New Books In Folklore

On January 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, hundreds of cities in the U.S. and across the globe organized Women’s Marches in response to Trump’s misogynistic comments and as a general rebuke of his election. In this collection edited by Dr. Rachelle (Riki) Salzman, established and emerging scholars contribute essays that examine the folkloric aspects of the Women’s Marches. Hear our conversation as we discuss the symbolic elements of these protests. First, Dr. Saltzman tells me about her start in folklore with her fascinating adventures in documenting the oral histories of Chesapeake watermen on the Eastern Shore in Maryland as a college student and then later curating thousands of World War II letters written by American soldiers who corresponded with a secretary at a Jewish YMCA. We begin our discussion of Pussyhats, Politics, and Public Protest (University Press of Mississippi, 2020) by talking about the deliberate timing of its release. While the publication focuses on the

Today I talked with Jack Zipes about a life in Folklore Studies, about some of his many publications, and about publishing fairy tales.  Jack Zipes is Professor Emeritus of German at the University of Minnesota and has previously held professorships at New York University, the University of Munich, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Florida. In addition to his scholarly work, he is an active storyteller in public schools and has worked with children's theaters in France, Germany, Canada, and the United States. In 1997 he founded a storytelling and creative drama program, Neighborhood Bridges, in collaboration with the Children's Theatre Company of Minneapolis that is still thriving in the elementary schools of the Twin Cities and in other cities of the United States. Most recently, in 2018, he founded a small publishing house called Little Mole and Honey Bear with the motto to unbury talented and neglected writers and illustrators of fairy-tale books from the interwar years 1919-1940 before he

The town of Pinhook in Missouri was founded in the 1940s by southern Black farmers who were looking for land that they could purchase and own in the face of limited options. It was low land that was often flooded, but the farmers were able to clear it and successfully farm it for decades to come while building up a small town. However, in 2011, after heavy rains and historic flooding, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided to breach the Birds Point levee. Pinhook, directly in the flood zone, was completely destroyed. David Todd Lawrence and Elaine Lawless, in their book When They Blew the Levee: Race, Politics, and Community in Pinhook, Missouri (University Press of Mississippi, 2018), document the narratives of the town’s former residents which counter the official story from the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers - that the levee breach was a success story of saved lives and property. Winner of the 2019 Chicago Folklore Prize, the book offers a vivid portrait of the town’s efforts to rebuild and maintain their c

Michael Slouber's new book A Garland of Forgotten Goddesses: Tales of the Feminine Divine from India and Beyond (University of California Press, 2020) surveys the diversity of India's feminine divine tradition by bringing together a fresh array of captivating and largely overlooked Hindu goddess narratives from different regions. As the first such anthology of goddess narratives in translation, it highlights a range of sources from ancient myths to modern lore. The goddesses in this book battle demons, perform miracles, and grant rare Tantric visions to their devotees. Each translation is paired with a short essay that explains the goddesses­­s historical and social context, demonstrating the ways religion changes ov­­er time. Christopher Austen is Associate Professor, Religious Studies at Dalhousie University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A quinceañera is a traditional fifteenth birthday celebration for young women (though in contemporary times, it can also be for young men) in many Latinx communities. While the celebration has roots in religiosity, it has also become a space for imagining and performing class, identity, and Americanity. With fieldwork conducted in California, Texas, Indiana, and Mexico City, Dr. Rachel Gonzàlez provides a richly nuanced study in her recent book Quinceañera Style: Social Belonging and Latinx Consumer Identities (University of Texas Press, 2019) that examines the quinceañera as a site of possibility where young woman and their families can take ownership of their identity through consumerist actions and challenge narratives of Latinx class status that emphasize poverty and unstable migratory status by presenting an image of middle-class Latinx families In this podcast, we talk about how Dr. Gonzàlez’s move from studying neurology to studying folklore and why it was so important to study quinceañera with the len

