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Cultural Appropriation Vs. Borrowing in Belly Dance (Part 1)

March 13, 2014 in Dance, Folklore | 10 comments

Photo by Curtis Claspell

Me, a “white” belly dancer      Photo by Curtis Claspell

By now there’s been a fair bit of comment on that infamous Salon post, Why I Can’t Stand White Belly Dancers, but I thought I would add my perspective as a folklorist and a (white-ish-I-guess) belly dancer.

One of my first reactions was along the lines of: um, are there no “white” people in the Middle East? How are we defining whiteness? Do Jews (which would include my ancestors) count? This response by Yessenia emphasizes the arbitrariness of ethnic categories, pointing out that a lot of well-known belly dancers might look like white impostors, but they’re actually of Lebanese, Egyptian, or Turkish descent.

As a folklorist, and as someone who’s actually done some research on the history of belly dancing, I know that this form of expressive culture – like many others – is transnational. Cultures have always come into contact and have always exchanged folklore, whether stories or dances or foods. This isn’t to say that there’s no power imbalance in the exchange (there usually is), but rather that this phenomenon is as old as humanity itself.

The ridiculousness of saying “X ethnicity shouldn’t practice Y art form” has already been mocked in The Washington Post. Besides, there have been Western influences on belly dance, so it’s sorta ours too. As Nazneen points out in her blog post A “brown” dancer responds to “Why I can’t stand white belly dancers,” contemporary belly dance “was shaped by Mahmoud Reda, an Egyptian dancer who popularized Egyptian folk dance for the stage by blending it with Western ballet. (Interestingly, he was inspired by the likes of Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, by his own admission).” Determining the true origin of an expressive culture form is a knotty problem, as folklorists know, so I always like to remind people of how complex these questions are.

And the origins of belly dance are pretty complex. Quoted in The Atlantic, Dr. Ruth Webb, an expert in performance during antiquity, states: “with regional variations, something like Raqs Sharqi seems to have been known throughout the Mediterranean and certainly flourished in Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean before the arrival of the Arabs in the 7th century.” Very old. Multiethnic (even pre-Arab, by some accounts). You get the idea.

And yet because of the Salon author’s focus on essentializing and universalizing race/ethnicity, she misses a valuable opportunity to critique the colonialist, imperialist, and orientalist problems with belly dance in both the East and the West. Autumn Ward’s response to the piece cogently points out: “For Egyptian women from the Muslim Arab cultural majority, dance is simply not a respectable profession, so dancing professionally is not an option. This is a firmly entrenched cultural attitude that predates current conservative politics by centuries.” In other words, Egyptian society has made it unacceptable for women (and in many cases, men – read some Anthony Shay!) to take up belly dancing without being accused of also being a sex worker. This is a problem of local politics/beliefs, but then outsiders are blamed for wanting to perform a dance because they aren’t held to the same standards? Hm. This is my skeptical face.

G. Willow Wilson also points out some of the political implications of Westerners borrowing belly dance when she writes: “When you shimmy around a stage in a hip band and call yourself Aliya Selim and receive praise and encouragement, while the real Aliya Selims are shortening their names to Ally and wondering if their accent is too strong to land that job interview, if the boss will look askance at their headscarf, if the kids at school are going to make fun of their children, guess what: you are exercising considerable privilege.” There is a hostile, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim sentiment in many parts of the West right now, and belly dancers should be informed and possibly even active about these topics, just as we educate ourselves about the cultures framing the dance when it’s performed “over there.”

On the whole, I agree with professional dancer and Middle Eastern scholar Asharah‘s take in her essay, I’m A White Woman and I Belly Dance, in which she writes:

“What this article wants to be is about imperialism and power. It wants to be an article about the domination of the ‘West’ over the Middle East. It wants to take a jab at the exploitation of Western powers (read: British, French, and American) of the Middle East and its people. It wants to be an article about Orientalism. It wants to be about white privilege in the United States.  All of these topics are valid and should be discussed…But, as a means for bridging gaps of understanding between the Arab world and ‘white people,’ it fails. It fails because of its own racism, sweeping generalizations, and bigotry.”

Bingo. As artists and world citizens, we ought to be open to discussions about the political implications of cultural borrowings. But as belly dancer and artist Tempest writes in her post Nobody’s Right If Everybody’s Wrong, what tends to happen in these discussions is people stating, “it doesn’t matter who you are/where you come from/what you say/how you say it: you are wrong, so shut up. Which doesn’t empower or help anyone.”

I agree that there does need to be room to address the grievances raised in this debate, and obviously it’s not my place to tell someone that they’re wrong to be offended and that their feelings aren’t valid. As far as how to productively have that kind of conversation, well, that’s coming up in Part 2!

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Why You Should Stop Telling Folklorists To Write Children’s Books

February 25, 2014 in Fairy Tales, Folklore | 3 comments

Thanks to Wikimedia for the image.

As a folklorist – and especially one who researches fairy tales – I get the following comments a lot:

  • “Oh, you study folklore? Do you also write children’s books?”
  • “How cool that you study fairy tales! Do you write them too?”
  • “I’m sorry to hear you’re having trouble on the academic job market. Have you thought about writing books for kids?”

While these statements are often accompanied by good intentions, they begin to get annoying after a while (and I hope that I can say that without totally disregarding the positive intentions of the people saying these kinds of things, especially since a lot of the people saying these kinds of things to me are family members!). So I thought I’d take the time to explain why this kind of linkage is not only erroneous in nature, but ultimately unhelpful.

By now readers of my blog should know that folklore isn’t just fairy tales and other kinds of stories, it also encompasses other verbal genres (riddles, jokes, slang, proverbs, etc.) as well as material culture (traditional foods, clothing/costumes, crafts, vernacular architecture) and customs/beliefs/behavior (holiday customs, festivals, folk dance & music, gestures, games, and so on). Folklore is intertwined with power relations and weaves in and out of every individual’s life, tying us to our various social groups (or “folk groups” we as call them) while also highlighting our unique life circumstances.

