Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Call And Response : Experiments In Storytelling, Deanne Fernandes

Masters Theses

Being part of RISD's inaugural Masters of Illustration cohort has been an immense honor. This journey has been nothing short of transformative and healing, as it has allowed me to unearth layers of self-discovery through my creative practice.

In my thesis, I introduce a fresh research methodology rooted in the principles of call and response, with adaptability, creativity, and storytelling as its foundational pillars. Through the lenses of visual storytelling, experimental animation, graphic journalism, and fictional world-building, I demonstrate how these techniques can effectively bridge the gap between theory and practice. This dynamic approach fosters meaningful connections among diverse perspectives …

Food And Memory In Literature: A Folkloric Approach, Pola Schiavone

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

This paper analyzes food as a memory device in the novel Doña Flor y sus dos maridos by the Brazilian author Jorge Amado. Set in San Salvador du Bahía in northern Brazil, the novel follows Doña Flor after her husband Vadinho dies. Food and drink – considered here as folkloric forms – play a central role not only in her exploration of memories of her husband but also in the broader bahiana society with its mix of different ethnicities (African, indigenous, European). Drawing on Felix Coluccio’s and Dan Ben-Amos notions of folklore and literature and Arjun Appadurai’s exploration of the …

Folklore And Zooarchaeology: Nonhuman Animal's Representation In The Historical Narrative, Nicholas Miller

Field Notes: A Journal of Collegiate Anthropology

It has been argued before that archaeology and folklore go hand-in-hand, with a variety of scholarship and studies focusing on landscapes and monuments in reference to this pair; however, this research argues for a different approach. As the title suggests, this paper engages with folklore topics and zooarchaeological data to argue that faunal remains (along with landscapes and monuments) are intertwined and cannot be separated from the historical narrative. While faunal evidence helps provide scientific explanations of the natural interconnectedness of humans and nonhuman animals, folklore aids in creating and developing cultural understandings. By exploring the relationship between humans and …

The Question Of Design In The Context Of The First Australian Nations: Designing Reparations Through Decolonial Architecture, Eli Abamonte

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Forget about tourist postcards and picture-perfect landscapes. Australia's true heart beats in the ancient stories of the Indigenous communities that tell them, their vibrant cultural tapestry woven beneath the surface. My research dives into this tapestry, not as an Architect with blueprints imposing my own vision, but as a student with an open ear and collaborative spirit. Australia’s vastness holds countless stories, but my research led me deep into the heart of East Arnhem Land, where ancient legends whisper in the wind and the Yolngu people dwell. Anthropologists like Bruno Descola shattered my singular view of the world, revealing a …

Georgia Ghosts: History, Folklore, And The Roots Of The Southern Gothic, Katherine M. Mcdowell

Master's Projects

There is something quintessentially human about ghost stories, yet particular regions tend to be more powerfully associated with haunted folktales than others. One of the regions is the southeastern United States. In fact, these oral traditions appear to have influenced the area's best-known literary subgenre: the Southern Gothic.

Why is the South considered haunted? Are there particular qualities in historical events that make them more likely to engender ghost stories? What makes the South's folkloric spirits so powerful that they appear even in modern literature? Most of all, what connects the region's history and folklore with the Southern Gothic? By …

Witches On The Wind: Weather Magic In New England Folktales, Zephyros Quinn Craven

Thinking Matters Symposium

The English language folktales collected from coastal New England in the 19^th and 20^th centuries display a prominence of weather magic motifs compared with folktales from other regions of the United States. This paper aims to explain the success of the weather magic theme in New England folklore collections and to serve as a starting point for scholarly discourse on the subject, which has hitherto been sparse. This study utilizes climate research, both scholarly and popular collections of folktales, local travel guides, and colonial and labor histories. Through a combination of historical analysis, comparative study, and textual analysis, …

Anthropomorphism In Aesop's Fables, Nasih Alam

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Generally, Aesop’s The Complete Fables is considered didactic for children. In my paper, I discuss how Aesop represents nonhumans in his fables and how they could negatively affect the psychology of children aged 7-12 if we as parents, teachers and legal guardians do not become conscious of its problematic didactic function. I show that most of the anthropomorphized animals in The Complete Fables have anthropocentric and provide environmentally harmful rhetorics. In order to keep the required length of paper in mind, I have limited myself to five tales from Aesop’s The Complete Fables, to show how and where the rhetoric …

