On behalf of the New York Folklore Society’s executive board and the editorial
board of Voices, I want to congratulate Faye McMahon for winning the American
Folklore Society’s 2008 Chicago Folklore Prize with her outstanding book Not Just Child’s Play: Emerging Tradition and the Lost Boys of Sudan, published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2007. It brings all of us great happiness to see Faye receive this richly deserved award….According to the American Folklore Society’s web site, the Chicago Folklore Prize, “awarded to the author of the best book-length work of folklore scholarship for the year, is the oldest international award recognizing excellence in folklore scholarship.”
Folklorists
Dynamic yet Fragile:
Archives, historical societies, and museums
today have inherited the task
of caring for a swelling mass of audiovisual
materials. A 2005 Heritage Health Index
survey calculated a staggering 2,423,568
moving image collections and 2,189,992
audio collections safeguarded within the
United States alone. Alarmingly, more than
40 percent of audio and video collections
are maintained in unknown conditions. The
same report concluded that many cultural
institutions lack essential resources to care
for these artifacts. These collections are
in peril if left unattended, as over time the
fragile plastic-coated tapes can deteriorate
and fail to play.
From the Editor
A Call to Action.
Just before the new
year, along with hundreds of arts nonprofits across
the state, the New York
Folklore Society received
alarming news. New
York State’s deficit reduction
plan instituted in December 2008 included
extensive cuts to a number of state programs—
including the grants budget of the
New York State Council on the Arts. The cuts
to NYSCA meant that pending requests for
fiscal year 2008–9 funding, including the New
York Folklore Society’s request for general operating
support, could not be considered.
From the Director
Our History. The New York Folklore Society was founded in 1944 by a group of folklorists, historians, writers, and enthusiasts—dreamers and visionaries emerging from the Great Depression. Sharing a vision for cultural democracy after World War II, they felt that it was essential to collect, save, and share the folk arts and cultural traditions of the many cultures that made up the urban and rural areas of the state, its historic regions, and the American literary traditions it inspired. The founders’ goal was to “plow back”: to give back traditional arts to the people who created and maintained them.
Fieldwork, Memory, and the Impact of 9/11 on an Eastern Tennessee Klansman:
I wish to share a personal account
of my first folkloristic encounter: the series
of events that led to my choice of a
career in folklore. While many folklorists
may recall their excitement and fascination
with their first informants and the unique
narratives or artifacts that they produced,
my tale involves near-accidental fieldwork
in the company of a less-than-savory group
in American society: the Ku Klux Klan
(KKK).
Downstate
Why do folklorists and scholars of
play so rarely explore the playful aspects
of sex? Perhaps, as I’ve always suspected,
a prudish element runs through the discipline.
Or perhaps, despite the similarities,
sex and children’s play seem to exist in separate
universes. Nonetheless, any folklorist
or ethnographer seeking to understand
New York City, in particular, can’t do so
without acknowledging a side of the city’s
life that attracts people from all over the
world for its anonymity and permissiveness.
From the Editor
The articles featured
in this issue of Voices
contain a variety of
voices whose messages
are “traditional”—in the
surprising, the comforting,
and even the most
alarming senses of that disciplinary keyword. In the photo essay “Carving Out a Life:
Reflections of an Ithaca Wood-Carver,”
self-taught carver Mary Michael Shelley describes
how she responded simultaneously
to her Northeastern farm family heritage,
liberal arts education, and the emerging
feminism of her time to claim a form of
man’s work—carpentry and carving…
From the Director
As we look back
on our organization’s
sixty-fifth year,
I would like to thank
all of our supporters
on behalf of the entire
New York Folklore
Society family.
2009 was a year of
great upheaval and rethinking of the organization….Partnerships in
2009 … helped us to realize programming goals: Union College, the Albany Institute
for History and Art, the City of Schenectady,
and the Erie Canalway National Heritage
Corridor were invaluable in helping us to
continue to provide folklore and folk arts
programming
Downstate
Fundraising
is about individuals and groups with
different resources collaborating around a
vision shared: a good and workable marriage,
like the simple tin cup I imagined picking
up in the forest. Funders are collaborators.
As Bob Dylan put it, “I’ll let you be in my
dreams, if I can be in yours.”
From the Director
Folklorists are uniquely positioned to lend
an important voice to the debates around
immigration and immigration reform. As
globalization brings the world together, folklore
works to draw attention to that which is
local, individual, and expressive. Throughout
the next decade, it will be important for
folklorists to continue to draw attention
to the field of folklore through alliances
with disciplines and organizations outside
of folklore, thus providing a folkloristic
perspective on contemporary life.
From the Editor
This issue of Voices offers readers a cornucopia of food for deep thoughts on New York. We experience the transcendent freedom of Vodou dancing in the city, survey the shape-shifting history of Rip van Winkle stories, and wend our way through the psychological landscape of a post-9/11 urban legend. We also encounter Afro-Colombian music in Queens and Native New York handcrafts.
The Grateful Terrorist:
The folktale of the grateful dead was
once widely known and passed on through
both religious and secular traditions. Today
most people would conjure an image of
the popular rock band, which is said to
have found its name from this story, as
well…. The story has evolved
throughout history in response to society’s
psychological coping needs during times
of crisis. This mythic theme has resurfaced
from the earliest Judaic scriptures to
contemporary urban legends.
Annual Conference Roundup
The New York Folklore Society decided
to blend these traditions at the 2010
conference with a new element: student
presenters. In collaboration with New
York University’s Latino studies and Latin
American studies programs, we invited
graduate students to present their work
on the theme of Latino Folk Culture
and Expressive Traditions on Saturday,
November 20, at NYU.
From the Editor
The Spring–Summer
2011 issue of Voices
brings readers another
tasty mix of story, ethnography,
and analysis
of New York traditions,
upstate and downstate.
We open with SUNY–Oneonta English
professor Jonathan Sadow’s “Bagels and
Genres,” an insightful and witty musing on
what—in critical theory, as in life—makes a bagel a bagel, from Vegas to Montreal to
New York.
From the Director
Folklorists can offer important insights on
a community as tourism site. Drawing upon
knowledge gained through ethnographic
fieldwork, folklorists are able to provide
interpretive frameworks for a better understanding
of a community’s traditions and
cultural arts and may have a broader vantage
point on a community’s cultural assets.