So for someone to assume that simply because I have a background in folklore, I should be writing children’s books, is to erroneously whittle the entire purview of folklore studies down to “stuff for kids.” That can come across as insulting even if it’s not meant to be. It further implies that we shouldn’t do what we’re trained to do – that is, research, teach, and write about folklore – but we should come up with a specifically marketable product instead.

Okay, you might be saying, but I actually do study fairy tales and related genres such as fantasy literature, children’s literature, and YA fiction. However, studying something is different than producing it. Very, very different. As I’ve said before, I’m not that good at telling stories, but I’m great at telling stories about stories (by which I mean analysis, criticism, interpretation).

Many scholars do, in fact, learn to do the phenomenon they’re trying to study, whether this is part of participant-observation while doing fieldwork, or whether they’re studying the social phenomena that accompany creative actions. There are a lot of reasons for an ethnomusicologist to learn to play the instruments that the community he studies play, or for a sociologist to learn the dance that the community she studies performs. But you shouldn’t assume that it’s something that every scholar does, nor that a scholar will take that ethnographic knowledge and go on to perform/publish/market it.

Further, writing children’s literature is a very specialized sort of task that, while I have no doubt in my mind that I could do it, comes with ethical questions that I don’t know if I want to face. I’m comfortable teaching at the college level, but do I feel comfortable disseminating a message to much younger minds? Children’s literature has historically been used to shape (and in many cases hobble) the minds and morals of children. Do I really want to throw my hat in? I don’t know the answer yet, but it’s not something I’ll undertake lightly.

Let’s recap. By suggesting that because I study folklore, I should write children’s literature, you are:

  • Demonstrating that you don’t understand the full extent of what folklorists do
  • Devaluing the work that folklorists are trained to do, instead suggesting that we should turn to crafting and selling capitalist products
  • Conflating studying something with being able to and/or desiring to creatively produce it and market it
  • Stating that you think I should take on the moral obligation of sending messages to children

I’d love to hear from some other folklorists on their experiences with this subject, but I think I’ve covered the main points where this kind of thing bothers me.

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Organizing Course Learning Goals

January 9, 2014 in Academia, Folklore | No comments

I tried something new in my two classes at Butler in the fall semester, and I liked it enough that I’m going to continue it in my spring classes and also share it with you all here.

Often, when I am writing syllabi and constructing my first-day “let’s all get oriented” lectures, I find myself trying to balance my broader learning goals (instilling critical thinking skills, attentive reading skills, and so on) with my discipline-specific goals. In the case of folklore classes, it’s important to learn what we do differently when studying folklore than, say, literature, but also to learn about the topics at hand, which is more of a methods vs. facts distinction.

Then there’s this issue: articulating a balance of learning goals that is helpful to me when writing the syllabus is a different thing than trying to convey this information to my students, so they can know what’s expected of them. I think the idea I’m going to share here is more helpful for the latter, but maybe it’ll work well when kept in mind for the former, too.

In both of my classes last fall, I told my students that they were going to be learning three main types of things in the class:

  • Objective
  • Subjective
  • Critical

I’ll explain this with examples from my Folklore of the Midwest class.

  • Objective knowledge about folklore in/of the Midwest: we learned how to identify various folklore genres and texts; we learned the terminology used in folklore studies; there IS a right and a wrong answer for this kind of thing (don’t try to convince me that a riddle is a legend; it will go poorly for you)
  • Subjective knowledge about folklore in/of the Midwest: we learned how to identify folklore in our own lives, which would be different for each individual student; here, students might make connections between folklore items discussed in class and items known in their folk groups, ranging from family folklore to occupational folklore; there’s not so much a right or wrong here since this is very personal, but you should still be using folklore terminology correctly
  • Critical thinking about folklore in/of the Midwest: we learned how to apply concepts from class to not only our lives, but also the world around us; this is less easy to gauge than the other two elements, but it emerges when I have students design their own fieldwork projects, and when we discuss current events in class and I can see students making connections between class concepts and superficially unrelated topics

I came up with a similar breakdown of concepts and knowledges in my gender studies class last semester, which had even more of a subjective component to it since we were discussing marriage, relationships, sexuality, and gender, which people often respond to emotionally. Both of my classes seemed to respond well to this paradigm when I presented them with it on the first day of class, and I reminded them of it throughout the semester and at the semester’s close. I suppose this is what’s referred to as “scaffolding” in course design and lesson plan design – having a concrete idea of where the class is supposed to go, and giving your students the support and structure they need in order to think and explore in that direction.

This semester I’m probably going to stick closely to this course concept in one of my classes, and try something different in the other. I may well apply it in my class on fairy tales, sexuality, and desire, since as we all know, things tend to come in threes in fairy tales. I’ll try a different learning-goal paradigm for my class on dance, gender, and the body, and I’ll report back on any notable successes or failures in a few months.

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Why I Kinda Don’t Care About Origins

December 20, 2013 in Fairy Tales, Folklore | No comments

As the semester winds down, I like to reflect on what I’ve learned about folklore and being a folklorist in the past few months. Thankfully, I didn’t encounter one of my primary pet peeves (where everyone assumes they already know about folklore) while teaching my folklore class this fall, but in general conversations and reading, I ran into another annoyance I thought I’d elaborate on here.

I sorta don’t care about the origins of most folklore.

There, I said it. This is a big deal since most people assume that folklorists are ALL ABOUT origins. As though wondering about the origins of myths and stories and customs is what keeps us lying awake at night, tossing and  turning in bed until, with frantic eyes and mussed hair, we lurch to our libraries and laptops to look for answers. Maybe that’s the case for some folklorists, but it really isn’t for me.