Regional Folk Beliefs, Edward D. Ives

Dr. Edward D. Ives Papers

This accession contains over 4,000 folk beliefs organized on individual, 4x6-inch index cards. A majority of the belief cards were collected by students participating during the 1960s as part of the American Folklore course taught by Dr. Edward D. “Sandy” Ives. Folk beliefs originate primarily from Maine and the Maritimes, but occasionally extend into other areas. Each download contains a copy of the 1965 syllabus for American Folklore, explaining the assignment given to students.

Please Note: A significant number of these cards are handwritten and are not currently available as typed transcriptions. The belief cards are organized into categories noted …

Down The Bay Oral History Project Newsletter - Winter 2024, Center For Archaeological Studies, Mccall Library

Down the Bay Oral History Project Newsletter

Public newsletter sharing information about progress and discoveries during the ongoing Down The Bay Project.

Mf163 Somalis In Lewiston, Maine Collection, Special Collections, Raymond H. Fogler Library, University Of Maine

Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History Finding Aids

This collection includes interviews with five Somali women living in Lewiston, Maine in 2003. The interviews were conducted by Elizabeth Hoyt Hannibal and Dianne Schindler for a project for ANT 425 taught by Dr. James Moreira at the University of Maine. Included is a narrative of how Hannibal and Schindler set up the interviews with Fatuma Hussein, Azeb Hassan, Hawa Kahin, Kiih Issa, and Ayan Ismail. Interviews took place in Lewiston at Daryeelka, Inc., a resource for families that assists them in becoming economically independent and active participants in community life. Also included in the collection is a paper by …

Mf055 American Thread Company / Russell Carey, Special Collections, Raymond H. Fogler Library, University Of Maine

Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History Finding Aids

A collection of fourteen series deposited by University of Maine graduate student, Russell Carey between March, 1992 and November, 1993. The collection features videotaped and or audio interviews with workers at the American Thread Company's wooden spool mill in Milo, Maine, and contributed to research for Carey's Master's thesis entitled, "3,750,000,000 Perfect Wooden Spools" (University of Maine, 1994). The collective oral history of the mill's workers documents conditions, issues, history, occupational lore, and people's feelings about the mill from the 1930s through the 1960s.

Mf 036 Maine Leaders Oral History Project, Special Collections, Raymond H. Fogler Library, University Of Maine

Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History Finding Aids

Interviews with Senator Margaret Chase Smith (1990), James Russell Wiggins (1988) (Editor of the Ellsworth American). The interviews were supported with funds from the University of Maine President’s Office.

Mf089 Marshall Dodge Collection, Special Collections, Raymond H. Fogler Library, University Of Maine

Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History Finding Aids

Rob Golding and Earl Bonness give humorous stories and anecdotes of Downeast about local people and events, and these anecdotes reflect the quintessential Downeast character and type of humor later made famous by Marshall Dodge in his stories of “Bert and I” and may suggest the origins of the types of characters and humor Dodge used in his “Bert and I” records.

Dancers Of The Book: Yemenite, Persian, And Kurdish Jewish Dance, Quinn Bicer

Anthós

Despite the cultural significance of dance in Jewish communities around the world, research into Middle Eastern Jewish dance outside of the modern nation-state of Israel is sorely under-researched. This article aims to help rectify this by focusing on Yemenite, Persian/Iranian, and Kurdish Jewish dance and explores how these dancers have functioned and been received within the societies they have been a part of. The methods that have gone into this article are a combination of analyzing primary source recorded dances and existing secondary source research into the dance of these communities. Through these methods, this article reveals how Yemenite, Iranian, …

Contributors, Jewish Folklore And Ethnology Editors

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

Author biographies for contributors to this issue.

