I have made peace with the incoherence of my thoughts and, hence,this blog post. Trying to finish the reading and think about what it said will come easier next week. For this week, I note interesting things that make me think and questions that I could probably start to answer had I not been writing on Tuesday morning. Forgive me.
Barbara K-G's article seemed to hit me the hardest with its questioning of staid institutions and the dichotomies we all face in this gosh-darned world. Folklore's struggle to bridge the gap between academy and the real world parallels my field- education. I have taught in public schools, taught those who will soon teach in public schools and, finally, closed the door to my ivory-towered office, removing myself from the trenches I purport to care about so much. In academia, there is no shortage of theory about education, rules for "best practices" (hate that term!), and calls for praxis. I follow the teachings of Brazilian educator Paolo Freire who called for praxis to be initiated by and part of the DNA of learners as well as teachers. He was advocating for adult illiterates who were caught in an endless cycle of poverty and other forms of oppression. This praxis of theory and practice is rarely brought up to new teachers because circumstances make it so. A new teacher is thrown into the fray with barely adequate apprenticeship and usually little help navigating the new waters of leadership (principal's aren't the only educational leaders!). Because of the "survival in the trenches" mentality/reality, the academy is looked at by many with much wariness and a side of resentment or jealousy. (Anyone who has taught grade school knows the meaning of exhaustion.)
Logic rarely plays a role in this uneasy relationship. Typically, the academy comes up with theories, politicians and others who think they know what's best for their childrens' education pontificate, and the lowly "folk" shut their classroom doors and do the best they can. In recent years, those doors have been forced open by a foul ideological wind- the same shaming smell that causes teachers to shut out the world in the first place. (Cliche alert!) The baby is thrown out with the bath water. Praxis has many benefits. Maybe the most important is a dialogue between the two entities in question who are unfairly positioned against each other. In folklore terms, we have theorists that compete for a slice of recognition in the academy against those who need money to preserve "folklore". I hope that folklore doesn't feel the traumatic effects of a decades-long staring match between cousins who should dine at the same table.
Dorson can talk about "fakelore", but it ends up being a pissing match. K-G takes time to mention social theorists such as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall. In my humble opinion, those who see the hinderances to praxis have the most to say to all involved. Education rarely brings up the dispassionate scholar who might be able to instruct or mediate. Looking at media, culture, advertising, (all loaded terms) etc., the scholarship on representation is rich with theoretical umbrellas that the professor and the do-er can gather under. There is always a push-pull between the two, and our system in this country promotes that particular type of competition. We have to remember there is life beyond ideology and three seats (theory, practice, and praxis/context) can be at the table without one labeled "the head".
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Our Folk "Circles:" 1st Post By Krystal Sweitzer
I carried my history, my present, my faults, hopes, dreams, mistakes and success with me
as I walked around this new campus, and yet, I realized that none of these qualities were immediately visible to any of those strange faces that I passed by. My first day of classes at a civilian institution (23 August) seemed completely focused on the attire I donned, my Air Force blues with brand-new sparkling Lieutenant rank. I felt as if I sent a beacon of self-confidence, and yet my insides were shaking like a leaf and I was simply shrouding the overwhelmed person wearing the uniform. As I was sitting in our Folklore course I thought of the assumptions people all make, of the silent story that I wore on my body, one shaped by my appearance, my walk, and my attire. I walked outside of any of those comfortable circles that shared my same folklore, and I felt alone, the only one with no choice in what to wear on my Tuesday trips to the classroom.
And it was only when musing that evening I realized that everyone that day was walking outside of their primary circles, many new students, some entirely new to the area (country, region, or continent for that matter). I was not alone in my walk outside my circle, I was joined by a pattern of concentric circles all ready and willing to merge knowledge as we progress throughout the semester. We may carry our “folklore” on our sleeves, but that quality is always forming, adapting, and changing as we meet others with different circles than our own. It seems then a folklorists primary duty to capture those circles, and describe the meaning to those unaware.
