New Books in Folklore

Stephanie Khattak speaks with Carole Ann King, who, along with Mary Elizabeth “Sunshine” Johnson Huff, wrote Alabama Quilts: Wilderness Through World War II, 1682-1950 (UP of Mississippi, 2020).Alabama Quilts is a look at quilts of the state from before Alabama was part of the Mississippi Territory through the Second World War—a period of 268 years. The quilts are examined for their cultural context. This lens includes the community and time, the lives of the makers and role of women, and the events for which the quilts were made.Stephanie Khattak is a writer, artist, historian and folklore enthusiast. Visit stephaniekhattak.com to learn more, and connect on Twitter: @steph_khattak, Facebook: @khattakstudios or Instagram: @pinecurtainproject. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

Raj Balkaran speaks with Wendy Doniger about her new book Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares: Horses in Indian Myth and History (University of Virginia Press, 2021), along with her translation of the final four books of the Mahābhārata's Critical Edition translation project, the power of the purāṇas, cultural appropriation, and more!Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

Rakugo, a popular form of comic storytelling, has played a major role in Japanese culture and society. Developed during the Edo (1600–1868) and Meiji (1868–1912) periods, it is still popular today, with many contemporary Japanese comedians having originally trained as rakugo artists. Rakugo is divided into two distinct strands, the Tokyo tradition and the Osaka tradition, with the latter having previously been largely overlooked. This pioneering study of the Kamigata (Osaka) rakugo tradition presents the first complete English translation of five classic rakugo stories, and offers a history of comic storytelling in Kamigata (modern Kansai, Kinki) from the seventeenth century to the present day. Considering the art in terms of gender, literature, performance, and society, The Comic Storytelling of Western Japan: Satire and Social Mobility in Kamigata Rakugo (Cambridge UP, 2021) grounds Kamigata rakugo in its distinct cultural context and sheds light on the 'other' rakugo for students and scholars of Japanese culture and history.Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

Liang Luo's book The Global White Snake (U Michigan Press, 2021) examines the Chinese White Snake legends and their extensive, multidirectional travels within Asia and across the globe. Such travels across linguistic and cultural boundaries have generated distinctive traditions as the White Snake has been reinvented in the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English-speaking worlds, among others. Moreover, the inter-Asian voyages and global circulations of the White Snake legends have enabled them to become repositories of diverse and complex meanings for a great number of people, serving as reservoirs for polyphonic expressions ranging from the attempts to consolidate authoritarian power to the celebrations of minority rights and activism.The Global White Snake uncovers how the White Snake legend often acts as an unsettling narrative of radical tolerance for hybrid sexualities, loving across traditional boundaries, subverting authority, and valuing the strange and the uncanny. A timely mediation and reflection on our contemporary moment of continued struggle for minority rights and social justice, The Global White Snake revives the radical anti-authoritarian spirit slithering under the tales of monsters and demons, love and lust, and reminds us of the power of the fantastic and the fabulous in inspiring and empowering personal and social transformations.Huiying Chen is a Ph.D. candidate at University of Illinois at Chicago. She studies the history of travel in eighteenth-century China. She can be reached at hchen87 AT uic.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

Paula Richman and Rustom Bharucha's book Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments (Oxford UP, 2021) examines diverse retellings of the Ramayana narrative as interpreted and embodied through a spectrum of performances. Unlike previous publications, this book is neither a monograph on a single performance tradition nor a general overview of Indian theatre. Instead, it provides context-specific analyses of selected case studies that explore contemporary enactments of performance traditions and the narratives from which they draw: Kutiyattam, Nangyarkuttu and Kathakali from Kerala; Kattaikkuttu and a "mythological" drama from Tamilnadu; Talamaddale from Karnataka; avant-garde performances from Puducherry and New Delhi; a modern dance-drama from West Bengal; the monastic tradition of Sattriya from Assam; anti-caste plays from North India; and the Ramnagar Ramlila. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

It is a familiar story: A recipient of public assistance funds is caught buying expensive steaks, seafood, or other luxury foods with food stamps at the grocery store. Or they wear designer clothes and drive extravagant cars, belying the need for government assistance. Or they game the system in order to buy drugs or alcohol. Or they continue to bear multiple children in the belief that it will increase the amount of government aid they receive so that they can avoid working. Tinged with racial dog whistles and demonizations of poverty, these stories are often circulated as factual accounts of welfare fraud when they seem to operate more closely as contemporary legends – circulated stories with recurring motifs that seem as if they might have actually happened, but its veracity or falseness can be difficult to verify. Contemporary legends often include the caveat of the story happening to a “friend of a friend” though in the case of welfare legends, they often include first-person accounts. While the specific details of contemporary welfare legends are often not verified, the stories themselves are taken as accurate accounts and can impact public policy.In Overthrowing The Queen: Telling Stories of Welfare In America (Indiana University Press, 2020), Dr. Tom Mould explores these stories about welfare in the context of contemporary legends and their influence on our perceptions of public assistance. In our conversation, he explains the origins of the “welfare queen” stereotype and its connection to a singular woman who defrauded public assistance programs in the 1970s and whose story was thereafter frequently recounted in racially coded terms by Ronald Reagan during his 1976 presidential campaign. We discuss the deep connection that welfare legends have to the idea of the American Dream, often serving as counternarrative or an embodiment of the fears about its attainability. Stereotypes about welfare recipients are so deeply embedded in the American consciousness that recipients feel as they must recount their stories as exceptions to the stereotype.Such stories about people who defraud government assistance programs are compelling and memorable because they confirm preconceived biases about recipients. We talk about why such stories spread so easily and how they are spread. While contemporary legends are often told in third person, welfare legends are also told in the first person, but as Dr. Mould explains, the stereotypes are so strong that the tellers may have internalized specific details into eyewitness accounts in a move that makes for a more compelling narrative. However, even genuine eyewitness accounts do not provide the entire story – the circumstances that surround the purchase of what may be perceived come across as luxury items (perhaps a special occasion?) or why someone is driving an expensive car (a remnant from a life before falling upon difficult times?). He suggests that we take a “doubt-centered approach” when we hear such stories where we ask ourselves about the parts that may raise doubt - is it factually true? Is our interpretation true? Can this one story be generalizable to all stories about welfare recipients? Such an approach is an important addition to our understanding of how legend works. As our conversation continues, Dr. Mould suggests ways that we can and should counter the welfare legends, and why it is important to reclaim the terms “welfare” as a positive term rather than one that connotes fraud and laziness.  Dr. Tom Mould is Professor of History and Anthropology at Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana.Nancy Yan received her PhD in folklore from The Ohio State University and taught First Year Writing, Comparative Studies, and Asian American studies for several years before returning to organizing work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

Pan plays a central role in European mythology, originating as a figure who represented all that was impossible to tame in the world, something anyone who has ever worked with goats will understand. This primitive origin was slowly assimilated by the Greeks as a celebration of life and vitality, although through Plato’s radical dualism and the moral inflection introduced by Christianity, his transition from goatlike deity to devil leaves us with a complicated relationship today towards everything he represented, giving birth to a collection of complexes and pathologies that demand addressing. Joining me to discuss these ideas is Sharon Coggan, here to discuss her new book Sacred Disobedience: A Jungian Analysis of the Saga of Pan and the Devil (Lexington Books, 2020).Synthesizing Jungian psychology with the history of mythology and theology, Coggan works her way through the history of Pan as a way of thinking about the development of various forms of consciousness, both individual and social. This is then a history of myth and religion, but with the goal of developing a psychological and sociological diagnosis, and thinking about what sort of cure might be called for.Sharon Coggan is a recently retired professor who spent much of her career at the University of Colorado in Denver, and founded the Religious Studies Program where she served as director for many years. She can be reached at Sharon.Coggan@ucdenver.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

