WESTERN FOLKLORE最新文献

{"title":"Cheap and Tasteful Dwellings: Design Competitions and the Convenient Interior, 1879-1909","authors":"Lonn Taylor","doi":"10.5860/choice.43-3217","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.43-3217","url":null,"abstract":"Cheap and Tasteful Dwellings: Design Competitions and the Convenient Interior, 1879-1909. By Jan Jennings. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005. Pp. xxxv + 313, acknowledgments, prologue, introduction, photographs, illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $48.00 cloth) While Cheap and Tasteful Dwellings is ostensibly a book about design contests for inexpensive residential structures run between 1879 and 1909 by the magazine Carpentry and Building, the author, a professor of design and environmental analysis at Cornell, uses these events as an entry point to discuss a variety of topics of interest to folklorists concerned with material culture and vernacular architecture. These topics include the role of pattern books in shaping nineteenth-century building; the concept of \"practical architecture\" and the spread of architect-designed homes for ordinary people; the development of the architectural profession toward the end of the nineteenth century; and the evolution of the idea of convenient room arrangement in residences. The text is divided into two main sections of several chapters each. In the first section, the author focuses on what seems to her to be a representative group of late nineteenth-century practical architects: the 86 winners and 63 other competitors in Carpentry and Building's contests over a thirty-year period. Drawing on intensive research in a wide variety of sources, she examines the training, methods, and business practices of the contestants. A central theme of this section is how young people could become architects. About a third of the competition winners were carpenters or builders who \"passed into professional ranks\"; another third had apprenticed as draftsmen in architects' offices; and the final third had either taken correspondence courses in architecture or attended a university school of architecture. Because Jennings argues that learning to draft and to make architectural drawings was what elevated carpenters into architects, she goes into considerable detail about the processes of architectural drawing. In the second section, Jennings analyzes the drawings submitted by the winning architects and uses these to chart the emergence of \"convenient arrangement\"-asymmetric floor plans that gained ascendancy in the late nineteenth century over the more formal arrangements dictated by Georgian and Greek Revival styles and were the forerunners of \"ranch style\" floor plans of the 1940s and 1950s. …","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"65 1","pages":"495"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2006-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71109986","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":"Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921-1942","authors":"Peter B. Lowry","doi":"10.2307/25046018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/25046018","url":null,"abstract":"Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921-1942. By Tony Russell, with editorial research by Bob Pinson, assisted by the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. xi + 1183, acknowledgments, introduction, discography, bibliography, indices. $95.00 cloth) Why would a thousand-page alphabetical list of commercial music recordings from the first half of the twentieth century assembled by a Briton capture the interest of students of American folk music? The answer is that in those early days, the commercial recording companies were doing our fieldwork for us. Not that they knew what they were doing. Still clueless, at this early stage, about their emerging market, they took chances and offered commercial releases of all kinds, thus preserving much music that would today be called folk music or community music. Recordings by white Southern artists came to be known as old-time music, and those by African American artists, race records. There was a multi-ethnic recording enterprise as well. All such commercial music products played a role in the dispersal of tunes and styles throughout the world, flying upon the wings of a new and exciting technology. Though the mode of transmission was still aural/oral, the unseen potential audience was huge. Performance styles and musical repertoires could now be heard worldwide and could therefore be extremely influential, as shown in the present tome's alphabetical entries for Gene Autry, Vernon Dalhart, and Jimmie Rodgers. I have known author Tony Russell since he was editor of the now-defunct British journal Old Time Music (founded in 1971, foundered in year unknown), and have observed the present work's gestation over decades. I remember talk of its promised publication over the years-that it would be \"soon.\" Well, soon has finally happened, and Tony Russell has given birth to a toe-breaker of a tome. We are all relieved and pleased and we hope that the father is doing as well as his offspring appears to be, with no postpartum depression. It was worth the wait: the first three decades of old-time music, a.k.a. hillbilly music and old favorite tunes, both secular and sacred, will be found here in exhaustive but user-friendly detail. Russell begins with capsule histories of the many labels extant during the three decades covered by the discography. He then offers his main text, beautifully laid out and cross-referenced six ways to Sunday-listings of artists, songs, side musicians, release numbers, recording dates. The layout is clean and workable, the indices chockablock: it's a true \"compleat\" work of love. (Though admittedly a work of this kind can never be called complete, I predict that any additions or adjustments to Russell's work will be minor.) There are many discographic reference works with roughly the same cutoff date (somewhat arbitrary, but any such cutoff point is), because during and after World War II the record business and its technologies ch","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"65 1","pages":"366"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2006-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/25046018","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68749251","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 Anguish of Snails: Native American Folklore in the West","authors":"G. M. Hamilton","doi":"10.5860/choice.41-3200","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.41-3200","url":null,"abstract":"The Anguish of Snails: Native American Folklore in the West. By Barre Toelken. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 204, acknowledgments, prologue, photographs, notes, index. $39.96 cloth, $22.95 paper) In 1989, the National Museum of the American Indian Act (NMAI) required Smithsonian museums to repatriate sensitive Indian objects. In the process, curators were to examine not just archaeological, geographical, biological and anthropological records in determining the cultural affiliation of objects, but also linguistic, folkloric and oral-traditional evidence provided to museums by tribal people. While laws such as NMAI and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990 require that federally funded organizations examine their collections in light of Native American testimony, no law demands that scholars approach Native studies with the same level of collaborative engagement. Barre Toelken, in developing his book's title metaphor, observes that because scholars have, in the name of objectivity, distanced themselves from Native cultures, they have focused on (for example) the chemical composition of the \"snails\" they are studying. In such distancing, scholars have missed \"the anguish of snails\"-relevant cultural experience with which to inform their research. Toelken argues that subjective involvement is not only valid but necessary for authentic research and for sensitivity to research as it impinges upon Native peoples. After nearly fifty years of successful collaborations with Native people in the West, Toelken's career alone attests to the value of subjective involvement in the analytical discussion of cultures; yet if one had any doubts regarding the merits of this approach, The Anguish of Snails: Native American Folklore in the West should seal the deal. Toelken uses ordinary, everyday American Indian texts as tools to explore Native worldview and values and in turn demonstrates how Native cultural constructs lead to discoveries about the world. With an emphasis on innovative thinking and using a variety of divergent texts, The Anguish of Snails demonstrates wonderfully that one can learn a tremendous amount about American Indian culture without having to apprentice oneself to a New Age shaman. (Who knew?) Toelken avoids esoteric materials and suggests that to study tribal people one need \"simply listen to their voices and watch their performances, their expressions-their freely shared folklore-in the routine of their normal lives\" (6). By focusing on texts readily available to outsiders (for example, baskets, moccasins, powwows, carvings, stories, and jokes), Toelken illustrates the validity of a subjective approach and reveals the cultural value of these texts to Native people. Toelken opens his story with a discussion of American Indian material art, demonstrating the significance of Native oral traditions through examination of a specific Tlingit totem pole known as the \"Seward shame pole.\" ","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"65 1","pages":"332"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2006-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71099193","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":"Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965/gay Seattle: Stories of Exile and Belonging/The Courage to Connect: Sexuality, Citizenship, and Community in Provincetown","authors":"M. Weems","doi":"10.5860/choice.41-2981","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.41-2981","url":null,"abstract":"Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965. By Nan Alamilla Boyd. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 321, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, maps, appendices, notes, index. $27.50 cloth, $16.95 paper); Gay Seattle: Stories of Exile and Belonging. By Gary L. Atkins. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. Pp. ix + 451, acknowledgments, prologue, photographs, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $28.95 cloth); The Courage to Connect: Sexuality, Citizenship, and Community in Provincetown. By Sandra L. Faiman-Silva. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Pp. x + 279, preface, introduction, photographs, illustrations, maps, tables, appendices, bibliography, index. $35.00 cloth) These three histories, in chronicling three different GLBT (gay lesbian bisexual transgender) communities rather than one overarching national storyline, allow us to see the development of GLBT identities according to local, not national, conditions. Because we cannot know the nation if we don't know our communities, and we cannot know our communities if we don't listen to individuals within them, I recommend all three of these. Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 chronicles the manner in which unofficial city-sanctioned sex tourism, countered by official efforts to clean up vice, affected queer identity formation before Stonewall (1969). Author Nan Alamilla Boyd shows that San Francisco's lucrative reputation as a wide-open town in the years following the second World War contributed to its development as a safe haven for GLBT communities situated within a municipal geography of same-sex spaces in bars and districts (a map is provided). Boyd illuminates the interplay among sex tourism, drag shows, and civil rights activism that fostered GLBT community development in the city. Each chapter opens with material from interviews with key figures, for example the iconic Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon. Though this strategy disrupts the narrative flow slightly, it does allow Boyd to strike a balance between her own voice as critical historian and the voices of her collaborators. Following the rules of etiquette, she lets them speak first, removing her own questions and comments from the interview portions-Boyd is a historian, not a folklorist-and creating eloquent and accessible monologues from those whose lived experience informs her scholarship in the upcoming chapter. Of particular interest are accounts of early civil resistance, as against a police raid on the 1965 New Year's Day Ball sponsored by The Council on Religion and the Homosexual. In the aftermath of this raid, police harassment of arrested attendees led to a press conference of seven Protestant ministers the next day, all berating the police for \"intimidation, broken promises, and hostility.\" When San Francisco citizens at large voiced their displeasure, the arrests were thrown out of court. There are more than a few such pre-Stonewa","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"65 1","pages":"381"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2006-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71099045","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":"Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader","authors":"A. Buccitelli","doi":"10.5860/choice.42-1432","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.42-1432","url":null,"abstract":"Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader. Edited by Jane Chance. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004. Pp. xx + 340, preface, acknowledgments, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 cloth) While it seems that many professional folklorists have had their interest in the field initially sparked by the work of Joseph Campbell, W. B. Yeats, and J.R.R. Tolkien, most tend to deny their initial attraction to these writers, stigmatizing them as popularizers. Recognizing the scholarly problems associated with these writers, I nonetheless unabashedly proclaim my engagement with the works of all three, most especially that of J.R.R. Tolkien, a great source of inspiration to me and, I am sure, to many other young scholars. Of course the personal and emotional impact of Tolkien's work says nothing about its worth as a subject of academic study, and so the question is often posed whether Tolkien's work even deserves to be studied. This question has for years plagued scholars seeking to affirm the merits of the work. There have been fruitless and dull attempts to categorize Tolkien as a writer of children's literature or a producer of anomalously best-selling dime novels. Such attempts, tinged with embarrassment at the overwhelming popular success of Tolkien's fiction, are often accompanied by dismissive remarks made apparently in the hope that wishing will make it so. As recently as 2000, Harold Bloom pronounced The Lord of the Rings \"fated to become only an intricate Period Piece, while The Hobbit may well survive as Children's Literature\" (Bloom 1-2). When Bloom dispatched this thunderbolt, The Lord of the Rings had been robustly in print for forty-five years, The Hobbit for sixty-two. Despite the disapproval, over the past three decades scholars such as T. A. (Tom) Shippey, Verlyn Flieger, and Jane Chance have produced and inspired a growing body of scholarly Tolkien criticism. These three scholars, along with others, have begun to wade through voluminous Tolkien correspondence and scholarly research and writing and to unfold the major goals of Tolkien's work and the sources of his inspiration. In Tolkien and the Invention of Myth, the most recent addition to this body of scholarship, Jane Chance compiles eighteen essays that offer analysis of relations between Tolkien's writing and folklore, religion, and a wide range of historical literature. Inasmuch as the contributors are mostly approaching the work from the perspective of literary criticism (though of course most of the sources referred to, such as Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or the Kalevala, are literary renderings of what may well have been oral tradition), folklorists can anticipate that the volume contains little actual folklore or reference to folklore scholarship and that the contributors often make imprecise use of the technical terms \"myth\" and \"legend. …","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"65 1","pages":"343"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2006-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71103295","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":"Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults","authors":"Elinor Levy","doi":"10.5860/choice.42-5575","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.42-5575","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"65 1","pages":"360"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2006-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71107022","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":"Gender and Story in South India","authors":"F. Korom","doi":"10.5860/choice.44-4308","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.44-4308","url":null,"abstract":"Gender and Story in South India. Edited by Leela Prasad, Ruth B. Bottigheimer, and Lalita Handoo. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Pp. viii + 152, acknowledgments, map, chapter notes, chapter bibliographies. $45.00 cloth, $18.95 paper) This slim but useful volume is a re-edited and updated version of an earlier book edited by Lalita Handoo and Ruth Bottigheimer that was published in India in 1999 under the title Folklore and Gender. Four of the papers (those by Kanaka Durga, Narasamamba, Handoo, and Venugopal) were originally presented at the XIth Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research, which was held in Mysore. These same papers, in reworked form, have been sandwiched between a new introduction by Leela Prasad and a very brief afterword by Ruth Bottigheimer. In her introduction, Prasad essentially sets the theoretical agenda of the volume: namely, to look at gender as one factor, albeit an essential one, of identity construction. She points out that the stories analyzed herein are by, about, and for women, but not to the exclusion of men (5). Virtually all of the examples included in the essays, she states, deal with kinship, anguish, and patriarchal norms, as well as tensions between the natal home and the conjugal one (8). The stories in the various essays also suggest the strong but complex relationship between brother and sister, in which the brother often has a strong moral obligation to the sister, even though sometimes this obligation can become dangerous, as when incest enters into the picture. Prasad also points out reflexively that one factor weaving together these diverse essays is the intersection between the narratives told and the lived experiences of the narrators. Lalita Handoo's comparative essay focuses on stupid-son-in-law stories, which she correctly identifies as a subgenre of numskull tales (35). Her data comes from her own fieldwork in Kashmir, but also from published collections, providing ten examples from ten places in India. Hence she is able to make the claim that the genre is pan-regional in nature. Handoo's main point is that the tales use humor to subvert male dominance (37) , a reminder to us that Indian women often do not fit the stereotype of the silent, suffering daughter, wife, or mother. While Handoo's approach is mainly morphological and thematic in nature, Saraswati Venugopal's contribution emphasizes \"contextual meaning\" (55) by comparing audience responses in rural and urban settings in and around the city of Madurai, located in the state of Tamil Nadu. …","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"68 1","pages":"86"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2006-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71115397","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":"Types of the Folktale in the Arab World: A Demographically Oriented Tale-Type Index","authors":"M. Omidsalar","doi":"10.5860/choice.42-4361","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.42-4361","url":null,"abstract":"Types of the Folktale in the Arab World: A Demographically Oriented Tale-Type Index. By Hasan M. El-Shamy. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Pp. xxviii + 1255, acknowledgments, introduction, bibliographies, indices, addendum. $75.00 cloth) Hasan El-Shamy, Professor of Folklore, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and African Studies at Indiana University, is the foremost authority on Arab folktale in the western hemisphere. He has previously authored important studies on this subject (1995, 1999), but his newest book, Types of the Folktale in the Arab World: A Demographically Onented Tale-Type Index (DOTTI-A), is surely his crowning achievement. In an era when typological and indexing studies often take a back seat to idiosyncratic musings that pass for theorizing, this meaty work-1255 pages in small type-is an important and rare achievement. Both the author and the publisher deserve high praise for undertaking the project. As interest in Islam and the Arab world grows in the west, not only students of Middle Eastern folklore, but also comparative folklorists and students of cross-cultural studies, will greatly benefit from this contribution. Although Professor El-Shamy has adopted the Aarne-Thompson classification system (A-T), he goes beyond the work of his predecessors in providing a great deal of data following each of his entries. He does not simply list the occurrence of various tale types in some undifferentiated entity called \"the Arab world,\" but breaks down this category into its ethnic, geographical, and national components, telling the reader in exactly which parts of the Arab world a certain tale-type occurs. In addition to its valuable demographic data, the Index provides information about certain tale-types presumed to have been absent among the Arabs (xii-xiii). Many archives and sources that were either never consulted for a book in English before, or were inadequately utilized, have been put to good use here. Every tale type is presented according to a scheme that provides reference to the tale's literary sources, its type number, and information about its narrator and collector (xx-xxiv). Not only does DOTTI-A present a preliminary analysis of folktales of the Arab world and of the various ethnic groups that flourish among the Arabs, it also provides parallels from the cultural areas that border on Arab lands (Turkish, Persian, Israeli, sub-Saharan African). The author lists cross-references to related typologies (Arewa 1980, Eberhard and Boratav 1953, Jason 1965 and 1988, Klipple 1992, Marzolph 1984 and 1992, Nowak 1969), placing his text in a broad regional context while making the task of comparative study of Arab folktale easier (xiv-xv, xvii). One of his most important improvements upon other tale-type indices is the copious data he provides about narrators. The reader can find out in one glance if the narrator was male or female, educated or illiterate, young or old, religious or secular, married or single, w","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"64 1","pages":"323"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2005-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71105827","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":"Myth and History in the Creation of Yellowstone National Park","authors":"Robin Parent","doi":"10.2307/25443119","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/25443119","url":null,"abstract":"Myth and History in the Creation of Yellowstone National Park. By Paul Schullery and Lee Whittlesey. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 125, acknowledgments, introduction, illustrations, photographs, appendix, notes, index. $22.00 cloth) Everyone who grew up visiting the Yellowstone-Grand Teton National Parks area, as I did, is familiar with the story about the expeditionary party that, in 1870, pitched its tents where the Firehole and Gibbon Rivers come together to form the Madison. (This was an era when the railroad industry was plowing its greed-driven way dirough the American West.) As told to me many times by my parents and around campfires, these men, known historically as the Washburn-Doan Party, saw something special in the place and wanted to make it special for everyone. In their campfire musings, so the story goes, the men of the Washburn-Doan Party were the first to speak aloud the idea that a beautiful spot of terrain ought to be conserved and set aside for the nation. Thus was born the idea of the National Park, heralding-as antidote to the Age of Greed-the dawn of the Age of Conservation. As with other secular creation stories, questions arise about who had this originary thought. The authors of the present volume set themselves the task of finding the \"true\" story of Yellowstone's creation. Who, really, had been most instrumental in its conception and birth? The Park itself had adopted the Washburn-Doan Party line-though Aubrey L. Haines, Yellowstone's historian of the 1960's and 1970's, does acknowledge that a vision of Yellowstone preserved as a public park could be attested long before the Washburn-Doan Party set foot in the region. \"The important questions raised by Haines . . . are whether the Washburn party members actually did talk about the idea of setting Yellowstone aside, and, if so, what effect the conversations had on the subsequent events that led to the creation of the park. What did the participants in the campfire conversation have to say about the night in question?\" (5) This largely rhetorical question serves as the starting point for debunking the Campfire Story and for establishing that the federal government played the most significant role in events leading to the formal establishment of Yellowstone, the first of our national parks, in 1872. No rabbits are pulled out of hats-Schullery and Whittlesey use standard documentary sources along with Haines's historical works for their investigation. …","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"64 1","pages":"358"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2005-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/25443119","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69156472","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":"A History of Cooks and Cooking","authors":"Lucy M. Long","doi":"10.5860/choice.38-2143","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.38-2143","url":null,"abstract":"A History of Cooks and Cooking. By Michael Symons. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, [1998] 2004. Pp. xii + 388, preface, introduction, illustrations, acknowledgments, bibliography, index. $30.00 cloth, $25.00 paper) Most folklorists would appreciate the basic premise of Michael Symons' book-cooking is an artistic, social, and intellectual skill that has been overlooked and undervalued, both by scholars and by the world at large. Symons argues that contemporary western society tends to regard cooking and the wide range of activities connected to it as insignificant, trivial, and simply a means to an end that is bodily pleasure rather than spiritual edification, and therefore, unworthy of intellectual scrutiny. Similarly, individuals who cook are rarely accorded respect for the skills required to master their duties or for their role in society. This book is meant to remedy the situation by offering an apologetics for cooks and cooking. In the process, Symons attempts a theory of the world according to cooks. It is a colorful and intriguing theory, and, using Australia as his primary example, he regales the reader with anecdotes, quotations, and examples from literary, popular media, ethnographic, and historical sources. The book offers a selected compendium of famous thinkers on food and cooking. In that, it is very useful, and it is fascinating to read quotes and paraphrases from throughout history and across cultures on the subject of cooking. As would be expected with a work of this magnitude, however, it has a number of problems, namely, interpretations of theory and data, use of sources, and organization. To my mind, Symons' discussions of theories relevant to cooking tend to be superficial. He gives rather summary dismissals of major thinkers, rarely placing them in cultural context or giving complete analyses of their theories. Plato, Barthes, Marx, Geertz, Douglas, Levi-Strauss, Bourdieu and others are all evaluated in reference to their appreciation of cooking, which is probably as good a criterion as any, but his readings of these theorists are too biased against them to be accurate or useful. It is also unclear whether these writers are being used as data, as proof of the validity of Symons' arguments, or as interpretive frameworks. To his credit, he clearly and honestly states his own opinions. After discussing Mary Douglas's structuralist approach to the grammar of a meal, he states: \" [T] his kind of pattern is certainly intriguing, but fails to speak to me as the deep-seated cultural logic that is claimed\" (103). …","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"64 1","pages":"349"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2005-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71084549","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}