Allow me to explain. One of the key attributes of folklore is that it’s transmitted traditionally within groups, where “traditionally” can mean through oral culture and word-of-mouth, or it can just mean informally rather than institutionally (yes, folklore exists in institutions, but it’s rarely found in the printed rule books and the official or elite culture of that institution, but rather in the customs and on-the-job knowledge and skills that people acquire from other people).

As Lynn McNeill so eloquently puts it in her new (and awesome) book Folklore Rules,
“The significance of folklore studies as an academic field comes back to the idea that folklore exists as a form of cultural expression without the anchor of institutional culture.” (33) McNeill goes on to use  examples from the literary canon (we can’t just decide to ditch Dickens if we don’t like him anymore, since his contribution to Western literature has become institutionalized) and the law (we can’t simply decide to stop following certain laws if we don’t feel they’re relevant any longer) to illustrate her point.

But when we’re talking folklore, we’re in a different realm entirely: “Folklore, on the other hand, isn’t institutionally determined. That urban legend no longer speaks to something we  care about? Gone. That custom no longer meets the needs of that family? Done – never happens again. While we may record the legend or a description of the custom in an archive so that we remember it was once relevant, there’s no formal organization still making us tell the legend or practice the custom. Unlike reading the past works of a famous author or obeying an outdated law, the moment folklore is no longer relevant, we simply stop using it.” (33-34)

The amazing insight here, which McNeill has highlighted beautifully, is that “if folklore is currently circulating, it must be important” (34, italics in original) That means we can use folklore as a way to measure and interpret the concerns of people today, if we’re studying today’s folklore… and we can use folklore of the past to understand the concerns of people in the past. Both are legit, but both are not automatically the purview of folklorists.

See, if I’d wanted to study the past, I’d have become a historian, or at least a folklorist who is more historically-oriented than I am now. I am definitely interested in some historical origins of things, like when it comes to one of my favorite genres, fairy tales. But I’m also big on relevance, and most of the time, I find myself confounded by the social groups around me, so I want to use folklore to understand them (not least because the actions of others affect me, especially living in a democracy and whatnot).

Hopefully I’ve shown why it’s erroneous to assume that ALL folklorists are interested in the origins of a given story, or festival, or traditional food. Some of us are, sure, but not all of us. Understanding where something comes from can help us understand how it’s become the way it is today (assuming that it’s still practiced/told/transmitted), and that in its own right can be a fascinating example of the twin laws of folklore, tradition and variation, at work. But tracking down the origins of something won’t help us understand why it’s relevant today, or the functions it serves in today’s society. It might give us some hints, but it won’t yield the full picture, not the same way researching its contemporary uses will.

So now you know: not every folklorist is into chasing down the origins of a given item or genre of folklore. You’re welcome.

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Why Folklorists (Should) Love American Tribal Style® Belly Dance

October 31, 2013 in Dance, Folklore | 3 comments

Carolena Nericcio, creator of American Tribal Style® Belly Dance, dancing with her troupe, Fat Chance Belly Dance®

I was recently chatting with a folklore colleague who was thinking about starting belly dance classes, specifically, American Tribal Style® Belly Dance classes (or ATS for short). It occurred to me if folklorists knew what made ATS different from other styles of belly dance, would be all over this as something interesting and neat to talk about with the concepts of our discipline.

Here’s why (in handy bullet point form):

  • ATS is an improvised dance form using an agreed-upon movement vocabulary to communicate and create within the moment. It shows us how artistic performers utilize the tools in their creative toolbox (in this case, the dance moves) to create an emergent performance, much like epic singers or fairy-tale tellers might also do, but with the body instead of with words and phrases.
  • ATS exemplifies tradition and variation at work. The way you’re “supposed” to do the moves is the stable current of tradition, while the “flavor” that develops in troupe worldwide (intentionally or not) is the dynamic of variation.
  • ATS is only a few decades old, so it represents a fledgling folklore genre and folk group that we can study as it moves through infancy into maturity. There are already offshoots (Improvisational Tribal Style/ITS, tribal fusion, and countless other takes on tribal/improvisational belly dance), which makes for an intriguing example of cause-and-effect and community-building in action.
  • Material culture galore! The costuming style of ATS is unique and rich in texture, color, sound, weight… so many things! I would refer anyone who’s interested in this particular aspect of ATS to my article, “’Whether it’s coins, fringe, or just stuff that’s sparkly’: Aesthetics and Utility in a Tribal Fusion Belly Dance Troupe’s Costumes.” Midwestern Folklore 32 (1/2). (Terre Haute: Indiana State University Press). 83-97.
  • Because ATS incorporates dance moves from the Middle East (as well as from Indian classical dance, flamenco, and Gypsy dances to a degree), practitioners have an interesting relationship with the idea of “authenticity.” Most dancers agree that they’re not trying to recreate an actual tribe’s dances or costumes, but rather that ATS is a fusion that draws on these elements. But we could be having a conversation about cultural appropriation, too… is it all roses and sunshine in ATS-land? It’s a tough call, and more scholarship might be illuminating.
  • Verbal arts abound: personal narratives (how one got into the dance, transformative moments while dancing, funny run-ins with other troupes’ “flavors” that you didn’t pick up on at first), legends about origins of the dance, folkspeech such as naming practices, greeting and cheering (zagarheet anyone?), etc. Plenty of customary folklore, too: haflas, finger cymbal/zil practices, and obviously the whole body of dance movements that we collectively learn and perform
  • ATS dancers are an intentional community, a folk group comprised of hobbyists and professionals (and everything in between) who develop a shared worldview and esoteric understandings of the beauty of women’s bodies, the value of exercise in otherwise sedentary cultures, and the importance of clear and direct communication, among other things. I’ve seen ATS dancers develop greater body awareness and confidence/self-esteem, likely as a result of practicing this dance form. How is that not interesting to folklorists?
  • Perhaps you’ve noticed all the “®”/registered trademarks appearing in this post. That’s because the creator of ATS and founder of the troupe FatChance BellyDance® wants to protect her creative/intellectual property. Can you really trademark art? Or a dance form? Enough folklorists are engaged in these questions with other folk arts that I think we’d be interested in what makes this instance unique.