Our readings centered on the slippery definition of that difficult and elusive topic upon which we as new students to the field are ready to explore. The fact that folklore is a broad term is, of course, quite an understatement, and needs no lengthy reiteration here, and underneath that large and bright umbrella many of us may be clinging to our “favorite” definition, affectionately highlighted and circled among our printed out (or computer) pages. I clung to the notion that: “The province of folklore is one of the mind and spirit” and that further, this exploration challenges itself to uncover how people (read: culture, groups, societies, clans, etc) express their ideas and therefore work at expressing their unique, and collective souls (Bayard 9). That the term itself is elusive and a tempestuous academic undertaking seems all the more appropriate because a mind and spirit is never visible, no matter how long one stares into another’s eyes. As a woman looking at my soon to be husband across the table, I know that no matter how many anniversaries pass or how many memories we share, I will never SEE that intangible quality which makes me stick around. It is frustrating, and in some ways, a challenge, much the same as the folklorists look to their task and a never ending longing to explain that which cannot be shown; the invisible circles we all carry with us.
My reaction, like many of you, is to work at understanding the academic definitions in context of my burgeoning attachment to the topic. Welcome all to a new semester of study!
Debating the Discipline- Joshua Salyers
Folklorists’ struggle to define their field in academic terms, apparent in this weeks reading, speaks to the rigidity in some of academia. The methodologies necessary to study not just oral tradition but folklore in traditional written sources as well are inherently interdisciplinary. The debates concerning the name and the defining characteristics of the discipline seem to contradict the very essence of what folklorists do and where they look for folklore. I understand folklorists’ pragmatic need to justifying their field separate from other disciplines. In Latin American history, for example, folklore easily falls under the cultural historian’s scope of study as well as the anthropologist’s. Thus some folklorists consider these debates necessary to ensure their field’s academic survival.
Folklorists overly concerned with naming and distinguishing their field and ridding it of the “anthropological-impact,”[1] are expressing an academic rigidity incompatible with their field of study. Folklorists necessarily need to draw from various fields of cultural study to examine the “folklore” in songs, oral stories, written stories, jokes, works of art, and much more. Many cultural historians, benefitting from an already established discipline, adamantly espouse the need to blur the lines between disciplines in order to explore the history of non-elite individuals or popular culture. Folklorist cannot expect to produce meaningful studies of folk culture without relying on the training and knowledge of scholars in other fields, thus blurring the lines between disciplines. These blurred lines are what caused the insecurities among some folklorists who pushed to distinguish their field. I argue (as some other student have) that these debates should be secondary, at best, to debates over the value of studying folklore in general. While I understand that these articles do not represent what I am sure are numerous debates over the value of folklore studies, in the context of these readings, the specific significance of the field seems a more pertinent topic for debate. How do studies of folk culture advance our understanding of society?
What you can learn in an old colonial prison.
Why don’t you do real history? Don’t you want to see our well indexed collection of colonial documents? Routinely when I have visited the archives in Mexico City and explained to the man or women behind the desk, in the colonial prison re-purposed as an archive that I work on comic books from the 1970s they tried to convince me to change my dissertation topic right then and there. It seems to be that much like the bias in the academy that Barbra Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeannie B. Thomas make note of I too am not taken seriously in my field. The basis and assumptions made of folklorists, and the stigmas or assumptions that made it difficult for some to find a job, can be expanded to anyone working on modern Mexico on a topic that might also be construed as “vernacular” or too close to the “low others.” Having just come from a seminar yesterday on the role of popular culture in the creation of Mexico popular identity it seems to be that the connections between popular culture and folklore are tenfold, as is the struggle in being taken seriously within academia when you lack the tenure of Geertz but nevertheless has significant contributions to offer. Perhaps it is because of a fear held my the majority of realities that lay outside of their clearly established cultural boundaries and class constructions, or perchance it is the unappealing concept of giving serious powers of cultural production to the poor or marginalized, but it seems that a sense of fear is being masked by the ‘accepted’ historical community by trivializing the work of folklorists. Nevertheless, as Thomas explains, the true passion of the historian of popular culture, and the folklorist, should be to “go beyond the monolithic perspectives on cultural products and productions into an awareness of their defiant variance, difficulty, complexity, fecundity, and contrariness” (42).
