratives: how they are told and collected, the implications of these narratives (and the telling of these) for their tellers' lives, the relationship between teller and listener/writer, and how these narratives are retold and reconstructed for a reader far removed from the original context. From her work on women's folk traditions, life stories, and self-representation within master narratives in religious contexts to her work with survivors of domestic violence to the aftermath of the intentional flooding and destruction of the African American community of Pinhook, Missouri, Lawless provides a framework for considering the poetics and politics of reciprocal ethnography. This paper discusses Lawless's multifaceted use and sophisticated understanding of narrative as not only text but also as ethical practice throughout her collected works.","PeriodicalId":44620,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH","volume":"59 1","pages":"47 - 66"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45604883","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Soft Racism in the Contemporary Legend of Anawan Rock: A Critique","authors":"S. Gencarella","doi":"10.2979/jfolkrese.59.1.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfolkrese.59.1.03","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay is a critical folklore study concerning the traditional practices at Anawan Rock in Rehoboth, Massachusetts. Anawan Rock is the site of the surrender of Annawon, a captain of the Wampanoag people who were defeated by English colonists in 1676 during King Philip’s War. Annawon’s capture by Benjamin Church inspired legendary tales for centuries and multiple folk practices of and at the Rock. Since 1994 an emerging contemporary legend has posited that Anawan Rock is haunted; that story has fueled legend tripping and has been incorporated into the performances of paranormal investigators, who have increasingly utilized the site for their own agendas and to increase their own cultural and monetary capital. In addition to critiquing the narratives and related traditions associated with Anawan Rock from the colonial to the contemporary period, I argue that such folkloric material demonstrates a transition from a “hard racism” to a “soft racism,” an expression of inequity that continues to warrant redress to this day (including the potential return of the land at Anawan Rock to the Wampanoag people).","PeriodicalId":44620,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH","volume":"59 1","pages":"100 - 59"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45684535","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Transcribing Voices, Fashioning a Genre: Orality, Hybridity, and Inventiveness in James Oswald’s Songs from Ossian","authors":"James Porter","doi":"10.2979/jfolkrese.59.1.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfolkrese.59.1.02","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:A volume of songs with tunes, The Pocket Companion for the Guittar (n.d.), issued in London by the Scottish composer and music publisher James Oswald, contains nine songs from the poems of Ossian that were purportedly taken down from the singing of James Macpherson, their originator. This essay examines the origin and background of these songs from a cultural and political perspective, posing the questions as to when and why they were conceived, allegedly transcribed from the singing of the author, and inserted into a volume of mainly instrumental tunes, and their texts, by recognized masters such as Handel and Pergolesi. The date of inclusion must have been after the appearance of Temora (1763), the third and final volume of Macpherson’s Ossian poems, since several of the song texts are taken from that work. But the instrumental volume itself, the sixth in a series issued by Oswald, may already have been in preparation and Oswald probably wanted to take advantage of Macpherson’s latest bestseller. The central argument of this article is that these songs are a unique hybrid, reflective of the status of their makers in a London often suspicious of inventive “North Britons” like Macpherson and Oswald.","PeriodicalId":44620,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH","volume":"59 1","pages":"25 - 57"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42823883","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Tradition as a Field of People: The Mobilization of Folkloric Practices by Art Collective Turŏng","authors":"In-Seon Kang","doi":"10.2979/jfolkrese.59.1.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfolkrese.59.1.04","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Traditional Korean performing arts such as mask dances and madanggŭk (a traditional theatrical art) became highly popular on university campuses in the 1970s and 1980s. Driven by this movement, Turŏng, a South Korean minjung art collective in the 1980s, actively incorporated elements of tradition and folklore in its work. Primarily produced collectively, Turŏng’s works embraced a number of Korean traditional practices, including motifs and colors from minhwa (folk art) and themes and methods from Buddhist painting and shamanism. In the 1980s, minjung art—a term literally meaning the art of “common people,” as opposed to that of elites or intellectuals—increasingly came to overlap with the notion of the nation (minjok), as minjung art became partially associated with progressive student movements. While Turŏng has previously been studied exclusively within the framework of the minjung art movement, this article shifts attention onto the group’s larger associations with the minjung cultural movement, a progressive and prodemocracy force, with particular focus on the emphasis of traditional practices. My aim is to read the folkloric practices in Turŏng within a broader context of representing the oppressed, rather than one of nationalist intent, particularly by considering Turŏng as a place where tradition was mobilized for the recovery of the minjung.","PeriodicalId":44620,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH","volume":"59 1","pages":"101 - 145"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43544266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Supernatural Encounters in the Haunted Mill: Perception and Experience","authors":"Merrill Kaplan","doi":"10.2979/jfolkrese.59.1.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfolkrese.59.1.01","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: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 fictive 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.","PeriodicalId":44620,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH","volume":"59 1","pages":"1 - 24"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45537682","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Theorizing from the Margins","authors":"J. Jorgensen","doi":"10.2979/jfolkrese.58.3.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfolkrese.58.3.06","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Folklorists study folk and lore on the margins of society yet have not adequately accounted for how many of our own scholars are marginalized by existing power structures. Some of these power structures are unique to academia—without enough full-time work, not everyone can afford to work in the field; the tenure system grants limited access to resources, academic freedom of speech, and social capital—while others are exacerbated by US policies such as those tying health care to (full-time) employment. The aim of this article is to document, through the use of recent personal narrative as well as scholarship, the issues marginalized folklorists face within the discipline, and advocate for greater inclusive policies so that our discipline does not suffer from a lack of voices and perspectives, tuning in only to voices that are institutionalized enough to be broadcast: a fate that ironically seems to be the antithesis of our field's centuries-long focus on subjects on the margins.","PeriodicalId":44620,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH","volume":"58 1","pages":"117 - 99"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43107854","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Creating from the Margins: Precarity and the Study of Folklore","authors":"Sarah M. Gordon, Benjamin Gatling","doi":"10.2979/jfolkrese.58.3.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfolkrese.58.3.01","url":null,"abstract":"In policing the participants of the game, the boys were also protecting the boundaries of their community in the hope that it would in turn provide affective networks of social support that could protect them from real or imagined social, political, or economic vulnerabilities. Uneven public health responses to COVID-19 and reactionary regime-supported violence against the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and efforts to dismantle white supremacy emphasize the degree to which precarity-wrought both by disease and racial injustices-disparately affects already marginalized communities. [...]pandemic-induced economic vulnerability-when set against ever-present economic vulnerabilities in the Global South-and pandemic-required social distancing-when considered alongside the fact that capital-owners have always lived separated from those upon whose labor they depend-suggest both that neoliberalism has established new forms of precarity and that precarity is a general condition always experienced differentially. The articles variously consider how individuals and communities living in economic precarity, cobbling together income through contingent work, may turn to folk traditions to foster a sense of stability.","PeriodicalId":44620,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH","volume":"58 1","pages":"1 - 6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42854885","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}