Gathering/Place:
Folklore, Aesthetic Ecologies, and the Public Domain
40th Anniversary Conference and Reunion
April 2-3, 2004
University of Pennsylvania Campus
Logan Hall
Sponsored by the Center for Folklore and Ethnography
and the Graduate Students in Folklore and Folklife
Call for Participation
In 1963, Kenneth S. Goldstein became the first to receive a PhD in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania. Forty years and two-hundred and seventy-one dissertations later, we are inviting all Penn alumni, current and former faculty and students, and friends to join us in an exploration of the scholarship and practice that continue to emerge from Penn’s folklore program, and to imagine the future of folklore at Penn and beyond.
To focus our exploration, we propose the title: “Gathering/Place: Folklore, Aesthetic Ecologies, and the Public Domain.” Thinking of aesthetics as the culturally learned, appreciative awakening of the senses to one’s surroundings, and ecologies as the interrelations of people and their physical and social environs, we recall Dell Hymes’s testimony in support of the American Folklife Preservation Act, nearly thirty years ago, which illustrated what art looks like when embedded in the matrices of everyday life. Hymes related a moment in which Blanche Tohet, a Native American woman, finished hanging eels out to dry near her home in Warm Springs, Oregon. She then stepped back and surveyed them with satisfaction. “There!” she said, “Int [sic] that beautiful?” Hymes’s challenge to folklorists to explore the beliefs and practices underlying an aesthetics of everyday life inspired research agendas for many in the next generation of folklorists, a number of whom translated key legislation of the Great Society into unprecedented programs of public and applied folklore throughout the U.S.
Over the past two decades, folkloristics has moved toward new examinations of place as a dynamic milieu collectively produced through the language and practices of everyday life. In public practice we have seen the convergence of cultural conservation, natural resource stewardship, and sustainable livelihoods. Within the domain of social theory and ethnography, we have seen a turn toward the spatial, the bodily, and the ecological. This convergence of the ecological with previous aesthetic considerations provides an auspicious time both to revisit the lesson of Blanche Tohet and to imagine our trajectories for the future. How does the notion of “aesthetic ecologies” both clarify and complicate our inquiry into collective, vernacular ways of knowing, sensing, believing, and inhabiting that combine to produce locality and the spaces of everyday life? How does folklore circulate through aesthetic ecologies as a kind of public intelligence? What is the role of folklore in ecological production? How might the concept of aesthetic ecologies move us toward an understanding of folklife as the medium of place, and vice versa?
We are interested in examining these and related questions from multiple vantage points wherever folklorists practice; we are particularly interested in the ways in which folklore practice crosses disciplines, sectors, careers, and international borders. Therefore, to help us plan this conference, we want to hear from you. We invite everyone interested in participating to submit a description of his or her work as it relates to this topic. How does your current fieldwork, research, reading, writing, exhibiting, planning, or teaching contribute to the notion of folklore’s circulation within aesthetic ecologies? (For a list of bibliographic resources related to aesthetic ecologies, please see the conference's Working List page.)
These descriptions will be posted to our web page, and a program committee composed of Penn faculty and graduate students will use them to contact participants and organize sessions for the conference. Please note that the conference will occur over one and a half days of single-sessions only; therefore, sessions will be chosen according to their relevance to the central theme. However, we also imagine that the web page itself will provide an interesting perspective on the wealth and variety of work that continues to emerge from Penn and will remain as grist for the planning of future conferences, colloquia, and events.
Descriptions should not be longer than 250 words, may include links to other websites, and must be e-mailed as an attachment to Rosina Miller(romiller@sas.upenn.edu) by January 26, 2004.
