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Here, AFS continues the custom of including a public interview with a senior member of our field at the annual meeting. In this session, Robert Baron and Ana Cara will interview John Szwed, professor of music and jazz studies and director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University, about his life and work. (Sponsored by the AFS Oral History Project.)
Folk songs have been at the heart of the study of folklore since its beginnings, and the scholarship on song is one of the finest achievements of the field. But in recent years interest in songs, especially songs in English, has waned among scholars in both folklore and ethnomusicology. Despite some continuing important and innovative work, and public fascination with the subject, song no longer seems central to folklore studies. I will argue that song is a cultural universal, indeed a cultural imperative, and exists as a system similar to kinship systems, language, and economic relations. This will be a plea to resume interest in songs, and will suggest some means by which folklore studies might again assume responsibility for understanding the role of song in human history. (Sponsored by the AFS Fellows.)
More than four decades have passed since the advent of the new folkloristics. Assessments of this revolution tend to narrowly focus on performance theory and not on whether the broader promises of this era have been realized, especially in areas of cross-disciplinary research. This address will look specifically at how attitudes toward historical scholarship have changed within the discipline of folklore and how we have constructed our own disciplinary histories during this postrevolutionary phase. Finally, the address will look to the future and whether we are reconstructing our past in our current graduate training in the discipline.
Shukla, Pravina; Goldstein, Diane E.; Griffith, James S.; Primiano, Leonard Norman
Summary:
This forum features a conversation with prominent folklorists who will reflect on their respective careers, and meditate on the past and future of our discipline. The forum contributes to the intellectual history of folklore; it will be recorded, as past forums have been, for the AFS “Collecting Memories” Oral History Project. This year’s forum will focus on folk religion and belief, by looking at the “life of learning” and the choices, chances, and triumphs of participants Diane Goldstein, Jim Griffith, Elaine Lawless, and Leonard Primiano. Pravina Shukla will once again facilitate this exchange about their academic and public work, their fieldwork and festivals, and also their important involvement in our field and in our scholarly society over the past several decades. (Sponsored by the American Folklore Society.)
Brady, Erika, Kruesi, Margaret, Primiano, Leonard Norman
Summary:
Many years ago as a graduate student studying William Langland’s Vision of Piers Plowman, I came upon what was evidently a popular scatological riddle pertaining to a profound theological teaching. Since that time I have continued to ruminate over the role of humor—especially sexual and scatological humor—arising from within vernacular Catholicism. In this talk, I will consider the serious play of such forms of expression and their significance for folklorists concerned with the nature of belief in the sacred.
Some songs pertaining to the “música tropical” genre, or music exhibiting tropical rhythms from both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, feature Afro-mestizo protagonists in their lyrics. My study explores the imaginaries constructing the subjectivities of Afro-mestizo men and women and posits that these gender constructions are different between the two sexes. Men tend to be depicted more harshly than women. Both, however, are depicted in a stereotypical and racist manner. My study incorporates feminist and critical race theories as well as postcolonial theories in the analy- sis and hermeneutics of the representation of Afro-mestizos in the lyrics of these songs.