At the conclusion of her article, Thomas leaves her reader with two points that she implores folklorists, and academics in general, to keep in mind at all times: 1) that there is a vast and seemingly never-ending variety of things to study, and 2) that there is importance to all levels of culture (p 42). It is Thomas’s second point that I find to be her most important contribution because she gives folklorists the privileged position to be able to break out of the elite focused, class blinded, realm of cultural studies and allows them to contribute in new and exciting ways if they are willing. In a way, I find Thomas’s definition of the roll and importance of the folklorist encouraging for my own studies and I feel like the next time that I trudge the long route from the metro to the archivo nacional in Mexico City that I have the beginnings of a wonderful retort to the naysayers behind those intimidating desks.
Sarah Howard
“We” Folk – Post by Kelley Merriam Castro
“We” Folk – Post by Kelley Merriam Castro
The study of folklore clearly revolves around politics of identity and the national “we.” From the derogatory racist and sexist comments encountered by Doug Enders in his otherwise intensely convivial experience with Bluegrass musicians[i], to the academic discourse debating materials “worthy” of study in Kirsshenblatt-Gimblett[ii], the study of folklore finds itself battling the question of who “we” are as a people and a nation, what defines “us”, and what aspects of our so might best be left unexamined or ignored. Keeping to this, Jane Becker equates the term “folk” with the concept of a romanticized vision of national identity based on a common sense of national cultural roots (19). Exploring a century of folk studies and displays, she identifies three main foci of interest for twentieth-century observers of folk culture in the United States: the Native American, whose culture was studied in the late-19th and early-20th century under the assumption that it was rapidly disappearing; European American, whose folk traditions were sought after in isolated rural areas to obtain a sense of historical national (Anglo-Saxon) self in a changing industrial world; and immigrant folk life–a celebration of modern diversity from immigrants of “distant” lands, which the display curators of the time identified as European.
Within these three distinctions of folk culture, I question where border and transnational communities, particularly Mexican-American communities in the United States, fit in. Becker introduces us to the term gemenischoff, meaning an “organic community” that incorporates face-to-face interaction, contrasting this to geselschaft, or an artificial, industrialized community. A true transnational community (I use the definition provided by Glick-Schiller[iii]) involves an organic community tied together by history and birth, yet divided by political lines. Transnational communities offer an additional complication to the question of what constitutes “folk,” and reveal an important distinction: people identified as “folk” are always marginal, never mainstream.
A prime example lies in the comparison between Houston-born, permanent U.S. resident Lydia Mendoza and Mexican-born, permanent Mexican resident Lola Beltran. Both women sang traditional Mexican ranchera style music, both women topped the charts throughout Latin America in the 1950s and 60s. Yet Lola Beltran became known as Lola la Grande (Lola the Great), entering a central place in the hearts of Mexican listeners, while Lydia Mendoza sang at folk life festivals as an representation of Mexican-ness (Mexicanidad) as an ethnic other in the United States. The two singers experienced similar numbers of record sales and similar fame among the Americas, yet Lydia Mendoza recorded numerous “folk” records while Lola Beltran, singing much of the same music, helped foment a national musical identity in Mexico. This observation makes it clear that the definition of “folk” music lies as much in the opinion of the surrounding society as it does the content and form of the music itself, and that the study of folklore can tell us as much about the society defining the lore as “folk” and “quaint” as much as it can about the subject of study itself.
[i] Thomas, Jeannie, and Doug Enders. “Bluegrass and ‘White Trash”: A Case Study Concerning the Name “Folklore” and Class Bias.” Journal of Folklore Research, 37:1 (Jan-April, 2000) pp. 23-52.
