Gathering/Place:
Folklore, Aesthetic
Ecologies, and the Public Domain
Working List
Resources in Aesthetic Ecology
Abrahams, Roger D. 1986. "Ordinary and Extraordinary Experience" in The Anthropology of Experience, eds. Victor W. Turner and Edward M Bruner, 45-72. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
"Experience addresses the ongoingness of life as it is registered through the filter of culture - that is, through acts we have already learned to interpret as experiences or, in the case of shock, surprise, embarrassment, or trauma, through acts we reprocess as experiences after the fact, by talking about them and thus making them seem less personal, more typical." (p. 55)
"For Erving Goffman, the experience of even the smallest understandings (much less our larger mutual celebrations) seemed like a new rendering of an archaic holy act, one that acknowledges the existence of others and signifies a willingness to be involved in the flow of vital cultural information and, on occasion, to be exuberant in passing on this knowledge as a way of tying together self, others, and the larger worlds." (p. 69)
Allen, Barbara, and Thomas J. Schlereth. 1990. Sense of Place:
American Regional Cultures. Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky.
Basso, Keith. 1996. “Wisdom Sits in Places: Notes on a Western
Apache Landscape.” In Senses of Place, ed. Steven Feld
and Keith Basso.
Missing from the discipline is a thematized concern with
the ways in which citizens of the earth constitute their landscapes
and take themselves to be connected to them. Missing is a desire
to fathom the various and variable perspectives from which people
know their landscapes, the self-invested viewpoints from which
(to borrow Isak Dinesen’s felicitous image [1979]) they embrace
the countryside and find the embrace returned. (p. 54)
Bateson, Gregory. 1972. “A Theory of Play and Fantasy.” Steps
to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine, pp. 177-193.
Beck, Jane. 1982. Always in Season: Folk Art and Traditional
Culture in Vermont. Montpelier, VT: Vermont Council
on the Arts.
Ben-Amos, Dan. 1984. “The Seven Strands of Tradition: Varieties
in Its Meaning in American Folklore Studies.” Journal of Folklore
Research 21(2-3):97-131.
Bendix, Regina. 2000. “The Pleasures of the Ear: Toward an Ethnography
of Listening.” Cultural Analysis 1.
How might one go about initiating an ethnography of listening?
Take steps toward an ecology of the senses, their linkages to
cognition, their collaboration in providing us with aesthetic
pleasure? Nearly every promising point of entry requires cross-disciplinarity.
If we are to probe the contours of sensory perception and
reception and seek to understand the transitions between the
individual, cultural and transcultural dimension, as I am urging
here, then research methods will be needed that are capable
of grasping “the most profound type of knowledge [which] is
not spoken of at all” and thus inaccessible to ethnographic
observation or interview (Bloch 1998:46).
Berger, John. 1980. “Why Look At Animals?” About Looking.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1-26.
Briggs, Charles. 1988. Competence in Performance: the Creativity
of Tradition in Mexicano Verbal Art. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press.
Cadaval, Olivia and Cynthia L. Vidaurri. 2003. El Rio: A Travelling
Exhibition Exploring the Relationship Between Traditional Knowledge,
Local Culture, and a Sustainable Environment in the Rio Grande/Rio
Bravo Basin. Washington, DC: Center for Folklife and Cultural
Heritage, Smithsonian Institution.
Cantwell, Robert. 1993. Ethnomimesis: Folklife and the Representation
of Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Regional identity records and synthesizes, at what is perhaps
the ecological limit of the ethnomimetic process, patterns of
settlement, cultural retention, and creolization and the accommodation
of these historical forces, through economic and attendant social
formations, to the natural resources and features. . .that identify
a region as such without reference to its political boundaries.
(p. 111)
Davis, Susan. 1997. Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture
and the Seaworld Experience. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Appreciation of a separate, aesthetic version of nature
suppressed awareness of class exploitation and was used to distinguish
people from each other and normalize the differences between
them. For example, in the eighteenth century, as Williams argues,
the gentry justified their expanding property rights and dominance
over the rural poor through artistic practices. Sculpting nature
into country estates, celebrating it in pastoral poetry and
painting, manipulating in the form of lovingly landscaped gardens,
the wealthy literally naturalized the vast social and economic
power they derive from the enclosure of agricultural lands and
forests, even while they consolidated their control in the laws
and courts. (p. 31)
Dewey, John. 1954 [1927]. The Public and Its Problems. Athens:
Ohio University Press.
We lie, as Emerson said, in the lap of an immense intelligence.
But that intelligence is dormant and its communications are
broken, inarticulate and faint until it possesses the local
community as its medium. (p. 219)
Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience. New York: Minton,
Balch and Company.
The sources of art in human experience will be learned by
him who sees how the tense grace of the ball-player infects
the onlooking crowd; who notes the delight of the housewife
in tending her plants, and the intent interest of her Goodman
in tending the patch of green in front of the house; the zest
of the spectator in poking the wood burning on the hearth and
in watching the darting flames and crumbling coals. These people,
if questioned as to the reason for their actions, would doubtless
return reasonable answers. (p. 5)
Dorst, John. 2002. Framing the Wild: Animals on Display.
Laramie: University of Wyoming Art Museum.
With the coming of the intellectual and material revolutions
in 18th and 19th century Europe, Berger
argues, the age-old relationship between humans and animals
disappears, except in nostalgic reverie, and is replaced by
a relationship that marginalizes animals into the categories
of raw material, machine, and... display artifact.... Within
[the frame of display], “animals are always the observed. The
fact that they can observe us has lost all significance.”
(p. 4, citing Berger, 1980, p. 14).
Feld, Steven and Keith H. Basso. 1996. Senses of Place.
Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
Glassie, Henry. 1982. Passing the Time in Ballymenone:
Culture and History of an Ulster Community. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
----------. 2000. Vernacular Architecture. Philadelphia:
Material Culture and Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press.
Environmentally efficient, thatch is also beautiful. Looking
downhill at a house he had recently roofed, Tommy Love said,
“When it is new with straw, it shines like gold. The sun glints
off it, and it is lovely. It is lovely, right enough.”
Efficient and beautiful, thatching is also economical.
Its main demand is time, and in Ballymenone they say that the
man who made time made plenty. Thatch also requires a knowledge
of growing things, the understanding of seeds and soil and weather
that farmers develop during time passed in place. (p. 26)
Hufford, David. 1983. “The Supernatural and the Sociology of
Knowledge: Explaining Academic Belief.” New York Folklore Quarterly.
9 (1/2): 21-30.
Hufford, Mary. 1990. “’One Reason God Made Trees:’ The Form and
Ecology of the Barnegat Bay Sneakbox.” In Allen and Schlereth,
eds. Sense of Place: American Regional Cultures. Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky.
“He was the type of fellow that thought like a duck. He
thought like a duck. He just knew every move they were gonna
make. In other words, we’d sit there, gunning, and have the
stools [decoys] out, and in would come some ducks. And they
wouldn’t come in just the way he wanted em. Just exactly right.
You could kill em, but he says, ‘They gotta do better than that.’
And he would go out and he’d take this stool here and put it
there, and this stool here and set it back there, and the next
time they’d almost light in your lap….He just thought like a
duck all the time.” (Ed Hazelton, quoted in Hufford, p.
53)
Hymes, Dell. 1975. “Folklore’s Nature and the Sun’s Myth.” Journal
of American Folklore 88: 345-69.
I have thought that the true problem of aesthetic experience
as part of life would be posed by a study of the state of the
arts in Florence – not Florence, Italy, on the Mediterranean,
but the small town on the Oregon coast at the mouth of the Siuslaw
River. Or by an accounting of the satisfaction in the voice
of Mrs. Blanche Tohet of Warm Springs, Oregon, when, having
finished fixing eels to dry one evening, she stood back, looking
at them strung on a long line, and said, “There, int [sic] that
beautiful?” (p. 346).
James, William. [1984]. "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings" in William James: The Essential Writings, ed. Bruce Wilshire, 326-342. Albany: SUNY Press.
http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/jcertain.html
Jones, Suzi. 1980. Webfoots and Bunchgrassers: Folk Art of
the Oregon Country. Portland: Oregon Arts Commission.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1998. “Disputing Taste.” In Destination
Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
What is the nature of the imagination at work in the creation
of the Mince-O-Matic chopper and its hypertrophy of mechanical
wit or the plastic honey bear – “poetry in plastic,. . .a bear
filled to the eyebrows with his favorite food” – or aerosol
cheese, the apotheosis of processed food, or most recently molds
that grow vegetables in the shape of celebrities like Elvis?
(p. 267)
Kurin, Richard. 1997. Reflections
of a Culture Broker: A View from the Smithsonian. Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Linzee, Jill and Michael P. Chaney. 1997. Deeply Rooted:
New Hampshire Traditions in Wood. (Introduction by Burt Feintuch).
Durham: Art Gallery, University of New Hampshire.
McDermott, John. 1969. “Deprivation and Celebration: Suggestions
for an Aesthetic Ecology.” In James M. Edie, ed. New Essays
in Phenomenology: Studies in the Philosophy of Experience,
pp. 116-130. Chicago: Quadrangle Books.
