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Image: Benjamin Botkin
Benjamin A. Botkin, former head of the Archive of American Folk Song, Library of Congress. Photo courtesy of the National Council for the Traditional Arts.

Benjamin A. Botkin Folklife Lecture Series

Through the Benjamin A. Botkin Folklife Lecture Series, the American Folklife Center presents the best of current research and practice in Folklore, Folklife, and closely related fields. The series invites professionals from academia and the public sector to present findings from their research. The lectures are free and open to the public. In addition, each lecture is recorded for permanent deposit in the Archive of Folk Culture, where researchers can access them.

Benjamin A. Botkin (1901-1975) was a pioneering folklorist who believed that people continually create folklore out of their collective experiences. He was national folklore editor of the Federal Writers' Project (1938-39), chief editor of the Writers' Unit of the Library of Congress Project (1939-1941), head of the Archive of American Folksong (1942-45), and author of numerous folklore treasuries. The American Folklife Center is indebted to his work as both a folklorist and a government official. For all these reasons, the American Folklife Center has chosen to name this lecture series in his honor. Select this link for a biographical sketch, " Benjamin Botkin's Legacy-in-the-Making," by Jerrold Hirsch.

2013 Botkin Lectures

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Beautiful Music All Around Us book cover
Diana Baird N'Diaye
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January 30, 2013, 12:00 noon - 1:00 pm
Mary Pickford Theater,
3rd Floor, James Madison Building

The Will to Adorn: Reflections on African American Identity and the Aesthetics of Dress, presented by Diana Baird N'Diaye, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.

Diana N'Diaye will share stories, observations, and insights from "The Will to Adorn," a community-centered research and public presentation project, which explores and examines the diversity of African American cultural identities as expressed through traditional arts of the body, dress, and adornment. The project, which includes the work and perspectives of researchers and cultural practitioners across the United States, challenges notions of a monolithic African American community at the same time that it explores the ways that dress and body adornment are powerful expressive art forms grounded in the history and experiences of people of African descent in the nation.

Diana Baird N'Diaye is a Cultural Heritage Specialist and Curator at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Her research interests, specialties, and publications span the areas of African and African Diaspora folklife and ethnicity, ethnoaesthetics of dress, craft and design; cultural representation, heritage education, community-based tourism and cultural policy. She has curated Smithsonian Folklife Festival programs and exhibitions on Senegal, the communities, children's play, and performance of Maroon, African immigrant culture, Bermuda, Haiti and most recently on the African roots of Virginia's culture. She also coordinated program components on fashion for the Silk Road and Mali Festivals. She directed the Smithsonian's participation in the South African National Cultural Heritage Training and Technology Program, in partnership with Michigan State University, the Chicago Historical Society, and several South African cultural institutions. She has served on the Executive Board of the American Folklore Society, on the faculty of Georgetown University's African Studies Program, and as an advisor to several cultural and humanities institutions including UNESCO. She holds a PhD in anthropology and visual studies from The Union Institute.

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Beautiful Music All Around Us book cover
Margaret R. Yocom
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February 20, 2013, 12:00 noon - 1:00 pm
Mary Pickford Theater,
3rd Floor, James Madison Building

The Cinderella No One Knows: The Grimm Brothers' Tale of Incest, Fur, and Hidden Bodies, presented by Margaret Yocom, George Mason University.

Folklorist Margaret R. Yocom is a professor in the English Department of George Mason University who specializes in traditional narrative, material culture, family folklore, and gender studies. The director of the Northern Virginia Folklife Archive, she established the English Department's Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Concentration; the Folklore and Mythology Minor; and the Folklore Concentration in Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies. She teaches courses in traditional narrative and storytelling, traditional arts, folklore and gender, ethnographic writing, the traditional ballad, and folklore and creative writing. She holds a PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has published and edited widely in the field of Folklife and is also a published poet. Her current work in progress is a book on the traditional arts of the Richard family of Rangeley, Maine, entitled "Generations in Wood."

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Beautiful Music All Around Us book cover
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March 27, 2013, 12:00 noon - 1:00 pm
Mary Pickford Theater,
3rd Floor, James Madison Building

The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience, book talk by Stephen Wade, Researcher and Author.

Stephen Wade will present a talk related to the research for his recent book, The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience (2012), which takes as its starting point thirteen iconic performances captured on Library of Congress field recordings between 1934 and 1942 in locations reaching from Southern Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta and onto the Great Plains. Through decades of research and detective work, musician Stephen Wade tracked down surviving performers and their families, fellow musicians, and community members. Weaving together loving and expert profiles of these performers with the histories of these songs and tunes, Wade brings to life largely unheralded individuals—farm laborers, state prisoners, school children, cowboys, housewives and mothers, loggers and miners—whose music has become part of the wider American musical soundscape. By exploring how these singers and instrumentalists exerted their own creativity on inherited forms, "amplifying tradition's gifts," Wade shows how a single artist can make a difference.

April 3, 2013, 12:00 noon - 1:00 pm
Mary Pickford Theater,
3rd Floor, James Madison Building

Anxieties of Authorship and Ownership: Intellectual Property and the Future of Indigenous Collections, presented by Jane Anderson, Center for Heritage and Society, Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts.

Jane Anderson is Assistant Professor in the Center for Heritage and Society, Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts, and Adjunct Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. Anderson has a PhD in Law from the Law School at the University of New South Wales in Australia. Her work is focused on the philosophical and practical problems for intellectual property law and the protection of Indigenous/traditional knowledge resources and cultural heritage. Since 2007 Anderson has worked as an Expert Consultant for the World Intellectual Property Organization on a number of policy proposals for the protection of traditional knowledge and cultural expressions. These include developing a framework for an international alternative dispute resolution/mediation service for intellectual property and Indigenous knowledge disputes, international guidelines for cultural institutions with collections of Indigenous cultural material, and the development of site‐specific intellectual property protocols that help local communities enhance and support already existing knowledge-management practices. Her most recent publications include Law, Knowledge, Culture: The Production of Indigenous Knowledge in Intellectual Property Law (2009), and the Indigenous/Traditional Knowledge and Intellectual Property Issues Paper, Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Duke University, 2010.

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Music from the True Vine: Mike Seeger's Life and Musical Journey book cover
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June 12 , 2013, 12:00 noon - 1:00 pm
Mary Pickford Theater,
3rd Floor, James Madison Building

Music from the True Vine: Mike Seeger's Life and Musical Journey, a book talk presented by Bill C. Malone, Emeritus Professor of History, Tulane University.

A musician, documentarian, scholar, and one of the founding members of the influential folk revival group the New Lost City Ramblers, Mike Seeger (1933-2009) spent more than fifty years collecting, performing, and commemorating the culture and folk music of white and black southerners, which he called "music from the true vine." In this biography, Bill Malone explores the life and musical contributions of folk artist Seeger, son of musicologists Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger and brother of folksingers Pete and Peggy Seeger.

Botkin Lecture Series Online Archive

Includes descriptions of each lecture and informational essays from the event flyers. Links to webcasts of lectures are included as available.

2012 Lecture Series

2011 Lecture Series

2010 Lecture Series

2009 Lecture Series

2008 Lecture Series

2007 Lecture Series

2006 Lecture Series

2005 Lecture Series

2004 Lecture Series

 

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   January 8, 2013
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