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Working List
Resources in Aesthetic Ecology
Abrahams, Roger D. 1986. "Ordinary and Extraordinary Experience" in The Anthropology of Experience, eds. Victor W. Turner and Edward M Bruner, 45-72. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
"Experience addresses the ongoingness of life as it is registered through the filter of culture - that is, through acts we have already learned to interpret as experiences or, in the case of shock, surprise, embarrassment, or trauma, through acts we reprocess as experiences after the fact, by talking about them and thus making them seem less personal, more typical." (p. 55)
"For Erving Goffman, the experience of even the smallest understandings (much less our larger mutual celebrations) seemed like a new rendering of an archaic holy act, one that acknowledges the existence of others and signifies a willingness to be involved in the flow of vital cultural information and, on occasion, to be exuberant in passing on this knowledge as a way of tying together self, others, and the larger worlds." (p. 69)
Allen, Barbara, and Thomas J. Schlereth. 1990. Sense of Place: American Regional Cultures. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Basso, Keith. 1996. “Wisdom Sits in Places: Notes on a Western Apache Landscape.” In Senses of Place, ed. Steven Feld and Keith Basso.
Missing from the discipline is a thematized concern with the ways in which citizens of the earth constitute their landscapes and take themselves to be connected to them. Missing is a desire to fathom the various and variable perspectives from which people know their landscapes, the self-invested viewpoints from which (to borrow Isak Dinesen’s felicitous image [1979]) they embrace the countryside and find the embrace returned. (p. 54)
Bateson, Gregory. 1972. “A Theory of Play and Fantasy.” Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine, pp. 177-193.
Beck, Jane. 1982. Always in Season: Folk Art and Traditional Culture in Vermont. Montpelier, VT: Vermont Council on the Arts.
Ben-Amos, Dan. 1984. “The Seven Strands of Tradition: Varieties in Its Meaning in American Folklore Studies.” Journal of Folklore Research 21(2-3):97-131.
Bendix, Regina. 2000. “The Pleasures of the Ear: Toward an Ethnography of Listening.” Cultural Analysis 1.
How might one go about initiating an ethnography of listening? Take steps toward an ecology of the senses, their linkages to cognition, their collaboration in providing us with aesthetic pleasure? Nearly every promising point of entry requires cross-disciplinarity.
If we are to probe the contours of sensory perception and reception and seek to understand the transitions between the individual, cultural and transcultural dimension, as I am urging here, then research methods will be needed that are capable of grasping “the most profound type of knowledge [which] is not spoken of at all” and thus inaccessible to ethnographic observation or interview (Bloch 1998:46).
Berger, John. 1980. “Why Look At Animals?” About Looking. New York: Pantheon Books, 1-26.
Briggs, Charles. 1988. Competence in Performance: the Creativity of Tradition in Mexicano Verbal Art. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Cadaval, Olivia and Cynthia L. Vidaurri. 2003. El Rio: A Travelling Exhibition Exploring the Relationship Between Traditional Knowledge, Local Culture, and a Sustainable Environment in the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo Basin. Washington, DC: Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution.
Cantwell, Robert. 1993. Ethnomimesis: Folklife and the Representation of Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Regional identity records and synthesizes, at what is perhaps the ecological limit of the ethnomimetic process, patterns of settlement, cultural retention, and creolization and the accommodation of these historical forces, through economic and attendant social formations, to the natural resources and features. . .that identify a region as such without reference to its political boundaries. (p. 111)
Davis, Susan. 1997. Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Seaworld Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Appreciation of a separate, aesthetic version of nature suppressed awareness of class exploitation and was used to distinguish people from each other and normalize the differences between them. For example, in the eighteenth century, as Williams argues, the gentry justified their expanding property rights and dominance over the rural poor through artistic practices. Sculpting nature into country estates, celebrating it in pastoral poetry and painting, manipulating in the form of lovingly landscaped gardens, the wealthy literally naturalized the vast social and economic power they derive from the enclosure of agricultural lands and forests, even while they consolidated their control in the laws and courts. (p. 31)
Dewey, John. 1954 [1927]. The Public and Its Problems. Athens: Ohio University Press.
We lie, as Emerson said, in the lap of an immense intelligence. But that intelligence is dormant and its communications are broken, inarticulate and faint until it possesses the local community as its medium. (p. 219)
Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience. New York: Minton, Balch and Company.
The sources of art in human experience will be learned by him who sees how the tense grace of the ball-player infects the onlooking crowd; who notes the delight of the housewife in tending her plants, and the intent interest of her Goodman in tending the patch of green in front of the house; the zest of the spectator in poking the wood burning on the hearth and in watching the darting flames and crumbling coals. These people, if questioned as to the reason for their actions, would doubtless return reasonable answers. (p. 5)
Dorst, John. 2002. Framing the Wild: Animals on Display. Laramie: University of Wyoming Art Museum.
