WESTERN FOLKLORE最新文献

{"title":"American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 1927-1957","authors":"B. Ellis","doi":"10.5860/choice.39-0224","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.39-0224","url":null,"abstract":"American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 1927-1957. By Richard A. Reuss with JoArme C. Reuss. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000. Pp. xviii + 297, foreword, preface, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $55.00 cloth); Labor's Troubadour. By Joe Glazer. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, [2001] 2002. Pp. xvii + 299, preface, acknowledgments, photographs, discography, index. $34.95 cloth, $18.95 paper); Tin Men. By Archie Green. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Pp. xv + 203, acknowledgments, prologue, illustrations, photographs, appendix, bibliography, index. $29.95 cloth) These three fine books deal with laborlore, a vast, esoteric, and mostly neglected body of art created in the context of the blue-collar workplace. The three operate in different ways to recontextualize particular expressions of laborlore in the social issues of the workplace that gave them form. Richard Reuss's book details tensions between the international Communist movement of the 1930s and 1940s and the often unpredictable \"folksong\" community that grew up around it in America. Joe Glazer picks up the story by discussing his own career as an entertainer for labor and liberal movements from the early 1950s into the 1990s. Archie Green's task is more difficult, for while the general message of labor songs can be understood by outsiders, the folk art of sheet metal communicates in detail only to other craftsmen who can appreciate virtuoso fabrication techniques. All three books offer the folklorist ways to move past a purely aesthetic appreciation of art in order to try to comprehend the social worlds behind the art. Of the three, American Folk Music and Left Wing Politics is the most conventional work of scholarship and will be of most immediate use to folklorists. A revision and updating of the late Richard A. Reuss's dissertation, it addresses relations between the American Communist Party of the 1930s and 1940s and the central figures of the folk revival movement, a wide range of Anglo- and African-American artists that included (among others) Alan Lomax, Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Aunt Molly Jackson, and Lead Belly. These artists have been amply treated elsewhere, but the value of Reuss's account is in its extensive direct interviews with principals, along with previously unpublished letters and print ephemera. Reuss does not whitewash the Communist associations and activities of what he terms \"the Lomax performers\"-nor is there any need to, for the leaders of the American Communist Party did not understand what Lomax's circle was trying to do with vernacular music and so missed the opportunity to use their creations as propaganda. In their turn, the revivalists \"had little or no consciousness of theoretical debates on culture in the international communist movement\" (271). Valuing the clever and tuneful over the orthodox, they transcended arcane political discussion. This intellectual disconnect protected the Lomax p","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"62 1","pages":"293"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2003-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71087384","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":"Don't Get above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class","authors":"Rosemary N. Killam","doi":"10.5860/choice.39-5727","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.39-5727","url":null,"abstract":"Don't Get Above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class. By Bill C. Malone. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Pp. xvi + 392, preface, introduction, photographs, notes, bibliography, discography, indices. $35.95 cloth) This is a wonderfully nostalgic and grounded book. In the introduction, the author, a well-beloved writer about country music for four decades, contextualizes himself, describing how and when and why he learned country music in his own childhood. In the preface he specifies that the chief focus of this book is on \"the music made by southern working people.\" The book's historical sweep is wide-it reaches back to eighteenth-century dance instruction books (152) and forward to such recent songs as Steve Earl's 1996 \"Christmas Time in Washington\" (247). The book's chapters center on work, home, church, love and its heartaches, dance, and patriotism, particularly within the transmission media of radio and recordings. The photo images range from Pappy O'Daniel with his Hill-Billy Flour Band (1938) through Willie Nelson at MerleFest (2000). The book's argument is supported by approximately 650 footnotes covering 71 pages. Malone augments the narrative with a useful bibliography, discography, and index of song titles in addition to the extensive general index. For all its nostalgia, though, some readers will find this book disappointing. Malone uolcs in the preface that readers should not expect an intensive exploration of song lyrics (viii). He leaves to others any exploration of the uses made of southern working-class music