Folklore scholar Joseph Sciorra is the Director for Academic and Cultural Programs at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute in Queens College which is part of the City University of New York.  He’s also a Brooklyn-born and -raised Italian American and in this episode of the New Books in Folklore podcast, he talks about his latest book, Built with Faith: Italian American Imagination and Catholic Material Culture in New York City (University of Tennessee Press, 2015) which “offers a place-centric, ethnographic study of the religious material culture of New York City’s Italian American Catholics” (xiv). A transdisciplinary work, albeit firmly grounded in folklore scholarship and based on ethnographic research conducted over 35 years, this book is a comprehensive study of the myriad ways in which a people express their personal religious faith in tangible, dynamic, and often public forms.  The resulting yard shrines, sidewalk altars, elaborate presepi (Nativity scenes), and other manifestations – which also include extravagant Christmas light adornments of domestic exteriors, The Our Lady of Mount Carmel Grotto in Rosebank, Staten Island, and a series of Brooklyn religious processions – usually receive no kind of official sanction. In fact, they are more likely to provoke disdain than approbation in most quarters.  Nonetheless, they allow residents to both meaningfully relate to and actively construct the city in a way that is unique to “New York” and also speak to a vernacular Italian-American ethos that sets great store by the concept of lavoro ben fatto, or “work done well”. In Built with Faith, Sciorra gives prominence to the voices of the creators of this landscape of devotional material culture, voices which he has captured over decades in formal interviews as well as less formal ‘phone conversations, and casual street-side chats. He also takes pains to present the history of the sorts of displays that are his subject. In addition, the volume includes numerous photographs of the sites in question, often taken by the author himself. As noted by another New Books in Folkore interviewee, Luisa Del Giudice, in her review for the Journal of American Folkore: “Sciorra has vividly demonstrated why the study and practice of such material culture is important and how individual human creativity informed by a spiritual and cultural core becomes an act of both personal and community identity. These art forms may not have much social capital, but Sciorra does. As Director of Academic and Cultural Programs at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute of New York, editor (Italian American Review), blogger (“Joey Skee,” for i-Italy), noted scholar and cultural activist, Sciorra, through Built with Faith, will make a high impact beyond the disciplines of vernacular culture; art and architecture; migration and ethnic, urban, religious studies; and beyond New York City. This is definitely a carefully crafted work—that is, un lavoro ben fatto.” Cindy R. Lobel, writing for the Vernacular Architecture Forum’s Buildings and Landscapes journal, is similarly effusive: “Built with Faith makes a fine contribution to the literature on landscape, material culture, immigration, ethnic studies, and urban studies. It offers important information on the kinds of approaches Italian American New Yorkers have taken toward shaping the built environment of New York through their religious and cultural practices. Sciorra documents and offers wonderful thick descriptions of Italian American mat... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

In How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition (New York University Press, 2017), Ruth von Bernuth, Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures and Director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents the first in-depth study of Chelm literature and its relationship to its literary precursors. The Chelm stories surrounding the ‘wise men’ (fools) of this town constitute the best-known folktale tradition of the Jews of Eastern Europe. Bernuth’s book joins together a historical analysis of early modern and modern German and Yiddish literature to give us a compelling and insightful account of the history of these stories. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

Singular Spaces: From the Eccentric to the Extraordinary in Spanish Art Environments (Raw Vision, 2013) is an audacious tome. A comprehensive survey of 45 art environments on the Spanish mainland, it weighs just over eight and a half pounds and contains over 1300 color photographs (with over 4000 more plus site plans on the accompanying CD). Its author, Jo Farb Hernandez, is the Director of SPACES, a non-profit focused on art environments around the world. She first became interested in place-based creative constructions when she was an undergraduate in Wisconsin. In her introduction to Singular Spaces, she recounts how this particular book began: she and her husband were in the process of renovating an old farmhouse they’d purchased in Catalonia. They took a short road-trip to explore the area around their new home and chanced upon “the enormous roadside construction of Josep Pujiula I Vila, at that time one of the largest and most idiosyncratic art environments found worldwide” (16). Shortly thereafter Farb Hernandez began documenting Pujiula’s work while writing another book. In the process she came across more and more such endeavors that demanded her attention. Singular Spaces is devoted to those sites and like them, the book is the product of years of labor and dedication. Singular Spaces features the work of 45 artists, all men. Alongside the photographs and descriptions of the art environments, Farb Hernandez also tells the stories of their creators’ lives, and details the history and development of each project. She also describes the challenges that many of the artists have faced, not least those posed by unhappy neighbors and unsympathetic municipal authorities. In fact, helping the men deal with local adversities has led to Farb Hernandez frequently taking on the role of advocate on behalf of her interlocutors. A recent review in the Journal of American Folklore described Singular Spaces as “incredibly important for those who are interested in architecture, the politics of place and space, folk art and art in general, art and activism, the psychology of creativity, and relationships between tradition and the individual. Jo Farb Hernandez has written more than a survey of eccentric art spaces. She has opened a door to each artist and space so that they may be explored, analyzed, and, in some cases, loved by any who enjoy such contextual art forms.” Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

