Folklore Program
The Folklore Program at the University of California, Berkeley trains intellectual leaders in folkloristics for the twenty-first century. We seek to provide a deep, critical, and theoretically-informed reading of folklore scholarship from the seventeenth century through the present. We urge students to develop a particular field of expertise in folkloristics. At the same time, we advise our graduate students to develop strong grounding in another discipline or multidisciplinary perspective, such as race and ethnic studies, performance studies, science studies, rhetoric, narrative theory, ethnomusicology, materiality, womens and queer theory, and others, in order to bring new perspectives to their work in folkloristics.
We are truly international in scope, seeking to challenge the Eurocentric roots of folkloristics by bringing in critiques and alternatives from outside the Euro-American orbit, particularly through study with leading folklorists from around the world, who come to Berkeley each year as visiting faculty members.
In addition to the M.A. in Folklore, we offer the possibility of dual admission into a PhD program in a humanities or social science discipline and the M.A. in folklore.
Anthropology 160: Forms of Folklore
Folklore shapes social identities and notions of community. This course focuses on how all of us construct notions of difference—racial, ethnic, gender, sexuality, class, and nation—through folklore. The course project turns each student into a contributor to the field of folklore by collecting traditional knowledge from his or her milieu and placing it in the Berkeley Folklore Archives.
Announcements
October 19, 2011
Folklore Program Welcomes Kwesi Yankah, Visiting Professor for Spring 2012
Dr. Kwesi Yankah is the leading folklorist in and of Africa. His books on proverbs and on the okyeame
or "chief's spokesperson" in Ghana are two of the most widely cited sources on African folklore, and
he is the co-editor of African Folklore: An Encyclopedia. He received graduate degrees from both the
University of Ghana (M.A.) and Indiana University (M.A. and Ph.D.). Professor of Linguistics at the
University of Ghana, he has served as the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Pro-Vice Chancellor.
July 12, 2011
Visionary Culture in Transnational Perspective: The Lady of All Nations
Please join the Folklore Program for a Folklore Roundtable
Visionary Culture in Transnational Perspective: The Lady of All Nations
Wednesday, August 31, 2011 4:30pm-6pm
Gifford Room, Kroeber 221
Reception to Follow
Visionary and apparitional culture has become a major religious force all around the globe. The visions and messages not only create a grassroots traditionalist and conservative religious movement, the alleged apparitional interventions of Mary and Christ are also interpreted as being of a highly systematic character and part of a supernaturally determined plan. For this reason and because of the content of the messages this culture has become more and more adapted to various apocalyptic and end-time narratives and groups. The highly controversial transnational devotion of the Lady of All Nations, based on a long series of Marian apparitions and messages in Amsterdam and professed to be the last phase within the modern Marian era, is subject to such appropriation processes. As a consequence an apparitional war started among the different cultus leaders and groups of devotees, dispersed over different countries. The main discord emerged however between the original apparitional site in Amsterdam and the village Lac-Etchemin in Canada, where the local visionary, supported by her Army of Mary, professed to be the living reincarnation of the Virgin Mary herself in order to underpin her salvational claims and reject the Amsterdam assertion.
Peter Jan Margry is an ethnologist. He studied history at the University of Amsterdam, and was awarded his PhD by the University of Tilburg (2000) for his dissertation on the religious culture war in the nineteenth-century Netherlands. He became director of the Department of Ethnology at the Meertens Institute, a research center of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam. He is guest-professor Religious Studies at the university of Leuven (Belgium) and Executive Vice-President of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore. As a senior research fellow at the institute, his current focus is on contemporary religious and memorial cultures. He has published many books and articles in these fields, among them a four-volume standard work on the pilgrimage culture in the Netherlands. He coedited (with H. Roodenburg) Reframing Dutch Culture. Between Otherness and Authenticity (Ashgate, 2007). In 2008, he published the edited volume Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World: New Itineraries into the Sacred (Amsterdam University Press); in 2011 the coedited (with C. Sánchez-Carretero) the volume Grassroots Memorials. The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death (Berghahn).
Sponsored by: The Folklore Program, Graduate Assembly and Townsend Center for the Humanities
July 1, 2011
Applications for Folklore Program
Please note: the deadline for applying to the Master's in Folklore is DECEMBER 15, 2011. It is not December first as listed on the Graduate Division website.
August 27, 2009
Designated Emphasis in Folklore
Students receiving degrees from other departments may now declare a designated emphasis in Folklore Studies. The designated emphasis is designed to complement core PhD programs and provides exciting opportunities for interdisciplinary study and cross-collaboration.