I could go on, but hopefully you get the idea. I really love this clip where Carolena Nericcio, my teacher and the creator of ATS, explains what it’s all about.

I’d love to hear from other dancers and folklorists on this topic!

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Everyone Knows About Folklore! (except for when you don’t)

March 31, 2013 in Academia, Fairy Tales, Folklore | 5 comments

As promised, here’s my second post of the month. Hopefully I can continue to publish two posts per month, and perhaps even increase the number as time goes on.

Since I’ve spent the last few days revising a chapter of my dissertation into an article to submit for publication – which involved changing all the citations from MLA to Chicago style, and multiple other tedious rearrangements – I’m going to just write this pots in prose. No citations. Feel free to ask for them in comments if you’re curious.

While I was having a fabulous time at this year’s International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, I noticed a trend: people tend to discuss folklore (the topic) as though they know as much about it as someone who has academic training in folklore (the discipline). One of the most obvious manifestations of this was people who mixed up the names of folk narrative genres, like legend and fairy tale and myth, without regard to how they’re used in our discipline. And trust me, we use them quite precisely, distinguishing between their content, contexts, forms, and functions (among other characteristics).

I get that some of these genre terms have entered English vernacular with various meanings (“myth” being one of the most pernicious examples of this phenomenon), but I’d expect scholars to do a bit more research, and use their terminology with more intention and precision. And I get that folkloristics is a small, less-known discipline, so people don’t immediately think to look up our scholarship as examples of how to use genre terms with utmost precision. These are all factors, to be sure.

However, I think there’s something else going on too: I think that we folklorists, in our efforts to reach out to students and colleagues and the general public, have mistakenly placed an emphasis on how folklore is for everyone. If we all know folklore – which we all do, even if we don’t think of it in those terms – then we’re all, in some sense, folklore experts. We’re all the folk after all, right? (to quote my beloved mentor, Alan Dundes) So if we’re all the folk, we all know about folklore, and we all have the right to talk and write about it, right?

Sorta.

On the one hand, I’ve found emphasizing that everyone knows and performs folklore to be an incredibly useful strategy while  teaching folklore classes. Once my students know that folklore encompasses all the expressive culture and artistic communication of a given group, and that it’s not just myths and fairy tales, they respond enthusiastically to my in-class discussion prompts. They can rattle off jokes, folkspeech/slang, holiday customs, family stories, personal narratives, folk medicine, and more. All of which is wonderful to witness.

But on the other hand, perhaps we as professional folklorists are mistakenly giving the impression that once a person can identify folklore in her life, she automatically knows enough about it to present or publish about it. Perhaps this is related to the ethnographic impulse in our discipline, where we urge people to describe texts of folklore and  relate them to their life and cultural contexts. That’s definitely part of what we want out of folklore scholarship, and if laypeople can get that far, that’s worthwhile, right? But there’s a line between description and analysis, and perhaps that line is getting muddled somewhere.

I’m not sure how we can rectify this misunderstanding, and I suspect that there are deeper cultural forces at work here (such as the dichotomous relationship between orality and literacy and attendant values). I don’t know whether I’m willing to give up the powerful teaching tool that “everyone knows folklore!” has turned out to be, though I’m thoroughly annoyed by every instance where someone (whether a layperson or academic) doesn’t bother to look up our field’s research when referring to our field’s topics.

Suggestions or comments welcome, from folklorists as well as everyone else.

(for what it’s worth, I don’t intend this post to send a negative message to scholars who don’t have a folklore background but are actively interested in working on folklore topics… please just keep in mind that our discipline has a long history – the American Folklore Society was founded before the American Anthropological Association, for instance – and if you really want to do a good job of working with folklore materials, your research must include folkloristic approaches to the topic… and feel free to ask your local folklorist for research suggestions, most of us are happy to help!)

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Food and Culture: I Don’t Really Care for Pork (There’s a Reason)

November 29, 2012 in Folklore, Food, Observations | 2 comments

In my Introduction to Folklore class yesterday, we talked about food, leaving me, of course, super-hungry after class. I ate a delicious vegetarian dinner, belly danced for an hour, and then had some leftover homemade butternut-squash pie from Thanksgiving.

One of the main points we discussed in class was that food preferences are both individual and cultural. Certain flavor combinations are found only in specific regions or among certain groups, and those flavors are often considered “normal” – until you run into what another culture thinks is tasty, and you’re usually in for a shock (case in point: Estonians put pickles and ketchup on their pizza; I’m normally pretty open-minded about food, but I was both disgusted and offended by this practice).

Sometimes, no matter how you’re raised, there’s just no accounting for taste. One person’s comfort food is another person’s gag-inducer. Sometimes we try other cuisines and find them more palatable than what we were raised with, but other times people don’t bother to venture far from what they grew up eating.

Here, we begin to see the interconnections between food and value systems. People express their identities through the foods they both choose and refuse to eat. Whole families and ethnic groups declare their affiliation by what (and how, and when) they eat together. The allocation of food labor – which remains thoroughly gendered, even in this day and age – tells us still more about what people value, and how they express those values through their eating preferences.

I love food, and I love talking about food, so I really tried to reign myself in while in class, so that my students could reflect on their families’ Thanksgiving traditions. I was quite pleased when my students were able to verbalize which aspects of their family meals were traditional and which were variations or innovations. A surprising number of students recounted how That One Random Dish (Like Oyster Dressing) Become Traditional Because An Elderly Male Relative Likes It Even Though He’s The Only One (again, I’m seeing gendered patterns; is it any surprise that eccentric whims are tolerated when people in positions of authority demand to have their way even if no one else likes what they want?).

