2007 Botkin Lectures
Online Archive of Past Benjamin A. Botkin Folklife
Lectures
All of the materials from the Botkin Lectures are available
to visitors in the Folklife Reading Room. Selected materials will be
made available
online as digital versions ma available.
September 19, 2007, 12 noon - 1:30 pm
Afghan
Women's Stories: The Problematics of Cover, presented by Margaret Mills, Ohio State University
Read
the event flyer essay
View the video of
this presentation Time 1:42
Afghan women in burkas have become iconic representations of women's
oppression in western media, but this representation is contested in
various ways by Afghan women and men. The most common observation by
Afghan women activists is that we westerners should get over it, that
the burka, hot, uncomfortable and inconvenient as it is, is certainly
not their most pressing problem. It has even proved useful at times as
an enabling device to preserve women's mobility and anonymity under
circumstances of surveillance or constraint. (Photo credit on left: Storyteller
in Herat, 1975. Margaret Mills.)
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Woman in a burka (actually
called a chadri in Afghanistan - burka is a Pakistani term) in front
of the shrine of Ali in Mazar-i Sharif, 1975. Grace Brigham.) |
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Westerners have their own
preoccupations with visual access and its meanings, reflective of our
ideas about bodily privacy and self-determination. This talk, illustrated
with Afghan women's folktales and personal reminiscences
about the use and misuse of cover, both imaginary and actual, explores
how Afghan women understand and strategize around constraints on their
public presence and social authority. These observations
are used to reflect on certain recent mismanaged representations of Afghan women
and families in global media and their repercussions for the women so
represented.
Margaret Mills was raised in Seattle and educated at
Harvard, where she developed her lifelong interest in Persian-language
oral narrative under the tutelage of Albert Lord and Annemarie Schimmel.
She has taught ethnographic field research methodology in the U.S., Bangladesh,
India and Tajikistan, has done research on schooling and foodways in
Pakistan, on everyday ethical speech in Tajikistan, and continues her
work on Afghan oral narrative, both fiction and oral history. Her previous
publications include Rhetorics and Politics in Afghan Traditional
Storytelling (1991) and she co-edited South Asian Folklore:
An Encyclopedia (2003) with Peter Claus and Sarah Diamond. She has
a book project under way presenting the oral history of an Afghan family
as well as a monograph on tricksters and gender in Persian-language oral
tradition. Dr. Mills recently completed a term of service as the Chair
of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Ohio State
University.
August 15, 2007, 12 noon - 1:00 pm
Folklore's
Champion: Ben Botkin, presented by Roger D. Abrahams, Hum Rosen Professor
of Humanities, Emeritus, at the University of Pennsylvania
Read the event
flyer essay
View the video of
this presentation Time 1:04
Among Benjamin Botkin's accomplishments, the gathering of slave narratives
has received the greatest amount of attention, though not always with
his name attached. As folklore editor of the Federal Writers' Project,
and later head of the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress,
Botkin guided the fieldworkers who collected the narratives, amassed
and edited the raw materials, and produced seventeen bound volumes entitled
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from
Interviews with Former Slaves (Washington, D.C., 1941). In this lecture,
Roger Abrahams discusses this project, Botkin's place in it,
its impacton subsequent scholarship, and how one can take these studies
further to understand more fully the ways in which the slaves achieved
liberation themselves, before and after Emancipation.
Roger D. Abrahams is Hum Rosen Professor of Humanities,
Emeritus, at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author and editor
of many books, including After Africa (with John Szwed), African Folktales:
Traditional Stories of the Black World, Singing the Master: The Emergence
of African-American Culture in the Plantation South, African-American
Folktales: Stories from Black Traditions in the New World, Everyday Life:
A Poetics of Vernacular Practices, and Man-of-Words in the West Indies.
Newspaper articles on quilting. Photo by Bernard Herman |
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July 24, 2007, 12 noon - 1:00 PM
Quilters'
Save Our Stories, presented by Bernard Herman, Professor of American
Material Culture Studies and Professor of Art History at the University
of Delaware
Read the event
flyer essay
No webcast currently available
Bernard Herman's illustrated lecture demonstrates the rich
potential of the Quilters' Save Our Stories collection, now
happily housed in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress,
through an examination of the archetypal and ubiquitous Sunbonnet Sue
quilts.
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'The Sun Sets on Sunbonnet Sue,' courtesy of Tennessee State Library and Archives. |
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Industry estimates place the number of individuals engaged in some aspect
of quiltmaking in the United States alone at roughly 20,000,000 individuals
generating annual revenues, excluding buying and selling quilts, in excess
of $2,000,000,000. How is it then that so many Americans from all walks
of life are engaged in artistic production about which the rest of us
know so little? The Alliance for American Quilts addressed this lacuna
in 1999 when a working group conceptualized Quilters' Save Our Stories,
a project intended to capture and preserve the voices of the quiltmaking
community from the ardent hobbyist to the avant-garde art quilter. The
project pilot, conducted with the support of Quilters, Inc., at the Houston
International Quilt Festival, collected nearly fifty interviews that
were transcribed and placed online at www.centerforthequilt.org. As the archive grew, the Alliance and its partners at the University
of Delaware worked to transform the Q.S.O.S. into a grassroots effort.
New national and statewide projects were added including interviews with
a Texas quilt guild, exhibitors in Philadelphias biennial quilt expo "Art
Quilts at the Sedgwick," state chapters of the Daughters of the American
Revolution, and many individual and group projects. To aid in the collection
and processing of the interviews, The Alliance compiled a comprehensive
manual edited by Karen Musgrave. Like the interviews, the Manual is on
The Alliance website and free to all. The Q.S.O.S. continues to thrive
as an Alliance grassroots project under the leadership of Karen Musgrave
and invites volunteers to aid in the collection and preservation of the
living voice of the quilt.