Humble Theory: Folklore’s Grasp on Social Life (Indiana University Press, 2016) is an anthology of essays from Dorothy Noyes, professor of English and Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University and president of the American Folklore Society. The collection of essays takes aim at some of the critical questions that the discipline of folklore faces in the twenty-first century. From seminal keyword essays (monsters, she calls them) on group, tradition, and aesthetics that set out the state of the field, to studies of the historical uses of tradition at different moments across Europe, to critiques of present-day slogan-concepts like Intangible Cultural Heritage and resilience, Humble Theory: Folklore’s Grasp on Social Life (Indiana University Press, 2016) sets out to see how the discipline of folklore, with its emphases on vernacular theorization—as opposed to grand or high theories—provides unique insights into society more broadly. Ultimately, it seems, the strength and weaknesses of folklore might simultaneously lie in the fact that the field and its theories are humble: low and close to the ground. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

When folklorist Jean Freedman first met Peggy Seeger in 1979, Freedman was an undergraduate on her junior year abroad in London, while her American compatriot had been living in the UK for two decades. Their encounter took place in the Singers’ Club, a folk music venue that Seeger and her husband Ewan MacColl founded in the early 1960s and to which Freedman returned many times during her London sojourn. After Freedman returned to the States, the pair kept in touch for a while but their contact became increasingly sporadic. However, it began again in earnest when the folklorist emailed Seeger to check some facts for a writing assignment. During their subsequent exchange, Seeger asked if Freedman might know of anyone who would be interested in writing her biography. Immediately, Freedman volunteered herself. Eight years, many interviews, and much text-based research later, Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics (University of Illinois Press, 2017) is the result. As the book’s subtitle suggests, Freedman covers multiple aspects of her subject’s rich story, including Seeger’s upbringing within a privileged musical family; her relationship with the aforementioned leftwing folksinger and songwriter, actor and playwright Ewan MacColl; her involvement in the production of the groundbreaking BBC Radio Ballads; her musical endeavors, many of which were collaborative; her involvement in the establishment of various initiatives such as the Critics Group, a key aim of which was to help young singers perform folk material in an appropriate manner; and her political activism. Freedman also writes about Seeger’s return to America in the early 1990s following MacColl’s death, then her subsequent relocation to Britain in 2010 where she continues to live and be astonishingly active. Seeger’s most recent album, Everything Changes, was released in 2014, and when this New Books in Folklore interview with Freedman was recorded in March 2018, she already had another one in the works. Freedman’s Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics is the first full length study of an important cultural figure and has been very well received since its publication last year. A recent review in the Journal of Folklore Research described the book as offering a comprehensive overview of Peggy Seeger’s life along with an absorbing history of the folk music revival. It also praises Freedman’s prose for being as approachable and entertaining as Seeger’s lyrics and informal, intimate performance style. Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures: An Ecological Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2016), a multi-authored volume co-edited by Catherine Grant and Huib Schippers, examines a range of musical traditions from cultures around the world. The book deliberately places endangered musical practices alongside vibrant traditions like western opera and Hindustani music, each assessed along five domains: systems of learning music, musicians and communities, contexts and constructs, regulations and infrastructure, and media and the music industry. Doing so allows for both “vertical reading” (reading chapters in sequential order) and “horizontal reading” (in which one examines one or a handful of domains and focuses on these across different chapters). Beyond the book, information from the project is also available on the website soundfutures.org. Timothy Thurston is Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds. His research examines language at the nexus of tradition and modernity in China’s Tibet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

Claire Schmidt is not a prison worker, rather she is a folklorist and an Assistant Professor at Missouri Valley College. However, many members of her extended family in her home state of Wisconsin either were or are prison workers and it is their work-related humor that inspired this book. If You Don’t Laugh, You’ll Cry: The Occupational Humor of White Wisconsin Prison Workers (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017) is based on multiple interviews which Schmidt conducted during a decade or more, and also on her memories of hearing relatives talk about their working lives to great comedic effect at family gatherings over the years. Schmidt’s analysis provides many different examples of the ways in which humor can be deployed by prison workers. For example, it can be a means of acclimatizing recent recruits to their new roles as prison officers; it can alleviate the long stretches of tedium that characterize prison work, as well as offer a way to cope with the periods of extremely high stress which punctuate that tedium; it can help officers negotiate the boundaries between their working and their non-working lives; and it can help them to maintain manageable relationships with—and exercise control over—the inmates under their watch. In presenting her research, Schmidt engages with a range of previous folkloristic studies of work-placed culture. She also situates her subject within a problematic institutional landscape. She highlights the fact that the Wisconsin prison system has the highest incarceration rate of black men in the United States, describing it as a clear example of ongoing and systematic social injustice at the state level (5) and an oppressive structure of institutionalized racism and class warfare that affects both inmates and prison workers (11). She also attends to popular preconceptions about correctional officers which often depicts them as sadistic bullies. Whilst some could be described as such, Schmidt ultimately argues that casting prison workers in the public role of the bad guys keeps the hostile public focus on the relatively powerless individual prison worker as the source of oppression and racism, which deflects the focus of public critique and outrage from the larger social and political institutions that maintain oppression and racism (13). Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

How do individuals on national or societal peripheries make use of tradition and to what ends? How can narratives discursively construct a complex worldview? These are some of the questions Ray Cashman seeks to answer in his new book Packy Jim: Folklore and Worldview on the Irish Border (University of Wisconsin Press, 2016). Focusing on the singular character of Packy Jim McGrath and the narratives that feature in his repertoire—from personal experience narratives to stories about the supernatural—we are taken into a lifeworld in which Packy Jim struggles with and develops his own answer to questions of authority, power, sacrifice, place, belief, and more, in a world of limited good. As many people told Cashman during his fieldwork (though they mean something slightly different), “If you want real folklore, Packy Jim is your man.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

Gretchen Dykstra‘s career to date has been both impressive and wide-ranging. She was the founding President of the Times Square Alliance, the former Commissioner of the NYC Department of Consumer Affairs, and the founding President of the 9/11 Memorial Foundation. She is also a writer, and in this New Books in Folklore episode, she is interviewed about her biography of her grandfather, Franz Rickaby, which features in Pinery Boys: Songs and Songcatching in the Lumberjack Era (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017) Franz Rickaby was a young folk music collector and fiddler and between 1919 and 1923, he travelled extensively around the Upper Midwest, seeking out the songs and stories of logging industry workers. Even as he embarked on his venture, the region’s lumber business was in stark decline. Most of the original pine forests that had covered the area had been clear cut by that time, but although the environment had been depleted, a rich cache of folkloric material remained. Rickaby set about preserving this material—songs, ballads, and stories—in manuscript form and then presented in his seminal work Ballads and Songs of the Shanty-Boy. This tome provided, as folklorist James P. Leary writes in his introduction to Pinery Boys, “the foundation for our understanding of North Americas Anglophone lumberjack folksongs, song-makers, and singers” (3). Alas, Rickaby himself died aged 35 shortly before Ballads and Songs of the Shanty-Boy appeared in print leaving the prominent Harvard-based folklorist George Kittredge to oversee its publication which took place in 1926. Rickaby’s wife Lillian, who had urged Kittredge to take up the task, wrote elsewhere that although she was sorry that her husband had not lived to see the finished product, “what are books to those who walk among the stars?” (70). Gretchen Dykstra’s biography of her grandfather forms a significant part of Pinery Boys and offers valuable insight into the life and motivations of a man about whom little was previously known. Pinery Boys also includes the republication of Rickaby’s Ballads and Songs of the Shanty-Boy, along with other material he collected but which fell outside of the purview of his major work. In addition, and as mentioned earlier, the book’s introduction, which provides valuable context, is written by the University of Wisconsin’s James P. Leary. Leary, himself a distinguished scholar of the folk music of the Upper Midwest, also provides illuminating annotations to Rickaby’s work. Incidentally, during the course of her New Books in Folklore interview, Dykstra mentions a recent recording of songs collected by her grandfather as performed by Brian Miller. More information about this recording, which is entitled Minnesota Lumberjack Songs: Irish and Scottish Music from the North Woods, can be found here. Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

The author of this book, David Hopkin, is Professor of European Social History at Hertford College, Oxford. He is also my brother. However, I’m not featuring him on New Books in Folklore because of some misguided sense of nepotism, but rather because although he is historian by training, he is a folklorist by vocation. This duality is amply evident in his book Voices of the People in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press, 2017) in which he explicitly states that he is proselytizing for a folkloric turn within the discipline of history. As he explains in his introduction, this turn essentially makes two demands of historians. Firstly, I want them to consider oral literature such as tales and songs as appropriate sources for historical analysis; secondly I want to acquaint them with those aspects of post-war folklore scholarship that provide powerful methodologies for understanding popular culture. The bulk of the book is then given over to a series of case studies in which Hopkin practices what he preaches as he mines folklore collections for material which he then examines and interprets in order to shed light on the lives of ordinary people. The chapter titles indicate his chosen subjects: “Storytelling in a Maritime Community: Saint-Cast, 1879-1882,” “The Sailors Tale: Storytelling on Board the North Atlantic Fishing Fleet,” “Love Riddles and Family Strategies in the Dyemans of Lorraine,” “Storytelling and Family Dynamics in an Extended Household: The Briffaults of Montigny-aux-Amognes,” “Work Songs and Peasant Visions of the Social Order” and “The Visionary World of the Vallave Lacemaker.” His interpretations of the archival records offer ideas about how the folk were able to challenge authority figures from a position of safety, negotiate inequalities within their own families, maintain communal bonds despite often trying conditions, and achieve strategic marital alliances. More broadly, he shows how traditional oral forms stories, songs and riddles—provided viable mechanisms through which the poor were able to assert some degree of control over their own destinies. Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore