The transmission of children's folklore naturally falls within the broader question of the transm... more The transmission of children's folklore naturally falls within the broader question of the transmission of folklore in general. Every conceptualization of folklore must contain a theory, whether explicit or implicit, regarding the transmission of folklore, since folklore is universally recognized as an inherently social phenomenon. While these issues have not always received the attention they deserve, folkloristic theories of transmission nonetheless abound in the literature. To gain a grasp on these theories, I suggest the following two categories: theories viewing folklore transmission as a superorganic, mechanical process; and theories emphasizing its serendipitous and emergent character. Folklore transmission viewed as a mechanical process figures prominently in those theories of folklore taking their inspiration from the philological roots of our discipline. Jakob Grimm, in his studies of Germanic and Indo-European languages, identified systematic laws of phonological shift that operate, for all intents and purposes, outside the immediate arena of concrete speech events. The Grimm brothers considered folklore "only a higher and freer speech of mankind," and hypothesized that laws similar to sound shift laws could be discovered to account for the persistence of traditional items and their variants through time and space (see Crane 1918). Their theories accounting for Marchen as broken-down Indo-European myths are perhaps the main fruit of this orientation. The realm defined by their compelling aphorism, das Yolk dichtet, "the people, as a whole, composes poetry" (Kittredge and Sargent 1904), transcends the sphere of grounded human interaction. This superorganic orientation persists in the work of the historic-geographic folklore scholars. Kaarle Krohn (1971, 98) argues that "it is the mechanical laws of thought and imagination that prevail in the rich variation of oral tradition." In a sequence of chapters entitled "The Influence of
I1ke a cat drawn to a warm lap, I am drawn to the scenes of human conviviality. This is a trait t... more I1ke a cat drawn to a warm lap, I am drawn to the scenes of human conviviality. This is a trait that runs deep and has sustained me over the years as I have followed the murmur of voices and the echo of song to the places where people come together in festive or solemn mood. Never released from the spell of the talk and the music, I have learned to discover in these moments of togetherness a guide to personal temperament and character, to the way things are done in society, and to the imprint of codes underlying belief and practice. The llidigenou5 pcopk in Cob1:lbia's Sibundoy Valley live for the carnival that brings the community together once a year, just as the costen os of Mexico's Costa Chica relish their bohemios, evenings given over to exercising the local muses. And I thank my lucky stars for the pleasure of such company on these sorts of special occasions. A folklorist attuned to the artistic uses of speech and language, I have found myself on the edge and sometimes in the middle of many richly expressive moments. This quest has carried me to three continents (and an island or two), into homes, plazas, churches, and cabildos in dozens of villages, towns and cities. It is my style to travel light, avoid the authorities as much as possible, and seek out the goodhearted people of a place, and in this I have been fabulously successfuL It has been my fortune to attract or stumble upon a remarkable group of quasi-magical helpers, people sharing my own reverence for the play of creativity and tradition. I think of Miguel Arizmendi, Francisco Tandioy, Kwesi Yankah, Raul Mayo, and many others who guided my steps and awakened my mind to the wonders of their native districts. They brought me to the musicians, dancers, poets, and pranksters, to the wise mC!)lores and talented juglares, who animate in their voices and actions the legacies of their regions. At times I found riddles, or nicknames; at other times ballads, or stories imbued with mythic consciousness. I made it my rule • to respond, I hope with some agility, to what occupied the energies of those around me.
In this chapter, John McDowell proposes ecoperformativity as an explanatory model for how express... more In this chapter, John McDowell proposes ecoperformativity as an explanatory model for how expressive culture functions in settings of ecological debate and conflict. He analyzes the referential and performative dimensions of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) among Indigenous populations of the Otavalo region of Ecuador and Colombia’s Sibundoy Valley, demonstrating that TEK speech acts ground human communities and empower them to take action to defend their relationships with each other and with nonhuman others. Attending to dimensions that render performances of ecological knowledge effective and that move people to action, McDowell makes a strong argument for recognizing expressive culture as a vital tool for both resisting and negotiating environmental change.
This syllabus was used in spring 2006 in a graduate seminar in the Department of Folklore and Eth... more This syllabus was used in spring 2006 in a graduate seminar in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University. As with all Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology syllabi made available in IUScholarWorks, the course instructor who created the syllabi retains all relevant rights to it as a creative work
Music, Race, and Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia
Reviewed Medium: book Authors: Peter Wade Year: 2000 Pages: xi + 323 Publisher: University of Chi... more Reviewed Medium: book Authors: Peter Wade Year: 2000 Pages: xi + 323 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Prices: $20.00 US / £13.00
As the author alerts us, the project that resulted in her book, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge... more As the author alerts us, the project that resulted in her book, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia, began with a different purpose-as a study of popular music in Colombia during the middle decades of the twentieth century. But as Ana María Ochoa Gautier started to examine the data, she tells us, she found that an earlier substrate of intellectual grounding required attention; moreover, her research into these matters coincided with the emergence of sound studies, treating sound as "a field of theorization" (207), and this field seemed to offer a fresh and rewarding perspective. As a consequence of these shifts in the agenda, Aurality is a book about speaking and listening, about communication involving the voice and the ear, as these sensory elements were understood, represented, and subjected to reform in Colombia by a remarkable group of thinkers, writers, cultural activists, soldiers, and statesmen during the second half of the nineteenth century. As such, this book brings to life a series of debates centered on the role of language and its expressive forms in the context of a nation recently freed from colonial domination and seeking ways to mold its heterogeneous population into a society of citizens with a common national identity and consciousness. This topic is developed through the application of a rigorous analytical design aimed at teasing out "the politics of regimentation of the voice" (9) by attending to "contested site[s] of different acoustic practices" (4). Hence, it would appear the book's author has sought to make contributions on two fronts: one, to acquaint the reader with a cast of protagonists carrying on the featured nineteenth-century debates; and two, to realize the promise of sound studies through systematic deployment of its guiding principles in this case study. Let's take a look at how these tasks are performed in this valuable contribution to the scholarly library. Regarding the nineteenth-century conversations, Ochoa does an excellent job of introducing us to her cast of characters, locating them in relevant intellectual and political contexts, and exposing us to the ideas developed in their published work, with ample selections of their own writing, in the author's clear English translations. We begin this round of acquaintances with the renowned explorer and naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt, who traveled through the interior of Colombia at the dawn of the nineteenth century making observations of all that he encountered and documenting these in his diaries and publications. Humboldt enters this account as an early commentator on the disturbing vocalizations of the bogas, the pole-bearers who moved boats up the Magdalena River when this was an artery from the Caribbean coast to the nation's highland capital in Bogotá. What Humboldt described as the "barks and howling" (32) of these "free people of color"
BOOK REVIEWS BOOK REVIEWS life," and his insistence on interpreting minorities chiefly within the... more BOOK REVIEWS BOOK REVIEWS life," and his insistence on interpreting minorities chiefly within the flow of some m stand in Brahministic contrast to the volume's erstwhile stress on pluralism and
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