The First Question of the Week

Bienvenue!

After a - I think - rather neat class on romantic nationalism and the occasional downsides thereof evolved into a discussion of group identity as caricature ("The Caper", "The Maritimer," "The Upper Canadian"), one point that might have gone unexpressed, or unstressed, was how political boundaries often do not reflect the natural geographic boundaries to environments, which therefore at least calls into question some of Herder's conclusions - if not his premises - of national character. First, the confusion - or the propensity for confusion - of the nation with the state (Milan Kundera has a great article in this week's New Yorker about this point, although he also seems to be arguing for the opposite) and how nation-state identity can tend to obfuscate personal, local, or regional identity. The state is a construct that occasionally is contiguous with nation, but not exclusively. To suggest that Canadian identity does not exist is grossly unfair, but typically - with food, with song, with habitat- certain local or regional traditions have been extrapolated as representative of the whole.

But enough about that.

The Question for next week (e-mailed to me by Monday) is: Do you consider yourself a member of an ethnic group? Why or why not?

By the way, the course syllabus is now up as a link (look to the right): any other handouts I, um, hand out will be available there as well (this does not include chapter or article photocopies: those are outside my office door).

New sexy look, new sexy year, new sexy course, same ol' sexy prof

Greetings to you all. Welcome to 113 '07.

This blog was created last year as a way of keeping in touch with etudientes (that's foreign and therefore sexy-talk for 'students') and allowing for a bit more discussion of things. It is not a substitute for attendance, but you might - might - be able to catch up on the odd missed class.

It is better than WebCT because:

• WebCT is for losers;
• This allows anyone to look at it, as opposed to a privileged few, unlike WebCT, which is for losers;
• WebCT (because it is for losers) has a tendency of crapping out (at least here at CBU);
• I can abuse my power and silence people (unlike WebCT, which is not only for losers, but is for hippie losers); and
• WebCT is totally for losers.

In retrospect, it may all be one and the same reason. Anyhoo, this will be a way of making handouts available, and is a good place to look at quasi-regularly. There is an rss feed for those too lazy to check which will tell you when I've added something new. I'll get the syllabus up to the right in a day or two, and make it all pretty.

Since I'm so very good, and the fact that you didn't do the reading was beyond your control, here is a synopsis of today's class as a PowerPoint presentation. Don't expect too many of these.

PS: Those who are new to folklore country should mosey around, set a spell, and amble through some of the posts from last year, to get a sense of things.

Books for next semester's courses

Again: this is one of those posts that I started and then got tired. Here are my books for Winter 2007, with amazon links.

For Folklore 113: Introduction to Folklore II

• Elliott Oring, ed. Folk Groups and Foklore Genres: An Introduction
• Elliott Oring, ed. Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: A Reader

For Folklore 267: Food and Culture

• Lucy Long, ed. Culinary Tourism
• Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, eds. Food and Culture: A Reader

For Folklore 311: Gender in Traditional and Informal Culture

• Simon Bronner, ed. Manly Traditions: The Folk Roots of American Masculinities
• Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye. eds. Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada
• Joan Newlon Radner, ed. Feminist Messages: Coding in Women's Folk Culture

Class the nineteenth: What an essay is

Simply put, an essay is an effort (Fr. essayer) at establishing an argument about a particular something. It locates the argument within a larger tradition (informing influences) and in relation to similar arguments (parallel examples); it offers new evidence (in folklore, we are assuming a new study with primary data based on fieldwork, but in other disciplines we refer either to (a) primary data based on some other discipline-related means of data collection or (b) a confluence of perspectives which in concert offer a new perspective); it connects the new evidence to the larger tradition, allowing for either reaffirmation or challenge to what the tradition tells us; and it allows for a personal voice to speak both from and to that larger tradition, occasioned by the privileged perspective of being an 'expert' on the subject, even if the subject about which one is expert is a fairly narrow slice of the universe.

Because you are the producer of primary data, you are the (or 'an') expert on whichever topic you have studied: someone has likely done a study on something similar before, but as you look at a distinct occurrence of that phenomenon, you have a particular contribution to make. A gajillion people have studied Halloween traditions before you, but they have not looked at Halloween, 2006, Glace Bay (for example).

Today we tried to make this general argument. Because so far you have

1. looked around for an aspect of 'tradition' from your life/environment;
2. read up on similar situations;
3. read up on local context;
4. framed a question;
5. plotted a course of research;
6. thought through the ethical implications of said research;
7. did the original research; and
8. have begun the process of mining and organising said research,

you are now in the position to write up your findings. A week to do an essay might not seem like much time, but all your little ducks are in a row: you have been thinking about this for two months now, so it's practically just typing.

