New Books in Folklore

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

We tend to think of ourselves—our modern selves–as disenchanted. We have traded magic, myth, and spirits for science, reason, and logic. But this is false. Jason Josephson-Storm, in his exciting new book titled The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2017) challenges this classical story of modernity. Josephson-Storm, associate professor in and chair of the Department of Religion at Williams College, argues that modernity is riddled with magic, and that attempts to curtail it have often failed. Adding a twist to a well-known expression, he writes that we have never been disenchanted. Josephson-Storm investigates the human sciences—philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, and folklore studies, to name a few—which were critical to the creation and spread of the myth of a mythless society. But the human sciences were themselves also deeply entangled with magic. They often, Josephson-Storm reveals, emerged from occult origins, flirted with the paranormal, or even produced new enchantments. As can be surmised from this brief description, the audience of The Myth of Disenchantment will be a broad and eclectic one. The book will be of interest to scholars in religious studies, science and technology studies, and historians of philosophy, science, ideas, culture, and Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

On Second Thought: Learned Women Reflect on Profession, Community, and Purpose (University of Utah Press, 2017) is a collection of thirteen essays by women, all in the second half of their lives, in which they contemplate the ways in which the different facets of their identities—personal, professional and spiritual—have hitherto unfolded and intertwined. Among their number is the folklorist, ethnographer, oral historian, and prolific independent scholar Luisa Del Giudice, who is also the editor of the volume and the driving force behind it. The seed for the book began some years ago, when a career crisis led Del Giudice to question many aspects of her life. In the process, she developed an acute awareness of its often fragmented nature, a fragmentation exacerbated, if not caused, by an academic establishment that tends to looks askance on its members bringing any aspect of their personal lives, still less their spiritual beliefs, into their work. Del Giudice decided to push back against the resulting dichotomous state, which effectively pits the pursuit of knowledge (academia) against the pursuit of wisdom (spirituality). She contacted a number of women, most of whom she knew personally, and asked if they would be willing to provide written reflections on their lives to date often complex and multifaceted lives that encompassed a range of personal and professional identities. She encouraged each to describe how their existence has accrued meaning and purpose, as well as any spiritual leanings underpinning that process. The result is a kind of textual “Wise Women’s Circle.” It includes four folklorists (aside from Del Giudice herself, there is Mary Ellen Brown, Sabina Magliocco, and Christine Zinni) along with contributors whose professional backgrounds embrace a range of other scholarly disciplines, as well as practitioners of law, medicine, public health, and art. The spiritual and cultural leanings expressed are similarly diverse and include Catholicism, Paganism, Episcopalianism, Jungian Psychology, Judaism and Zen Buddhism. The paths of the women have often been shaped by societal and cultural expectations and institutional constraints. Despite the singular nature of each essay, a number of recurring themes emerge, not least the importance of cultural heritage, the challenges of combining a professional role with that of a domestic caregiver, workplace side-lining, the power of story-telling, and, perhaps most notably, an ongoing experience of existing within a creative, albeit uncomfortable, state of betwixt and betweeness. Del Giudice describes the contributors as “masters of bricolage and diverse resources who find meaning in lonely marginalized places, who struggle to weave together disparate aspects of life to make them meaningful” (23). All can speak to lessons learned, rewards gained, and the critical need for women’s voices to be heard. Overall, this collection is designed to inspire its readers to examine their own lives, to help them clarify their own sense of purpose, and then commit to fulfilling it, despite the obstacles which will surely arise. 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 A Vulgar Art: A New Approach to Stand-Up Comedy (The University Press of Mississippi, 2014), Ian Brodie, an associate professor of folklore at Cape Breton University, brings a folkloristic approach to the study of stand-up comedy. By focusing on comedic performance, Brodie shows stand-up comedy to be a collaborative act between comedian and audience similar to folk performance around the world, even as mediatization sees professional comedians transcend the initial performance to reach mass audiences. 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

