Calling all social scientists/humanities folk. I need your brains!
Just was looking over the instructions for submission to the Patai prize. I hadn’t really thought about applicability, as the submissions officer, upon hearing a description of my Jack Benny piece, said it was “just what they were looking for.”
But now I find applicability entails an “ethnography or folkloric approach.”
To be fair, I knew this was part of the deal two weeks ago (the prime clue being that Raphael Patai was a folklorist himself), but I either downplayed it in my head, ignored it, or am just spazzing now cause of nerves. Either way, I am discomforted.
I am certainly no ethnographer… But folklorist?? Perhaps. My stuff deals with oral material in terms of radio and Vaudeville legend… Does this seem to be enough?
Maybe I am just getting too wrapped up in the whole Ozarks image of folklore study.
But I can’t find a half decent definition of this term. I will spend sometime on J-STOR looking for articles defining the folkloric approach and methods, but, so far, everything I have found seems far too interested in extolling its virtues, and not at all concerned with actually telling me what it includes.
Hopefully it is one of those scholarly brackets that fits pretty much anything, because it is too broad and artsy that it can’t really help itself (ritual studies, I am looking in your direction!). But, I can’t be certain this is the case.
So if you have any good descriptions, links, leads, etc., that might help me tweak this piece to suit (or rest assured that it already fits), please, for Pete’s sake, help me.
I beg you.
5 comments:
Henry Glassie in his “Pattern in the material folk culture of the Eastern United States” (1969) has set forth certain guidelines. He said “the best student of folk culture is both field worker and theorist, and modern study of material culture might include the detailed description and ordering of field data, the historic-geographic connections of types, construction and uses, as well as functional and psychological speculations” (Glassie: 1969: 16). Glassie proposes “to go beyond the discussion of the history and distribution of the object and to probe into its emotional and cultural role in the life of its makers and users.” (Dorson 1972: 41). Glassie tried to evaluate the satisfaction of material culture in a world of mass technology and the development of an American folk life style.
DISCUSS
Found 50 page article on Jewish folklore study as a discipline...
Caught between happy to have found it, and about to cry over the length.
Question: Does the presence of an extended discussion of the characteristics of Jewish-American humour constitute a folklorist approach, even if it is not the main subject of the piece?
(I use the analysis of "Jewish humour" as a method for looking at Jack Benny as a Jewish cultural figure.)
Just remember that folklore doesn't just mean 'Ozarks'. McLuhan's "Mechanical Bride" is subtitled, "the folklore of industrial man."
Huh. You're right. I am reading some stuff on po-mo folklore study, in which folklore has to include more and more mediums and forms, to keep up with the times.
(And this is an EVENT: The first time the FAMOUS JOHN has posted a comment on my blog! So you DO read it! XXXOOO)
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