I didn’t talk much about food and religion with my class, in part because it’s not my specific area of study, and I didn’t really prepare a lot of material on that topic since we had plenty to discuss anyway. Besides, I figured that they’d just had Thanksgiving, so those food traditions would be fresh in their minds.

But it turns out that despite the fact that I don’t identify as religious, religion has influenced my food preferences in one major way: I don’t really like pork.

Yes, read that sentence again: I don’t really like pork. And I can’t pinpoint any logical reason why. Except for religion. Even though I’m not religious.

Bear with me for a moment (or, ya know, a paragraph or three). My mom’s side of the family is Jewish. Not really in the religious sense, but more in the cultural sense: we celebrate the main Jewish holidays by getting together with our family and preparing the appropriate foods, but we don’t go to temple or pray much. It’s more about the communal and family aspects of the religion.

My family is also composed of serious foodies. So we never bothered keeping kosher, in part because there were just too many tasty things out there to eat. My mom and dad each traveled through Europe in their college years, and so they would eat whatever was available to them. I ended up doing the same thing, because while I feel strongly that treating animals ethically is important, it’s also important to me to be a gracious guest at dinners, to be able to try new things while traveling, and to have an easy way to get enough protein and iron and other nutrients because I live a very active lifestyle. So while I’ve dabbled in vegetarianism in the past, and I still cook many delicious meals with minimal or no meat, I consider myself an omnivore these days.

So, religion enters the equation because while we ate plenty of shellfish and other non-kosher foods, pork didn’t cross the dinner table too often. This was also a matter of personal preference, as both of my parents find that pork can easily dry out, even in the hands of an experienced cook. So it just wasn’t something we ate very often. It became a habit to substitute other meats, and this even extended to (dare I utter the holy word?) bacon. Yes, BACON. I grew up eating turkey bacon. Most everyone who learns this about me pities me. I don’t think I had much in the way of real bacon til I was an adult, adrift in the world on my own.

Since leaving home, I’ve experimented with cooking with pork products, and I find that while I tend to enjoy bacon (duh) and other cured pork products like prosciutto and sausages (especially from Smoking Goose!), plain ol’ pork doesn’t do it for me. Loins, chops, you name it, I’ve tried it. Once in a blue moon I enjoy ribs or pork belly. But my poor partner (who’s from Texas if that tells you anything) keeps asking me to cook pork and I keep responding with things like, “I’ll think about it… ooh, look, wild-caught salmon is on sale!”

To the friends who have fed me pork in the past (especially my Philly friends, who fed me pork from a local pig that was raised sustainably!): don’t worry, I’m sure I enjoyed that meal (yes, especially that one). It’s just that I don’t seek out pork as a main course unless I’m in a very particular mood.

What I really mean to say in this long-winded excursion through my personal and family life is that our food preferences are acquired largely unconsciously, through means not of our own making. A religion that I do not identify with except in terms of cultural practices caused me to not be exposed to a certain food, which I do not really care for still today. The texture/taste preferences of my parents – who exposed me and my sister to a TON of food, both domestic and exotic – influenced my own feelings about how food should taste, look, feel, and smell. These factors, so far out of my control yet so essential in shaping my identity, have indelibly marked me, even as I, a fully-grown individual, can consciously make changes to and adapt to new environments.

This is what we study when we study food: the role of culture in molding individuals, who do their best to mold culture right back. Many of the forces shaping our lives are out of our control, if we’re even conscious enough of them to think of them in those terms. And yet, as the study of folklore shows constantly, individuals creatively draw upon cultural traditions as resources in the struggle for self-determination, self-expression, and even survival.

When I say that I don’t really care for pork, I’m making a statement about myself that is larger than myself. Analyzing food is an entry point to humanity through the lenses of the individual, the society, the family, religion, ethics, gender, social class, ethnicity, nationality, and much, much more. It’s kind of amazing that what we put into our mouths yields so much rich information.

And now I’m hungry again.

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Fairy Tale Story Time with Auntie Jeana

September 6, 2012 in Academia, Fairy Tales, Folklore | 5 comments

I am only okay at telling stories.

However, I’m actually really good at telling stories about stories.

Me dressed in traditional Manipuri clothing for the banquet at ICFA 2012.

(seriously, ask any of my intro-to-folklore students: I try to tell jokes as examples of the genre, and usually muck up the punchline; really, ask any of my friends or family – I am not so good at telling jokes or stories, but I am fantastic at interpreting and analyzing them)

So there I was at the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts this past March. This is where, incidentally, I’d had a life-changing conversation with China Miéville, a writer I adore beyond words. It’s also where I presented on my dissertation on gender and the body in European fairy tales, focusing on monstrous masculinity within my subset of tales. Some of my favorite people in the whole world attend this conference, so I love catching up with them. But I also get to meet new people, which is quite awesome in its own right.

One evening, after panel sessions were over, I found myself at the poolside bar with two young conference attendees who were both studying some permutation of library science and/or children’s literature/YA. They were really interested in learning more about the connections between fairy tales and fantasy, and I was more than happy to oblige them. After a drink or three, I was telling them, basically, how to not screw up this kind of scholarship. I might’ve also been referring to myself in the third person as Auntie Jeana… I can rock a donor figure role, okay?

If you wanna know how to do good scholarship on fairy tales and fantasy, I figure it helps to know what bad scholarship looks like. And oh boy, do I have some gems for you!

Earlier at this conference, I was attending a panel on, you guessed it, fairy tales and fantasy. There were two solid papers, one on illustrations in children’s books based on fairy tales, and one on a certain rather violent tale type. The third paper was… well… when I was feeling charitable before the Q&A session, I decided that it was ill-informed and poorly executed.

Despite the paper being on a folkloric topic – Cinderella – it veered off and ignored all folklore scholarship on the tale type. It tried to prove the origin of motifs from a single version of the tale based on shared historical associations which was, hm, misguided at best. I mean, searching for origins is so nineteenth-century. Contemporary folklorists don’t bother much with the quest for origins since unless someone writes it down, oral tradition is, well, oral. You’re not going to find what’s never been documented. That way lies madness (or inaccurate assumptions, or poorly-done history). However, I was willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt.

But in the Q&A session, when I politely tried to point out that the author might want to read what some folklorists have to say on the matter, I was repeatedly cut off. I mean, the author got really defensive. And I even started my comment with a compliment on one connection she’d made that had caught my interest!

So, kids, before you present a paper at a conference (or encourage your students to do so), make sure you’ve done some basic reading in the discipline that whichever topic it is happens to fall in. Also? Be open to criticism, especially when it’s politely phrased and well-intentioned.

This paper wasn’t as bad as other stuff I’ve seen, though. And by other stuff, I mean the work of Jonathan Gottschall. He’s a literary Darwinist who thinks folktales provide wonderful grist for the mill of analysis. It’s so convenient that you don’t even have to read them in order to analyze them! The computer does all the work for you! So you can prove that tales from every culture reflect basic evolutionary mating patterns!

I cannot make this shit up (though I say so in more polite terms in my dissertation).

Donald Haase (an awesome-sauce folklorist) has already done a great job of debunking Gottschall’s work on fairy tales, so I needn’t repeat it here. Though you can bet I repeated it for the benefit of my young audience at ICFA on that balmy March evening at the pool bar.

Basically, if you are going to do research on a folklore topic (which includes folktales and fairy tales), do us all the favor of reading some up-to-date scholarship from our discipline. Also, read the texts themselves (which Gottschall apparently couldn’t be bothered to do). Also, make sure you’re working with a good translation. How do you know which translations are good? See our scholarship, as indicated above. If it’s older than 50-80 years, be skeptical, since people’s morals (especially during the Victorian era) prevented them from doing authentic translations especially if the material was sexual or scatalogical in nature. Which, ya know, happens a lot in folklore.

I believe I taught my young charges a lot that night by the poolside bar. Certainly, I taught them a lot about vodka shots. But I also think that in my rambling, tipsy state, I also delivered an impassioned address about how the discipline of folklore has much to offer the study of children’s literature, YA, and fantasy. We study people doing creative things. We study storytelling in all its forms. We’ve been doing it for centuries now. Why on earth would you ignore us?!

And that, my friends, is how fairy tale story time with Auntie Jeana goes.

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Essay on Folklore and Power

June 27, 2012 in Folklore | 6 comments

In order to give y’all a glimpse into what it is that I do as a folklorist, I thought I’d share an essay that I wrote for a specific purpose (an application I’m very optimistic about) and have since revised a little. In it, I had to convey what we do in my field and some avenues of research I would like to pursue. Since it was for an application, it’s structured a little differently than my normal writing style, but as I was also trying to describe my scholarship to non-folklorists, I’m hoping it will be interesting and intelligible to my readers out there on the internet. Here goes.

Introduction

The concept of folklore as traditional and expressive culture is fundamentally intertwined with the notion of power. Folklore has been defined as artistic communication in small groups and as creativity in everyday life. As an academic discipline, folkloristics shares boundaries with anthropology, sociology, linguistics, literature, ethnomusicology, religious studies, and gender studies, among other fields that share our orientation towards group behavior, artistry, language, belief systems, social life, and narrative. Power weaves in and out of each of these ideas, for social life is structured by hierarchies dictating who has access to which resources and roles. Narratives depict the process of gaining the power to control one’s life. Artists have historically thrived under the patronage of the powerful—but artists also subvert dominant paradigms by illustrating inequalities.

My scholarship seeks to illuminate the ways in which folklore and power interact in social life and art, utilizing concepts of identity, belief, creativity, and access (strategies of gaining power) to guide the research process. These connections have not been properly investigated, due in part to the perception of folkloristics as a discipline with primarily festive and joyful topics. This could not be farther from the truth: there is folklore mourning death and dying, just as there is folklore celebrating birth and life. Sick joke cycles and urban legends mock current events and thus provide insights into a society’s collective anxieties, while traumatized refugees and rape survivors work through their experiences narratively.

However, another reason that the intersections of folklore and politics have been underexplored is that folklore and politics do indeed sometimes mesh well, too well, creating discomfort in both scholars and laypeople. For instance, the Nazi regime sanitized folklore in order to indoctrinate their followers, and this has contributed to the cautiousness with which German folklorists must proceed today. Alternately, oppressed nations have used their folklore as a rallying cry, as proof of shared identity and political legitimacy. Examples include the importance of the epic Kalevala to Finnish national identity, and the significance of folksong, folk dance, and national dress to the Estonian nationalist movement (Valk 2010). On top of all of this, scholars are not “supposed” to be political; we are not supposed to be activists, but rather, detached observers and analysts. The reality is, however, that merely choosing to turn one’s attention upon a topic is a political choice.

Much of the scholarship on folklore and power is indebted to the feminist movement. Feminist theory began to trickle into folkloristic research in the 1960s and 1970s (Jorgensen 2010). Feminist folklorists affirmed that the generations of mainly male folklorists primarily documenting men’s folklore rather than women’s folklore resulted in a skewed picture of the discipline (Young and Turner 1993). The study of women’s folklore is thus a corrective endeavor, to address the imbalances of power on an academic level.

Feminist folklorists also recognize that the exercise of power shapes folklore on multiple levels. For instance, an entire scholarly volume was devoted to the practice of “coding,” whereby a non-dominant social group must hide and subvert their messages in order to escape detection and punishment. Examples of women’s coding in folklore range from domestic disrepair to subversive quilting (Radner and Lanser 1993). Coding occurs in other contexts, and is but one instance of the ways in which power and folklore inform one another.

Theoretical Background

Power was, indirectly, a concern of early folklorists such as the Grimm brothers, who collected German folktales in a cultural context where Germany was not yet a nation-state and where Napoleon threatened German identities and proto-nationalist agendas. However, as discussed above, folkloristic works that explicitly address power are a fairly recent phenomenon.

