News & Events
Announcements
November 29, 2012
Hours by appointment during Reading week
The Archive will not open for regular hours during the week of Dec 3-7. If you want to come in and see the collections, set up an appointment with the Archivist by emailing ucbfolklore@berkeley.edu.
November 6, 2012
Premiere Film Screening of 'The Story of Por Por', featuring filmmaker Steven Feld, on 11/07/12
Berkeley Folklore Roundtable presents
The Premiere Screening of
The Story of Por Por
(60 minutes, 2012)
A film by Nii Yemo Nunu and Steven Feld
Followed by a Q and A with Steven Feld
Wednesday, Nov 7, 2012
5:00 pm
125 Morrison
Reception to follow
Drawing on their work with Accra’s La Township Driver’s Union from 2005-2010, Nunu and Feld’s film chronicles Ghana’s intertwined histories of colonial-era lorry driving and the invention of Por Por, a music for squeeze-bulb truck horns played uniquely for union driver funerals. Nunu and Feld’s previous work together includes the CD, Por Por: Honk Horn Music of Ghana, produced for Smithsonian Folkways Recording in 2007 as a Fiftieth Independence Anniversary gift to Ghana, and the film A Por Por Funeral for Ashirifie, recipient of the Prix Bartók at the Paris International Festival Jean Rouch in 2010.
Steven Feld is a musician, filmmaker, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Music at the University of New Mexico, and a Visiting Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Folklore Program at UC Berkeley this semester. In 2012, Duke University Press published his Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana, originally the 2009 Bloch Lectures in Music at Berkeley, and a thirtieth anniversary third edition of Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song, in Kaluli Expression.
Co-sponsored by: The Berkeley Folklore Program, Department of Anthropology, Center for African Studies, Department of Music, Graduate Assembly, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities.
This event is open to the public. For information on special seating, please contact ucbfolklore@berkeley.edu
October 8, 2012
Save the Date! Folklore Open House for Prospective Students and Roundtable featuring Steven Feld: November 7, 2012
Our Annual Open House for prospective students will take place on November 7th, 2012.
The tentative schedule for the day is as follows:
11:00 am - 2:00 pm: ANTH262: Theories of Traditionality and Modernity (co-taught by Profs. Charles Briggs and Steven Feld)
2:00 - 3:00 pm: lunch with Folklore students
3:00 - 5:00 pm: afternoon meetings with faculty of your choice
5:00 pm: the day will end with a
The Story of Por Por
A film by Nii Yemo Nunu & Steven Feld
Ghanaian photographer Nunu and filmmaker-anthropologist Feld worked
collaboratively with elder members of the La Drivers Union of Accra from
2005-2010. Their film chronicles Ghana's intertwined histories of late
colonial-era driving and the invention of por por, a truck horn music
played uniquely for union driver funerals.
September 21, 2012
Week of 10/01-10/07: Archive hours by appointment only
The Archive will not open during regular hours for the week of October 1st. To set up a time by appointment, please email the archivist at ucbfolklore@berkeley.edu. Thank you for bearing with us.
September 21, 2012
Annual Alan Dundes Lecture featuring Veena Das
Berkeley Folklore is pleased to present
the Annual
Alan Dundes Lecture
Time, Emotion, and the Poetic Voice
by
Veena Das
Krieger-Eisenhower Professor and Director of Graduate Studies,
Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University
Thursday, September 27, 2012
5:00 pm
Gifford Room, Kroeber 221
Reception to follow
“In one of those provocative statements that made Alan Dundes famous for pushing the field of folklore beyond its accepted boundaries, he stated: “I suggest that folklorists once having admitted intellectually that legends contain fantasy proceed to dismiss this fact, blithely ignoring the total range of academic scholarship specifically concerned with the study of human fantasy.” Although Dundes had in mind the opening of folklore studies to psychoanalytic theory, while I take this paper in a different direction I am fascinated by his comments on the function of time in creating nearness and distance. In my lecture I will take two examples from Dhwani theorists of Indian aesthetics to consider how the poetic voice functions to create the experience of closeness or distance and thus to navigate the contradictory swirl of emotions to suggest affects that exceed meaning. I will then track how these complex philosophical notions about time and emotion are dispersed in everyday life. I return to the question of fantasy but now see it as shaping the textures and contours of everyday life giving temporal depth to relationships, moving along with habits and repetitions that are also the features of everyday life. Thus fantasy is not set apart from everyday life but shadows everything that we posit reality to be." - Veena Das
Veena Das is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary and Structure and Cognition: Aspects of Hindu Caste and Ritual. The abiding concerns of her research have been to understand the working of long time cultural logics in contemporary events as well as moments of rupture and recovery. In recent years she has worked intensively on questions of violence, social suffering and subjectivity, tracing intricate relations between biography, autobiography and ethnography.
Sponsored by: Berkeley Folklore Program, Graduate Assembly and the Institute for International Studies.
For information on accessibility and special seating, please contact ucbfolklore@berkeley.edu.
September 13, 2012
Folklore Roundtable Lecture: Kathleen Stewart
Folklore Roundtable Lecture
Worldings: Atmospheres, Refrains, Rhythms, Energetics…
by
Kathleen C. Stewart
Chair, Department of Anthropology, UT Austin
September 18, 2012
5:00 pm
Gifford Room, Kroeber 221
Reception to follow
"This talk gives an overview of a book project on worldings. It begins with the ethnographic proliferation of little worlds of all kinds in the United States, ranging from the tiny and temporary to the earth shatteringly complete. I approach these worlds as ways of living out a present that this both charged by forces of all kinds and continuously tipping into and out of emergent forms. Rather than attempt to make neat causal arguments, I try to approach worldings by opening a conceptual space around atmospheres, refrains, rhythms, registers, sensory attunements, tactile compositions, labors, energetics and the constitution of a life. I take these spaces to be angles on the prismatic structure of things that throw themselves together, spread or contract, and have durations, speeds and compositional excesses or weaknesses. Such concepts are also ways of approaching the dual phenomenal character of things that are strangely hard-wired but also radically partial, singular and shifting. Worldings are the kind of anthropological object that prompt engaged response." - Kathleen Stewart
Kathleen Stewart writes and teaches on affect, the ordinary, the senses, and modes of ethnographic engagement based on curiosity and attachment. Her first book, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an `Other' America (Princeton University Press, 1996) portrays a dense and textured layering of sense and form laid down in social use. Ordinary Affects (Duke University Press, 2007) maps the force, or affects, of encounters, desires, bodily states, dream worlds, and modes of attention and distraction in the composition and suffering of present moments lived as immanent events. Her current project, Atmospheric Attunements, tries to approach ways of collective living through or sensing out an attunement that is also a worlding.
Sponsored by: Townsend Center for the Humanities, Graduate Assembly, The Folklore Program and the Department of Anthropology.
For information on accessibility and special seating, please contact ucbfolklore@berkeley.edu.
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.