[ii] Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “Mistaken Identities,” the Journal of American Folklore 101:400 (Apr.-June, 1988), pp. 140-155.
[iii] Glick Schiller, Nina., et. Al “Transnationalism: A new Analytic Framework for Understanding Migration”
Monday, August 29, 2011
Twain, Cooper, and the Exploitation and Misrepresentation of Native American Culture by Stephen Pallas
In Mark Twain's essay, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," he takes aim at one of the literary canon--as the title suggests--in James Fenimore Cooper, with particular interest to two of his Natty Bumppo tales, The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder. In the essay Twain reflects upon two distinct sets of folk from earlier on in the nineteenth century--Twain writing post-Civil War and Cooper writing before the bloodshed. The two sets of folk, as I refer to them, and although there are perhaps more contained within the essay in smaller proportion, are of writers and Native Americans. With respect to Becker's "Revealing Traditions: The Politics of Culture and Community in America, 1888-1988," she describes the "especially active interest in the culture of America's Indians in the late 19th century," the ground work of which was perhaps laid by Cooper's generation closer to the turn of the century (5).
Of Deerslayer, Twain writes, "[t]here are nineteen rules governing literary art in domain of romantic fiction--some say twenty-two. In 'Deerslayer,' [sic] Cooper violated eighteen of them." Twain lists, in terse and pointedly comical language, the eighteen offenses Cooper makes against literary culture. To cite one example, "the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the 'Deerslayer' tale." Twain further languishes in the notion that Cooper has among the most unkeen eyes in all of literary history, and intersperses his disgust at these offenses with his inaccurate depictions of Native Americans, a group which, as I will describe later, Twain harbored some upfront hatred.
Other than these offenses, Twain extrapolates from reading Cooper that the latter misunderstood the relationship "Indians" maintained with Nature. For example, argues Twain, "he was almost always in error about his Indians. There was seldom a sane one among them... In that matter of intellect, the difference between a Cooper Indian and the Indian that stands in front of the cigar-shop is not spacious," installing yet his own commentary on Native American culture in his contemporary society. Twain himself utilizes Native Americans often, loosely employing the storytelling tactics used by Native American oral tradition of trickster tales in such stories as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; this subject can, however, be flushed further out in another discussion. Most importantly, Twain argues that Cooper misses the boat as far as understanding the actual intellect of Native Americans. But Twain himself refused to acknowledge Native Americans as anything more than a savage culture. If the people of the nineteenth century were fascinated by Indians, then Mark Twain was certain among their chief dissenters.
In "Mark Twain's Response to Native Americans," Helen Harris argues in plain terms how Twain harbored a "literary insistence on the inferiority of the Indian and the nation's need to mythologize the extermination of the natives and seizure of their homelands as an admirable part of the 'pioneer struggle.'" (495). And certainly Twain's most noteworthy and famous depiction of a Native American--in Injun Joe--is exemplary of this attitude toward them. Twain and Cooper, and many other white writers of the nineteenth century, played a tremendous role in chronicling certain attitudes toward the Native American folk as the years rolled on into the twentieth century, and both emphasizing some strikingly negative stereotypes.
Advocacy and Representation 8/30 (Ying-wen Yu)
Reading from Samuel Bayard’s “The Materials of Folklore” (1953) to Doug Enders’ and Jeannie Thomas’s “Bluegrass and ‘White Trash’” (2000), it is quite interesting for me to see how definitions and contents of a certain field of study have changed overtime. The definition of “Folklore” is not clear-cut as time goes by; instead, it complicates itself with the expansion and inclusion of different aspects concerning the change of culture. To be honest, I had to google definitions of “ethnography,” “anthropology,” “cultural anthropology,” and even “cultural studies” to try to figure out a more definite definition of what “folklore” is. However, googling those terms didn’t help much because there are so many overlapping aspects in these studies. That being said, I find Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett’s “Mistaken Dichotomies” echos the current conditions in Taiwan not only in academy but also in the making of government policies.In her essay, Kirschenblatt-Gimblett proposes “four areas of concern: Advocacy, representation, art, and critical discourse” (142). I especially find advocacy and representation intriguing when the applying what she says to the Taiwanese society.