Yahrzeit ... Haya Bar-Itzhak (1946–2020), Simon J. Bronner

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

Haya Bar-Itzhak was a driving force behind this journal and a shaper of the global study of Jewish folklore and ethnology. In her teaching, writing, and editing, she brought into relief the long lineage of work in periodicals devoted to Jewish folklore beginning in the nineteenth century (Bar-Itzhak 2010, 16–26) and inspired the editors of Jewish Folklore and Ethnology (JFE) with a vision for a journal that would go beyond an audience of Jews to become indispensable for all folklorists and ethnologists. The JFE editors, indeed all who care about understanding tradition, lost a friend and mentor when …

Yiddish Songs And Jewish Futures: A Besere Velt, Partisan Music, And Modern Performance, Justine Orlovsky-Schnitzler

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

A Besere Velt, the Boston Worker’s Circle community chorus, performs for a modern audience the music of Yiddish-speaking Jewish partisans and ghetto resisters. Through active transmission and re-interpretation of partisan and ghetto songs, A Besere Velt invokes East-European Jewish tradition and creates a liminal space ripe with new possibility. In the process, the chorus gives these old songs life for contemporary Jews. The analysis situates the songs within the genre of Yiddish music and investigates through interviews ways that members build meaning through the performance of partisan music, the construction of Jewish space, and the promise of Jewish futures.

Landscape Into Legend: Tracking Lost Tribes And Crypto-Jews Across New Mexican Terrain, Judith S. Neulander

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

The essay traces the “Lost Tribes of Israel” legend to the purported academic discovery of lost and hidden “crypto-Jews” in contemporary New Mexico. The essay explores perceptions and beliefs of Jewish diasporic survival and identity in folkloristic, religious, historical, and genomic contexts. Analysis exposes pseudo-ethnography and pseudoscience as the basis for New Mexican claims, influenced in part by habitual association of the regional landscape with lost, hidden, and/or “wandering” Jews.

Gendered Foods And Traditions Among Argentine Jewry, Jacqueline Laznow

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

Examining layers of meaning found in personal stories, folktales, memoirs, recipes, and cookbooks collected from interviewees in Argentina and in Israel, this essay interprets the women’s role in Jewish-Argentine identity formation and preservation in connection to processes of forming private and collective memory. Traditional Jewish foodways generally and gefilte-fish specifically in contrast to traditional Argentine foodways such as meat grilling are analyzed as a symbolic praxis that strengthens Argentine identity.

The Rise Of Judaic Calligraphy In The Twentieth Century, Stephen Michael Cohen

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

Excluding religiously required safrut (e.g., handwritten Torah scrolls, mezuzot, tefillin, gittin), artistic aspects of Judaic calligraphy declined after moveable type was invented in the fifteenth century. Rediscovery of medieval calligraphic techniques in late nineteenth-century Britain, plus contemporaneous typographical studies in Germany, spurred revival of artistic calligraphy. The first Arts and Crafts movement, pre-World War I German research into aesthetic letterforms, and the Bezalel Academy sparked a rise of secularized Judaic calligraphy. Growth of folk arts and ethnic pride in the 1960s and accessible photocopiers in the 1970s allowed nonspecialists to become expert calligraphers.

Bird Spies And Poisoned Tomatoes: New Rumors And Legends In The Middle East, Steve Siporin

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

New rumors and legends about spy animals, attack animals, and attempted mass poisonings, all purportedly the work of Israel, circulate in Middle Eastern newspapers, television, and radio. This essay answers two sets of questions regarding these narratives, one regarding belief and the other regarding antisemitism. The analysis shows that the rumors and legends express attitudes in addition to conveying information. Whether or not any, some, or all these transgressions occurred, the narratives ineluctably serve to assert and confirm the depravity of a constructed enemy. They reveal unexpected continuities with age-old antisemitic folklore.

“They Have Countless Books Of This Craft”: Folklore And Folkloristics Of Yemeni Jewish Amulets, Tom Fogel

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

The nineteenth-century voyager Yaakov Sapir published accounts of Yemeni Jewish amulets that provide significant historical and ethnographic sources for a study of Yemeni Jewish occult practices and the perception of them by non-Jews. The combination of blurred religious boundaries characterizing occult traditions, the prominent place of the Judeo Arabic language, and Arabic or pseudo-Arabic magical scripts constructed occult traditions as an essential social and cultural role for the Jewish minority, and simultaneously made these traditions the center of a polemical discourse.