This isolated line and the isolated fish alike are living
beings with forces peculiar to them, though latent . . . But
the voice of these latent forces is faint and limited. It is
the environment of the line and the fish that brings about a
miracle: the latent forces have become dynamic. The environment
is the composition, profound. Instead of a low voice, one hears
a choir. The latent forces have become dynamic. The environment
is the composition. (Wassily Kandinsky, quoted in McDermott,
p. 116).
Miska, Maxine and I. Sheldon Posen. 1983. Tradition and Community
in the Urban Neighborhood. Brooklyn: Brooklyn Education and
Cultural Alliance.
Moonsammy, Rita, David Steven Cohen, Lorraine E. Williams, eds.
1987. Pinelands Folklife: Tradition, Community, and Environment. New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Muthukumaraswamy, M.D. 2000. “Finding Ecological Citizenship
Inside the Archives of Pain: Famine Folklore.” Indian Folklife.
(Special issue on Ecological Citizenship). 1 (3): 3-4.
----------. 2002. “NFSC folk Festival, March 2002: Oral Narratives,
Folk Paintings, usical Instruments and Puppetry of India.” Indian
Folklife 1:3 (January), 3-4.
The true task of the folklorist ... is to restore his specialized
idiom to communal, collective structures, which underlie speech,
language and artistic expressions. (3)
Paredes, Americo. 1958. “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border
Ballad and Its Hero. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Prosterman, Leslie. 1995. Ordinary Life, Festival Days: Aesthetics in the Midwestern County Fair Smithsonian
"The nature of the aesthetic here is determined by its use in the community and the meaningfulness in context, as finally stated by a livestockman at the Champaign County Fair:
Well, you talk about beauty.
I was walking with a young woman from Chicago and we stopped to look at some wheat fields. It was the end of the summer and they were full of wheat.
And she said to me, look at that, all golden and shining. Isn't that a beautiful sight? Isn't that pretty?
And I said, yes that's certainly pretty. But that would be more beautiful in my eyes if that field of wheat were scythed and stacked into sheaves.
That would be a beautiful wheat field."
Reid, Herbert and Betsy Taylor. 2003. “John Dewey’s Aesthetic
Ecology of Public Intelligence and the Grounding of Civic Environmentalism.”
Ethics and the Environment (Special Issue on Art) 8: 74-92.
We call this power ‘cosmogenic agency’ – or the labor of
conjuring a ‘cosmos’ out of ‘univers’ and of ‘consenting’ to
one’s constitution by and in the matrices of world and mortal
time. Within the space-based logics of universe and the universal,
the relationship of individual and matrix is ‘flat’ because
the individual can be infinitely resituated and rotated insofar
as it can be relocated according to calculable coordinates –
which are themselves infinitely replicable in all locations
where those calculative logics obtain. In cosmogenesis, the
relationship of individual and matrix is deep and full. It
is simplest to say that this logic is the logic of place and
narrative. (p. 86)
Schneider, Jane. 1991. "Spirits and the Spirit of Capitalism" in Religious Regimes and State-Formation: Perspectives from European Ethnology, ed. E.R. Wolf, 24-54.
Sciorra, Joseph. 1996. “Return to the Future: Puerto Rican Vernacular
Architecture in New York City.” In Anthony King, ed. Representing
the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st
Century Metropolis, pp. 60-90. London: Macmillan Press.
Siporin, Steve. 1984. "We Came to Where We Were
Supposed to Be:" Folk Art of Idaho. Boise: Idaho
Commission on the Arts.
Taylor, Betsy. 2002. “Public Folklore, Nation-building, and Regional
Others.” Indian Folklore Research Journal. 1 (2): 1-28.
Public folklore has much to contribute, not just to the
expansion of the public sphere, but to a regrounding of public
creativity in the enabling conditions from which public culture
springs, and on which it depends. Muthukumaraswamy says that
the ‘true task of the folklorist.. .is to restore his specialized
idiom to communal, collective structures, which underlie speech,
language and artistic expressions’ (2002:3). These formative
structures constitute what Cantwell calls the ‘marrow of culture’(1993)
– that shared life-world that provides the creative powers from
which the architectonic structures and metanarratives of public
culture emerge – as bone arises from, and protects, marrow.
(p. 4)
Titon, Jeff Todd. 1988. Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant,
and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church. Austin: University
of Texas Press.
After saving money from their factory jobs or inheriting
a portion of their parents’ estate, they bought lots on the
outskirts of town and next to their houses they built farm outbuildings
from sawn planks just as their fathers had done before them.
(p. 138)
Yocom, Margaret and Kathleen Mundell. 1999. Working the Woods.
Augusta, Maine:
Maine Arts Commission.
Young, Katharine. 1997. Presence in the Flesh: The Body in
Medicine. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
. . .folklore, the study of forms of thought that have become
typified within a discourse. (p. 2)
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