It was not until two to three decades ago did the Taiwanese government pay attention to the aboriginal cultures in Taiwan. In order to make people learn the diverse cultures in Taiwan, the government constructed a theme park with aboriginal houses, festivals and ceremony replicas. As a child, my parents usually took me there for sightseeing during weekends and schools would hold outings as well. I found the theme park amusing because there were so many shows about different ceremonies and festivals going on. If I missed the 2pm show, I could always watch one at 3pm. There were cultural artifacts from nine main tribes in Taiwan. To be honest, I could recite the names without any mistake but had absolutely no idea on the cultural backgrounds of each tribe because we were asked to know who were there in Taiwan before European or Japanese colonization. As time goes by, more and more aborigines people voice out that there are more than nine tribes and that they want their original tribal names back. Yes, the government added some tribes to the official list and yes, students are requested to recite more names. But do they really know the cultural backgrounds of tribes? They may have the ability to distinguish a certain artifact from another but for the students, these things belong to the past. It is ironic that the government serving as the most powerful and influential advocate but still represents the aboriginal cultures as the product of the past.
In Discourse (2004) Sara Mills, applying Foucault’s idea on power relation, points out that there is discursive formation behind every representation be it cultural or political. She suggests that aboriginal people or native people alike are usually put in “the past” in the scale of time that they belong to the past and are not capable of progress. If the government as one of the influential advocates still propagande such wrongly portrayed images to the public, how do people understand the “real” or “living” cultures in the country? How can a government seemingly support rights for aborigines and help “preserve” culture on one hand and at the same time take away the land, names and resources from these people and try to “modernize” them so as to adapt to the “modern society?” In Kirschenblatt-Gimblett’s essay she writes, “dependence on government funding shapes the language of advocacy and blunts its critical potential” (142). I can’t help but wonder, does government, as an advocate, really change the way people view “folk,” “native,” “aboriginal” or “indigenous?” Or does it perpetuate the cultural representation that “folk,” “native,” “aboriginal” or “indigenous” belongs to the past?
Disciplinary Identity Crisis (Natasha)
For all that the field of folklore studies does to name and describe human phenomena, the field itself seems to be, paradoxically, in a state of constant debate about its own identity. The essays we read for class this week illustrate the ongoing negotiations that take place within the field to determine what constitutes “folk” and “folklore.” The essays also reveal a certain insecurity that surrounds the discipline. Several of the authors devoted ample time to justifying the field’s very existence and delineating the distinctions between itself and anthropology, literary, and cultural studies. However, I argue that there are more pertinent existential questions the field should be debating.
Bayard clearly states that folklore studies should be a “purely documenting activity” and the implication is that those doing the documenting are not members of the folk group being studied. His attitude highlights two major concerns I had about folklore studies as it was presented in this week’s readings. First of all, while the authors argued their perspectives on the parameters of folk and folklore, not a single one considered who should be studying the folk. There was no mention of a folk group documenting its own oral traditions, foodways, etc. The implication, then, is that those with access to higher education are the ones doing the documenting and studying of the folk, replicating a colonial power structure that has long haunted related disciplines, anthropology being the closest analogy. Even the field of anthropology, however, has recently embraced the autoethnography in which members of a group are recognized as legitimate documenters of their own lifeways.
Kirschenblatt-Gimblet does acknowledge the inherent power structures that exist in folklore: “Folklorists, like other professionals, are an elite; their knowledge is a source of power; and like Orientalism, the study of folklore is ‘a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary [and] scholarship.’” However I feel that these power structures should not just be acknowledged but rather incorporated into the self-critique of the discipline and used as a platform for reforming.
