WESTERN FOLKLORE最新文献

{"title":"The Lancashire Pace-Egg Play: A Social History","authors":"Pauline Greenhill, E. Cass","doi":"10.2307/1500341","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1500341","url":null,"abstract":"The Lancashire Pace-Egg Play: A Social History. By Eddie Cass. (London: FLS Books, n.d. [2001]. Pp. xiv + 257, preface, introduction, photographs, illustrations, appendices, bibliography, index. L13.95 paper) In the best of all possible folklore scholarship worlds, every traditional practice would be the subject of a book like this one. In the preface, Eddie Cass confesses that he saw his first pace-egg play in 1968 \"under the influence of T.S. Eliot and, through him, of James Frazer, Jessie Weston, and the Cambridge anthropologists\" (xi). It's clear he's come a very long way in the interim; the book is called a social history, but it is much more. Not limited to bibliographical and archival research, it also includes ethnographic work: participant observation and interviews. Personally, I would differ with the romanticised conclusion to the preface: \"The custom has to be at least two hundred years old in the county. That in itself makes it a folk tradition worth preserving\" (xiii). Lots of old traditions, like racism, sexism, and homophobia, are definitely unworthy of preservation. Yet there is no doubt that pace-egging deserves-and receives-a thorough, respectful, and erudite treatment from Cass. The introduction discusses the play (the hero-combat type) as a calendar custom (usually presented at Easter) and as a \"legitimized wealth transfer transaction\" (1), by which children and adults gather money and food. Though he does not subscribe to it, Cass points out that the idea that such activities were ritual survivals significantly affected 20th century revival participants' understandings of what they were doing. But he also seems to conflate the ritual/spiritual explanation with the play's meaning per se, as in: \"there is no clear historical evidence that the play has a meaning\" (3). The concept that any practice, traditional or otherwise, could be without meaning seems bizarre-particularly so when the practice has such a long history as pace-egging. This notion of the play's meaninglessness points to one of a few locations where readers may find Cass's perspective somewhat opaque. The book's first chapter goes through definitions of folk drama and locates the Lancashire pace-egg play within them, as well as in its geographical setting in northwestern England. He points out that \"pace-egging was a house-visiting custom within the working class community,\" not only to raise money from the \"merchants and masters\" (30), and argues that its decline, then, can be explained in terms of changes within the community, rather than simply alterations in the socioeconomic class structure. This seems a sensible approach, given the pace-egg play's clearly demonstrated adaptability not only to different socioeconomic structures, but also to different contexts within the communities in which it was played. The chapter on performance and performers draws attention to a variety of specifics, from costume to audience participation, focusing primarily upon histor","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2002-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1500341","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68838006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Pots, kettles, and interpretations of blackness","authors":"P. Turner","doi":"10.2307/1500286","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1500286","url":null,"abstract":"Like any folklorist: would be, I was honored by the invitation to deliver the 2001 Archer Taylor Memorial Lecture. I first attended a California Folklore Society meeting in 1980, during one of my first years in graduate school. Although I eventually selected a different dissertation topic on African-American discourse, I became very interested in proverb study during that intellectually stimulating time. Because they are one of the most popular genres of everyday speech, proverbs encapsulate the appeal of folklore study to scholars dedicated to analyzing the worldview of peoples whose cultures are more oral than written. For those of us interested in African-American folklore, the omnipresence of proverb use in everyday speech indicates that studies of African-American world view may be incomplete without proverb analysis. At the UC Berkeley Folklore Archives, I ferreted out the files on African-American proverbs as well as the folders on Anglo ones. I was looking for commonality. I wanted to know which proverbs were commonly repeated and reported by both blacks and whites. And were there similarities in the interpretations of meaning? The most frequently reported proverb in the African-American files was some version or another of \"Don't let your mouth write a check your ass can't cash.\" But I didn't find versions of it in the Anglo file. \"That's like the pot calling the kettle black\" was the most frequently reported proverb in the African-American files that also had a thick folder in the Anglo files. But while the proverb is clearly familiar in both cultures, informant interpretations vary. I began with my personal understanding of the proverb's meaning. For me, the proverb is probably the most appropriate idiom to use when I \"catch\" someone making a hypocritical statement. Since my family, my father in particular, did not suffer hypocrites gladly, I certainly grew up hearing this proverb and had it directed at me whenever I might accuse someone of a fault I possessed. Proverbs were teaching tools and by pointing out hypocrisy in this fashion, my parents were trying to mitigate this attribute in me. Another common usage in my own family is to utter the proverb itself in order to get away with a sharp observation. An example here might be, \"This is sort of like the pot calling the kettle black, but I heard that Jan was working on his paper right up until the California Folklore Society meetings.\" Here I've called myself a hypocrite before anyone else can level the accusation but also managed to get in a jab at Jan. The coloring of pots and kettles posed no problems. I grew up in kitchens adorned by black cast iron cookware and my own still fledgling culinary skills are rooted in the use of these imposing tools. My father's farm kitchen didn't have electricity until I was around eleven so when I ate there, it was food cooked in a cast iron pot on a wood stove. There was always a kettle of water on the stove because of the need to add moisture to","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2002-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1500286","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68837828","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Balut: Fertilized Duck Eggs and Their Role in Filipino Culture","authors":"M. Magat","doi":"10.2307/1500289","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1500289","url":null,"abstract":"\"Whoever discovered balut stumbled onto the fact that food has changing excellences (taste, texture) as it evolves and develops. Thus between the egg and the full-grown duck, there are stages that bear exploring-and eating. And the Filipino has explored them and evolved the culture of balut.\" Doreen Fernandez in \"The World of Balut\" This essay illustrates how consumption of one particular food, fertilized duck eggs, can reveal the interplay between food, beliefs, culture and history. Called balut in the Philippines or hot vit lon in Vietnam, fertilized duck eggs are also familiar in the food customs of Chinese, Laotians, Cambodians and Thais. Socio-cultural factors, not just nutritional reasons dominate its consumption. Using historical and literary sources, as well as fieldwork data culled from 25 balut eaters, two balut distributors and a duck farmer as well, I will explore what it is about balut that makes eating it desirable. Why ingest something that may already have bones, feathers and a beak? For Filipino and other Asian Americans, there are alternative sources of protein, (which is not the case for many in the Philippines who do not have the luxury of choice). \"Eating is usually a more complicated function than just taking nourishment\" wrote food scholar Kurt Lewin. The complexities involved in the eating of balut, or any other food for that matter, has since been explored by a number of folklorists and anthropologists. Food scholarship has ranged from food as a semiotic system (Theophano 1991; Douglas 1966 & 1972; Weismantel 1988), to how consumption is tied to psychological and economic factors (Lewin 1942; Richards 1932), to the way food defines ethnicity (Brown and Mussell 1984; Georges 1984; Kalcik 1984). However, much of the debate between food scholars is between the materialists, led by Marvin Harris and Marshall Sahlins, and symbolic theorists such as Mary Douglas and Claude Levi-Strauss. Harris agrees that food may have symbolic meaning, but before anything else, \"food must nourish the collective stomach before it can feed the collective mind\" and whatever foods are eaten, \"are foods that have a more favorable balance of practical benefits over costs than foods that are avoided (bad to eat)\" (Harris 1985:15). For Douglas, however, food embodies a code, and the messages in it can be seen in \"the pattern of social relations\" (1972:61). Who is being excluded or included can be gleaned from the food categories and meal patterns; for example, drinks are reserved for strangers and acquaintances while meals are for intimate friends and family (Douglas 66). In the case of balut, both symbolic and material explanations can illuminate the reasons why people would eat embryonic duck eggs. Although it is always eaten boiled, and never raw, eating balut requires the consumption of something in the fetal stage, and psychological, cultural, and socio-economic factors must all be considered. Generally sold late at night or early morning, balut ","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2002-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1500289","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68837445","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Modern Construction of Myth","authors":"Gregory Schrempp, Andrew von Hendy","doi":"10.2307/1500291","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1500291","url":null,"abstract":"The Modern Construction of Myth. By Andrew Von Hendy. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Pp. xvii + 386, acknowledgments, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95 cloth) This is a large, sophisticated study of currents in theory of myth from the eighteenth century onward, bringing together works from a number of disciplines and reminding the reader how broad-spread academic interest in myth is (spanning literature, social sciences, classics, philosophy, and semiotics, among others). Although Von Hendy's work is a gangling thing, it will reward those who persist-especially, perhaps, scholars who are versed in some strands of myth theory but not others. Because the syntheses offered are so abstract, it will likely be less useful as an introduction to myth theory. The body of the work deals with four concepts of myth (each actually a tangle of strands held together by a dominant impetus); in briefest terms these are the romantic (myth as a realm of timeless, transcendental values), the ideological (myth as a widespread lie), the constitutive (myth as a necessary but fictive foundational belief), and the folkloristic (myth as a genre dealing with collective concerns in small-scale, oral societies). The four foci work effectively for laying a base as well as for exploring connections with recent figures who are difficult to classify (e.g., Roland Barthes, Leszek Kolakowski, Hans Blumenberg). At his best moments Von Hendy is full of subtle, synthetic insights about inheritances and intersections among myth theorists, although some long stretches are mainly summaries of books by mythologists (e.g., the treatment of Erich Neumann). Considering its level of abstraction, the work remains generally intelligible. Exceptions occur in the treatment of the romantics and neo-romantics such as Cassirer. Von Hendy's writing seems to shift, chameleon-like, to emulate the particular thinker he is discussing at a given moment. While this is an interesting and at times helpful trait, in the context of the (shall we say) luminescent vagueness of the romantics and neo-romantics it gives rise to moments of second-order luminescent vagueness. Von Hendy's is an \"intellectual history\" which rarely steps outside the world of ideas to directly consider issues of social and political context-this despite the fact that Von Hendy seems to relish the sociopolitical contextualizing brought to the study of myth by the folkloristic mythologists. While some will regard the lack of contextualizing as a major flaw, it might also be seen as self-imposed limitation-one whose motivation in this case I applaud. Specifically, Von Hendy is responding to what he sees as a lack of historical self-knowledge among myth theorists. …","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2002-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1500291","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68837516","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Harmonizing Corrido and Union Song at the Ludlow Massacre","authors":"S. Rudd","doi":"10.2307/1500287","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1500287","url":null,"abstract":"In Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914, anti-union state militia and hired gunmen opened fire on a colony of miners and their families. After a ten-hour assault with machine guns, dynamite, fire, and kerosene, over twenty people died and many more were wounded. The most publicized atrocity was the death of two women and eleven children who took refuge in a ground cellar only to suffocate and burn to death in what became known as the infamous Black Hole. The Ludlow Massacre became a catalyst for pro-labor movements across the nation as well as a subject of much debate by lawmakers, historians, labor activists, and writers such as Meridel LeSueur, Upton Sinclair, Zeese Papanikolas, and even George S. McGovern. More recently, the site of the Ludlow Massacre has been the focus of annual archaeological digs as scholars endeavor to find more details surrounding the history of this significant labor conflict. Each discovery and rendition of the massacre adds greater understanding to the history of the people, times, and events of the Colorado Coal Strike, but many stories remain to be told. Throughout his lifetime Elias Baca (1895-1998) sang the history of the massacre by synthesizing corrido and union song forms. Taking a corrido form widely used for protest by Mexicans and Mexican Americans and combining it with union song elements, Baca created his own discourse to broadcast and comment on the massacre. Looking at the historical and social contexts surrounding Baca's corrido and at the formulas and customs of both Mexican American balladry and union song allows for several conclusions: First, Hispano and Mexican American culture had a distinct and vocal presence in the Colorado Coal Strike as well as in other mining conflicts throughout the intermountain West. Second, Baca used his corrido to rally Spanish-speaking union miners and to emphasize the unity and power of the union, making Baca's corrido one of the earliest pro-union corridos recorded, if not the earliest. Third, Baca's adaptations and additions to traditional border corrido forms and union songs create a new corrido form as well as a new social identity for its performers. Representing the culture and history of a working-class people who had little access to other forms of expression, Baca's song is a discourse that is critical for understanding the larger history of the massacre, specifically how members of unique ethnic groups worked together to fight capitalist corruption and oppression. HISTORICAL CONTEXT The Ludlow Massacre occurred after a long and disillusioning strike. Before the 14 month-long strike, the Colorado state government ruled that mine operators must give miners eight-hour days, an elected check-weighman, the right to patronize any business or doctor, and the right to organize. When none of these rulings were enforced, on September 23, 1913, an estimated thirteen thousand miners went on strike against the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, leaving only 7 percent of the wor","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2002-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1500287","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68837377","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Multicultural Southwest: A Reader","authors":"T. Griffin-Pierce, Gabriel A. Melendez, M. J. Young, Patricia Moore, Patrick Pynes","doi":"10.2307/1500299","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1500299","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2002-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1500299","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68838227","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Medieval Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Myths, Legends, Tales, Beliefs, and Customs","authors":"H. Kelly, C. Lindahl, John Mcnamara, John Lindow","doi":"10.2307/1500413","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1500413","url":null,"abstract":"Medieval Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Myths, Legends, Tales, Beliefs, and Customs. 2 Vols. Ed. Carl Lindahl, John McNamara, and John Lindow. (Santa Barbara, Denver, and Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 2000. Pp. xxxiii + 1135, preface, acknowledgments, illustrations, indexes. $175 cloth) This large compilation consists of 306 entries in alphabetical order, each followed by \"references and further reading.\" Many of the entries are only a page or two long; the longest, like \"Folklore\" and \"Folktale\" (both by Lindahl), can be 10 or 12 pages. There are comparatively lengthy entries on geographical areas by experts in the field: Arab-Islamic (Ulrich Marzolph), Baltic, Finno-Ugric (both by Thomas A. Dubois), English (McNamara and Lindahl), French (Francesca Canade Sautman), German (Leander Petzoldt), Hispanic (Samuel G. Armistead), Hungarian (Eva Pocs), Irish (Joseph Falaky Nagy), Italian (Guiseppe C. DiScipio), Jewish (Eli Yassif), Scandinavian (Stephen A. Mitchell), Scottish (McNamara), East Slavic (why not West Slavic as well?-Eve Levin), and Welsh (Elissa R Henken and Brynley F Roberts). We are told in the preface that traditions of the British Isles are favored in the choice of entries (however, the judicious findings of Ronald Hutton on subjects like Halloween, Samhain, and harvest festivals have not been utilized). Most expected topics can be found here, but surprisingly, nothing on Superstition, Luck, or Omen, and nothing on number symbolism except as used by Dante. What were the medieval equivalents-or lack thereof-for fear of the number 13 or of Friday the 13th? No obvious answer here. Church law is also neglected, for instance in the entries on Law and Marriage Traditions (no account of clandestine marriages in the latter). Many entries are not folkloric in any but the most general and unhelpful sense, i.e., everything is folklore-for instance, those on St. Andrew's Day (in contrast to a pertinent entry on St. Anne), Apollonius of Tyre, Bagpipe, Bal des Ardents, Bowed Strings, Boy Bishop, St. Catherine of Alexandria, Chanson de Geste, Chretien de Troyes, Courtly Love, and so on, ending with Zither. Some of these topics could easily have been given a folkloric emphasis, of course, which means that the editors should have re-worked the drafts submitted and returned them for the contributors' \"approval.\" The editors, however, seem to have been so timid that they did not even venture to insert motif or tale-type numbers into entries where these are lacking, even though they list them in the indexes at the end of Volume 2. There is, by the way, no abbreviations page at the beginning, and two of the targeted audiences (nonfolkloric medievalists and nonfolkloric nonmedievalists) are likely to be mystified by \"B160.1,\" \"AT 1242A,\" and the like, unless they are dedicated enough or lucky enough to find the indexes at the end. The editors recount the instructions that they gave to contributors, telling them especially to be very specific in dating and in characterizi","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2001-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1500413","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68839609","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Whispers on the Color Line: Rumor and Race in America","authors":"B. Ellis, G. Fine, P. Turner","doi":"10.2307/1500416","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1500416","url":null,"abstract":"Whispers on the Color Line: Rumor and Race in America. By Gary Alan Fine and Patricia A. Turner. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Pp. x + 260, illustration, notes, index. $27.50 cloth) This book presents an important argument for folkloristics as both a valid academic discipline and a valuable intellectual tool for helping American culture work toward honest and productive racial understanding. It is built on Fine's conviction that folklore studies can play a central role in academia and on Turner's penetrating work on folk narrative in the black community, as seen in her classic I Heard it Through the Grapevine (1993). This work extends their scholarship to deal with a variety of persistent and newly emerged traditions, with particular attention given to the role of the Internet in transmitting folklore. Especially telling is the authors' development of Turner's 'Topsy/Eva\" concept, holding that similar stories tend to circulate simultaneously in both black and white communities. In some cases, the stories provoke violent clashes, and the role of rumor in race riots throughout the twentieth century is well told. However, in many other cases the stories are distinct and reflect different cultural perspectives on a single concern-mercantilism, suspicion of government, sexually transmitted disease, and violent crime. There are many highlights: the discussion of legends inspired by fried chicken brings together insights from Fine's \"Kentucky-fried rat\" scholarship and Turner's discussion of the belief that some restaurant chains promote the Klan or add chemicals to their product to sterilize black males. The chapter on government conspiracies extends Turner's previous work into new areas, particularly the complex issues raised by Ron Brown's mysterious death in a plane accident in Bosnia. Turner and Fine reasonably note that rumors have a way of being true and rightly discuss what rumors say about the worldviews of the communities involved without the authors' committing themselves to conclusions about the truth/falsehood of such rumors. In this regard, the work is an important corrective to more popular-based approaches that begin with the assumption that contemporary legends are, above all else, false. On the other hand they do deal thoughtfully with the issues raised by false claims of attacks by the other race, and one of the most disturbing chapters discusses the influence of folk beliefs and narratives on the Tawana Brawley and Susan Smith affairs. A concluding chapter pulls together important lessons drawn from this research and suggests that both folklore and folkloristics could help reduce racial tensions and enhance communication between these historically divided communities. Without sugarcoating the difficulties that remain, Fine and Turner suggest ways in which members of both races could \"listen to themselves and each other more carefully and critically\" (229). While the book begins with a strong statement of the import","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2001-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1500416","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68839695","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Folklore and Fantastic Literature","authors":"C. W. Sullivan","doi":"10.2307/1500409","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1500409","url":null,"abstract":"I At first blush,joining a term like \"folklore,\" which has its roots deep in traditions traceable back through generations, with terms like \"fantasy\" and \"science fiction,\" which seem to have less to do with the past than with alternate realities or projected futures, may seem like a juxtaposition of dubious value. Folk materials, it seems, are something we recognize quickly in nineteenth-century writers like Cooper, Melville, or Hawthorne, or something we use to decode writers from longer ago and farther away-Shakespeare, Chaucer, and the Gawain poet, for example. But this latter use of folklore, to help decode literatures of the remote past and therefore substantially removed from the world in which we now live, is a key to that juxtaposition: the writer of fantastic literature, the creator of impossible worlds, has need of and uses folklore to make those imagined words accessible to the reader in much the same way, if obverse, as the modern critic might use a knowledge of folk materials to gain access to the meanings) behind Shakespeare's depictions of \"heroic deaths\" in Macbeth, Chaucer's use of the color red in reference to the Wife of Bath's stockings, or the Gawain poet's attention to hunting lore. In short, fantasy and science fiction authors use traditional materials, from individual motifs to entire folk narratives, to allow their readers to recognize, in elemental and perhaps subconscious ways, the reality and cultural depth of the impossible worlds these authors have created. The word \"impossible\" appears in many of the leading critical definitions of fantastic literature. C.S. Lewis, in Experiment in Criticism (1965), defines fantasy as \"any narrative that deals with impossibles or preternaturals\" (50). In Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (1975), Colin Manlove argues that a \"substantial and irreducible element of supernatural or impossible worlds, beings, or objects\" is essential to fantastic literature; and he defines \"supernatural or impossible\" as \"of another order of reality from that in which we exist and form our notions of possibility\" (3). In The Fantastic in Literature (1976), Eric Rabkin argues that the \"polar opposite\" of reality is fantasy (15). And in \"Problems of Fantasy\" (1978), S.C. Fredericks calls fantasy \"the literature of the impossible\" (37). These critical exercises, which took place in the 1960s and 1970s, as fantastic literature was experiencing an enormous increase in popularity, led Gary Wolfe, in \"The Encounter with Fantasy\" (1982), to assert that the \"criterion of the impossible ... may be the first principle generally agreed upon for the study of fantasy\" (1-2). Although the foregoing definitions have appeared to set fantastic literature in opposition to realistic literature, critic Kathryn Hume suggests that we should see the real and the impossible as separate ends of a continuum that includes all fiction. She argues that literature is the product of two impulses. These are mimesis, felt as the desire to im","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2001-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1500409","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68839783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The \"Topping Out\" Traditions of the High-Steel Ironworkers","authors":"John Robinson","doi":"10.2307/1500407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1500407","url":null,"abstract":"\"Topping out\" is the term used by ironworkers to indicate that the final piece of steel is being hoisted into place on a building, bridge, or other large structure.1 The project is not completed, but it has reached its maximum height. To commemorate this first milestone the final piece of iron is usually hoisted into place with a small evergreen tree (called a Christmas tree in the trade) and an American flag attached.2 The piece is usually painted white and signed by the ironworkers and visiting dignitaries (figure 1). If the project is important enough (and the largesse of the contractor great enough) the ceremony may culminate in a celebration known as a \"topping out party\" in which the construction crews are treated to food and drink. Ironworkers belong to the union called The International Association of Bridge, Structural, and Ornamental Ironworkers, which was established in 1896. Local #1 is in Chicago, the putative birthplace of the skyscraper. The work encompasses a wide variety of construction activities from the placement of reinforcing steel (called \"re-bar\") in concrete structures, to welding, to heavy rigging, to the more visible and extreme activities like the erection of skyscrapers and bridges. The oldest continuous aspect of the trade is practiced by ornamental ironworkers who install metal stairways, ladders, catwalks and a wide array of decorative metal structures. Ornamental ironwork predates the union and the use of structural steel by many hundreds of years. Even though steel long ago supplanted iron as a building material the men in the trade are called ironworkers-not steel workers-and they usually refer to the columns and beams as iron. One reason the ironworkers observe the topping out custom is the simple fact that they are the first workers to reach the top of the structure. I guess the impulse to commemorate the achievement is similar to that of mountain climbers-or astronauts landing on the moon for that matter.3 Topping out the structure means the end is in sight for the \"raising-gang\"-the men who actually set the iron in place. There is more work to be done, and ironworkers will be involved in some aspects of it, but the heavy work is done and the raising gang is almost out of a job. While no two topping out ceremonies are the same, they usually have some combination of a tree, a flag, the ritual signing of the final beam, and a party. The custom of decorating the uppermost point of the structure with an evergreen tree is a tradition that predates the structural-steel industry in America by hundreds of years and has old Northern European roots. Although the topping out tree has ancient roots there is no consensus among modern ironworkers as to what exactly the tree symbolizes, or when and how it came to be used by the ironworkers. According to The Ironworker, the union's official publication, \"for some the evergreen tree symbolizes that the job went up without a loss of life, while for others it's a good luck char","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2001-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1500407","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68839665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}