With the coming of the intellectual and material revolutions in 18th and 19th century Europe, Berger argues, the age-old relationship between humans and animals disappears, except in nostalgic reverie, and is replaced by a relationship that marginalizes animals into the categories of raw material, machine, and... display artifact.... Within [the frame of display], “animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance.” (p. 4, citing Berger, 1980, p. 14).
Feld, Steven and Keith H. Basso. 1996. Senses of Place. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
Glassie, Henry. 1982. Passing the Time in Ballymenone: Culture and History of an Ulster Community. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
----------. 2000. Vernacular Architecture. Philadelphia: Material Culture and Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Environmentally efficient, thatch is also beautiful. Looking downhill at a house he had recently roofed, Tommy Love said, “When it is new with straw, it shines like gold. The sun glints off it, and it is lovely. It is lovely, right enough.”
Efficient and beautiful, thatching is also economical. Its main demand is time, and in Ballymenone they say that the man who made time made plenty. Thatch also requires a knowledge of growing things, the understanding of seeds and soil and weather that farmers develop during time passed in place. (p. 26)
Hufford, David. 1983. “The Supernatural and the Sociology of Knowledge: Explaining Academic Belief.” New York Folklore Quarterly. 9 (1/2): 21-30.
Hufford, Mary. 1990. “’One Reason God Made Trees:’ The Form and Ecology of the Barnegat Bay Sneakbox.” In Allen and Schlereth, eds. Sense of Place: American Regional Cultures. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
“He was the type of fellow that thought like a duck. He thought like a duck. He just knew every move they were gonna make. In other words, we’d sit there, gunning, and have the stools [decoys] out, and in would come some ducks. And they wouldn’t come in just the way he wanted em. Just exactly right. You could kill em, but he says, ‘They gotta do better than that.’ And he would go out and he’d take this stool here and put it there, and this stool here and set it back there, and the next time they’d almost light in your lap….He just thought like a duck all the time.” (Ed Hazelton, quoted in Hufford, p. 53)
Hymes, Dell. 1975. “Folklore’s Nature and the Sun’s Myth.” Journal of American Folklore 88: 345-69.
I have thought that the true problem of aesthetic experience as part of life would be posed by a study of the state of the arts in Florence – not Florence, Italy, on the Mediterranean, but the small town on the Oregon coast at the mouth of the Siuslaw River. Or by an accounting of the satisfaction in the voice of Mrs. Blanche Tohet of Warm Springs, Oregon, when, having finished fixing eels to dry one evening, she stood back, looking at them strung on a long line, and said, “There, int [sic] that beautiful?” (p. 346).
James, William. [1984]. "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings" in William James: The Essential Writings, ed. Bruce Wilshire, 326-342. Albany: SUNY Press.
http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/jcertain.html
Jones, Suzi. 1980. Webfoots and Bunchgrassers: Folk Art of the Oregon Country. Portland: Oregon Arts Commission.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1998. “Disputing Taste.” In Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley: University of California Press.
What is the nature of the imagination at work in the creation of the Mince-O-Matic chopper and its hypertrophy of mechanical wit or the plastic honey bear – “poetry in plastic,. . .a bear filled to the eyebrows with his favorite food” – or aerosol cheese, the apotheosis of processed food, or most recently molds that grow vegetables in the shape of celebrities like Elvis? (p. 267)
Kurin, Richard. 1997. Reflections of a Culture Broker: A View from the Smithsonian. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Linzee, Jill and Michael P. Chaney. 1997. Deeply Rooted: New Hampshire Traditions in Wood. (Introduction by Burt Feintuch). Durham: Art Gallery, University of New Hampshire.
McDermott, John. 1969. “Deprivation and Celebration: Suggestions for an Aesthetic Ecology.” In James M. Edie, ed. New Essays in Phenomenology: Studies in the Philosophy of Experience, pp. 116-130. Chicago: Quadrangle Books.
