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{"title":"Witchcraft and Magic: Contemporary North America","authors":"Mary Koegel","doi":"10.5860/choice.43-5596","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.43-5596","url":null,"abstract":"Witchcraft and Magic: Contemporary North America. Edited by Helen A. Berger. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Pp. 207, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95 cloth) Witchcraft and Magic sets out to clear up public misunderstandings about magical religions in America today. Editor Helen A. Berger's introduction briefly mentions areas of misunderstanding - social and political issues, diversity among magical religions, and modern manifestations which the essays in the collection are to address. Berger seeks to convey a clearer image of Neopaganism in this volume, as well as to illustrate similarities and differences among at least a few of the many distinct neopagan practices that have developed and seem to enjoy a growing popularity in North America. The book contains seven essays in addition to Berger's introduction. Though the editor has not explicidy separated these seven into thematic sections, three general divisions emerge as one reads the book: history and development, cultural manifestations of practices in North America, and representations of practices in contemporary mass media. The initial three essays discuss the development of the practice of magical religions in North America. While other essays in the volume include at least a brief historical overview, these three provide a politically and socially solid historical context for the entire work. Michael York, in \"New Age and Magic,\" looks at the New Age Movement in a generic sense, though widi a focus on North America. Helen A. Berger, in \"Witchcraft and Neopaganism,\" examines spiritual paths that have emerged in North America, such as Druidism and Odinism, acknowledging the New Age Movement in England and its influence on North American developments. The diird essay, \"Webs of Women: Feminist Spiritualities,\" by Wendy Griffin, addresses the feminist perspective and its influence upon developments in North America over the past several decades. Perhaps unavoidably these essays, despite their different emphases, become a bit repetitive in places. Michael York's \"Shamanism and Magic\" leads beautifully into the middle theree chapters, which focus on specific manifestations of magical religions and serve to show that magical religions comprise not only witchcraft and Neopaganism, but include distinct stand-alone variations such as Shamanism (as opposed to \"shamanism,\" witheout the capital letter) , Lucumi (a term preferred by contributor Ysamur M. Flores-Pena to the more commonly known Santeria, which she says carries racist connotations), and Satanism. Stuart A. Wright's essay, which analyzes mass-media portrayals of Satanism and public reactions to these portrayals, provides a comfortable segue to the seventh and final essay in the anthology. Tanice G. Foltz's \"The Commodification of Witchcraft\" rounds out the volume with an elaborate description and analysis of representations of witchcraft and magic in contemporary North American media, and assesses th","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"67 1","pages":"460"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2008-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71112068","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":"Algonquian Spirit: Contemporary Translations of Algonquian Literatures of North America","authors":"J. Rudy","doi":"10.5860/choice.43-5115","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.43-5115","url":null,"abstract":"Algonquian Spirit: Contemporary Translations of Algonquian Literatures of North America. Ethted by Brian Swann. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Pp xxx + 532, introduction, chapter notes and bibliographies, index. $34.95 paper) Brian Swann's Algonquian Spirit finishes a trilogy of anthologies on Native North American literatures in translation. As with his earlier volumes Coming to Light (1994) and Voices from Four thrections (2004), the intended authence is non-Native readers, and the purpose is to help those readers \"appreciate fascinating inthgenous languages and wonderful inthgenous literatures\" (2005: xxi). Unlike the previous works, which cover all of North America, Algonquian Spirit focuses on the language family closest to the ethtor's home and heart. Although Swann could produce anthologies on other language families, he suggests that this anthology is \"in all likelihood the final volume\" in his series of collections treating Native American oral literature (xix) . Swann incorporates thstinctive features into his anthologies to satisfy interest in and spark appreciation of Native literatures and languages. He prefaces each entry with an introduction, usually written by the translator or collector of the text, to provide contextual information incluthng historical background, linguistic features, details of the collecting process, and cultural clues to interpretation and understanthng. Bibliographic entries for further reathng and information about the performers, translators, and commentators also provide readers with knowledge that other anthologies, especially those from earlier in the twentieth century, omit. The result is readable, informative, enjoyable, and thought-provoking. Because Swann has invited specialists with a range of expertise to write the introductions (contributors include contemporary storytellers, graduate students, anthropologists, linguists, ethnomusicologists, and Native consultants