My other major concern is the lack of a social justice component to a discipline that has had a history of studying marginalized peoples[1]. While occupied by the question of what folklore and folklore studies is, folklorists seem far less concerned with justifying why folklore and folklore studies is. In a world filled with social and environmental injustice, poverty, corruption, illness and power structures that make marginal peoples more vulnerable to these maladies, what is the purpose of a field that documents the music, art, and food of these peoples in a way that isolates it from the troubling contexts that threaten the people and their traditions? Is it purely for the edification of the reader as Thomas and Enders state or is there some other value? If another value does exist, do folklorists not have some ethical obligation for the value to in some way benefit the people they study?
In sum, I hope folklorists engaged in the debate about who and what they study can soon look beyond these debates and begin addressing some of the other questions of power and ethics that are indeed central to the discipline.
In sum, I hope folklorists engaged in the debate about who and what they study can soon look beyond these debates and begin addressing some of the other questions of power and ethics that are indeed central to the discipline.
[1] Although all the authors acknowledge that every individual can be a member of a folk group, authors Thomas and Enders affirm the discipline’s tendancy to study marginal groups.
Folklore:To Be or Not Be
Folklore-To Be or Not Be That is the Question
Pat Bc
Blog for the Week of 8.30.11
ANTH-549
Folklore appears to be in a phase of transition within the halls of academia. The forceful hand of the political and capitalistic ideals are undergirding the true meaning of learning which may yield an inevitable fate for the philosophy and design of study, but the saddest aspect could be the lost of traditions and ideas of man. Becker’s article, Revealing Traditions: The Politics of Culture and Community in America addresses this issue. He discusses the emphasis on the preservation of a national identity based on the elite theory which conflicts with the democratic feelings of belonging and the lack of acceptance of minority cultures. For example, the media’s portrayal of cultural differences is quite limited particularly in two popular programs such as Little House on the Prairie and The Walton’s which idealize the past in American culture. However, because these programs are developed in the 1970’s they not only impart romantic ideals but include a few people of color in limited episodes to project the realities of American life among the social and racial groups.
Folklore is an interesting field of study which offers inquiry of self and others and its variety of methods that are used for study only enhances the results and the researcher’s knowledge. Bayard’s article, Materials of Folklore argues against total objectivism which dismisses any value of thought or idea that can not be quantified for reproduction. However he does identify the need for greater articulation of the definition and the materials of folklore. This move to greater scientific inquiry indicates America no longer allows for individuality but conformity in rules of methodology for greater productivity and economic gain.
Thomas and Ender’s article, Bluegrass and “White Trash”: A Case Study Concerning the Name “Folklore” and Class Bias, discusses the ramifications for social groups. Music is an important aspect of culture that reveals many aspects of tradition in beliefs and thought. Bluegrass and the connections with true blues, country, and jazz are interrelated as each serves as a gateway to the heart and soul based on political and social group circumstances. Growing up in a Black middle class neighborhood in South Phoenix Arizona, I recall listening to blues, country, and jazz almost daily as my mother would listen to recordings of Billie Holliday, Nina Simone, Ahmad Jamal, as well as Waylon Jennings, Red Foley, Johnny Cash, and others after dinner, while doing chores, or just about any free time that was available. Often she would sing and discuss the music. Jazz also is important because of the influence of neighbors’ groups. Much like the blue grass players, music is part of living the day to day life thus it becomes a part of your being. I am excited about this field because of its diversity and significance to life.
Identity of the Folklorist (Awndrea Caves)
My thoughts this week were provoked by Thomas and Enders’ article “Bluegrass and “White Trash”: A Case Study Concerning the Name of “Folklore” and Class Bias.” This article led me to wonder about folklorists and their own understandings of their position, as a member of any particular group and as folklorists. This article made me think of my own background. Honestly, as I type this response, my heart beats overly strongly in my chest and I imagine the regret I will experience once I publish this response. As I read this article, scenes of my own childhood and upbringing in rural Oklahoma sprang to mind. Memories of relatives whispered about my shoulders and those relatives, most of them still among the living, seemed to be reading along with me. John Hartigan, Jr.’s reference about the twig holding up the headlight of the vehicle as a “hillbilly” solution reminded me of own my uncle’s phrase for such work: calls such handiwork “Southern engineering.”
