New Books in Folklore

People have long been captivated by stories of dragons. Myths related to dragon slaying can be found across many civilizations around the world, even among the most ancient cultures including ancient Israel. In his book The Dragon, the Mountain, and the Nations, Robert Miller chronicles the trajectories and transformations of this myth, and brings out the major role of dragon slaying in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Join us as we talk with Robert Miller about an age-old, fascinating topic: dragons! Robert D. Miller II earned his Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible from the University of Michigan, and is Associate Professor of Old Testament at The Catholic University of America, and Research Associate with University of Pretoria, South Africa. His other books include Chieftains of the Highland Clans: A History of Israel in the 12th and 11th Centuries BC (2005), Oral Tradition in Ancient Israel (2011), and Covenant and Grace in the Old Testament: Assyrian Propaganda and Israelite Faith (2012). Robert teaches courses in Old Testament, the ancient Near East, and Archaeology. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author ofThe Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), and Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

Ann K. Ferrell is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Folk Studies program at Western Kentucky University, and also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of American Folklore. Her first book, Burley: Kentucky Tobacco in a New Century (University of Kentucky Press, 2013) is the result of multiple research methodologies including extensive ethnographic fieldwork, archival investigation, and rhetorical analysis. The book’s introduction includes a history of tobacco production in the United States along with a summary of changes in attitudes towards the product over time – the most significant shift coming in the wake of the 1964 Surgeon General’s report confirming its detrimental health effects.  Thereafter, the book is divided into three parts. Part One offers a detailed description of the work involved in raising the eponymous crop as well as how that process has changed over time. Part Two, titled “The Shifting Meanings of Tobacco,” is based upon Ferrell’s study of the representation of tobacco – or its non-representation – in the Kentucky Department of Agriculture newsletters from the 1940s up until the time of her fieldwork (c. 2007); here Ferrell shows how the state’s response to tobacco’s fluctuating fortunes played out in rhetorical decisions made manifest on the page.  For example, recent depictions of tobacco farming suggest it has been relegated to part of Kentucky’s heritage rather than its present, despite the state still being home to thousands of tobacco farms.  In the third part of the book, Ferrell combines her ethnographic research with her study of rhetoric to consider what it means to be a tobacco farmer in Kentucky in the 21st century; whereas claiming such an identity in the past might well engender pride and respect, it has become stigmatized and therefore more likely to provoke disdain at best. Partly as a result, recent decades have seen the development of the complex concept of tobacco nostalgia, characteristics of which include mourning the “golden age of the tobacco man”. In addition, Ferrell investigates why “just growing something else” is by no means as simple an endeavor as it sounds. Burley: Kentucky Tobacco in a New Century has been widely-acclaimed.  For example, in his review for the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Jeffery A. Duvall described Ferrell’s monograph as “an illuminating account of how burley tobacco, once a proud symbol of the economic strength and cultural heritage of the commonwealth, has in recent years been scrubbed from the consciousness and public image of Kentucky, and the impact this has had upon tobacco farmers in the state.”  In addition, Burley received the 2014 Wayland D. Hand Award (awarded by the American Folklore Society to the best book to combine historical and folkloristic methods and materials). 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

In Chinese Heritage in the Making: Experiences, Negotiations, and Contestations (Amsterdam University Press, 2018), edited by Christina Maags and Marina Svensson, gathers authors from a variety of disciplines to examine the growing emphasis on heritage in contemporary China. Since China began its heritage turn in the 1990s, and especially since 2004 when it became the sixth nation to ratify the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, the Chinese state’s enthusiastic promotion of safeguarding traditions, objects, and sites has empowered communities to carefully engage with the cultural practices. Using an approach that draws from the young discipline of critical heritage studies and featuring chapters examining festivals, museums, architecture and more, this volume shows how attention to the dynamic engagements between local stakeholders, government representatives, and cultural specialists can provide important perspectives on cultural forms in China and beyond. These questions are particularly important both for understanding both culture work in twenty-first China, and in the field of folklore studies. 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

The Lòlop’ò of Southwest China’s Yunnan Province have a folktale in which they, Han Chinese, and Tibetans were given the technology of writing. The Han man was wealthy, purchased paper, and wrote on paper. And so the Han continue to have writing today. The Tibetan man wrote on an animal hide, and so the Tibetans now have writing as well. The Lòlop’ò man, being poor, wrote on buckwheat pancakes. He ate the pancakes on the way home, and the Lòlop’ò now keep their texts orally among a group of ritual specialists. In Erik Mueggler’s Songs for Dead Parents: Corpse, Text, and World in Southwest China (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Lòlop’ò oral literature and Han Chinese writing feature prominently in local “work on the dead.” For the Lòlop’ò, one’s familial ancestors, and non-familial ancestors are present in the world, and people maintain complex intimate relations with them that are not constrained by death. These relations find expression in rituals in which souls are given material body and then dispersed again, in laments and chants, and in gravestones inscribed with Chinese. In examining these various factors, this book provides new pathways for studying the anthropology of death, and for understanding ethnic minority experience in Southwest China. 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

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