in primary-school music books, as well as the sale of song-lyric collections and of sheet music, often including guitar tablature and piano accompaniments. (As a group, southern working-class song writers and singers have learned to read music in multiple ways-through regular instruction in school, in the process acquiring such songs as \"This Land is Your Land\" and \"The Boll Weevil Song;\" through shape-note singing in church; and through adult evening music classes, at one time offered everywhere in the South, that combined music instruction with socializing among neighbors and flirting and courtship among the marriageable young. The effects of these multiple and deeply culturally contextualized sources of learning on working-class music cry out to be studied but are not explored in this book.) As noted above, the book provides a wide-ranging historical and cultural outline of the development of the repertoire central to southern working class country music. In his conclusion, Malone posits that \"No demographic study has ever accurately measured the country music audience, but I suspect that most fans are suburban-dwelling Middle Americans. …","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"62 1","pages":"297"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2003-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71090532","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":"Framing a National Narrative: The Legend Collections of Peter Christen Asbjørnsen","authors":"C. Kerst","doi":"10.5860/choice.41-1433","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.41-1433","url":null,"abstract":"Framing a National Narrative: The Legend Collections of Peter Christen Asbjornsen. By Marte Hvam Huit. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003. Pp. 260, acknowledgments, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 cloth) In Framing a National Narrative, Marte Hvam Huit, a scholar of Scandinavian studies, has written the first serious English-language literary analysis of Peter Christen Asbjornsen's collection of Norwegian legends, Norske huldreeventyr ogfolkesagn [Norwegian folktales and legends], originally published between 1845 and 1847. Asbjornsen (1812-1885) is best known for his part of the \"Asbjornsen and Moe\" folktale collecting collaboration with poet Jorgen Moe, which had led to the publication of the famous collection of folklore, Norske folkeeventyr [Norwegian folktales] a few years before. But in Framing a National Narrative, Huit focuses her attention exclusively on Asbjornsen's work and his literary approach to retelling Norwegian legends and tales. She writes that her study provides \"a new perspective on Norshe huldreeventyr ogfolkesagn, showing that the elements of nature, folklore, and language form a totality that insists on the reassessment of this text as an autonomous literary work, and one that has had enormous influence on the development of not only modern Norwegian prose but on the entire cultural narrative of Norway, becoming part of the nation's collective diary\" (194). It is Hult's conviction that Asbjornsen's contribution to Norwegian nation-building through his work with oral tradition, separate from Moe, has been neither appreciated nor examined in detail to the extent that it deserves. For folklorists, the value of Hult's study lies primarily in its examination of Asbjornsen's literary adaptations and his stylistic choices in the presentation of Norwegian oral literature in the context of mid-nineteenth-century national romanticism and of the search for a national identity in Norway. It is clear that, as in Germany and elsewhere in Europe at the time, mid-century Norwegian folktale collecting and publishing ventures not only became immediate popular classics, but were also used by cultural theorists to uncover what they felt were indigenous national truths and modes of expression that represented the worldview of the common folk. At the same time, though popularly understood to be the direct product of a national collective folk spirit, these publications were quite heavily edited and stylized to suit literary conventions of the day and to conform to an idealized and uniform view of the folk. Here Huit explores Asbjornsen's recreated literary presentation of Norwegian oral literature through a variety of framing techniques and narrative devices. Among other things, she shows that Asbjornsen invented folk narrators and contextual embellishments for his tales and legends, reformulated and restructured narrative details, privileged supernatural narratives, and incorporated Norwegian dialect, idiomatic phrases, and his ow","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"62 1","pages":"308"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2003-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71098115","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 Myth of the Anglo-Saxon Oral Poet","authors":"J. Niles","doi":"10.1484/m.sem-eb.4.00064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1484/m.sem-eb.4.00064","url":null,"abstract":"Ten years ago Roberta Frank published an article, based on her Toller Lecture for 1992, titled \"The Search for the Anglo-Saxon Oral Poet\" (Frank 1993). With caustic wit as well as impeccable scholarship, she there points out the extent to which modern-day conceptions of