Introduction: Jewish Folklore And Ethnology: What, Why, And Whither?, Simon J. Bronner

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

The inspiration for and significance of field-based Jewish folklore and ethnology studies as a distinct branch of learning devoted to the understanding of tradition in relation to diasporic Jewish studies and folkloristics is traced back to the Talmudic directive to “Go out and see what the people do.” The shapers of the field include S. An-Ski, Max Grunwald, Yoysef-Yehude Lerner, and Dov Noy along with theoretical influences of Franz Boas and Erving Goffman heralding a shift from textual sources to analyses of practice and performance. The characteristic definition, content, method, and theory of Jewish folklore and ethnological studies since the …

Note On Transliteration, Jewish Folklore And Ethnology Editors

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

As a publication with an international scope and audience, JFE uses transliteration to maintain flow in the essays and make the pronunciation of languages accessible for readers of English.

Citing Seeds, Citing People: Bibliography And Indigenous Memory, Relations, And Living Knowledge-Keepers, Megan Peiser Choctaw Nation Of Oklahoma

Criticism

By turning the page or reading further, you are accepting a responsibility to this story, its storyteller, its ancestors, and its future ancestors. You are accepting a relationship of reciprocity where you treat this knowledge as sacred for how it nourished you, share it only as it has been instructed to share, and to ensure it remains unviolated for future generations.

This story is told by myself, Megan Peiser, Chahta Ohoyo. I share knowledge entrusted to me by Anishinaabe women I call friends and sisters, by seed-keepers of many peoples Indigenous to Turtle Island, and knowledge come to me from …

Desire, Difference, And Productivity: Reflections On “The Perverse Child” And Its Continued Relevance, Christopher Hewlett

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

This article is concerned with the relationships through which children have been born, raised, and made into Amahuaca people over the past 75 years, and within contemporary Native Communities on the Inuya River since their formation beginning in the 1980s. The process of making children into kin among Amahuaca people is similar to that described throughout much of lowland South America. The production, preparation, and sharing of proper food (manioc, plantains, fish, and game) as well as manioc beer are central aspects of sociality and the formation of specific kinds of bodies. While the processes of sharing substances, demonstrating care, …

Blacklash: Phenomenological Hermeneutics In Black Dance, Darvejon A. Jones

Theses and Dissertations

The horrors inflicted on Black bodies, souls, and spirits in the United States during the transatlantic slave trade, the Jim Crow era, and the current era (2023) have a lasting legacy of trauma metabolized through the body and transmuted generationally. Jones uses this data to contextualize the work of Black dance artists as hermeneutic phenomena in which the Black dance artist is a hermeneut tasked with delivering a message of the Black body/spirit complex: “I AM HUMAN. DO NOT KILL ME.” This paper examines how Black dance artists frequently petition for their survival — incessantly subjugated to the interpreter’s empathy, …

This Is The Way: Christian Asceticism Alive In The Star Wars Universe, David Allen Osb

Obsculta

This article is a creative reflection on how the Desert Fathers, especially St. Antony, could be compared in a pastoral way to the Jedi Masters found in the Star Wars Film and Television Canon.

Alfred Russel Wallace Notes 26: Confessions Of A 'Wallace Enthusiast', Charles H. Smith

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

The author’s longstanding interest in the life and thought of Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) is profiled in three ways, through: (1) a brief factual review of its history (2) a discussion of some problems with the way Wallace has been treated over the years, and (3) a consideration of the author’s personal experience with the paranormal, and how this has made him, if not always a full believer, more patient with divergent explanations of the type Wallace was famous for.

The Intermountain West Lgbtq+ Oral History Project: The Folklorization Of Queer Theory, John Priegnitz

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Following the passing of a friend who witnessed firsthand the transformation of Salt Lake City’s Queer community from the 1950s to 2020, I created the Intermountain West LGBTQ+ Oral History Project to document the queer experience within the Intermountain West. Since beginning the project in 2020, I have documented several diverse stories that intersect class, race, sexuality, gender, faith, and politics. By documenting the queer experience, a marginalized community will have their voices heard and preserved for the enlightenment of future generations. This presentation provides an overview of my project and its preliminary findings.