{"title":"Horsing around Again: Poetics and Intention in Oral Narrative Performance","authors":"Katherine Borland","doi":"10.2979/JFOLKRESE.58.1.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/JFOLKRESE.58.1.02","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this article I compare two accounts by the same narrator of the same event separated by forty-two years, one enclosed in a personal letter and the other an unrehearsed, voiced text. Comparison offers the opportunity to examine transformations in story form from one medium to another. These transformations demonstrate the importance of thematic and emotional as well as linguistic parallelism in oral narrative performance, and they complicate our understanding of personal narrative as distinct from traditional storytelling forms. My own reinterpretation of the emotional core of the story calls attention to the shifting subject positions of narrators who conjure an earlier self in their storytelling.","PeriodicalId":44620,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH","volume":"58 1","pages":"46 - 5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48615996","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":"New Editor's Note","authors":"Solimar Otero","doi":"10.2979/JFOLKRESE.58.1.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/JFOLKRESE.58.1.01","url":null,"abstract":"Rather than reifying an idea of a \"core culture\" that can be borrowed or stolen, Jackson prefers to look at how talk about cultural appropriation in the academy, media, and the arts reflects central concerns about cultural advocacy and the power of representation Putting cultural appropriation alongside terms like diffusion, acculturation, assimilation, heritage, and cultural property, Jackson also gives us a deep historical and academic contextualization of the term [ ]Gary Dunham, the Director of Indiana University Press, offered essential support for our Encounters: Explorations in Folklore and Ethnomusicology book series and the journal during this time of transition","PeriodicalId":44620,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH","volume":"58 1","pages":"1 - 3"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44494679","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":"\"A Round Unvarnished Tale\": The Dissolution of Narrative Authority in Othello","authors":"Greg Kelley","doi":"10.2979/JFOLKRESE.58.1.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/JFOLKRESE.58.1.03","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Folklorists have much to learn from Shakespeare's protoethnographic handling of the storytellers and storytelling he portrays in his plays. One case in point is Othello in which our title protagonist disclaims an aptitude for oratory (\"Rude I am in my speech, / And little blessed with the soft phrase of peace\" [1.3.96–97]), a common disclaimer to performance, yet Othello's subsequent storytelling betrays that he is in fact a skilled narrator who recounts personal experience with rhetorical prowess and expressive style. Furthermore, despite being an outsider in Venice, Othello enjoys an elevated station due in part to his artful narrative building. We witness the depreciation of his status as a master narrator, however, when Iago takes over the storytelling ethos of the play with whispers, innuendo, and veiled aspersions. Once Iago's deceptions fully bloom, there is, in the end, no accommodation for Othello's lofty personal narratives. Tracking both how Othello uses personal narrative to construct and present a coherent self, and how Iago deploys equally virtuosic verbal skill to dissolve Othello's persona and narrative authority, reminds us of the fictive nature of narrative, its variable power to build and destroy, and the competition inherent in the discursive construction of social realities.","PeriodicalId":44620,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH","volume":"58 1","pages":"47 - 75"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45150983","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":"Pokémon GO in the Field: Digital Gaming Apps and Ethnographic Methods","authors":"N. Young","doi":"10.2979/jfolkrese.57.3.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfolkrese.57.3.03","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Qualitative, ethnographic research methods are rooted in relational contacts within social networks. Such contemporary social networks are being facilitated by digital devices and the related applications designed for interpersonal connection and communication. Online games have also emerged as a result of the proliferation of these digital technologies. Pokémon GO is one such game that relies on networking and geographical/spatial exploration. Gameplay brings people together into both physical and virtual spaces, thus forming expanding networks. Further, Pokémon GO rewards social and gaming competencies while cutting across networks based on other, more typical affinities and identities. Based on my recent experiences, I contend that activities such as playing Pokémon GO, which mediate virtual and physical spaces, are shaping ethnographic encounters and fieldwork research. This article explores how handheld digital technology mediates relationships and contacts, thus facilitating folkloristic and anthropological research methods and data collection in the field.","PeriodicalId":44620,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH","volume":"57 1","pages":"63 - 85"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44335613","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":"Incest, Eclipse, and the Origin of the Moon's Spots: Nature as Darkness and Chaos in Amerindian Myth","authors":"Deon Liebenberg","doi":"10.2979/jfolkrese.57.3.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfolkrese.57.3.02","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Amerindian myths dealing with the related themes of incest, eclipse, and the origin of the moon's spots reveal glimpses of an elaborate cosmological system, widespread across the Americas, that presents nature in terms of darkness, chaos, corruption, and mortality—in opposition to culture, which is identified with light, order, immortality, and the sacred. This opposition takes diverse manifestations and the mediation of these opposites is achieved, in both myth and ritual, in complex ways. This article uses a comparative approach to analyze myths and motifs documented by Claude Lévi-Strauss. The notorious abuse of comparative mythology in the past to vindicate colonialist and racist agendas has cast a dark shadow over this discipline. Instead of reducing the material to generalized functions of the mind or of human society, the ideas expressed are treated as manifestations of an intellectual tradition. Starting with the structural links that Lévi-Strauss makes between a large body of Amerindian myths, this article will reveal the richness and intellectual depth with which the relevant mythic ideas are elaborated in different cultures. The variations of an idea or motif are approached with the understanding that they are manifestations of a dynamic process of tradition and creation.","PeriodicalId":44620,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH","volume":"57 1","pages":"27 - 61"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43640299","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 Azerbaijani Ashiq: Musical Change, Transmission, and the Future of a Bardic Art","authors":"Behrang Nikaeen, Anna Oldfield","doi":"10.2979/jfolkrese.57.3.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfolkrese.57.3.01","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines how changes in methods of transmission are enhancing a tendency toward musical change in the Azerbaijani ashiq genre as it is performed in the Republic of Azerbaijan and northern Iran. Based on fieldwork in both of these regions, the authors have observed the ashiq genre in flux, shifting from an essentially narrative bardic genre to an essentially musical genre. Although many factors influence this change, this study focuses on how changing methods of transmission are impacting this change. Although the Republic of Azerbaijan and northern Iran are different contexts, the processes are similar: as the genre has changed from being taught in a master-apprentice model to music lessons and self-teaching, many of the skills specific to bardic dastan (epic) recitation are not being transmitted to younger ashiqs. Instead, musical skills that encourage virtuoso performance are being transmitted and are popular with contemporary audiences. This paper seeks to explore and contextualize this change from bardic to musical values within discussions of transmission and musical change in the disciplines of folklore and ethnomusicology.","PeriodicalId":44620,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH","volume":"57 1","pages":"1 - 25"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42302082","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":"On the Status of African Oral Tradition Since 1970s: An Interview with Robert Cancel","authors":"M. Mirzeler","doi":"10.2979/jfolkrese.57.3.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfolkrese.57.3.04","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This interview with Robert Cancel focuses on folklore studies of Africa since the 1970s. The interview indicates that the study of African oral tradition in the 1970s and early eighties revolved around a type of structuralism that eventually became known as performance theory, which was inspired by theories of cinema coming out of the French New Wave and the American new critics. Yet, African folklore studies remained firmly grounded in the contributions of Continental Folklorists, the Finnish Folklore Fellows, and the motif-tale-type theory as well as Russian formalism.","PeriodicalId":44620,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FOLKLORE RESEARCH","volume":"57 1","pages":"105 - 87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43973917","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}