One of the seminal works addressing the relationship of identity and power in folklore is Richard Bauman’s “Differential Identity and the Social Base of Folklore.” Bauman’s examples, drawn from genres such as taunts and jokes that bridge the communicative spaces between social groups, demonstrate that folklore is a response to and is inextricably wrapped up in the relationships among groups of people with differing access to control over their circumstances (Bauman 1972). Bauman’s essay initiated a shift in folkloristics towards performance as an orienting model. Rather than focusing on the folklore text, scholars began studying the context in which the text was situated, some going so far as to claim that there is no originary text, but instead that folklore is emergent, created in performance (Bauman 1984).

The shift toward performance helped illuminate many of the ways in which power structures folklore events. Patricia Sawin is one of Bauman’s students and one of the few folklorists to apply the power-oriented gender and identity theories of Judith Butler to performance theories of folklore, arguing that comprehensive studies of folklore and power must begin “by looking for evidence of a power imbalance and ask how the esthetic event impinges on and plays out for the less powerful participants” (Sawin 2002, 55). In her work with traditional singer Bessie Eldreth, Sawin demonstrates that “esthetic performance is a central arena in which gender identities and differential social power based on gender are engaged” (48). In other words, folklore performances—which range from song-singing and story-telling sessions to kinesthetic events such as folk-dances and festivals to the creation and consumption of material culture like holiday foods or customary garments—are fraught with power. Power can be contested or reinforced within a performance, and the power at stake need not be gender relations, but could also be ethnic or national tensions.

Hypotheses

  • Beliefs about power are an inherent structuring element of folklore because of the fact that folklore is circulated amongst groups of people whose lives are shaped on a daily experiential level by power. Thus any study of folklore must begin with a contextual accounting of the types of power—economic, gendered, racial, class-based, colonial, religious, and so on—that inform the groups from whence folklore springs and wherein it circulates.
  • Every genre of folklore, from nursery rhyme to festival, is structured by power relations and will thus display some aspect of those power relations in their content, context, form, and/or function. However, since folklore does not always show a direct relationship with reality (e.g., fairy tales alter the real world by adding magic), the nature of the relationship with the power sources of the society may be artistically distorted. Therefore, one aim of this project is to note the differing relationships between folklore genres in how they address the distribution of power in society.
  • Genres of folklore that explicitly address power relations will be particularly charged and creative in how they deal with the roles and rituals associated with power. For instance, folklore about gender roles, such as courtship rituals or jokes about sex, will be especially emphatic in their framing of identity. The more a genre is infused with roles of power, the more I expect to find creative strategies making it socially acceptable to address the topic of power, which is frequently taboo as power obscures its own discursive workings (Foucault 1972).
  • The connections between beliefs about and access to power, as well as the creative strategies for debating and displaying power, will thus be visible to the analyst of folklore and identity, even if these relationships take different forms among different groups and between different genres.

Methodology

Historically, folkloristics has incorporated methods from both the social sciences and the humanities. Our discipline’s concern with the expressive aspects of social life makes it necessary to consider the quantitative and qualitative methods available. Culture is patterned—hence involves numbers and the relationships between them—but culture is also subjective, something that is experienced and felt in both conscious and unconscious ways. Thus, scholars of culture should incorporate both quantitative and qualitative methods where possible.

Folklore materials are generally flexible and adaptable in their forms. Unlike a literary work that is fixed in print once published, folklore materials display variation and multiple existence as part of their defining characteristics (Dundes 1999). For example, it is not uncommon to see legends and jokes that were once oral traditions now being transmitted by email and SMS, while folktales and fairy tales are transformed into films, books, poems, and games. The inherent instability of folklore makes it essential for researchers to be comfortable with a number of tools, methods, and theories.

In American folkloristics especially, there has been a divide between literary and anthropological approaches to folklore (Zumwalt 1988). As my training has been primarily in America (though I’ve benefited from the mentorship of numerous international folklorists), I have the ability to balance and negotiate these complementary research modes.

As I plan to investigate a number of genres, so must I be prepared to utilize various methods to examine them. I will use literary analysis and methodologies from the digital humanities (such as computer programs that allow for advanced text analysis) in order to study genres such as fairy tales and epics that have primarily existed in print in recent years. For those “living” folklore genres such as folk dance, belief, and gendered behavior, I shall utilize fieldwork methods (e.g., participant observation). The anthropological principles of ethical practices and reflexivity inform my fieldwork practices. I always emphasize studying folklore in its cultural context and treating the materials as respectfully as possible.

Conclusion

As my introduction and literature review demonstrate, my project addresses a gap in existing scholarship and thus makes a new and significant contribution to cultural knowledge production. While there are many ways to study folklore, placing power at the forefront of this investigation makes for an exciting and relevant research project. Though I am most drawn to genres such as dance and narrative, the multifaceted and timely hypotheses I propose here give me the flexibility to explore various folklore genres and folk groups depending on which avenues seem the most fruitful, as well as which topics will be conducive to collaboration.

With wars and economic crises afflicting numerous societies today, it is increasingly important to understand how power works, and how power structures both cooperate with and disrupt local traditional cultures. Understanding the dynamic interrelationship of power and folklore will help illuminate conflicts as well as the potential for their resolution in social microcosms and macrocosms.

Bibliography

Bauman, Richard. 1972. “Differential Identity and the Social Base of Folklore.” In Toward New Perspectives in Folklore, eds. Américo Paredes and Richard Bauman. Austin: University of Texas Press, 31-41.

Bauman, Richard. 1984 [1977]. Verbal Art as Performance. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc.

Dundes, Alan. Holy Writ as Oral Lit: The Bible as Folklore. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Foucault, Michel 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge.