past and present) , the scholarship varies from text to text. Swann notes in the introduction that this thversity is intentional: \"Some introductions may be more technical than others, but the aim is always to demonstrate the skill and particularities of the original [text]\" (2005: xx). Although the details and scholarly thsciplines vary, the introductions all have an engaged and informative tone. Some texts are presented in block paragraphs; other texts are rendered in lines following (to greater or lesser degree) ethnopoetic principles. Readers are left to their own knowledge to assess the effectiveness of the information and format of the entries. Swann provides little information about how he selected items for the anthology, though he notes his effort to include as much linguistic variety as possible and to provide historical breadth from the seventeenth through the twentyfirst centuries. The general organizing pattern is geographic, thvided into three parts, East, Central, and West. Swann's anthologies provide more ","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"67 1","pages":"444"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2008-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71111788","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":"Secrets beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives","authors":"E. Cray","doi":"10.5860/choice.42-5650","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.42-5650","url":null,"abstract":"Secrets beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives. By Maria Tatar. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Pp. xiv + 250, introduction, illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95 cloth, $17.95 paper) Secrets Beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives is an expansive but unpersuasive and problem-ridden monograph. In it, author Maria Tatar takes a second bite at the Bluebeard apple, having previously visited the larder in The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales (1987). Once upon a time, Tatar reviewed the various interpretations that folklorists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, and others have given to the tale of Barbe Bleue, who slays successive wives until he is finally himself killed (1987:156-178). The essential story, or perhaps the implicit moral, of the Bluebeard tale - what in today's business jargon is called the takeaway is about woman's curiosity. Is the heroine's discovery, her knowledge, an error, quite like Pandora or even the Biblical Eve; or, instead, is her newly discovered knowledge an opening of doors, a way to rescue and eventual happy marriage? (1987:3-4). As they say about carney games, you pays your money and you takes your choice. As with the tale itself, Tatar's work requires a willing suspension of disbelief for it to engage any but the most credulous. Critical scrutiny of any sort scorches her argument. Tatar claims that in both oral and written tradition, the curiosity of a male, such as Prometheus, is \"celebrated as a life-giving force,\" while that of a female \"is castigated as the death principle\" (1987:3-4). How then to reconcile \"How Toodie Fixed Old Grunt\" in which die diird daughter - in the Germanic tradition of threes it is typically the third (Olrik 1909) - slays Bluebeard? (Randolph 63-65). How to fit into Tatar's schema the Kentucky tale \"The Golden Ball,\" in which the protagonist is a litde boy, Johnny? (Roberts 30-32) . Tatar seems not to be bothered with cultural, geographical or chronological deviations such as these. She prefers to hew to \"The Bluebeard,\" as translated from the French of Charles Perrault's Mother Goose; upon that text she plants the single standard against which all others are to be measured. There are many translations of Perrault's 1697 Contes de ma mere l'oye. I use Barchilon and Pettit's edition, from a 1729 translation. Significandy for the present discussion, this translation of the moral to the tale asks \"which of the two, the man or wife, bears sway?\" (Barchilon and Pettit 1960:17-31). Such fiats will not do in considering folklore or its unending derivatives, yet it seems Tatar ignores folklore in Secrets Beyond the Door, even as she quotes author Margaret Atwood, who cautions diat \"die true story . . . [is] vicious and multiple and untrue\" (15). Tatar ranges far and wide in popular literature and film, seeing the Bluebeard motif everywhere, ignoring anything - including plot and audior's intent - diat does not fit her predetermine","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"67 1","pages":"428"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2008-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71107077","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 Saturated World: Aesthetic Meaning, Intimate Objects, Women's Lives, 1890-1940","authors":"L. Horton","doi":"10.5860/choice.44-6420","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.44-6420","url":null,"abstract":"The Saturated World: Aesthetic Meaning, Intimate Objects, Women's Lives, 1890-1940. By Beverly Gordon. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006. Pp. xii + 274, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $38.00 cloth) Beverly Gordon's new book is about \"the way American women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries enriched and added meaning to their lives through their 'domestic amusements'-leisure pursuits that took place in and were largely focused on the home\" ( 1 ). For anyone familiar with Gordon's writings, it is no surprise that she has provided this clear and concise overview in the book's first sentence, or that the rest of the book maintains this clarity and focus, supported by impeccable scholarship and elegant prose. Folklorists may well ask if a book that describes the practices of making paper-doll houses, planning elaborate parties, and dressing up and making costumes is useful for our field. My response would be that it depends on how we define our work. If we assume that the white, middle-class (broadly defined) women who participated in these activities do not constitute the kind of \"group\" that interests us; if we exclude these pursuits because they were promoted through books and magazines, incorporated commercially available materials (such as crepe paper), and functioned as \"popular\" culture of a past era; or if we look at the ephemeral nature of the resulting \"products,\" then we might conclude that there's nothing here of interest. However, Gordon uses popular genres to illustrate a larger concept, which she calls \"saturation.\" Expanding the word's meaning from its application to color intensity, she describes saturation as \"a kind of heightened experience (state, reality) that was aesthetically and sensually charged and full\" (1). This concept, it seems to me, is central for any scholar who seeks to understand why people create, embellish, or perform. For Gordon, the interrelated characteristics of the saturated world include the stimulation of multiple senses, various aspects of embodiment, childlike playfulness and expressiveness, a connectedness with other people, an intimacy with objects, and the value of process over product (3). Folklorists have explored similar qualities in the work of folk artists, particularly outsider artists who, by definition, explore idiosyncratic directions, but Gordon encourages us to look at the largely communal activities of ordinary women. \"These women created self-contained, enchanted 'worlds' that helped feed or sustain them, usually by elaborating on their everyday tasks and responsibilities, 'making them special' and transforming them into something playful and socially and emotionally satisfying\" (1). A chapter called \"Collecting\" offers a demonstration of gender differences in the motivations of men and women. Beginning with a brief but cogent overview of the explosive growth of collecting as a hobby at the turn of the ","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"63 1","pages":"310"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2008-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71116846","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":"Thinking through Material Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective","authors":"Charles Camp","doi":"10.5860/choice.43-2294","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.43-2294","url":null,"abstract":"Thinking Through Material Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. By Carl Knappett. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Pp. ix + 202, preface, maps, photographs, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95 cloth) \"Material culture\"-the phrase, not the thing to which it refers-has recently generated a considerable buzz in art history, where it identifies the ground against which the varied figures of aesthetically charged objects may be arrayed and compared. Building upon well-established morphologies, anthropologists who produce ethnographies of contemporary cultures continue to find \"material culture\" a useful term. And folklorists who embrace the concept of \"folklife\" have for some time applied the phrase to segment the range of cultural expressions found in any community, designating some as spoken, some as sung, some as gestural, some as material. A course that Don Yoder taught at the University of Pennsylvania for many years was titled \"Material Aspects of American Folk Culture.\" There was (and is) both precision and balance in the phrase: a whole thing-even so very large and complex a thing as American folk culture-could be dissected and clarified by aligning one of its apparent characteristics with its ontological equivalent. Finding friends among cultural geographers, linguists, and genealogists, to name just a few, Yoder, Warren Roberts, and other American folklorists who first championed folklife studies used \"material culture\" to suggest the vast reaches of tradition to be found within and beyond it. A half-generation later, Henry Glassie's groundbreaking Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States (1968) organized what had come before and charted a course for what would come next. Classic's early work was pointedly not about material culture; the first word in his book's title identified its true subject. Pattern's investigation of material folk culture was almost wholly concerned with pinning down the \"folk\" in material folk culture, not the \"material.\" This was (and is) certainly consistent with the arguments that preoccupied folklorists in the twentieth century. In the scramble to establish folklife studies, history seems a solid thing-too solid, perhaps, but understood if not assumed. Popular historians, Daniel Boorstin, for example, who write about folklore may seem a bit off m their identification of materials, in locating where the action is (1973). But archeologists have seemed to understand folklore, to choose examples that play to both historical and social scientific sensibilities. …","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"67 1","pages":"119"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2008-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71109532","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":"Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture","authors":"M. McKernan","doi":"10.5860/choice.43-2872","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.43-2872","url":null,"abstract":"Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture. By