WESTERN FOLKLORE最新文献

{"title":"Cultural Democracy: The Arts, Community, and the Public Purpose","authors":"Lisa L. Higgins, Teresa K. Hollingsworth","doi":"10.5860/choice.43-1645","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.43-1645","url":null,"abstract":"Cultural Democracy: The Arts, Community, and the Public Purpose. By James Bau Graves. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Pp. xii + 256, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, charts, table, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00 cloth, $20.00 paper); Federalizing the Muse: United States Arts Policy and the National Endowment for the Arts, 1965-1980. By Donna M. Binkiewicz. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. xii + 295, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, table, notes, bibliography, index. $59.95 cloth, $24.95 paper) Both of these titles should be added to the folk-arts administrator's reading list, and both should be included in syllabi for public-sector folklore courses. We advise the same for arts administrators and arts-administration curricula. These two volumes provide historical context and useful insight into funding mechanisms and program development. In the first volume, Cultural Democracy (the term is defined here as \"social agenda\"), James Bau Graves provides a view of the evolution of this movement in the United States, its relationship to corporate America-and its potential global impact. He offers strong arguments for the economic benefits of cultural democracy and the sustainability of traditional culture. He explores the conflicts and blessings of corporate and foundation funding in addition to addressing the impact of America's political agenda and private sector sphere on the rest of the world. An ethnomusicologist and the director of the Center for Cultural Exchange in Portland, Maine, Graves draws extensively from his own experience working with immigrant communities over twenty years. Because he readily admits his own foibles in establishing relationships and developing projects within ethnic communities, Graves presents the reader with honest assessments of his own work as a self-described \"cultural mediator.\" Most of his examples are reflective of his work with new immigrant communities, with less attention paid to tradition bearers from African American and Anglo American communities. In fact, he usually writes of cultural democracy as it relates exclusively to minority communities. Graves weaves chapters addressing subjects as broad as education, economics and globalization into thought-provoking discussions about the conflict between an implied greater good and corporate power. Chapter one, \"Communion,\" is essential reading for arts administrators who truly strive to involve local communities in arts planning. The most useful portion of the book is chapter seven, \"Mediation\"; here Graves introduces ten specific, insightful examples for cultural mediators to employ when working in collaboration with communities. Throughout, he offers suggestions for implementation often with projected, sometimes lofty, outcomes. Although he cites impressive and extensive research from a number of sources, Graves relies too heavily on the theories of economic-development specialist Richard Flor","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"64 1","pages":"332"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2005-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71109060","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":"Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition","authors":"E. C. Ballard","doi":"10.5860/choice.41-6470","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.41-6470","url":null,"abstract":"Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition. By Yvonne P. Chireau. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. ix + 222, acknowledgments, photographs, illustrations, notes, index. $34.95 cloth) A professor of religion, Yvonne P. Chireau has focused her research for Black Magic on the religious life of the African American community, using a strong historical component. Yet folklorists and anthropologists will not be disappointed in the book, as its author has relied in large part upon texts produced by researchers in these fields. In its own right, however, the historical perspective shows that African American religiosity cannot be explained by methodologies ordinarily applied to studies of religion. In particular, the author shows that religious activity for African Americans has historically encompassed both \"orthodox\" church experiences and liminal experiences in non-institutional contexts. She argues that the academic distinction between magic and religion is of little use in an analysis of the lived religious experience of African Americans, and offers instead an experience-centered historical approach that bridges the worlds of religious ritual and magical practice-\"Conjure,\" or \"Rootworking\" (in this book the author capitalizes the names of all Afro-diasporic religions and practices)-that shows why, in the case of the black community, the older dichotomy not only fails to explain a worldview of which both religion and magic were expressions, but fails also to see that when it came to African American spirituality, magic and religion were parts of a single complex. Other scholars who have studied African American spirituality have either largely failed to address, or have discounted the connection between, African American magical practice and African American Christianity. Chireau seeks to provide a corrective in chapters such as the provocatively titled \"Our Religion and Superstition Was All Mixed Up': Conjure, Christianity, and African American Supernatural Traditions,\" which addresses this issue in detail and with thoughtfulness. Ambiguity of distinction between official religion and popular magic is at the heart of her contention that these two approaches to spiritual life among African Americans may not be separated. Appropriately, then, the historical interaction (and at times the difficulty in distinguishing) between Conjurer and minister is examined in the first chapters. Chireau's claim is that any attempt by observers to construct such historical distinctions is both artificial and unfaithful to actual understandings within the black community, not merely about these two figures-preacher and Conjurer-but about the very nature of Spirit. She tracks the careers of several Conjurers, showing how they moved, at times seamlessly, between the role of Conjurer and the role of minister, and showing that such individuals and their roles were often viewed within the community of worshipers as equal competit","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"64 1","pages":"144"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2005-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71101493","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":"Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery","authors":"E. Kissling","doi":"10.5860/choice.41-4702","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.41-4702","url":null,"abstract":"Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery. By Virginia L. Blum. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. x + 356, acknowledgments, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 cloth, $19.95 paper) Blum has written a provocative and thoughtful exploration of contemporary American interest in cosmetic surgery and its influence on identity. Her analysis is scholarly, but with a personal tone that is neither tangential nor overly confessional. She asserts that three cultural phenomena have profoundly shaped the experience of American life in the twentieth century: celebrity culture, psychoanalysis, and plastic surgery. Blum skillfully weaves these three threads together to develop an innovative picture of how identity is increasingly rooted in two-dimensional images. Her analysis includes examination of selected literature (including Frankenstein, of course) and films in which plastic surgery is key to transformation of identity, as well as interviews with several plastic surgeons and observations of surgeries. Regrettably, she provides little background about the interviews or how candidates were identified and selected for interviews, and no indication of an interview protocol. Blum briefly and knowledgeably rehearses some truisms of contemporary feminist theory-such as the way feminine identity is shaped by the male gaze so that woman becomes both an object and a subject to herself-to develop her thesis. She recognizes that it is widely assumed that people-especially women-are influenced to change their appearance by omnipresent images of impossible-to-achieve beauty. But Blum rejects the claim that surgery is on a continuum with other forms of body modification such as chemical hair straightening or curling, tooth bleaching, and starvation diets; among other criticisms, she notes that these practices have a comparatively low risk of fatality. Blum regards the acceptance of risk of death in exchange for beauty as indicative of the degree to which we identify with the two-dimensional. Blum focuses on the narrowing distinction between the human and the two-dimensional in our cultural definition of beauty and its pursuit. \"We are immersed in visual culture to the degree that we become its embodied effects,\" making the specific content of the image thus less important than the general yearning for identification with the image per se. Cosmetic surgery ultimately transforms the patient's image as much as it transforms her body, as beauty comes to be defined as photogenicity. This identification with media images ultimately puts us at risk for \"a lifetime of transformational identifications\" because images are inherently changeable, two-dimensional, and technologically constituted. Blum notes, however, that critical demands for \"more realistic\" media images are ineffectual: \"To imagine that there are people who could change the images if they wanted to is to misunderstand the embeddedness of the image producers in a cultural machinery","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"64 1","pages":"130"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2005-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71100310","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":"Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote","authors":"R. Weaver","doi":"10.5860/choice.40-1707","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.40-1707","url":null,"abstract":"Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote. By Janet Theophano. (New York: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. xviii +362, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 cloth, $18.95 paper) In Eat My Words, Janet Theophano offers theory and technique for reading cookbooks as primary documents, going well beyond obvious texts such as marginalia in individual copies and taking into account less-obvious texts, such as mass-produced works. She includes cookbooks that are both single-authored-Hopestill Brett's seventeenth-century housekeeping book or Buwei Yang Chao's 1945 volume, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese-and collectively authored, for example the 1972 Rochester Hadassah Cookbook. After providing theory and instruction on reading between the lines, as it were, Theophano demonstrates the technique on actual cookbooks, examining these as though they were personal journals. She shows that a cookbook, far more than simply a guide to roasting chicken or baking pound cake, is a primer of the woman who wrote it: we become acquainted with the woman as we experience her writings. We become aware that learning how to make a particular dish is not nearly so interesting as constructing the details of these cookbook writers' lives and the cultures that inform them, for their books are \"maps of the social and cultural worlds they inhabit\" (13). Each of the seven chapters introduces the reader to a variety of cookbook authors, with a documentary description of their lives and an exhaustive analysis of each woman's cookbook. Theophano looks at the cookbooks as a woman's way of identifying and defining herself in her culture: \"As icons of cultural identity, a culture's cuisine may be used to mark the complex negotiations groups and individuals undertake in a new land\" (50). In this way the past and the present merge as foodways are adapted and adopted depending on place of origin and current home region, the woman's willingness and ability to likewise adapt and adopt, and the availability of various ingredients. In chapter one, \"Cookbooks as Communities,\" we are introduced to Hopestill Brett and her 1678 receipt book. Beyond collecting recipes, Brett used the book as a record of her household inventory and as a repository for home cures. Through this book we learn of Brett's status in society and her views on that status, as well as on her community, religion, and culinary and housekeeping abilities. In this chapter Theophano recounts also the story of Jane Janviers, whose mid-nineteenth-century collection includes the recipes of family, friends, and neighbors-this known because of the marginalia, as in, \"Eliza melts the butter in the Molasses, then beats the eggs and milk in last,\" and \"Mrs. Barre's Recipe for Citron Melon . …","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"63 1","pages":"373"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2004-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71092186","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":"Rap Music and Street Consciousness","authors":"Jordan Rich","doi":"10.5860/choice.40-5128","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.40-5128","url":null,"abstract":"Rap Music and Street Consciousness. By Cheryl Keyes. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Pp. xxv + 303, preface, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, musical notation, glossary, notes, discography, bibliography, indices. $34.95 cloth) As a reader whose commitment to the study of folklore is rooted in a fascination with African American oral folk poetry-from toasts to rap to hip hop-I have been alert to Cheryl Keyes' previous writings on this subject (1993, 1996, 2000). Here, in her first full-length treatment of rap, published as part of the distinguished Music in American Life series of the University of Illinois Press, Keyes succeeds in comprehensively approaching rap \"from the perspectives of ethnomusicology, folklore, and cultural studies\" (ix). The book covers rap from its beginnings until 2000. Written for a general audience, Rap Music and Street Consciousness details the geographic, cultural, and economic settings from which this music emerged, in addition to providing a thorough analysis of the music itself, and it is a pleasure to read. The author situates herself-student outsider, musician not in the industry, African American, woman-and discusses the problematics of these multiple identities in her role as participant-observer. Of many subjects covered in this wideranging work, especially noteworthy are the origins and present social location of rap, the current public controversy over rap language and culture, and the role of women in rap. Keyes' historical overview begins, of course, in Africa. African poetic speech and performance (including antecedents of jive) are shown to have provided an artistic and cultural matrix for formal and stylistic developments in America black performance. Bringing the subject into the present, the author covers new versions of the rap genre that have developed over the past decade and generally entwines recent musical and social developments in an interesting and relevant way. Gang culture, a major context for rap performance, grew out of poverty worsened by the flight of wealth to the suburbs and resultant inner-city decay. The forced migration and involuntary isolation of African American community segments amid gentrification caused by the construction of superhighways such as the Cross Bronx Expressway in New York are further example of social dislocation whose effects are expressed in rap. Generalized apprehension about the oppressor, often expressed in widespread conspiracy rumors-for instance, that African Americans have been the target of intentional spreading of AIDS and crack-cocaine addiction (Turner 1993)-is also expressed in rap poetry and music. In the face of oppressive conditions, however, many rappers have become mainstream, achieving a high degree of commercial success, some artists starting their own labels and becoming moguls. Rap music videos, another popular format, display visually as well as musically the cultural messaging so intrinsic to rap, though the entry ","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"63 1","pages":"339"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2004-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71095529","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":"\"Deep Play\": John Gay and the Invention of Modernity","authors":"B. Bowden","doi":"10.5860/choice.38-6026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.38-6026","url":null,"abstract":"\"Deep Play\": John Gay and the Invention of Modernity. By Dianne Dugaw. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001. Pp. 322, acknowledgments, prologue-epilogue, illustrations, musical notation, charts, notes, bibliography, index. $48.50 cloth) Once upon a time, literature professors really knew what college students really did not know. They knew how to read literature in Latin and Greek. The study of literature written in the vernacular-English-gained a toehold in university curricula only at the end of the nineteenth century. But by the mid-twentieth century the designers of the English canon had all but banished both Classics and oral literature, and subsequently introduced a panoply of critical methodologies that reinvented the wheel. Bringing it all back home, fortunately, is Dianne Dugaw's \"Deep Play\": John Gay and the Invention of Modernity. In jargon-free language, Dugaw applies and expands folklore methodology in order to analyze the work of a dead white British male author. Bertrand Bronson likewise brought to eighteenth-century literature a wide-ranging expertise in matters of folklore, music, visual art, social science, and indeed Classics (1968), but Bronson published his insights only in discrete essays, where Dugaw has here arranged hers sequentially into a unified whole that sets the standard for future scholarship at this interstice of academic disciplines. Dugaw's prologue establishes the ramifications of the phrase deep play. Clifford Geertz analyzes deep play in reference to Balinese cockfighting (1973), with no apparent awareness that highwayman Macheath uses the same phrase to summon thieves to high-stakes gambling. Throughout Dugaw's book, each chapter focuses on one work or a few related works by John Gay, in each case establishing methodology applicable beyond Gay and beyond the eighteenth century. Dugaw structures the book not chronologically but rather in an order that both engages specialists in Gay's milieu and also welcomes readers who, say, merely know Beggar's Opera and would like to know more. Chapter one compares Gay's breakthrough ballad opera to three twentieth-century reworkings including, of course, the one by Bertolt Brecht inevitably recalled as The Mack the Knife Play, demonstrating that comparative analysis in terms of texture, text, and context, so basic to folklore methodology, lies behind \"reception aesthetics\" familiar to contemporary literary scholars (Jauss 1982, Holub 1984). In chapter two, Dugaw provides nonspecialists with Gay's full biography, tracing its metamorphosis across two centuries in words and also in visual portraits of the author, especially the atypical one in which Gay appears whimsically, boyishly, coyly . . . well, gay. Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets (1779-1781) gave wide circulation to this visual image and to a biography that trivialized Gay's accomplishments. Chapter three brings readers to folklore genres: Gay's references to proverbs, games, customs, riddles, beliefs, an","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"63 1","pages":"323"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2004-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71086700","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":"Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations","authors":"K. Baldwin","doi":"10.5860/choice.40-1578","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.40-1578","url":null,"abstract":"Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations. By Sharla M. Fett. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 304, preface, acknowledgments, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper) Opening her prize-winning cultural history of healing within the power structures of slavery, Sharla Fett invokes the United States Public Health Service study of 1932-1972 under which hundreds of Alabama black men and their families were allowed to suffer untreated syphilis, purportedly for medical research. The Tuskegee Experiment was not merely unconscionable behavior in the name of bad science: Fett demonstrates that the Public Health Service's malfeasance was historically founded in establishment medical philosophy and practice regarding enslaved Africans. Extending Todd Savitt's groundbreaking work in the study of medicine and slavery (1978), Fett shows that not only were slaves doctored with minimum expense and effort, but they were routinely subjected to medical experimentation meant to affirm a racial concept of differential health needs between whites and enslaved blacks. Yet \"enslaved communities nurtured a rich health culture . . . , a constellation of ideas and practices related to well-being, illness, healing, and death, that worked to counter the onslaught of daily medical abuse and racist scientific theories\" (2) that were vital to slavery. Fett's purview-plantation settings in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia-provide a multi-generational depth of engagement between African American and \"Anglo-American systems of medicines\" within slavery (8). Fett discusses the differential health belief systems of slaveholders and slaves, grounding each in respective worldviews, amply illustrated from slaveholders' diaries and letters, physicians' handbooks and journals, and (folklorists will note) records of the spoken word and life experiences documented in slave narratives and WPA collections. The slaveholder's notion of soundness defined the health and cash value of enslaved Africans and their descendant generations and restricted attentions to slaves' medical needs. By contrast, the philosophies and cultural memories of healing in relational contexts that force-migrated with Africans represented powerful visions of physical and spiritual health from different regions of the African continent. Enslaved communities operated with knowledge that collective relationships influenced each individual's well being. \"The midwife's touch, the conjurer's roots, and the herb doctor's pungent teas addressed the sufferer's pain as well as her or his standing within an extensive web of relationships\" (36). Plant materials for teas, poultices, inhalants, or food were the mainstay of unofficial medicine in the antebellum Atlantic region. Cross-cultural networks for exchange of such herbal medicines were uncharacteristically free from class strictures among Native Americans, enslaved","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"63 1","pages":"342"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2004-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71092038","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":"Out in Theory: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Anthropology","authors":"Gregory Sharrow","doi":"10.5860/choice.40-4699","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.40-4699","url":null,"abstract":"Out in Theory: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Anthropology. Edited by Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Pp. χ + 329, foreword, acknowledgments, introduction, notes, index. $44.95 cloth, $19.95 paper) As a gay folklorist, I was eager to review Out in Theory because of my knowledge of gay and lesbian worlds, not as a formal researcher but as a participant. I have long been fascinated by culturally patterned communicative behavior in gay settings-from nonverbal coding in cruising areas to verbal dueling at dinner parties-and I was curious to explore the theoretical perspectives that anthropologists would bring to bear in scrutinizing the various dimensions of gay and lesbian experience. It was a fortunate impulse. Out in Theory is rich in provocative thinking, not only about homosexual cultures and alternative gender identities, but ultimately about the study of sexuality and gender themselves. Out in Theory contains eleven essays which variously survey the course of twentieth-century research on sexual minorities, explore competing models for the study of alternative sexualities, probe the implications of the study of sexuality and gender in the context of such anthropological subfields as linguistics and archaeology, and chart the challenges of future research. The volume is a companion to Out in the Field: Reflections of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists (1996), also edited by Lewin and Leap. Out in Theory takes the work a step farther, presenting gay and lesbian anthropology as an emerging field of specialization, identifying its scope and subject matter and laying out its defining theoretical issues. I use the phrase \"gay and lesbian\" advisedly because, as the writers in this volume assert, the explanatory power of these terms is linked to a particular place, moment, and politically-located idea that elucidates some experiences and obscures others. A central theme across the essays is in fact the need to scrutinize such fundamental organizing concepts as male and female, heterosexual and homosexual, gay and lesbian, and even such seemingly unproblematic categories as gender and sex. This level of scrutiny is necessary to ensure that anthropologists' analytical tools not distort or erase the range of experiences that they endeavor to see clearly. Euro-American culture presumes the binary opposition of biologically determined male and female bodies and an exact correspondence between sex and gender. Because this mapping of sex and gender is believed to reflect an order that is \"natural\" and therefore absolute, everything outside the model is marked deviant. As our writers make clear, however, this assumption is a cultural artifact without currency everywhere in the world and without consistency across time even in the Euro-American sphere. …","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"63 1","pages":"271"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2004-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71094772","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":"Place, Language, and Identity in Afro-Costa Rican Literature","authors":"E. Dalili","doi":"10.5860/choice.41-2054","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.41-2054","url":null,"abstract":"Place, Language, and Identity in Afro-Costa Rican Literature. By Dorothy E. Mosby. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. Pp. xiii + 248, preface, acknowledgments, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 cloth) In her preface to Place, Language, and Identity in Afro-Costa Rican Literature, Dorothy E. Mosby notes that the Creole saying, \"me navel-string bury dere,\" articulates an intersection of place, identity, and belonging. Persons of African descent have not been in Costa Rica from the time of earliest European settlement but were brought in as workers relatively recently, at the turn of the twentieth century. Afro-Costa Rican creative writers, whom Mosby identifies as first, second, third, and fourth generation, demonstrate through their literary works how the location of \"home, \"nation,\" and \"belonging\" has evolved according to the generation to which particular writers belong. Those born early, close to the turn of the twentieth century, located home firmly within a West IndianAnglophone construct and tended to have a more intimate connection with Jamaica, Barbados or Trinidad than with Costa Rica, even if only through parents who were born in the islands. The creative writings of these earliest residents of African descent in Costa Rica identify their culture as West Indian, their national affiliation with Britain as former subjects, and their language as English. They tended to consider their sojourn in Costa Rica as temporary, believing they would make money and return to their islands of origin. Instead, economic circumstances deriving from the advancements of capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, along with the caste system, relegated Caribbean workers of African descent to the bottom of the economic ladder in Costa Rica. Political and social circumstances, then, combined with thwarted opportunities, prevented the early migrant laborers from returning home and negated their desire to \"do better.\" Later AfroCosta Rican creative writers evinced a sense of longing and of loss in their writing through evocations both of the injustices meted out to them as Blacks denied formal legal status until the civil war in Costa Rica in 1948 and of the racial prejudice Blacks have experienced there from the beginning and on into the twenty-first century. Mosby deftly analyzes Afro-Costa Rican literature published between 1938 and 1999. The introduction gives a thorough analysis of the historical background, provides a review of relevant literature, and describes her use of scholarship by Edward Said, Ian Smart, Donald Gordon and others to provide a framework for examining how language, the fluidity of identity with regard to place and displacement, and the notion of diaspora have become central to the fiction and poetry of Costa Rican writers of African descent. …","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"63 1","pages":"264"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2004-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71097987","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":"Voices from Four Directions: Contemporary Translations of the Native Literatures of North America","authors":"Brian Swann","doi":"10.2307/40158849","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/40158849","url":null,"abstract":"Storytelling and singing continue to be a vital part of community life for Native peoples today. \"Voices from Four Directions\" gathers stories and songs from thirty-one Native groups in North America - including the Inupiaqs in the frigid North, the Lushootseeds along the forested coastline of the far West, the Catawbas in the humid South, and the Maliseets of the rugged woods of the East. Vivid stories of cosmological origins and transformation, historical events remembered and retold, as well as legendary fables can be found in these pages. Well-known Trickster figures like Raven, Rabbit, and Coyote figure prominently in several tales as do heroes of local fame, such as Tom Laporte of the Maliseets. The stories and songs entertain, instruct, and recall rich legacies as well as obligations. Many are retellings and reinventions of classic narratives, while others are more recent creations. Award-winning poet and critic Brian Swann has gathered some of the richest and most diverse literatures of Native North America and provides an introduction to the volume. In addition, each story is introduced and newly translated. Brian Swann is on the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. His many works include \"Coming to Light: Contemporary Translations of the Native Literatures of North America\".","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"65 1","pages":"371"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2004-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/40158849","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69645668","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}