Jorgensen, Jeana. 2010. “Political and Theoretical Feminisms in American Folkloristics: Definition Debates, Publication Histories, and the Folklore Feminists Communication.” The Folklore Historian 27: 43-73.

Radner, Joan N. and Susan S. Lanser. 1993. “Strategies of Coding in Women’s Cultures.” In Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Cultures, ed. John N. Radner. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1-29.

Valk, Ülo. 2008. “Folk and the Others: Constructing Social Reality in Estonian Legends.” In Legends and Landscape: Articles Based on Plenary Papers from the 5th Celtic-Nordic-Baltic Folklore Symposium, Reykjavik 2005, ed. Terry Gunnell. University of Iceland Press: Reykjavik. Pp. 153-170.

Valk, Ülo. 2010. “Folklore and Discourse: The Authority of Scientific Rhetoric, from State Atheism to New Spirituality.” In Handbook of Religion and the Authority of Science, eds. James R. Lewis and Olav Hammer. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 847-866.

Young, M. Jane and Kay Turner. 1993. “Challenging the Canon: Folklore Theory and Reconsidered from Feminist Perspectives.” In Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, eds. Susan Tower Hollis, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 9-28.

Zumwalt, Rosemary Lévy. 1988. American Folklore Scholarship: A Dialogue of Dissent. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Day of Digital Humanities: Dissertation Edition

March 27, 2012 in Digital Humanities, Folklore | No comments

I’m still in conference-recovery mode (see my post on this year’s ICFA to see part of why I was so jazzed), so this is a very brief attempt to engage in the #DayofDH conversation.

As you may know–especially if you read my personal narrative about how I found DH–I recently wrote and defended a dissertation from a traditional humanistic discipline that incorporates DH methods. Some of the tensions inherent in this enterprise were discussed at my defense.

So because my dissertation was a part of my daily life for the past, um, over a year, I’d say my daily work has usually had a DH component to it. If nothing else, I reflected on what it means to apply quantitative methods to expressive culture (fairy tales in my case), and what it means to try to combine quantitative and qualitative approaches to the same topic. I also keep up with a lot of DHers on Twitter, which has been important for my sense of the scholarly community because I’ve spent a good chunk of the past year in Estonia, where there’s not a ton of DH stuff happening as far as I can tell (though since I was so immersed in my diss, it’s entirely possible that I missed something or someone).

Other than some DH engagement through my dissertation or the internet (Twitter, blogging, reading other people’s blogs), my days tend to be filled with various things that support me in these endeavors. I love to cook and dance and run, and fortunately I’m able to fit these things in on an almost-daily basis. I revise my CV and look for jobs and counsel my friends who are also my younger folklore colleagues. Since I don’t have a family to look after, I can go on outrageous excursions–watching avant-garde dance or rock climbing or traveling to new places–that keep my mind and body fresh.

Today, however, I’m thinking about how to revise my introduction to my dissertation. During my dissertation defense, some of the more traditional humanists on my committee brought up some interesting points: newer does not equal better, everyone engages with data differently, and empirical data can help us articulate what’s at stake in research. I’ll tackle these ideas one by one.

First, my committee brought up the idea that newer is not always better. Folkloristics is a discipline obsessed with tradition; we tend to use traditionality as the measure of whether we want to study something in the first place. If you can’t prove that something is traditional, even if it’s an emergent tradition or something that is traditional to a tiny group of people, then folklorists would question why we’d want to study it. Somehow related is the fact that a lot of folklorists tend to be luddites; this is very chicken-or-egg in my mind. Is someone drawn to the study of tradition since they want to live a more traditional/old-school lifestyle, or is someone who studies tradition going to be more and more into the idea of incorporating what they study into their lifestyle? I doubt it’s as simplistic as either A or B, but it’s a trend I’ve noticed.

However, I’m one of a growing number of folklorists who think technology is great. I’m eagerly awaiting the day when we can pipe the internet straight into our heads. A lot of us are on Twitter now, and we blog, and discuss DH issues like open access and such. We don’t necessarily think new is always better than old, since our discipline is pretty concerned with the old (or new takes on the old), but I do think we have room for new things in folkloristics. My dissertation, by applying new approaches (DH and feminist/body theories) to old topics (fairy tales) participates in a dialogue on evaluating the role of the new and the old in expressive culture and scholarship thereon.

Second, one of my advisors brought up the idea that everyone engages with data differently. She liked a lot of the nifty-looking charts that I had to visually demonstrate which body parts were described the most in fairy tales, since it helped her understand what my thought process was while handling the data before writing about it. One of my other advisors, though, did not see the charts as adding much value to the reader’s experience. This conversation, we bemusedly noted at the defense, proved that different people handle data in different (and valid) ways. It may sound obvious, but it’s one of the reasons I think there’s a lot of room to do DH in folkloristics, since expressive culture is a vast field and you need to have different perspectives to understand what’s going on with these very complex materials.

Finally, we talked about the use of empirical data to reinforce the importance of the main argument or, in other words, to help us get back to what’s at stake. Yeah, pretty pictures are pretty to look at, and visualizations can help you empirically back up your claims. But when you are dealing with material that bridges the subjective and the objective–as I believe all culture does–then you need to have language for spanning these interpretive realms. So, one thing I think DH can do for a study is help scholars use empirical data to read the material differently, and to connect back to why we’re doing all this in the first place. And believe me, in a field like fairy tale studies where huge amounts of scholarship have already been done on just about every aspect of the topic, having a fresh approach is invaluable. Being able to offer an empirical perspective can help us ask questions about what really interested us in the topic in the first place.

As a folklorist, I am deeply aware that we are enmeshed in cultural forms that repeat and reiterate and vary over time and space. As someone with a lot of postmodern perspectives on things, I tend to view multiplicity as a bonus. Put these aspects of my identity together, and how could I not be in favor of DH and a multiplicity of ways to approach an interesting topic?

That’s all I have for #DayofDH ruminations. Now I need to get back to my dissertation revisions!

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