Then we spent a while talking about citations: I refer you to any style guide for reference.

Some more very basic rules to doing an essay (very basic, nothing of insight, but pure 'this is sound advice which you might not like much but which every prof you will ever have will appreciate someone having told you and telling you early'):

• double space;
• type;
• 12 point font;
• clear font (Arial, Times (New Roman), Helvetica, Courier, etc.); and
• black ink.
• Take advantage of your word processor's spell check option, and do it slowly (don't simply accept the first option that comes along without thinking it through. See Jon Stewart's appendix to Naked Pictures of Famous People for a list of what Microsoft Word offers as possible corrections.
• Avoid exclamation points, italics or bold or colour or uppercase for emphasis, etc. This rule may be slightly disregarded: on occasion, an exclamation point or italics (only) can be used as a rhetorical device, but I caution you to do so judiciously.
• Be informed about your readership, even if it is a 'pretend' readership. You should be aiming to communicate your findings to a first-year university, North American, Canadian, Cape Breton-familiar but not -centric audience, so you should expect a certain level of 'common sense'. Provide context and definitions (your own are fine: this isn't an 'according to Webster's' thing) for terms that you can reasonably expect people not to know, and skip definitions for terms that you can reasonably expect people to know. (It is not unreasonable to assume that your reader knows what cheerleading is, but it would be unreasonable to assume that your reader has an understanding of Sydney-area high school rivalries.)

More tomorrow:

P.S. DaVinci Code sucks major (insert offensive body part here) for reasons too numerous to even begin the process of conceiving of a way to record them. However:

Behold, I bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people, except at Columbia Pictures, where the power lunches won’t even be half-started. The Catholic Church has nothing to fear from this film. It is not just tripe. It is self-evident, spirit-lowering tripe that could not conceivably cause a single member of the flock to turn aside from the faith. Meanwhile, art historians can sleep easy once more, while fans of the book, which has finally been exposed for the pompous fraud that it is, will be shaken from their trance. In fact, the sole beneficiaries of the entire fiasco will be members of Opus Dei, some of whom practice mortification of the flesh. From now on, such penance will be simple—no lashings, no spiked cuff around the thigh. Just the price of a movie ticket, and two and a half hours of pain. [Anthony Lane, The New Yorker 29 May, 2006]

Classes seventeen and eighteen: Music and Dance

This is Emily, the one who went to the vet. As I write this, she is recovering from a weekend during which my wife's parents were visiting, bringing along with them their dog, named Puppy. (I bet there's a great story behind that one.) She is fine now, but was not happy.

But enough about the world's awesomest cat, we are talking about music and dance.

Very simply, when one moves from the observance of (seemingly) straightforward performances - straightforward only in terms of a self-evident primary media for data collection - to more complex ones, one needs to expand one's repertoire of media and admit (which is not a big admission) that one needs a variety of media to make sense of it.

Take dance, and ethnochoreography (*sigh*). Photography, ethnography, interview: they would get a flavour of things, but wouldn't it be better to (a) have a medium that allows for both sound and vision recording of homeostatic phenomena (they do: film) and (b) have a medium for communicating movement on the page (they do: dance transcription)?

The lesson that can be learned from this is twofold:

1. the ability to study a phenomena is predicated on the access to a technology to research it properly. Complaining about nineteenth century folklorists' ambivalent attitudes to dance from a twenty-first century perspective is akin to deriding eighteenth century studies of epidemics and the concept of 'bad air': they didn't have microscopes, so cut them some frigging slack.
2. all human performance is complex: no medium exhausts one aspect of it. But the narrowing of focus to one aspect of it can nevertheless be fruitful if one is self-aware of this limiting.

The next aspect that 'separates' contemporary music and dance study - the staked claim domain of ethno- types - is the centrality of participant observation, where you not only observe and interact with the performers, you become one yourself. Only by doing are you really learning.

*hem*

Participant observation - as folklorists understand it - is the basis of all contemporary folklore scholarship. It is the involvement of the self within the community and the slow path of discovering what it is to be a member. When it comes to music and dance, the folkloristic approach is to learn what it is to be, shall we say, an audience. If that involves clapping or singing along, shaking one's ass, whatever, it is fine. But it is not trying to 'be' a tradition bearer. That is - qu'est-ce que c'est la mot juste? ah, oui - hippie liberal white bread suburban bullshit.

With that we take a deep breath and leave the topic for the day.