February Folklore Finds

Another month gone by, and another stack of folklore books to explore:

• In Grandmother's House: Thai Folklore, Traditions, and Rural Village Life - Sorasing Kaowai and Peter Robinson. A memoir, but filled with traditional folklore from Thailand.
• Six Mi'kmaq Stories - Ruth Holmes Whitehead. Small collection of stories from the Native American people originally from the Nova Scotia region of Canada.
• Eve of the Festival: Making Myth in Odyssey 19 - Olga Levaniuk. Published by the Center for Hellenic Studies. A discussion of myth-making as communicative device in the Odyssey.
• North Pennsylvania Minstrelsy: As Sung in the Backwoods Settlements, Hunting Cabins and Lumber Camps of Northern Pennsylvania, 1840-1910 - Henry Wharton Shoemaker. Reprint of a 1919 collection.
• Little Red Riding Hood and Other Classic French Fairy Tales - ed. by Jack Zipes. Paperback. Seriously, anything with Prof. Zipes's name on it is worth checking out.
• The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth and Drama - Lord Raglan. Dover Books on Literature and Drama. A low-priced reproduction of Raglan's classic study (which has not aged all that well, if you're asking me).
• The Polar Eskimos - Erik Holtved. This looks very interesting - the book itself gives off the appearance of a standard ethnography, but it is actually a collection of stories, storytellers and variants from the native population around Thule, Greenland, collected in the middle of the last century.
• Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic: Invoking Tradition - Alison Butler. Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic.

The stack just keeps growing!

Folklore Books for the New Year!

Happy 2011 - it's about that time to preview the books that are arriving in the first month of the new year. As always, there are one or two books that really excite me - for such a small discipline, at least there is always something new to keep up with.

• Folklore/Cinema: Popular Film as Vernacular Culture - Mikel J. Koven. Paperback.
• Far North Tales: Stories from the Peoples of the Arctic Circle - Bonnie Marshall & Kira Van Deusen. World Folklore Series.
• Alan Lomax, Assistant in Charge: The Library of Congress Letters, 1935-1945 - edited by Ronald Cohen. American Made Music Series.
• Jerusalem: Arab Social Life, Traditions and Everyday Pleasures - Subhi S. Gosheh. Paperback.
• Going to the Well for Water: The Seamus Innis Field Diary 1942-1946 - edited by Rionach Ui Ogain.
• Sakuntala: Texts, Readings, Histories - Romila Thapar.
• Mythology in the Middle Ages: Heroic Tales of Monsters, Magic and Might - Christopher R. Fee. Praeger Series on the Middle Ages.
• Explorations into Arab Folk Literature - Pierre Cachia.
• The Uncommon Sense of the Immotal Mullah Nasrudin: Stories, Jests, and Donkey Tales of the Beloved Persian Folk Hero - Ron J. Suresha.
• Myths of the Opossum: Pathways of Mesoamerican Mythology - Alfredo Lopex Austin.

Folklore and Google Books

Google books is a blessing to us 'independent scholars' who have trouble sneaking into the Widener library! For giggles I did a search for books with the term "folkloristics" (full view books only). Here's what came up on the top page:

• A Flowering Tree: and other oral tales from India - A. K. Ramanujan. Edited with a preface by Stuart Blackburn and Alan Dundes. University of California Press, 1997. Anthology of stories from the Kannadigas of South India which were collected from the 1950s through the 1970s. The title essay includes a list of collectors and informants. Ramanujan is a towering figure in the study of Indian folklore and a recipient of the MacArthur grant.
• "From Cairn to Oven: on the use of ethnological documents in interpreting remains of historical structures" - Kristiina Korkeakoski-Vaisanen, Journal of Estonian Archaeology 6/1, 2002.
• American Folk Medicine - ed. by Wayland D. Hand. University of California Press, 1976. Collection of essays from the 1973 UCLA conference on American Folk Medicine.
• The Hmong: 1987-1995. A Selected and Annotated Bibliography - Compiled by J. Christina Smith.
• "Interview with Prof. A. K. Ramanujan" - T. N. Shankaranarayana and S. A. Krishnaia. In Indian English Poetry: Critical Perspectives by Jaydipsinh Dodiya. Sarup & Sons, 2004 reprint. Two of the hits on the first page concern Prof. Ramanujan.
• American Folk Legend: A Symposium - ed. by Wayland D. Hand. University of California Press, 1971. Essays presented at the 1969 UCLA Conference on American Folk Legend, including essays by Dundes, Paredes, Dorson, Degh, Yoder, Brunvand, Toelken and Hand. Oh to be a fly on that wall :) Two Hands in the first page as well.
• Allegorical Speculation in an Oral Society: The Tabwa Narrative Tradition - Robert Cancel. Modern Philology No. 122, University of California Press, 1989.
• "Science in Folklore? Folklore in Science?" - Dr. Alan Dundes. The New Scientist, Dec. 22-29, 1977.
• Armenian Folklore Bibliography - Anne M. Avakian. University of California Press, 1994.
• Folkloristics: An Introduction - Robert A. Georges & Michael Owen Jones.

An interesting grab-bag of items with a few gems I fully intend on researching further. Like all things google it does take some culling. One of the best things about Google Books - no overdue fines!

Festivus Folklore Finds!

Happy Festivus everyone! Hope you all had some quality time to grab the Festivus pole, air your grievances and display great feats of strength. Here is the stuff that filled my folklore folder during the holiday weeks:

• Google introduced a brand new toy: Google Books Ngram viewer. It's a sharp tool that lets you track the use of set words and phrases in Google's collection of millions of scanned books. Jason Baird Jackson has already played with it some. I did too. The Boston Globe discusses the possibilities for scholars. The New York Times, however, is more cautious in its optimism. I think that there is great potential here for the patient scholar - I wish I had this tool when I started my work back in the dark ages of the late nineties :)
• Our sisters and brothers over in the anthropology world are having some sort of brouhaha over their self-definition (as folklorists, we can more than relate). Anthropology in Practice as a fuller recounting of the imbroglio.
• Boing Boing owns the intranets. Here they discuss Wade Davis & drugs, and here they discuss British Oral Histories.
• And the Hindustani Times has an introduction to the study of folklore!

Try not to eat too much figgy pudding and Kwanzaa cake this week!

The Quail-a-day Diet

From the good folks at Snopes, an investigation into the belief that it is impossible to eat quail for thirty days in a row. This is the kind of bet I would happily take.

Cleaning Out My Folklore Bookmark Folder

I have months-worth of folklore bookmarks to share with you wonderful people. Consider these my early Festivus presents. Warning: not all of these are timely.

• How exactly do Russians celebrate Christmas? Don't turn to the Internet for answers: they usually tell you how Russians used to celebrate Christmas. Instead, read this. (This reminds me of a headline I saw on Vesti.ru the other day: "Ded Moroz does not like letters that start with 'Gimme.")
• Folklorist Dan Barnes was feted at the AFS meeting. Since retirement he spends a lot of his time tickling the ivory, quite an accomplished chap. Congrats on the award.
• Are you a folklorist looking for a tenure-track job? Apply here! These jobs don't grow on trees, you know.
• The estimable Jason Baird Jackson recounts his adventures at the AFS conference. Prof. Jackson is one of the folklorists behind the Open Folklore project - which just might be the greatest thing to hit folklore since the Aarne-Thompson Tale Type Index. I order you to subscribe to his blog right now.
• Vance Randolph's "Pissing in the Snow" is a major influence on my folklore career. But there was way more to him than collecting obscene folklore - here's a bio on the influential writer.
• My advisor wanted me to submit a chapter of my dissertation to The Journal of Folklore Research. I got lazy and never revised it. Now it is way out-of-date. But here is the new issue for your enjoyment. (I don't subscribe to Project Muse, but the articles look interesting, especially the "Undoing of of an Encyclopedia" and "Slovenian Folk Culture" articles).
• I am sure I have discussed my love for the works of Henry Glassie before. Meeting him at a talk at the University of Virginia was a highlight of my folklore life. Here he is discussing creativity in the context of winning the AFS award. Here's the press release about the award.
• The Boiled Down Juice is another folklore blog I demand that you read. Here she reviews a book on the life of Hazel Dickens.
• The Chicago Folklore Prize this year goes to . . . .David Delgado Shorter of UCLA for his book "We Will Dance Our Truth: Yaqui History in Yoeme Performance."

The Unibrows of Tajikistan

This article proves that conceptions of beauty are definitely culturally influenced. Personally, I find it more pretty than collagened lips.

"Where the Unibrow Reigns."