Cultivating Community: Interest, Identity, and Ambiguity in an Indian Social Mobilization by Michael Youngblood, a cultural anthropologist based in San Francisco, was published in November, 2016 by the South Asian Studies Association Press. The book is a winner of the Joseph W. Elder Book Prize (conferred by the American Institute of Indian Studies), and has been very well received by reviewers. Cultivating Community is based on the author’s two and a half years of field research in 1996-1999 with the Shetkari Sanghatana, a massive and influential anti-statist movement in India’s Maharashtra state. The book explores the creation of political meaning and the construction of collective identity in a mass social movement. In it, the author address fundamental questions in making sense of mass movements anywhere: Where do movement ideologies come from and what makes them compelling? What motivates diverse groups of ordinary people to rise together in common cause? How can we make sense of individual participants in a movement when their participation sometimes appears irrational and against their own interests? The book argues for a participant-centric view of the Shetkari Sanghatana, digging beneath the movement’s fantastical mythological idiom and the overarching demands that we hear articulated by leadership to see how the Sanghatana is experienced and constructed by individual participants on the ground. An important part of the analysis focuses on ways that participants and leaders together deploy a pool of shared but highly ambiguous spiritual and political symbols in an ongoing competition to define what the movement stands for, whose interests it represents, and what the future should look like. This is an anthropological ethnography that delves into history, political science, economics, cultural geography, folklore, and religion. Mike Youngblood received his PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has taught at the School for International Training, the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley, the Masters in Social Design program at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University. Mike’s interests in social innovation, collaborative change, design thinking, and ethnographic methodology are central to his work both inside and outside of academe. His work has received a number of recognitions, including the Sardar Patel Award for Best American Dissertation on Modern India, the Percy H. Buchannan Prize for Writing on Asian Affairs, the Robert Miller Prize for Innovation in Anthropological Research, and the Joseph W. Elder Book Prize. He has been a Fulbright fellow, a Watson fellow, and an American Institute of Indian Studies fellow.     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

Jewish Magic Before the Rise of Kabbalah (Wayne State University Press, 2017) opens new vistas not only on the history of the practice of magic throughout Jewish history, but on the variety and syncretistic depth of such practices. Its author is Yuval Harari, professor in the Department of Jewish Thought and head of the Program of Folklore Studies at Ben Gurion University. Professor Harari’s work challenges perceptions and categorizations of what Jewish magic is, and what its place in the Judaism of late antiquity was. It thus promises to facilitate a reappraisal of the performative practices, the beliefs and rituals, on which Jewish life as we know it is founded. Professor Harari’s work carefully and systematically examines a wide variety of Jewish texts and artifacts, and reveals the extent to which the practice of magic is woven into Jewish ritual, thought, culture, from Late Antiquity through and beyond the Middle Ages. David Gottlieb is a PhD Candidate in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research interests center on the influence of rabbinic midrash on the formation of Jewish cultural memory. He can be reached at davidg1@uchicago.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013) by Laura J. Olson and Svetlana Adonyeva casts a new look at the traditional representation of Russian women and village life in scholarship. Grounding the imagery of a Russian woman in the network of her relationship with her family and the larger community, Olson and Adonyeva show how age and gender shape village communities and traditional lifestyle. Previously, Olson and Adonyeva argue, women have been excluded from the folklore tradition mainly because their performances took place in private rather than public setting, and thus were either not accessible for, or discounted in scholarship. The private character of these performances, however, endows women with a larger agency in preserving and negotiating tradition. Through the discussions of aspects and practices of village life as marriage and courtship, death, memory, motherhood, magic, or singing over the course of three generations, the images of Russian village woman arise as very different from their habitual depiction as “victims of oppressive patriarchy.” Olson and Adonyeva employ a broad analytical framework relying on a set of tools of anthropology, folklore studies, linguistics, psychology and literature studies to recover the previously silenced female voices and tell a fascinating story which challenges our understanding of the lives and societal roles of Russian women. Olga Breininger is a PhD candidate in Slavic and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Her research interests include post-Soviet culture and geopolitics, with a special focus on Islam, nation-building, and energy politics. Olga is the author of the novel There Was No Adderall in the Soviet Union and columnist at Literratura. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore