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
April 23, 2012
Spring 2012 Conference: Towards an Ethnography of Mediatization
27 April 2012
Geballe Family Room (220 Stephens Hall)
Townsend Center for the Humanities
We live today in a world of mediatized objects, composite figures whose materialities are shaped through reflexive interactions between media ideologies and practices of engagement that take place in a host of sites, many located beyond "the media." So when does mediatization begin? If we think beyond an anthropology of the media to examine ethnographically the social lives of mediatized objects, how might we trace these trajectories of circulating mediatizations? A multidisciplinary group of panelists will address these questions by examining mediatized objects drawn from journalistic, religious, medical, and museum domains.
Conference Schedule:
9:00 am
Charles L. Briggs (UC Berkeley)
Introduction: Toward Ethnographies of Mediatization
9:15 am
Charles Hirschkind (UC Berkeley)
Media, Mediation, Religion
10:15 am
Deniz Göktürk (UC Berkeley)
Memory Sites of Migration: Moving Containers, Transient Archives
11:15 am
Coffee break (served in the Seminar Room)
11:30 am
Cecilia Rivas (UC Santa Cruz)
Achievement and Migration: Definitions of Salvadoran Success from National Media to the Diaspora
12:30 pm
lunch (provided; served in the Seminar Room)
1:30 pm
Charles L. Briggs (UC Berkeley)
Daniel C. Hallin (UC San Diego)
Clara Mantini-Briggs (UC Berkeley)
Bio-Mediatization: Constructing “the Media,” Making Pandemics
2:30 pm
Robert Glenn Howard (U Wisconsin, Madison)
VAXNet: Network Graphing the Vernacular Mediatization of Vaccines
3:30-3:45 pm
Coffee break (served in the Seminar Room)
3:45-4:45 pm
Dominic Boyer (Rice University)
Click and Spin: Aggregation and expertise in online news
4:45-5:45 pm
General discussion
5:45-7:00 pm
Reception (in the Seminar Room)
April 18, 2012
Welcome Steven Feld to Folklore Program for Fall 2012!
The Folklore Program is delighted to welcome Professor Steven Feld to the Folklore Program for Fall 2012. Professor Steven Feld is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Music (Ethnology) at the University of New Mexico. His work has been highly influential in areas and topics spanning: Cultural poetics and politics; aesthetics, sound, senses and media; world music; globalization, cosmopolitanisms and modernities; place; Papua New Guinea, and West Africa.
Professor Feld will teach a semina in the Anthropologies of Sound and Music (Anthropology 189) and co-teach the core Folklore seminar (Folklore C262A) with Professor Briggs, with a particular emphasis on circulations.
More info about these courses and other Folklore courses for Fall 2012 can be found in our course listings
March 22, 2012
Alan Dundes Lecture - Memory, Taboo, and National Calamities: 9-11 from an African Perspective: by Kwesi Yankah
Please join the Folklore Program for our annual Alan Dundes Lecture:
Memory, Taboo, and National Calamities: 9-11 from an African Perspective
Friday, April 6, 2012 4:00pm-6pm
Sutardja Dai Hall, Room 250
Lecture with reception to follow
In his talk, Kwesi Yankah, linguist and folklorist, uses the tragedy of 9-11 as a frame of reference to examine differential attitudes to national calamities and commemorative sites. His paper revolves on the integration of verbal taboos and unmentionable calamities within judicial systems in parts of Africa, and emergent dilemmas within the contemporary nation state. The situation is compounded by intrusive norms of the global media that confront customary lore in Africa.
Kwesi Yankah is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Ghana, and until last August, the Pro-Vice Chancellor, for Academic and Student Affairs at the University. Other positions he occupied in his long career at the University of Ghana include, Head of Linguistics, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Dean of Students.
He was educated at both University of Ghana and Indiana University, where he earned his PhD in Folklore. His groundbreaking work on the proverb at Indiana earned him the Esther Kinsley award for outstanding doctoral dissertation in 1985, the first non-American to win the award. Since then he has published widely in various international journals, and has written two well-known books: Speaking for the Chief: Okyeame and the Politics of Royal Oratory, published by Indiana University Press, and The Proverb in the Context of Akan Rhetoric, whose second edition was just released by the Africa Diasporic Press of New York. These two books are widely read in universities worldwide. He also co-edited the much-acclaimed Encyclopedia of African Folklore, published by Routledge. Kwesi Yankah is currently working on a book project with University of Michigan Press on Language, Culture and Democracy.
Yankah has been guest lecturer in several universities in US, Europe, and Africa, and has held fellowships and visiting professorships at several universities including Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan, and is currently visiting professor at the Anthropology Department, here at Berkeley. For next year, he has been invited to fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin, Germany.
Sponsored by: The Folklore Program, Graduate Assembly, the Center for African Studies, and African American Studies
March 16, 2012
Roundtable Lecture: John Lindow : Viewing Nordic Pre-Christian Religions from 21st-Century Perspectives
Please join the Folklore Program for a Folklore Roundtable
Viewing Nordic Pre-Christian Religions from 21st-Century Perspectives
Friday, March 16, 2012 4:00pm-6pm
Gifford Room, Kroeber 221
Reception to Follow
This lecture treats some of the theoretical and methodological issues facing an international effort to produce a new scholarly treatment of Nordic pre-Christian religion, replacing the standard handbooks, of which the most complete is now more than seventy years old. This older scholarship was essentially philological in nature, but we now recognize that only an interdisciplinary approach will serve, one that links the textual traditions to the material world in time and space, accepts the plurality of the record, and brings to bear the theoretical insights of several disciplines, even when they may conflict.
John Lindow is Professor in the Department of Scandinavian and a member of the Graduate Group in Folklore at UC Berkeley. His research and teaching focus on medieval Scandinavian textual traditions and on more recent folklore of the Nordic region, from Greenland to Karelia. He has treated Scandinavian mythology and early religion in three books: Scandinavian Mythology: An Annotated Bibliography (1988), Death and Vengeance among the Gods: Baldr in Scandinavian Mythology (1997), and Handbook of Norse Mythology (2001). Among his other books are Comitatus, Individual and Honor (1975), Swedish Legends and Folktales (1977), and, with Carol J. Clover and others, Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Critical Guide (1985; reprint 2005). With Carl Lindahl and John McNamara, he is co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Medieval Folklore (2000).
Sponsored by: The Folklore Program, Graduate Assembly and Townsend Center for the Humanities
February 16, 2012
Aaron Fox—Native American music repatriation: Colloquia of the Musicologies
The U.C. Berkeley Folklore Program is pleased to invite you to a talk co-sponsored with the Music Department:
Aaron Fox—Native American music repatriation: Colloquia of the Musicologies
Performing Arts - Music: Colloquium: MUSIC DEPARTMENT event | March 2 | 4:40-6 p.m. | 128 Morrison Hall
Sponsors: Department of Music, Folklore Program
Aaron Fox (Columbia University) will talk about his work on Native American music repatriation in Alaska and Arizona and related non-Native American community-based projects in Appalachia.
His talk is titled "Repatriating Laura Boulton's 1946 Iñupiaq Recordings: A Report from Alaska" and the photos are of the Tagiugmiut Dancers, a group formed to perform the repatriated collection (made up of young descendants of the primary singers on the recordings). The second photograph is a detail of their regalia. Photographs by Aaron Fox.
An ethnomusicology event in the Colloquia of the Musicologies
Tickets not required
Refreshments: Reception follows
Event Contact: 510-642-2678
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.