Old English poets and poetry have been shaped by the passion for bardic verse that swept through Europe during the later decades of the eighteenth century. For a while, it seems, thanks to the influence of Thomas Percy and the vogue of James MacPherson's spurious Ossian, no ancient poetry was judged worthy of acclaim unless it could be ascribed to the wild, natural art of minstrels. Frank also points out that the search for the oral poet began well before the era of Percy and MacPherson. During the twelfth century, the writers of Latin chronicles seemed fascinated by the idea that there had been bards in Anglo-Saxon England. It is the Anglo-Norman historian William of Malmesbury (ca. 1095-ca. 1143), for example, whom we can thank for the story that Aldhelm, the late seventh-century co-founder of the monastery at Malmesbury and the first major figure of Anglo-Latin letters, used to accost church-goers at a bridge so as to entice them to listen to moral sermons (Hamilton 1870:336). After first attracting their attention through English songs, he would then intersperse the words of Scripture, thus leading the people back to good sense and right reason (ad sanitatem). This tale is such a pleasing fancy that it has often been taken as historical despite the passage of over four centuries between the period when the supposed incident took place and the date when William wrote down the story in his Gesta pontificum Anglorum (1125), where it is first told.1 To put this temporal distance into perspective, it would be as if someone today were to write down for the first time, in a manner as if to be believed, a story of how Shakespeare used to entice Londoners into the theater by playing the lute on the banks of the Thames. William of Malmesbury is also the historian who is responsible for the information that King Alfred the Great (r. 871-899) once disguised himself as a professional entertainer (sub spetie [= specie] mimi . . . ut ioculatoriae professor) so as to slip into the camp of his Danish enemies and spy on them unobserved.2 This Alfred who is a master of disguise and is so skilled in the arts of minstrelsy is the same man, William tells us, whose spirits were lifted shortly before this adventure when he and his mother, both of whom had taken refuge from marauding Danes in the island retreat of Athelney, had identical dreams. Each of them in turn, it seems, was visited by the spirit of St. Cuthbert (d. 687), the hermit bishop of Lindisfarne, who promised them that the Saxons would soon achieve a great victory, \"and of this I will give you a striking token,\" he tells both Alfred and his mother. The local fishermen will return later in the day with a great catch of fish, he predicts,","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"62 1","pages":"7-61"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2003-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66718572","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":"Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture","authors":"H. Everett","doi":"10.2307/1500431","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1500431","url":null,"abstract":"In this study of roadside crosses, the first of its kind, Holly Everett presents the history of these unique commemoratives and their relationship to contemporary memorial culture. The meaning of these markers is presented in the words of grieving parents, high school students, public officials, and private individuals whom the author interviewed during her fieldwork in Texas.","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"40 1","pages":"357"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2002-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1500431","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68840257","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":"Controlling women: Reading gender in the ballads Scottish women sang","authors":"L. Wollstadt","doi":"10.2307/1500424","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1500424","url":null,"abstract":"The Scottish ballad tradition has always been a tradition of both sexes; since ballads started to be collected in the eighteenth century, at least, both men and women have learned and passed on these traditional songs.1 According to the recordings made of traditional singers by the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh, however, men and women do not necessarily sing the same songs. The ten songs in the School's sound archives most often recorded from female singers between 1951 and 1997, for example, have only two titles in common with the ten songs most often recorded from men.2 Analysis of the specific ballad narratives that were most popular among female singers in twentieth-century Scotland suggests certain buried themes that may underlie that popularity; these particular themes may have appealed more than others to many women singers. I must preface this study with three vital caveats. First, it would certainly be foolhardy to imply that any singer would never choose to learn a song whose lyrics did not appeal to him or her. Certainly many other factors play into that decision, such as a pleasing melody or the social context with which the song is associated.3 Second, this discussion is based primarily on the number of times that a ballad was recorded and the most common