Special Events
Guest Speaker: Silke Meyer, University of Münster
Wednesday October 3, 2007
4:00-5:30 PM - Dulles 308
An Anthropology of Credit. Instant Credit and Consumer Practice in Contemporary Germany
Dr. Silke Meyer is currently a Fulbright scholar with the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University. She studied Folklore/Cultural Anthropology, Art History and English Literature at the universities of Tübingen, Sheffield and Münster. After her 2002 PhD from Münster (“The iconography of nations. National stereotypes in English prints and caricatures”, published in 2003), she taught Cultural Studies at the German Department, Nottingham University (GB). Since 2004, she is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Folklore/Cultural Anthropology at Münster University. Her research interests are the culture of credit and debts, modern hero figures, visual anthropology, nationalism and national identity.
Guest Speaker: Haya Bar-Itzhak, University of Haifa
Tuesday November 6, 2007
4:00-6:00 PM - Denney 311
Settlement, Trees, and Ideology in Kibbutz Local Legends
Co-sponsored by the Melton Center for Jewish Studies and Project Narrative
Haya Bar-Itzhak is chair of the folklore division of the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa, where she also serves as academic head of the Israel Folktale Archives. She has conducted ethnographic research on Jewish traditions from Poland, Morocco, and Israel. Her most recent book is Israeli Folk Narratives: Settlement, Immigration, Ethnicity (Wayne State, 2005). Drawing on literary theory, Bar-Itzhak analyzes the poetics of folk narrative in its ethnographic setting. This year she is a Fulbright Scholar at Penn State University Harrisburg.
A reception will follow the lecture.
The inaugural Francis Lee Utley Lecture: David Whitford, United Theological Seminary
Friday, November 30, 2007
3:30-5:30 – Ohio Stadium, Suite 218
Dr. Whitford teaches courses on the history of Christianity, the Reformation, and the Reformed Tradition, specializing in Late Medieval, Reformation, and early modern church history. He is currently working on a book on race and slavery that examines the so-called “Curse of Ham” from Genesis 9, with parts of his research overlapping earlier work by Francis Lee Utley. Whitford has written various articles and books, and is editor of the forthcoming Reformation and Early Modern Europe: A Guide to Research. Truman University Press, October 2007, which updates and continues the tradition of publishing a survey of historical investigation in Reformation and early modern Europe.
This inaugural lecture is being held in conjunction with the dedication of the new Center for Folklore Studies Archives now located in Suite 218 of the Ohio Stadium (enter between gates 18-20).
Dinner Lecture: Bill Ellis, Penn State Hazelton
Thursday, February 7, 2008
5:30-8:00 PM – Mershon Center
"From Satanic Cults to Latino Gangs: The Hazleton Illegal Immigration Crusade as Rumor Panic"
In the late 1980s, Northeastern Pennsylvania was a hotbed for rumor panics focusing on alleged Satanic cults, who were blamed for a variety of social ills. These panics took the form of collective action, usually in response to a violent triggering event (often a murder or suicide), which demonstrated community solidarity in the face of an underground conspiracy by evil others. With the Satanism scare, the threat proved to be merely symbolic: the Satanic cults in fact did not exist. But when the area was affected by a rapid influx of Dominican immigrants during the past five years, the community responded with yet another rumor panic, and this time the target of the collective action did in fact exist. Racism? Religion? Or Progress? This presentation will present a folklorist’s description of this crusade, and its social roots dating to the economic troubles caused by the end of the coal industry, and show that this controversy, like many in small communities, represents a fusion of religious ideals and political strategies. Seeing the grassroots origins of the immigration controversy may help us understand the way in which this issue has replaced terrorism as a touchstone issue in the 2008 political campaigns.
Spring Colloquium: Urban Party Mix: Performing the Americas in the Metropole
February 21-23, 2008
Bowen Theatre, Drake Center
The simultaneous deterritorialization and re-rooting of Latin American and Caribbean forms of celebration within urban centers of Europe and the United States has accentuated their essential hybridity and intensified social and aesthetic transformations in the performing communities. In honor of the Columbus opening of the exhibit “Midnight Robbers: The Artists of Notting Hill Carnival,” this colloquium will place the London carnival in conversation with emerging Latin- and Luso- American dance scenes in Newark, New Jersey. In both locales the individual and collective identities of performing revelers are changing. As new and diverse groups acquire styles of bodily expression associated with the marginalized Americas, what are the aesthetic, economic, social, and political effects? Come discuss the promise and challenges of hybrid forms among shifting populations.
Dinner Lecture: Sabina Magliocco, California State University Northridge
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
5:30-8:00 PM – Mershon Center
A showing and discussion of the film Oss Tales (2007)
Padstow, a town on the north coast of Cornwall, celebrates May Day with a unique custom: two hobby horses, or osses, dance through town streets, accompanied by drums and accordians. All Padstownians participate in this exciting event, which has now become a tourist attraction, drawing over 30,000 visitors the first of May to this fishing town of 3000. Folklorists Alan Lomax and Peter Kennedy visited Padstow in 1951, producing a film called Oss Oss Wee Oss (1953). In 2004, filmmaker John Bishop and folklorist Sabina Magliocco (with Jaynie Ali Aydin and Noah Bishop) returned to Padstow to see how the custom was faring fifty years later.
Sabina Magliocco, Professor and Chair of Anthropology at California State University, Northridge, grew up in Italy and the United States. Her most recent book is Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America (Penn 2004). She has published on religion, folklore, foodways, festival, witchcraft and Neo-Paganism in Europe and the United States. A recipient of Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright and Hewlett fellowships, and an honorary Fellow of the American Folklore Society, she also serves as editor of Western Folklore. Her non-academic interests include music (she plays guitar and banjo), gardening and animal welfare.
Special Guest Lecture & Reception, 4:00-6:30, 311 Denney
Erika Bourguignon, OSU Emerita Professor of Anthropology
"Ecstasy, Collective Joy, Possession and Exorcism: or the Uses and Abuses of Anthropology."
Erika Bourguignon is emeritus Professor of Anthropology at OSU, where she taught starting in 1949. Her studies of altered states of consciousness (trance, possession) began with her fieldwork in Haiti. This was followed by a large scale world-wide comparative study supported by the National Institute of Mental Health. The results are reported in Religion, Altered States of Consciousness and Social Change (1973) and Possession (1976). Among her other publications is a textbook Psychological Anthropology: An Introduction to Human Nature and Cultural Differences (1979).
Guest Speaker: Mustafa Kemal Mirzeler, Western Michigan University
Thursday, May 8, 2008
12:00-1:30 PM - Dulles 308
Brown bag talk and storytelling: Kurdish Traditional Narrative
Dr. Mirzeler is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Affiliate Faculty of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University. He grew up traveling the Taurus mountains with his father, a well-known Kurdish storyteller, before emigrating to Germany and the U.S. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he studied storytelling traditions in East Africa. He has published articles on local memories of colonial expeditions in East Africa, on violence against women in Kurdish traditional narrative, and on origin narratives, and has forthcoming books on Jie and Elmolo storytelling.
4:00-5:30 PM - Denney 311
Voices of African Storytellers: the Jie people of Uganda, the Turkana people of Kenya
Co-sponsored by the Center for African Studies, the Middle Eastern Studies Center, and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
Guest Lecturer: Alan Govenar, Director Documentary Arts, Dallas, TX
Friday, May 16, 2008
This special lecture is being held in conjunction with the Folklore Students’ Association Conference.
Time TBA – Denney 311
Dr. Alan B. Govenar received his BA at OSU, studying with Patrick Mullen, and completed his PhD at the University of Texas. He is a versatile scholar of American vernacular culture (especially African American music), authoring films, books, DVD-Roms, and most recently a musical, Blind Lemon Blues, which opened off Broadway in 2007 and is touring internationally. His fieldwork in Ohio with the great Columbus tattoo artist Stoney St. Clair is documented in Stoney Knows How: Life as a Sideshow Tattoo Artist (Schiffer Publishing 2003). In 2007 Dr. Govenar produced the revised edition of the DVD-Rom Masters of Traditional Arts, documenting the more than 250 recipients of the National Heritage Fellowship. He is founder and director of Documentary Arts in Dallas, Texas, dedicated to the preservation and presentation of historically and culturally significant places and people.
