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Putting Folklore To Use

Author: Michael Owen Jones

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2014-07-11

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0813147700

The first book of its kind, Putting Folklore to Use provides guidance to folklorists but also informs practitioners in other fields about how to use folklore studies to augment their own studies. How can acting like a folklore fieldworker help a teacher reduce inter-group stereotyping and increase student's self-esteem? How can adopting a folklore fieldworker's point of view when interviewing patients help practitioners render health care more effectively? How can using folklore research help rural communities survive and thrive? Thirteen folklorists provide answers to these and other questions and demonstrate the many ways folklore can be put to use. Their essays, commissioned for this volume and edited by Michael Owen Jones, apply the methods and insights of modern folklore research to thirteen different professions and areas of practical concern. The authors, all of whom have themselves put folklore to use in the fields they describe, consider applications in detail and explain how folkloristic concepts and techniques can enhance the work of various professions. They explore applications in such areas as museums, aiding the homeless, environmental planning, art therapy, designing public spaces, organization development, tourism, the public sector, aging, and creating an occupation's image. In an extensive introduction to the volume, Jones provides an overview of applied folkloristics that defines the field, surveys its history in the United States, and scrutinizes its basic issues and premises. Part I of the book shows how to promote learning, problem solving, and cultural conservation through folklore and its study. Part II deals with folklorists helping to improve the quality of life. Part III reveals folklore's role in enhancing identity and community.

Humble Theory

Author: Dorothy Noyes

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2016-10-03

Total Pages: 471

ISBN-13: 0253023386

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A collection of fifteen essays exploring what folklore is, its history, and how it all connects to the world. Celebrated folklorist, Dorothy Noyes, offers an unforgettable glimpse of her craft and the many ways it matters. Folklore is the dirty linen of modernity, carrying the traces of working bodies and the worlds they live in. It is necessary but embarrassing, not easily blanched and made respectable for public view, although sometimes this display is deemed useful. The place of folklore studies among modern academic disciplines has accordingly been marginal and precarious, yet folklore studies are foundational and persistent. Long engaged with all that escapes the gaze of grand theory and grand narratives, folklorists have followed the lead of the people whose practices they study. They attend to local economies of meaning; they examine the challenge of making room for maneuver within circumstances one does not control. Incisive and wide ranging, the fifteen essays in this book chronicle the “humble theory” of both folk and folklorist as interacting perspectives on social life in the modern Western world. “Tying folklore to larger trends in Western cultural thought, leaving behind narrow concerns with genre or fossilized expressive forms, Humble Theory showcases the potential of folkloristics to contribute meaningfully to interdisciplinary conversations about culture.” —Journal of Folklore Research “Humble Theory is a big book. From a small scholarly field, it announces the most substantial, far-seeing insights into the world’s social life. By writing it, Noyes becomes the kind of public intellectual the United States needs.” —Journal of American Folklore

Keepers of Tradition

Author: Maggie Holtzberg

Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 9781558496408

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Throughout Massachusetts, artists carry on and revitalise deeply rooted traditions that take many expressive forms - from Native American basketry to Yankee wooden boats, Armenian lace, Chinese seals, and Irish music and dance. This illustrated volume celebrates and shares the work of a wide array of these living artists.

Folklore in the United States and Canada

Author: Patricia Sawin

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2020-10-06

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 0253052882

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To ensure continuity and foster innovation within the discipline of folklore, we must know what came before. Folklore in the United States and Canada is an essential guide to the history and development of graduate folklore programs throughout the United States and Canada. As the first history of folklore studies since the mid-1980s, this book offers a long overdue look into the development of the earliest programs and the novel directions of more recent programs. The volume is encyclopedic in its coverage and is organized chronologically based on the approximate founding date of each program. Drawing extensively on archival sources, oral histories, and personal experience, the contributors explore the key individuals and central events in folklore programs at US and Canadian academic institutions and demonstrate how these programs have been shaped within broader cultural and historical contexts. Revealing the origins of graduate folklore programs, as well as their accomplishments, challenges, and connections, Folklore in the United States and Canada is an essential read for all folklorists and those who are studying to become folklorists.