Bernard
L. Herman, Chair and Edward F. and Elizabeth Goodman Rosenberg
Professor of Art History at the University of Delaware, teaches courses
in material culture, vernacular architecture, folk and ethnic arts,
historic preservation, and writing. His books include Everyday
Architecture of The Mid-Atlantic (1997), The Stolen House(1992), A
Land and Life Remembered: Americo-Liberian Folk Architecture (1989)
with Svend Holsoe and Max Belcher, Architecture and Rural Life
in Central Delaware, 1700-1900(1987), and most recently Town
House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780-1830 (2005)
. In 2006 and he contributed an essay, "Architectural definitions,"to
the volume Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt. In 2005
he worked with twelve students in a senior writing seminar, compiling,
designing, and producing People Were Close, an oral and photographic
history of Newark, Delaware's historic African-American community.
A second volume, Food Always Brings People Together: Stories, Poems,
and Recipes from the New London Road Community was published in
2006. Currently Dr. Herman is working on two book projects: the
first period houses of the Delaware Valley, 1675-1740, and "Quilt Spaces,"with
a particular emphasis on the quilts of Gee's Bend, Alabama, and the
worlds of contemporary quiltmaking.
July 5, 2007, 12 noon - 1:30 PM
Down
in the Old Belt: Voices from the Tobacco South, a film screening and lecture
by documentary film maker Jim Crawford
Read the event
flyer essay
No webcast was made for this film screening
It was the gold of Jamestown, the birthplace of our nation. Now, in
the storied landscape of the Old Belt, tobacco farmers speak to the end
of a culture 400 years in the making. From Jamestown to the 2004
buyout, Jim Crawford's documentary film Down in the Old
Belt: Voices from the Tobacco South, reveals the decline of
the tobacco culture in the Old Belt of Virginia.
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Stringing blairs, or bunches of tobacco leaves, to dry. Courtesy of the Virginia Chamber of Commerce. |
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Told in the context
of tobacco's
cataclysmic human history, this film weaves a complex picture of the
livelihoods and traditions that compose this declining culture. The farmers
in this documentary tell their stories not for sympathy but to reveal
what is fading in the wake of this change. Their stories personify the
cultural changes occurring in agriculture throughout the United States
today.
James P. Crawford, is a Cultural Geographer, writer and film maker living
in Roanoke, Virginia. He has taught Geography at Virginia Tech and Hollins
University, but is presently focusing his efforts on his documentary
production company, Swinging Gate Productions, LLC. His first documentary,
the award-winning Down in the Old Belt: Voices from the Tobacco South will
be broadcast on PBS to 48% of US households in the fall of 2007.
The Benjamin Botkin Lecture Series provided support for the following
event:
SYMPOSIUM: "All through the North, As I Walked Forth...":
Northern Ireland's Place Names, Folklife and Landscape
May 16, 2007
Library of Congress
Washington, DC
Read the event flyer essay
Currently no webcasts are available for the symposium presentations listed here. Materials are available in the Folklife Reading Room. See the symposium pages, Rediscover Northern Ireland, for more information about this event.
WELCOME & INTRODUCTION: Library
Officials and Peggy Bulger (Director, American Folklife
Center)
Edward Redmond (Geography and Map Division) delivered a presentation on cartobibliographic resources on Northern Ireland
at the Library of Congress.
Richard Bartlett and Place-Names on his
Maps of Ulster, 1600-1603, presented by Kay Muhr, Northern Ireland Place
Names Project, Queen's University, Belfast
Kay Muhr is Senior Research Fellow
of the Northern Ireland Place-Name Project in Irish and Celtic Studies,
Queen's University. She is the author of North
West County Down/Iveagh, vol. 6 in the Place-Names
of Northern Ireland series, and of the text of the touring exhibition
and booklet called Celebrating Ulster's Townlands.
Kay Muhr grew up in rural Cambridgeshire, read Celtic studies at Edinburgh
from 1966 to 1970, and received her Ph.D., on narrative style in traditional
Gaelic literature, from the University of Edinburgh. She has written and
lectured on early Irish literature, on the use of place-names in the Ulster
Cycle tales, and on the early maps of Ireland. Professor Muhr is Chairman
of the Ulster
Place-Name Society, and is a past president of the Society for Name
Studies in Britain and Ireland. Her research interests span Ireland, Scotland,
and the Isle of Man, including language, culture, oral tradition, and place
and family names. Please visit the following website to view an exhibition
of her current research on Ulster place-names entitled, Celebrating
Ulster's Townlands.
Ballymenone: The Power of Place and the Riddle
of History, presented by Henry
Glassie, Professor, Indiana University, Indiana University,
Bloomington
Henry Glassie is the College Professor
of Folklore at Indiana University. In 1972, he settled into a community in
County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, to learn how country people endure in
hard times. He worked with them, gathering their stories, and five books
were the result: All Silver and No Brass, Irish
Folk History, Passing the Time in Ballymenone, Irish Folktales, and The
Stars of Ballymenone. Professor Glassie has served as the president
of the American Folklore Society, and he has received many awards for his
work, including the Chicago Folklore Prize and the Cummings Award of the
Vernacular Architecture Forum. Among his other books are Folk
Housing in Middle Virginia, The Spirit of Folk Art, Turkish Traditional Art
Today, Art and Life in Bangladesh, The Potter's Art, and Vernacular
Architecture.
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