This isolated line and the isolated fish alike are living beings with forces peculiar to them, though latent . . . But the voice of these latent forces is faint and limited. It is the environment of the line and the fish that brings about a miracle: the latent forces have become dynamic. The environment is the composition, profound. Instead of a low voice, one hears a choir. The latent forces have become dynamic. The environment is the composition. (Wassily Kandinsky, quoted in McDermott, p. 116).
Miska, Maxine and I. Sheldon Posen. 1983. Tradition and Community in the Urban Neighborhood. Brooklyn: Brooklyn Education and Cultural Alliance.
Moonsammy, Rita, David Steven Cohen, Lorraine E. Williams, eds. 1987. Pinelands Folklife: Tradition, Community, and Environment. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Muthukumaraswamy, M.D. 2000. “Finding Ecological Citizenship Inside the Archives of Pain: Famine Folklore.” Indian Folklife. (Special issue on Ecological Citizenship). 1 (3): 3-4.
----------. 2002. “NFSC folk Festival, March 2002: Oral Narratives, Folk Paintings, usical Instruments and Puppetry of India.” Indian Folklife 1:3 (January), 3-4.
The true task of the folklorist ... is to restore his specialized idiom to communal, collective structures, which underlie speech, language and artistic expressions. (3)
Paredes, Americo. 1958. “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Prosterman, Leslie. 1995. Ordinary Life, Festival Days: Aesthetics in the Midwestern County Fair Smithsonian
Reid, Herbert and Betsy Taylor. 2003. “John Dewey’s Aesthetic Ecology of Public Intelligence and the Grounding of Civic Environmentalism.” Ethics and the Environment (Special Issue on Art) 8: 74-92.
We call this power ‘cosmogenic agency’ – or the labor of conjuring a ‘cosmos’ out of ‘univers’ and of ‘consenting’ to one’s constitution by and in the matrices of world and mortal time. Within the space-based logics of universe and the universal, the relationship of individual and matrix is ‘flat’ because the individual can be infinitely resituated and rotated insofar as it can be relocated according to calculable coordinates – which are themselves infinitely replicable in all locations where those calculative logics obtain. In cosmogenesis, the relationship of individual and matrix is deep and full. It is simplest to say that this logic is the logic of place and narrative. (p. 86)
Schneider, Jane. 1991. "Spirits and the Spirit of Capitalism" in Religious Regimes and State-Formation: Perspectives from European Ethnology, ed. E.R. Wolf, 24-54.
Sciorra, Joseph. 1996. “Return to the Future: Puerto Rican Vernacular Architecture in New York City.” In Anthony King, ed. Representing the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st Century Metropolis, pp. 60-90. London: Macmillan Press.
Siporin, Steve. 1984. "We Came to Where We Were Supposed to Be:" Folk Art of Idaho. Boise: Idaho Commission on the Arts.
Taylor, Betsy. 2002. “Public Folklore, Nation-building, and Regional Others.” Indian Folklore Research Journal. 1 (2): 1-28.
Public folklore has much to contribute, not just to the expansion of the public sphere, but to a regrounding of public creativity in the enabling conditions from which public culture springs, and on which it depends. Muthukumaraswamy says that the ‘true task of the folklorist.. .is to restore his specialized idiom to communal, collective structures, which underlie speech, language and artistic expressions’ (2002:3). These formative structures constitute what Cantwell calls the ‘marrow of culture’(1993) – that shared life-world that provides the creative powers from which the architectonic structures and metanarratives of public culture emerge – as bone arises from, and protects, marrow. (p. 4)
Titon, Jeff Todd. 1988. Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church. Austin: University of Texas Press.
After saving money from their factory jobs or inheriting a portion of their parents’ estate, they bought lots on the outskirts of town and next to their houses they built farm outbuildings from sawn planks just as their fathers had done before them. (p. 138)
Yocom, Margaret and Kathleen Mundell. 1999. Working the Woods. Augusta, Maine:
Maine Arts Commission.
Young, Katharine. 1997. Presence in the Flesh: The Body in Medicine. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
. . .folklore, the study of forms of thought that have become typified within a discourse. (p. 2)
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