version of each ballad.4 Although this essay does look at specific versions of songs that the School of Scottish Studies has transcribed, many recordings remain untranscribed, and it is possible that certain recordings may contain variations that change the meaning of the song. Finally, it must be noted that the traditional songs that are most often recorded from any particular group of people are not necessarily the most popular among that group or even the favorites of individual singers. Fieldworkers may request certain songs more than others, or singers might sing songs they think the fieldworker wants to hear. Nevertheless, the decision to learn and remember a song does require that a singer find the song appealing or meaningful in some way; the fact that a song has been learned by a particular singer means that that singer found the song worth learning. Thus, it is significant that the songs that appear most often in the repertoires of women-the songs that significant numbers of women found worth learning-show similar patterns in their portrayal of gender roles. These patterns are especially noteworthy because they are at odds with patterns in the larger corpus of traditional ballads in Scotland. This essay looks specifically at the way the ballads popular among twentieth-century women singers construct both male and female gender roles. What sort of women people these ballads, and what type of men? Though on the surface these ballad narratives seem to describe women who are either pathetic victims or heartless hussies, many can be seen as addressing issues of female power. These narratives not only deal with a woman's lack of control over her own l","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"61 1","pages":"295-317"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2002-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1500424","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68839861","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":"Logan, 1968: A Reminiscence","authors":"Frances Cattermole-Tally","doi":"10.2307/1500425","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1500425","url":null,"abstract":"The recent meeting of the California Folklore Society at Utah State University, the first time in its 61-year history that it has assembled outside the Golden State, causes me to reflect on another meeting held in the same location 34 years earlier. Once upon a time the Utah Folklore Society joined with the American Folklore Society for a regional meeting designed to consider material culture and customs exclusively. The meeting was organized by Austin E. Fife of Utah State University at Logan, his wife, Alta, Henry Classic and Jan Harold Brunvand. The Fifes were experts on cowboy songs and material culture, especially that of the Rocky Mountain West. Glassie was interested in folk architecture and was on the American Folklore Society's folklife committee. Brunvand was newly a professor at the University of Utah. The conference was held in Logan, July 26 and 27, 1968, and it followed an intensive week-long course entitled \"American Folk Cultures and Their Crafts\" that had been taught by Austin Fife and Henry Classic. In conjunction with the course and the conference was an exhibit of \"American Folk Arts and Folk Life\" in the Merrill Art Gallery and the Special Collections Library of the University. The exhibit consisted mainly of photographs and artifacts with explanatory labels. Austin Fife also wrote a short description of the exhibit, including not only reproductions of the photographs but also texts from some of the placards that accompanied the thirty-some components of the exhibition. He took this opportunity to introduce what were, at that time, the little known fields of Folklife and Folk Art by calling attention to the objects of material culture and their uses, such as woodsman's tools-axes for felling trees and spuds for stripping bark-and house types from dugouts to rock houses with their fences, often of barbed wire, and the mailboxes which connected them to society. Fife pointed out the stereotype of the old West that still exists in popular belief aided by the mass media. As an example he mentioned the Landor Hotel in Wyoming with its \"Western\" furniture utilizing cowhide, Indian-woven fabric and native wood. Fife also described the braiding of horsehair to make hackamores, hatbands and lariats as well as the braiding of human hair, which was at one time made into jewelry. He commented on gravestones and gravestone rubbings. He mentioned the use of native plants as folk remedies, an old practice but one that continues into the twenty-first century. The preceding topics were rarely, if ever, dealt with by folklorists at this time. In contrast, Fife himself had devoted articles to them before and after the exhibition, several of which were reprinted in Exploring Western Americana (1988). According to Henry Classic the conference at Logan was the first meeting in the United States to have its range defined by material and social tradition. In 1969 a report of the conference was published in a paperback, Forms on the Frontier, Folklife","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"26 1","pages":"319"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2002-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1500425","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68839951","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":"Escalating