After several days of thinking about the article, a sudden question occurred to me: “How did Zora Neale Hurston feel?” Even though she was writing fiction, she was writing about the place she grew up, the people she knew. Did she feel fear of rejection by those outside of the group? Did she fear rejection by the group due to the value of her education and her acquired position as viewer and interpreter of a culture she grew up in but no longer lived within? Does the folklorist/writer get to talk about their own lived experience or is that unprofessional and non-academic? Where is that line drawn, especially when one discusses the lives and productions of the group from which they sprang?
I grew up in rural Oklahoma with a stay-at-home mother and a father who worked as a maintenance man and bus driver for the local elementary school. Our family would have been classified as “working class” or the “working poor.” But I have certainly heard “poor white trash” applied to our family. This article was interesting and painful to read at the same time.
The “character” of Al was interesting to me on the issue of his experience of the myth of the American Dream. One could possibly argue that by embracing a “hillybilly” persona and “lifestyle,” that Al rejects the American Dream and the American myth of “making it big.” Yet, Al is not resisting the American Dream. He is trying desperately to fulfill it while simultaneously understanding that he has failed that goal and will never achieve it. As the authors’ noted, Al and the other “bluegrassers” never reject that particular American myth. What he appears to feel is a mixture of pride and shame, pride at what he has accomplished and shame at how far from his dream his actual life falls.
I believe the racism and sexism exhibited by the musicians comes from a place of fear and self-loathing. The authors’ hint at this but I do not feel they go into this issue very deeply as it was peripheral to their main topic of inquiry. That fear and self-loathing that leads to racism and sexism allows a positive identity to be created for these “poor working class” individuals.
These men feel so left out of the American Dream, which they staunchly believe in. Otherwise, what would be the point of striving so much and getting nothing in return? People cannot function believing that their actions have no positive influence on their lives. People cannot believe that their poverty is permanent, that their position outside of what is perceived by the whole American culture as “real life” is real. Someone must have stolen what should have belonged to them as white men, be those thieves minorities or women. Otherwise they have failed or the institutions they believe in, a deity or a particular political party, have failed them. The acknowledgement of that failure would leave them rootless, without a framework for the reality that surrounds them. This is not to say that people are clueless. People know that what they believe has flaws and sometimes purposely refuse to acknowledge those flaws because to see those flaws would also reveal all of the other flawed perceptions, in their worldview, in their daily lived experiences.
For example, if I, as a lower class white man (which I am not), agree with affirmative action, then I am acknowledging my own link to those misdeeds of the past and the present. I am acknowledging my own complicity in the continued racism, sexism, homophobia, and other prejudices still so present in American culture. It is in my own self-interest to go so far as to say that these prejudices are not even real but are imaged or exaggerated in the few instances in which they “really” occur. I am acknowledging that I got “something,” in this case white male privilege, that I did not earn. I already feel left out of the loop, like I failed the American Dream test. In order to minimize my own self-loathing, I need a scapegoat, someone to blame and also someone to point out as “less than” my own “wretched” self. I create for myself a positive identity by making fun of Hillary Clinton for not fitting a particular conception of women and by believing that African Americans were “bred” for high level sports capabilities, but nothing else.
We dance around the term “lower class” to the point of denying as a country that we even have one. We all consider ourselves “middle class” because we cannot acknowledge the pain of being “less than” we had hoped for and this also allows us to ignore our own complicity in the situation.
One population not under much investigation in this article, are women within the “white working and lower class”. I have not yet hit upon a term I feel properly encompasses the lived experience of this socio-economic class. As some film scholars have noted about American cinema, women are culturally encouraged to identify with the male protagonist as there is little to no development of the female protagonist in Hollywood cinema as a whole. This cultural identification with the male experience is confusing, at least as I am speaking from my own “white working and lower class” upbringing and general adult life experience. You are put into the position of not only accepting the sexism as described in this article, but internalizing it as truth. Then your own accomplishments are suspect, are “less than” because in order for you to succeed, some man was forced to fail. Or that intrinsically, your accomplishment will always be less than by the value of your gender. So that self-loathing based on your own sex is engendered in you by the culture in order to preserve the supposed “natural” hierarchy you have been raised within.
This article refueled questions I have already been considering, as an academic, as a white woman from the “working and lower class”, and as a person who financially functions within one social-economic class (working and lower class) while working within a career considered “middle class.” By value of my education, I am no longer simply “working and lower class.” But what does this mean for my perception and understanding of my own lived experience? What does this mean for my insights into my culture of origin? What does all of this mean for my position as an academic studying someone else’s cultural productions?
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Folklore, what's the point? (Katie Moore)
As I finished up with the last of this week’s articles, Thomas and Ender’s Bluegrass and “White Trash” (2000), I found myself thinking that folklore as a field might be considered the “white trash,” the second-class citizens, of academia. Although “white trash” might not be the most fitting (and surely not the most politically correct) analogy for the field, one of the main points that struck me in this week’s articles was the precarious and uncertain nature of folklore as a distinctly defined discipline. Who are “the folk” and what about them are we really aiming to understand that makes folklore an important subject of inquiry? This problem is first discussed by Bayard (1953) but is a common thread found in each article assigned this week. Studying the “embellishment of the ordinary,” the kitsch, the jokes, the vernacular, the superstitions, the daily lives of ordinary people, the good and the bad, folklorists touch on many topics that overlap or slip between the cracks that separate fields like Anthropology, English, and Art History (Alvarez, class lecture notes 8/23). These are topics (and people) that are ordinarily overlooked in favor of fine art and high culture (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1988), or simply bypassed by other fields which deem such cultural and “social products” as superfluous to study (Bayard 1953:8).
Archaeology has faced similar crises of identity throughout its growth as a field, sometimes independent, and sometimes placed under the umbrella of anthropology. Its purpose and goals as a field have similarly been questioned internally and from other academic fields, especially in historical archaeology where the question has often arisen, “If we have historical documents, why do we need to do archaeology on historic sites?” In essence, this boils down to making the case for why what you study is important. The idea that kept recurring in my head throughout last week and this week’s reading was how similar these fields are in their focus on often marginalized groups, everyday life, and oft ignored “dirty” details that creates the full picture of a community or society. As Thomas and Enders point out, folklorists (and archaeologists) must make a strong case for taking on topics that may be avoided or deemed unimportant by other fields, like low class citizens.
As a historical archaeologist focused on the early fur trade in the American Pacific Northwest, I’m interested in getting at Native American life during the period of early contact and subsequent colonial interactions in the Northwest. This is a group of people that does not get to speak for itself in the documentary record, so archaeology becomes an important part of illuminating the lives of Native people, the untold stories and overlooked details of daily life that were not deemed important enough to write down by early explorers and missionaries. Archaeologists have the unique opportunity to discover the parts of the past that people try to hide, because we will literally dig through your trash to find it. Therefore, no topic is off-limits: hillbillies of Appalachia, brothels in colonial Boston (see link for more info on a really cool site: http://www.bu.edu/bostonia/summer11/brothel/), life in a slave quarter in the Deep South, or the first encounters with the noble (or bloodthirsty, depending on who you talk to) savages of the New World. Closer study by those academians from the “toy department” disciplines like folklore and archaeology (because after all, what we really do is just play in dirt, right?) reveals more about social, cultural, economic, political, and religious undercurrents than some might give us credit for!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)