Public Performances: Studies in the Carnivalesque and Ritualesque (University Press of Colorado) offers a deep and wide-ranging exploration of relationships among genres of public performance and of the underlying political motivations they share. Illustrating the connections among three themes—the political, the carnivalesque, and the ritualesque—the volume provides rich and comprehensive insight into public performance as an assertion of political power. Dr. Jack Santino is professor of folklore and popular culture and has served as director of the Bowling Green Center for Popular Culture Studies. He was the Alexis de Tocqueville Distinguished Professor at the University of Paris, Sorbonne, 2010–2011. He was a Fulbright Scholar to Northern Ireland and has conducted research in Spain and France. His documentary film on Pullman Porters, Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle, received four Emmy awards. His research centers on rituals and celebrations, with a particular focus on carnival and political and public r

What does it mean to be a Brahmin, and what could it mean to become one? The ancient Indian mythological figure Viśvāmitra accomplishes just this, transforming himself from a king into a Brahmin by cultivation of ascetic power. The book, Crossing the Lines of Caste, examines legends of the irascible Viśvāmitra as occurring in Sanskrit and vernacular texts, oral performances, and visual media to show how the "storyworlds" created by these various retellings have adapted and reinforced Brahmin social identity over the millennia. Adheesh Sathaye is Associate Professor, Sanskrit Literature And Folklore, University of British Columbia. You can check out his online class "Narrative Literature in Premodern India" here. For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com/scholarship Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why do contemporary writers use myths from ancient Greece and Rome, Pharaonic Egypt, the Viking north, Africa's west coast, and Hebrew and Christian traditions? What do these stories from premodern cultures have to offer us? In her new book, The Metamorphoses of Myth in Fiction since 1960, Professor Kathryn Hume examines how myth has shaped writings by Kathy Acker, Margaret Atwood, William S. Burroughs, A. S. Byatt, Neil Gaiman, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Jeanette Winterson, and others, and contrasts such canonical texts with fantasy, speculative fiction, post-singularity fiction, pornography, horror, and graphic narratives. She argues that these artistic practices produce a feeling of meaning that doesn't need to be defined in scientific or materialist terms. Myth provides a sense of rightness, a recognition of matching a pattern, a feeling of something missing, a feeling of connection. It not only allows poetic density but also manipulates our moral judgments, or at least s

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020) Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanati

The culture of insurgents in early modern Europe was primarily an oral one; memories of social conflicts in the communities affected were passed on through oral forms such as songs and legends. This popular history continued to influence political choices and actions through and after the early modern period. The chapters in Rhythms of Revolt: European Traditions and Memories of Social Conflict in Oral Culture (Routledge, 2018), edited by Éva Guillorel, David Hopkin, and William G. Pooley, examine numerous examples from across Europe of how memories of revolt were perpetuated in oral cultures, and they analyse how traditions were used. From the German Peasants’ War of 1525 to the counter-revolutionary guerrillas of the 1790s, oral traditions can offer radically different interpretations of familiar events. This is a ‘history from below’, and a history from song, which challenges existing historiographies of early modern revolts. Rachel Hopkin PhD is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer. Learn mor

This is a book of encounters. Part memoir, part essay, and partly a guide to maximizing your capacity for fulfillment and expression, The Poetry of Everyday Life: Storytelling and the Art of Awareness (Cornell University Press, 2016) taps into the artistic side of what we often take for granted: the stories we tell, the people we love, the metaphors used by scientists, even our sex lives. A folklorist, writer, and cultural activist, Steve Zeitlin explores how poems serve us in daily life and how they are used in times of personal and national crisis. In the first book to bring together the perspectives of folklore and creative writing, Zeitlin explores meaning and experience, covering topics ranging from poetry in the life cycle to the contemporary uses of ancient myths." This convergence of poetry and folklore," he suggests, "gives birth to something new: a new way of seeing ourselves, and a new way of being in the world." Written with humor and insight, the book introduces readers to the many eccentric and