E. N. Anderson. (New York: New York University Press, 2005). Pp. viii + 295, introduction, photographs, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $60.00 cloth) Crusading \"to improve world nutrition,\" (8) E. N. Anderson says his work is not a textbook or basic reference volume, but a \"question raising essay\" (245). Call it textbook-lite. A worthwhile, if incomplete, survey of nutritional anthropology, Everyone Eats could be useful reading for introductory courses that discuss foodways. Anderson's prose is highly readable and he includes numerous references to scholarly works. His approach to food studies is \"biocultural\"-considering not just biology and culture, but also \"political economy, all at once\" (4). Torn between gloom and doom on the one side and techno-optimism on the other, Anderson disputes himself throughout: \"Time is short, ecological disaster is at hand; we have no time to lose\" (8). Yet \"[technology is doing quite well in solving world food problems, and even the much-maligned global marketplace is at least doing what it is supposed to do-motivating production and getting the food around\" (210). Seemingly contradictory statements challenge readers in this attempt to introduce the complexities of world food systems. In the final chapter, \"Feeding the World,\" the author announces that \"we simply cannot do without genetically modified crops [GMOs] in the future\" (220). But while still insisting that GMOs are essential, he writes that we are \"ignorant of the real costs and benefits . . . [and] the technology is untried, uncontrolled and uncertain\" (225). And finally, GMOs \"will not solve the world food problem\" (226). The initial chapters address nutrition and the sensory systems that affect individual perception of foods. While maintaining this biological underpinning, Anderson devotes perhaps twice as much space to sociocultural matters. Chapters on \"Food and Traditional Medicine\" and \"Food and Religion,\" as well as sections on classification systems, identity and status, and the (permeable) boundaries of ethnicity and cuisines, often approximate a folkloric viewpoint. Nutritional anthropology excels in stepping outside the \"ethnographic present\" to embrace the history and pre-history of foodways. Anderson does well in communicating the importance of the past for understanding present-day beliefs and practices. But some of his presentation of modern foodways is less compelling. For example, he discusses \"lifestyle\" as the \"most protean and most important of concepts\" and then quickly concludes that \"[i]t defines individuals and their foodways\" (129). Deeper analysis would help here, and in a few other places. (The paragraph following the one just cited does make a more profound point on a different topic, using a humorous story dealing with familial transmission of foodways.) Anderson's style sometimes approaches snideness when he is dealing with modern practices. …","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"67 1","pages":"112"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2008-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71109896","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":"Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942","authors":"M. Barton","doi":"10.5860/choice.43-2101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.43-2101","url":null,"abstract":"Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942. By John Wesley Work, Lewis Wade Jones, and Samuel C. Adams, Jr. Edited by Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005. Pp. xvi + 343, preface, introduction, photographs, illustrations, musical notation, maps, appendices, notes, indices. $34.95 cloth) Lost Delta Found presents important writings from an uncompleted project, launched on the eve of the second World War, to document the African American folk culture of an entire county, Coahoma, in the Mississippi Delta. A collaboration between the pioneering African American college Fisk University and the Library of Congress's Archive of American Folksong, the project was to have culminated in the publication of a large field study, and to that end some forty hours of field recordings were made (including the first of Muddy Waters), one hundred residents separately interviewed, and a variety of data gathered. The project bogged down in disagreement over editing and authorship, however, and was shelved when principal researchers Lewis Wade Jones of Fisk and Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress were drafted into the military. The present volume has been assembled by editors Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov from the project writings of Lewis Wade Jones, Samuel C. Adams, and Fisk University music professor John Wesley Work III. Although the only finished piece in this volume is \"Changing Negro Life in the Delta\" (Adams' Fisk M.A. thesis), all the writings are vital and illuminating, for they represent some of the earliest scholarship on African American folklife and folk music in the Mississippi Delta. At the time of the project's inception, Fisk was home to an innovative sociology department headed by Charles S. Johnson. Johnson and his associates (including Lewis Jones, but not John Work) had just published Growing up in the Black Belt (1941 ) a survey of eight predominantly black southern counties. Coahoma was depicted as a once-isolated area still dominated by the cotton plantation system but