Danger in Contemporary Legends","authors":"Elissa R. Henken","doi":"10.2307/1500422","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1500422","url":null,"abstract":"Legends develop and change in relation to changes in the surrounding culture. That, of course, is part of their essence as folklore. Accordingly, legends get updated to reflect new styles: The spiders in the beehive hairdos of the 1950s and early sixties migrated to the hippies' long hair of the late sixties and early seventies, then inhabited the dreadlocks of the eighties and nineties and eventually the punk mohawk at the turn of the century, in each case with an implicit comment on the questionable hygiene of a marginal group. Legends kept pace with new technologies, as ill-fated pets moved from the oven to the clothes drier to the microwave and announced new perils when AIDS became part of our world. Going beyond material changes, legends present society's judgments (even if, at times, ambiguously) on behavior, and these, too, reflect cultural changes. The forms of change and the factors effecting those changes are many and varied, but here I will examine one type of change that I have observed in certain contemporary legends, namely an escalation of danger-both in the behavior that puts one in jeopardy and in the penalty.1 Changes in punishable behavior appear clearly linked to changes in a group's morals. For example, in legends of a couple becoming stuck together during sexual intercourse, the ironic punishment has remained constant, but the \"sin\" has changed. In the fourteenth-century manual Handling Synne, a married couple is punished by becoming locked together when they have intercourse too close to a church (Mannyng, 1. 8937-9014; Lindahl 1999). Mere proximity to a church no longer offends our general sensibilities; it takes far more to incur retribution. Two modern (1990s) legends told by members of Black Baptist churches indicate how much more. In one case, rather than being married, the couple is gay and they are having sex on one of the pews inside the church. In the other case, the couple is heterosexual, but their behavior is one step more sacrilegious as they have intercourse on the altar. The punishment remains the same-the couple becomes locked together. The same punishment applies also to others who have crossed a certain boundary with their sexual activity. In the legendry of young teens and pre-teens, even necking is a big step; the kissing couple's braces become interlocked. In the legendry told by and about an older group, a couple in the back seat of a car become locked together when startled by a patrolling police officer, and they have to be taken to the emergency room for extrication. I have heard this latter one told about both married and unmarried couples; their offense appears to be in the misuse of public space. While Americans generally prefer that sexual activity, even the most sanctioned kind, be done out of sight, legendary punishment drags it into the public gaze, a matter ensured by the couple becoming locked in flagrante. There can be no doubting for what act they are being punished, since they suffer not","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"61 1","pages":"259-276"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2002-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1500422","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68840148","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":"Women's Oral History: The Frontiers Reader","authors":"D. Hanson, S. Armitage, P. Hart, Karen Weathermon","doi":"10.2307/1500428","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1500428","url":null,"abstract":"Women's Oral History: The Frontiers Reader. Edited by Susan H. Armitage with Patricia Hart and Karen Weathermon. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 392, introduction, photographs, illustrations, notes, index. $29.95 paper) At the conclusion of her article, \"Digging Beneath the Surface: Oral History Techniques,\" Sherry Thomas writes, \"Absolutely ordinary people matter and count, their stories are important, and we need all of their stories\" (60). Thomas's statement could well serve as the underlying credo for the anthology Women's Oral History: The Frontiers Reader. Since its founding in 1975, the thrice-yearly Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies has been regarded as a publication interested in recording and examining the lives of all women in ways which reach beyond academia and into the community at large (ix). This collection of well-selected, well-researched, and well-written essays carries on the Frontiers tradition in its careful and respectful treatment of the experiences of a multiplicity of women whose stories the editors and contributors obviously believe are narratives which definitely \"matter and count.\" With articles concerning everything from the life of a North Carolina millworker to the fluctuating roles of Palestinian camp women to the history of illegal abortions in Montana, Women's Oral History: The Frontiers Reader offers readers a wide variety of topics and approaches from which to choose. The selections are unified, though, not just by the consistently fine research which supports them but also by their engaging, thoroughly readable presentations. In the first portion of the volume, the Women's Oral History: Resource Section and Judy Yung's article, \"Giving Voice to Chinese American Women,\" provide valuable advice on conducting oral history interviews, including sample questions and release forms. Additional articles in this section and elsewhere in the anthology explore other methodological issues, including the need for creative questioning techniques (Strobel 47), the ethical concerns involved in recording the words and lives of others (Broughton 175), and the conditions that must be addressed when dealing with outside sources of funding (Kesselman et al. 162; Broughton 177; Marchant 184). Such matters, often obscured by pedantic language elsewhere, are expressed clearly and concisely in these cases. This concern for clarity and quality research is evident in other essays as well. Anne M. Butler and Gerri W. Sorenson's \"Patching the Past: Students and Oral History,\" for instance, describes in detail how oral history can be effectively used in the classroom and presents this information from the viewpoints of both teacher and student. Other essays, such as Dolores Delgado Bernal's \"Grassroots Leadership Reconceptualized: Chicana Oral Histories and the 1968 East Los Angeles School Blowouts,\" Jean Calterone Williams's \"Domestic Violence and Poverty: The Narratives of Homeless Women,\" and Harriet Wrye an","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"61 1","pages":"349"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2002-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1500428","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68840188","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":"Imagined states : nationalism, utopia, and longing in oral cultures","authors":"Luisa del Giudice, Gerald Porter","doi":"10.2307/1500439","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1500439","url":null,"abstract":"Imagined States: Nationalism, Utopia and Longing in Oral Cultures. Edited by Luisa Del Giudice and Gerald Porter. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2001. Pp. 224, introduction, illustrations, photographs, index. $22.95 paper) This is a hugely enjoyable collection, extending Benedict Anderson's notion of imagined communities into a treatment of \"imagined states.\" It is a topical subject of more than disciplinary interest (similar studies in my field include David McCrone's Understanding Scotland and Devine and Logue's Being Scottish). Imagined States will be valued by all those interested in the construction of national and regional identities, including literary critics and historians, but it is particularly useful for the folklorist. Imagined States shows that landscapes of the mind depend on comparing personal experience with that of \"the other\" (whether through social class, ethnic origin or family unit). The first section, \"Idealized States,\" opens with Luisa Del Giudice's \"Mountains of Cheese and Rivers of Wine: Paesi di Cuccagna and other Gastronomic Utopias\" (11-63). This essay explores the sense-satisfying land of Cuccagna (Cockayne), in Italy and beyond, from the sixteenth century onwards. Scholarly and convincing-illustrations include broadsides, paintings and festival recreations of Cuccagna-Del Giudice sheds light on how mental Utopias (and their formation in relation to less perfect realities) shape expectations for the future and are thereby altered, and demonstrates that \"Italians came to associate Cuccagna with America as it was imagined and as immigrant propaganda-and immigrant narrative itself-came to depict it: the land of plenty\" (48). Paradoxically, by enacting Cuccagna, they rendered the phenomenon \"never actually a place but the desire for place-obsolete\" (53). It is an intriguing premise which deserves further investigation; Del Giudice draws attention to her forthcoming work, In Search of Abundance: Mountains of Cheese, Rivers of Wine and other Italian Gastronomic Utopias. The following piece, Sadhand Naithan's \"Prefaced Space: Tales of the Colonial British Collectors of Indian Folklore\" (64-79), shows that \"British colonial officers and missionaries created in the second half of the nineteenth century a tale about India suited to the interests of the colonial state\" (77). Reimund Kvideland and Gerald Porter, in \"Working the Railways, Constructing Navvy Identity\" (80-97), look at how Norwegians constructed, through song, \"a compensatory territory\" relating to their physical environment (88). Parallels could be drawn-as the writers point out-with songs from the British and American traditions; the virile poetry of the Scottish Alexander Anderson \"Surfaceman\" (1845-1909) springs to mind in this context. In his Song of Labour Anderson celebrates his \"toiling Brothers\": \"The God above hath made us one in flesh and blood with kings, / But the lower use is ours, and all the force of rougher things\" (1). His, too, is an imagi","PeriodicalId":44624,"journal":{"name":"WESTERN FOLKLORE","volume":"61 1","pages":"375"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2002-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1500439","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68840337","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}