In Vyāsa Redux: Narrative in Epic Mahābhārata (Anthem Press, 2019), Kevin McGrath examines the complex and enigmatic Vyāsa, both the primary creative poet of the Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata and a key character in the very epic he composes. In doing so McGrath focuses on what he considers the late Bronze Age portions of the epic feature prioritizing the concerns if the warrior class. In his discussion, McGrath distinguishes between plot and story and how this distinction comes to bear on the differences between preliterate and literate phases of the epic’s compositional history. For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com/scholarship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I interview Martin Shaw. In Shaw’s new book, Courting the Wild Twin (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2020), he writes, “Here’s a secret I don’t share very often. Myths are not only to do with a long time ago. They have a promiscuous, curious, weirdly up-to-date quality. They can’t help but grapple their way into what happened on the way to work this morning, that video that appalled you on YouTube. Well, they are meant to; if they didn’t they would have been forgotten centuries ago.” In our interview, Shaw invites us to consider the power of myth to guide us not only toward new ways of seeing our current moment—one in which we’re witnessing an unprecedented global pandemic—but also new ways of seeing itself. For Shaw, a mythologist who’s designed courses at Stanford University and who directs the Westcountry School of Myth in the U.K, myths reveal unseen possibilities in our own lives and overlooked chances to reunite with our natural world. The old stories can lead us forward if only we learn how to hear the

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as P

Adam H. Domby, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Charleston, has written a rigorous analysis of American political memory as it connects to the Civil War and long shadow of the Confederacy. The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (University of Virginia Press, 2020) unpacks a variety of threads all connected to the Lost Cause ideology, and all based on falsehoods. These dimensions of the ideology include Domby’s examination of the history of dishonest claims to confederate pensions by white veterans, and also the accusations of fraud associated with claims made by former slaves and free people of color for much smaller pensions. The False Cause digs into the historical claims made about the heroics demonstrated on the battlefield during the Civil War. In this context, The False Cause unpacks the myth that the Confederate army was one of the best ever, and these heroic claims, many of which were made at least forty years after the war itself, are not

The myth of Jews killing Christian children emerged in 1144 CE, with the death of a boy named William in Norwich, England. Over the course of several centuries, this myth gained traction and became firmly rooted throughout medieval and early modern Europe. In Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth (Harvard University Press, 2020), Magda Teter traces the history of this myth and analyzes how accusations of ritual murder have followed Jews from the 12th century to the contemporary period. Magda Teter is Professor of History and Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies at Fordham University. Lindsey Jackson is a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction. The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its diffe

The discipline of folkloristics in the People’s Republic of China is robust and well-funded. With thousands of scholars across the country, it is surprising then that there is relatively little understanding of the research and contributions of Chinese folklorists to the discipline. This despite the fact that Chinese folklorists are well-acquainted with many of the latest advances in folkloristics research globally. As the first English language attempt to discuss the historical development, current situation, and theoretical contributions of Chinese Folklore studies to the discipline of folklore more broadly, Chinese Folklore Studies Today: Discourse and Practice (Indiana University Press, 2020), edited by Lijun Zhang and Ziying You, attempts to rectify this situation. The volume’s five essays point out different issues relevant to folklore studies, including urban folklore studies, studies of women’s folklore, folksong, myth and belief, and intangible cultural heritage. This unique contribution not only int

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/folkore

Rebgong, in the Northeastern part of the Tibetan Plateau (China’s Qinghai Province), is in the midst of a ‘Battle for Fortune.’ That is, a battle to both accumulate as much fortune, but also a battle to decide which definitions of fortune are going to dominate Tibetan society: a material fortune based in ‘authoritarian capitalism’ or a Buddhist form of ‘counterdevelopment’ based in traditional ideas about language, landscapes, and compassion. In The Battle for Fortune: State-led Development, Personhood, and Power among Tibetans in China (Cornell University Press, 2018), Charlene Makley, Professor of anthropology at Reed College, intermixes these tensions while also exploring her own experience attempting to conduct fieldwork immediately before and after a series of demonstrations rocked Tibet in the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Using a form of multi-sited, ‘dialogic ethnography’ from linguistic anthropology, Charlene Makley considers Tibetans’ encounters with development projects as a historically si