experiencing rapid mechanization and urbani/ation. Folk culture was not documented or studied for the book, but when Alan Lomax, who had been making field recordings throughout the South, Northeast and Midwest since 1933, visited Fisk in April, 1941 to take part in an anniversary celebration, a joint project was discussed, and Coahoma was subsequently chosen for further study. A brief preliminary field-recording trip was made at the end of the summer, with Johnson and Work present at some sessions, but most of the field recording was done the following summer by Alan Lomax and Lewis Jones. Working independently of Lomax and Jones, Samuel C. Adams and Fisk anthropology fellow Ulysses Young collected interviews and data on paper based on a prepared questionnaire, a method developed by Johnson. In Lewis Jones's writings for the unfinished study, he observes that three generat","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"66 1","pages":"408"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2007-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71108986","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":"Witchcraft and Welfare: Spiritual Capital and the Business of Magic in Modern Puerto Rico","authors":"Kyoim Yun","doi":"10.5860/choice.41-3519","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.41-3519","url":null,"abstract":"Witchcraft and Welfare: Spiritual Capital and the Business of Magic in Modern Puerto Rico. By Raquel Romberg. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Pp. xvii + 315, preface, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $50.00 cloth, $24.95 paper). This captivating work on Puerto Rican brujeria, or witch-healing, is a breakthrough study transcending geographic and disciplinary boundaries. Honoring the wishes of the bruja Haydee, a close collaborator during fieldwork, author Raquel Romberg will attempt to \"let the world know what brujos really do\" (xv) in contemporary capitalist Puerto Rico. Far from ethnicizing brujos as a group outside the mainstream, Romberg shows that they actively participate at the center of post-capitalist social systems while using their spiritual power and secular savvy as a means of enhancing their clients' spiritual and material well-being. Confounding widely held dichotomies of \"materialist and spiritualist\" or \"worldly and cosmic,\" the author makes a compelling case for linkage between these extremes in the contemporary practice of brujeria. Romberg accomplishes her goals by combining multi-layered historical and ethnographic approaches. The historical first part traces brujeria from the Spanish Catholic period, when it was persecuted as heretical (1502 to 1860), through a period of nationalist discourse that marked brujeria as anti-progressive (the 1860s through the 1970s), and into the current phase, characterized by spiritual entrepreneurialism (1980 to the present). Relating brujeria to the broader arena of political, religious, economic, state, and globalization discourses, this section provides a critical apparatus for understanding the way contemporary brujeria is interwoven with the past and with other locales. Taking the reader deep into the daily practice of Haydee and other brujos, the book's second part presents what brujeria means to practitioners and clients in their everyday lives in Puerto Rico. For them, the spiritual world provides power and resources for well-being in this world, a conviction that boosts their pursuit of material prosperity without at all conflicting with their faith in brujeria. Taking advantage of the laissezfaire space open to them and even resorting to manipulation of the institutional power that until recent decades persecuted them, brujos as spiritual entrepreneurs today legitimately exercise power. They not only solve their clients' mundane problems but also enhance their worldly success, and in so doing, brujos increase their own fame and their potential to attract clients. Romberg interlaces her ethnographic observations with issues that are both current and residual in folklore, anthropology, and religious studies; these include globalization, transnationalism, and authenticity. …","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"66 1","pages":"167"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2007-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71099067","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":"Performing Folklore: Ranchos Folclóricos from Lisbon to Newark","authors":"S. Hutchinson","doi":"10.5860/choice.43-5791","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.43-5791","url":null,"abstract":"Performing Folklore: Ranchos Folcloricos From Lisbon to Newark. By Kimberly DaCosta Holton. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press., 2005. Pp. xvi + 296, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, maps, illustrations, tables, musical notation, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $75.00 cloth, $27.95 paper) As a public folklorist in Long Island, I once worked with a Portuguese community in Mineola for whom folk dance was vitally important. Every Wednesday the sounds of accordions, drums, scrapers, and cavaquinhos resounded in their cultural center. As children rehearsed in the ballroom, fathers watched satellite news of Portugal and discussed soccer over vinho in the basement. The adult dancers' commitment was impressive: at their own expense they traveled throughout New England visiting other Portuguese folk dance groups (ranchos folcloricos) and spent months on end learning new repertoire in Portugal. They told me about dances-vira, malhao, shula-and about ranchos by the dozen along the northeastern seaboard. This is great stuff, I thought; someone should write a book about it. At last, someone has. Kimberly DaCosta Holton's book, Performing Folklore: Ranchos Folcloricos From Lisbon to Newark, based on fieldwork among ranchos in Portugal and New Jersey, is flavored by the autiior's own identity as a LusoAmerican. She sets out to discover why in both locales ranchos have continued to proliferate despite their origin under the Estado Novo (1933-1974) regime of dictator Antonio Salazar, when diey were used to keep the laboring classes busy and happy while fostering a fascist national agenda. After the 1974 revolution, the function of Portugal's ranchos changed along with national policy. First the newly created Federation of Portuguese Folklore (FFP) elevated ethnographic research and an enforced standard of \"authenticity\" (though Holton notes that earlier groups, too, had conducted fieldwork). Where during the Estado Novo years national competitions encouraged increasingly colorful costumes and stylized dances, costume reform and the pruning of repertoire in the post-revolutionary period reflected newly conceptualized regional identities and marked \"folklore's move from showmanship to scholarship\" (61). Top-down reforms did not always sit well with the ranchos, however. Many dancers resisted the FFP's mandated costuming changes, finding the less-colorful new versions unattractive, while the FFP \"Folklore Police\" eliminated everything that did not come directly from a rancho's home region. Even women's makeup and eyebrow-plucking were banned. Holton suggests that such post-revolutionary regulations, in making a \"spectacle out of ethnographic authenticity\" (87), actually constituted a reactionary move to uphold traditional gender roles and guard against the effects of modernization and liberalization. When Portugal joined the European Union and entered the era of globalization, ranchos continued to be important, but for new reasons. Many Portugue","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"66 1","pages":"187"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2007-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71112291","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":"Living Sideways: Tricksters in American Indian Oral Traditions","authors":"Willie Smyth","doi":"10.5860/choice.42-5713","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.42-5713","url":null,"abstract":"Living Sideways: Tricksters in American Indian Oral Traditions. By Franchot Ballinger. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006 [2004]. Pp. xii + 212, preface, introduction, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $19.95 paper) For students of folklore, familiarity with Coyote and other versions of Trickster is important because of the prominence of these figures in American Indian narrative. In Living Sideways: Tricksters in American Indian Oral Traditions, Franchot Ballinger raises important questions concerning tricksters, including those centering on hindrances to outsiders' understanding of them: \"What do we really know about tricksters if we view them through Euro-American and not tribal eyes? How does one negotiate the differences (in trickster stories) and what about the similarities? And: \"What can a single telling of a story reveal to us about its culture?\"(7) Ballinger's book is, overall, a compendium of scholars' failed attempts to explain the significance of tricksters in America Indian traditions, though the author does give credit where it is due, and he does offer some analysis of his own to help us better understand the trickster enigma. In the process we become well acquainted with the bulk of trickster scholarship produced up to the mid-1990s. In his introduction, he outlines the general contours of previous scholarship, presents a need for multi-modal interpretation of trickster stories, and explains the polyvocality and overlapping of myth and story in American Indian oral tradition: \"Such an array of meanings is certainly consistent with the many-sided nature of reality as manifested in the trickster himself\" (17). The book's exposition then follows-a via negativa route along which the author points up deficiencies of prior interpretation. In chapter one, Carl Jung's and Paul Radin's stress on Trickster as archetype and cultural hero (Jung 1972, Radin 1956), Mac Linscott Ricketts' view of Trickster's humanist elements (1966, 1987), Barbara Babcock-Abrahams' notion of marginality (1975), andjarold Ramsey's interpretation of Trickster as bricoleur (1977) are examined. All interpretations are useful within limits, the author observes-but most, if not all, interpreters seem to have fitted Trickster into their own paradigms without doing justice to Trickster's wider significance, especially to American Indians themselves: \"Like subatomic particles, tricksters never allow a final definition of time, place, and character. They never settle or shape themselves to allow closure either fictional or moral\" (30). In chapter two, the author explores why tricksters are generally associated with animals, along with Trickster's role as cultural hero. Trickster's activities as wanderer help define the experiential physical and social world-but also deconstruct the same definitions through comic inversion of the mythic journey. Here Ballinger discusses the contributions and shortcomings of such interpreters as Andrew Wiget (1990), Barry","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"65 1","pages":"487"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2006-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71107284","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}