Until now, the herbal traditions of the Ashkenazi people have remained unexplored and shrouded in mystery. Ashkenazi Herbalism: Rediscovering the Herbal Traditions of Eastern European Jews (North Atlantic Books, 2021) rediscovers the forgotten legacy of the Jewish medicinal plant healers who thrived in Eastern Europe’s Pale of Settlement, from their beginnings in the Middle Ages through the modern era. Including the first materia medica of 26 plants and herbs essential to Ashkenazi folk medicine, Ashkenazi Herbalism sheds light on the preparations, medicinal profiles, and applications of a rich but previously unknown herbal tradition–one hidden by language barriers, obscured by cultural misunderstandings, and nearly lost to history. Written for new and established practitioners, it offers illustrations, provides information on comparative medicinal practices, and illuminates the important historical and cultural contexts that gave rise to Eastern European Jewish herbalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

Children’s folklore is simultaneously a conservator of tradition and a site for creativity and innovation. For over five decades, Dr. Jeanne Pitre Soileau documented and collected the jokes, chants, rhymes, and games that that she observed on school playgrounds throughout her career as a public school teacher in southern Louisiana. From the early days of integration to the first decade of the 21st century, Dr. Soileau has taken note of the evolving forms in which children’s play take and its reflections of contemporary times. Her book, Yo’ Mama, Mary Mack, and Boudreaux and Thibodeaux: Lousiana Children’s Folklore and Play (University Press of Mississippi, 2016), examines forty-four years of children’s folklore and play collected in southern Louisiana schools. The book has won the 2018 Chicago Folklore Prize for excellence in folklore scholarship and the 2018 Opie Prize for the best published scholarly book on children’s folklore.In this podcast, we hear about Dr. Soileau’s early fascination with the sounds of children chanting and handclapping at Louisiana school playground and her subsequent efforts to collect and document them and mores. She shares the playground jokes she heard, the “dozens,” an African American insult ritual with specific patterns with “clean” and “dirty” versions. We also discuss chants and ring games that were played among girls, some of which had origins from the late 19th century, but still expressed expectations of womanhood. The rhymes and playing that children engaged with were often reflective of current trends and popular culture. While the 21st century saw the rise of electronic media in the play of children, traditional rings games and chants still persisted on the playground. Such inventions did not replace these familiar games, but simply added to them, allowing for a different type of creativity and play for children.Dr. Jeanne Soileau was born in New Orleans and taught public school and university classes in Louisiana for forty-seven years. Though retired, she continues to collect and study children’s folklore. Her upcoming publication What The Children Said: Child Lore of Southern Louisiana (University Press of Mississippi, 2021) will explore children’s play and its influence on learning about race, history, and sexuality.Nancy Yan received her PhD in folklore from The Ohio State University and taught First Year Writing, Comparative Studies, and Asian American studies for several years before returning to organizing work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

If China’s Mao era is seen by many as a time of great upheaval and chaos, there are also people and places for whom things appear quite different. Writing from one such place in A Time of Lost Gods: Mediumship, Madness, and the Ghost after Mao (U California Press, 2020), Emily Ng foregrounds the perspective of a rural population in Henan province whose cosmological visions frame the Mao period as a time of relative calm, when a powerful sovereign brought order to both human and sprit realms.Throughout this book, cosmological disturbance, ghosts and psychiatric disorder become lenses through which to understand the upheaval of capital flows, cross-country migrations and intergenerational strife which have coloured social, economic and political relationships in China since Mao. Ng’s extensive fieldwork with spirit mediums themselves, ordinary villagers who consult them and patients in a local hospital is complemented by cosmically ambitious insights into society and history which make this beautifully written book an invaluable resource for understanding China’s past and present, and eras of historical disturbance more generally, through a highly compelling new lens.Ed Pulford is a Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore