Student Conference
Translation/Transformation
View Flyer [DOC]May 16-17, 2008
The Ohio State University Campus
Denney Hall, Room 311
Panel 1
Who Are You: Defining Identity
Also Like Life: Learning from Taiwan's "Little People" Clay Caroon & Rebecca Chun Hui Chuang
For more than 200 hundreds years, Budaixi ??? (Taiwanese glove puppetry) has been both a popular folk entertainment and a cultural accompaniment to religious festivals in Taiwan. While bearing some similarities to Zhangzhongxi ??? (Chinese palm puppetry) introduced to Taiwan in 1648 by Chinese immigrants from the Fukien province, Budaixi has since evolved extensively in response to the powerful social and political forces that have influenced Taiwanese society in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Prior to the 1930's, puppet troupes, consisting of 2-10 people, moved easily through rural and urban Taiwan performing Sino-Taiwanese legends and literary epics on ornate, portable stages with small, hand-held cloth and wood puppets. Traditional musical instruments accompanied performances that were frequently given for temple celebrations, holidays, at the request of wealthy patrons and wherever else an audience was to be found.
However, the influences of Chinese immigration, Japanese occupation, KMT governance and the technological advances of the last 80 years have greatly influenced the literary diction and performance media of the puppet characters and their varying portrayals of the state, its politics, and Taiwanese national identity.
Despite Sue-mei Wu's recognition of the profound degree to which Budaixi is "intertwined" with Taiwanese culture, Taiwanese glove puppetry has yet to be significantly addressed by western scholarship. In this presentation our research will consider Budaixi's historical developments, important turning points (such as the acceptance of the first female apprentices/performers in 1945), and the place now held by Budaixi in contemporary Taiwanese society.
The Making of a Nigger: How "Ten Little Niggers" Changed the Consciousness of a Race Tiffany Anderson
The United States was a nation under destruction and reconstruction in the 1860's. At the end of the Civil War, President Lincoln consented to gesture the freeing of all African slaves through the Emancipation Proclamation. While the proud Confederate states found themselves in a place of subordination, forced to concede their free moneymaking slaves for the Union's promise to reconstruct their ruined lands, the former citizens of the Confederacy refused to fold their ideology of the inferiority of the freed slaves. A "comic" song titled "Ten Little Niggers" began circulation throughout the United States in Minstrel songs and children's nursery rhyme books and eventually migrated to Great Britain in 1868.
In my paper, I will focus on "Ten Little Niggers" as folklore. Mostly I am interested in how the ballad shapes social and cultural consciousness regarding race. While the purpose of its widespread popularity was to refute the competency and human qualities of the black freemen to white audiences, the ultimate legacy the rhyme leaves behind is the mental conditioning of every following generation of black males. There is a relevant quotation from the Dead Black Poets: "So many of our black men think that they are niggers because their fathers thought they were niggers, too." It is the essence of this mental conditioning that I hope to explore. The white men and women who circulated the song intended to define the black freeman as barbaric and ignorant, yet the song instead connected the white-constructed definition of nigger to the black man's consciousness. While buying into the nigger mentality is itself an illness within the black community, the greater consequence comes when a black male stands outside of this belief system: his isolation creates another mental illness which endorses the hopelessness of a black man in a world for niggers which weighs heavily in his decision to commit suicide, ultimately reenacting the last figure within the bit of folklore under examination.
Authenticating Jewish Folk Music: Behind Abraham Zvi Idelsohn's Hava Nagila Nick Block
Jews today are often accosted with the ubiquitous jaunt Hava Nagila and its assigned status by the world as perhaps the Jewish national anthem, despite Hatikva's official status in Israel. Little known is that this song was a product of pre-WWI German ethnicization politics. To distinguish a Jewish nationality from the German, Abraham Zvi Idelsohn, a Latvian-born German cantor and "the father of Jewish ethnomusicology," compiled Hava Nagila in his ten-volume collection of Diasporic Jewish folk music. Idelsohn's work emerged both within and against the Zionist aims of creating the New Jew.
Seeking the origins of European Jewish music, Idelsohn ventured to Palestine to record various Jewish cultures onto wax cylinders for the Viennese Phonogramm-Archiv. The apparent contradiction of finding ancient music and "origins" in an extant Jewish culture underlines his Orientalist paradigm. His ethnomusicology borders on vitriolic rejection of both German music and European Jewish acculturation while exalting Oriental Jews for their musical, linguistic, and racial purity. Idelsohn's message was, however, popularly received as was Hava Nagila.
This paper will examine Idelsohn's groundbreaking work as published between 1914 and 1932 and its transitioning locales of the authentic Jewish "Orient" from Middle East to Eastern Europe in the broader context of Zionism's fin de siècle ethnicization politics. In the final analysis, Orientalism, Diaspora, and identity politics will be engaged to explain ethnomusicology's central role in creating a narrative for Jewish authenticity a narrative so enduring that even almost a century later, Idelsohn's Hava Nagila continues to affect everyday Jewish identity.
Sing It Like It Is: Ironic Social Commentary in Western and Asian Karaoke Anne Henochowicz
Western-style karaoke requires that the singer expose himself or herself to a roomful of strangers. This contrasts strikingly with Asian-style karaoke, where a group of friends pays for several hours in a private room. Based on my experiences at the Ravari Room in Columbus, Ohio and in a "karaoke box" in Beijing, I will argue that Both Western and Asian styles of karaoke allow the performer to comment on social or political structure without consequence. In the Asian context, the intimacy and privacy of the "karaoke box" permit politically incorrect performances. In the West, the relative anonymity of the karaoke "stage" and the lack of accountability to a disinterested audience supports the testing of waters. Depending on the individual singer, karaoke can celebrate popular music and culture, or it can mock and belittle it. Karaoke allows those who typically only receive popular culture to enact it on their own terms. The medium also provides a safe place for ironic and playful social commentary.
I will touch briefly on the origins of karaoke in Japan before moving into analysis of my experiences singing both Western (American) and Asian (Chinese) karaoke. In Beijing, the karaoke box is the perfect stage for a private mockery of Communist propaganda, as I learned when my friends sang Cultural Revolution songs on a summer day. In Columbus, a young woman made an "innocent" pun on "you""Jew"with no repercussions. I draw on Bauman's keys to performance, Geertz's idea of self-reflexivity in performance, and Mitsui and Hosokawa's conception of karaoke as "mediated-and-live performance."
Panel 2
Gone but Not Forgotten: Rituals of Memory
Testimony and Truth after Auschwitz Sarah Gordon
Survivor testimony of the Holocaust often deviates from historical fact. Postmodern theory allows for the near nihilation of that testimony by arguing that history, or the existence of the past in the present, is nothing but versions of events; the imperfection of survivor testimony makes it possible for other, equally imperfect versions of events to be put forward. This is the logic that makes Holocaust revisionism possible which means that it is problematic logic. This paper explores one way that individual testimony can be understood to be true without needing to be accurate, with particular focus on personal histories of Holocaust survivors and on the early work of Primo Levi. It considers an ethics of testimony, inspired by the work of ethicist Giorgio Agamben, which establishes testimony as the moral responsibility to speak the unspeakable, on behalf of those who cannot speak. Factual inconsistency and subjective language are understood to be the manifestation of the survivor's attempt to testify to the inexpressible to force language into shapes that it resists. It bears witness to the pathological fear of forgetting expressed by most survivors of atrocities, and incorporates the role of the audience in the fulfilment of that moral responsibility. The conclusion drawn is that factual truth and testimonial truth are members of fundamentally different categories, the latter dependent not on accuracy but on the social, ethical mandate to respect the memory of people who suffer and die so that others may live to tell the story.
Gui Yue: The Ghost Month YiFan Pai
Ethnographic Report on Taiwanese Sacrificial Tradition
In Taiwan, the seventh month of lunar calendar is called gui yue (ghost month), which is a very special month for both the living and the dead. The seventh lunar month is roughly corresponded to August or September of the solar calendar. The exact time varies every year. Based on the folk beliefs, the ghosts are released from their punitive torments in the Hell and allowed to come back to our world to visit their living family during this month. The living people will hold a series of sacrificial ceremonies for their passed family members and ancestors, and also for the wandering hungry ghosts who have no family to worship them. Based on my fieldwork in Taiwan last summer, this report details three major rituals that are performed throughout gui yue in order to examine the ghost worship tradition in contemporary Taiwanese society. I will first discuss the main sources of gui yue tradition, along with its historical and cultural background. Then, I will examine the gui yue taboos, both during the ceremonies and in daily life, and provide my own observation and interpretation. The three major rituals held in gui yue are guimenkai (opening of the ghost gate), guijie (the ghost festival), and guimenguan (closing the ghost gate). Although the tradition of gui yue has a Chinese root and shares the larger cultural context, it has developed into a unique shape that reflects the island's spirit and history.
The voice of an errant maiden: analyzing an Estonian ballad about infanticide Elo-Hanna Seljamaa
Estonian ballad christened by folklorists "Mareta's Child" ("Mareta laps") or "An Errant Maiden" ("Eksinud neiu") tells the story of a secret sexual encounter between a young unmarried peasant woman and a man of higher social status and of the illegitimate son born out of their meeting. The woman receives money from the man and either on his advice or on her own initiative conceals her pregnancy and abandons the neonate in the forest. Another woman from the same community finds the baby and brings it back to the village in order to identify his parents. While the mother denies the child, God makes the newborn speak and reveal both of his parents.
Titles given to the song by folklorists blame the infanticide on the mother, suggesting that the ballad serves to caution women against errant behavior. Since it is composed in Kalevala meter, the poetic meter common to Balto Finnic peoples, previous scholarship has tended to regard them as ancient in the sense of being "untouched" by European ballad tradition.
In my paper I intend to question both of these assumptions by focusing on two variants of "Mareta's Child" collected in Estonia in 1843 and 1910 respectively. I will analyze the songs in the socioeconomic context of their recording and argue that the miraculous exposure of the child's parents and their illegitimate relationship can be regarded not as a punishment, but as a means of talking about the otherwise unspeakable: intersections, if not violent encounters of gender, class, and ethnicity in Estonian agrarian communities in the 19th and early 20th century.
Image of Children in Japanese Folk Joshua Denoncour
The child in Japanese folk beliefs neither fully exists in the realm of man nor of that of the gods, but in transition between both. It is only after the child's seventh year during the shichi-go-san (7-5-3) festival does he/she fully enter into the world of existence of man and become a human. This is further emphasized in the death of children before this age in early Japan, as they are termed mizuko (lit. water child). They were not given a full burial, but a small Jizo statue is placed up for them. Because of this quasi-existence children are able to travel between the two planes of man and gods.
In folk stories and beliefs many images appear of children, many of which involve their quasi-existence in both realms. I will examine the different images of children in some of the major folk tales (and their variants) such as that of "the divine child" shown in many folk stories like "Momotarô" and "Issun bôshi" where children are depicted as gifts from the gods. Alternately others, like Kaguya-hime, who are actual divine being sent down to the realm of man. Also the dualism of children as they display qualities "children," innocence and play, but at the same time they are also capable of displaying qualities of adulthood with their determination and wisdom.
Panel 3
Walk the Lines: Applying Theory
Locating Meaning in the Ballad Genre: A Case Study of Jean Ritchie's Autobiography and Repertoire Cassie Patterson
Many ballad scholars argue that a categorization system, beyond that of Child's collection, must be created for the sake of coherence and accessibility of ballads. However, such a categorization process presupposes scholarly agreement upon what a ballad is. Is it a text? Is it a song? Who's opinion should matter most? In order to shed some light on this dispute, I turned to a famous folk singer.
Born in 1922 in Viper, Kentucky, Jean Ritchie has become what folklorist and ballad scholar Kenneth Goldstein has termed a "great tradition bearer." Both a traditional and professional singer, Ritchie's extensive repertoire, puts her at the fore of the folk music tradition. This paper investigates Ritchie's relationship with the ballads by closely examining the structure, rhetoric and repertoire represented in the singer's autobiography: Singing Family of the Cumberlands as well as her CD: Jean Ritchie: Ballads from her Appalachian Family Tradition. Close readings of these mediums reveal Ritchie's complex relationship with the ballad genre one that blends life history with song.
Utilizing Thomas DuBois' concepts of generic, situational, and associative axes allows one to distinguish subtle connections between different features of the ballad. Using Ritchie's repertoire and biography as a test case I extrapolate to conclude, perhaps as many before, that the ballad genre generates meaning along each of these axes and is much too complex to be reduced to any one formal categorization.
Does Native Really Mean Good?: The Complexities of Emic vs. Etic Arle Lommel
The emic/etic distinction, originating in the writings of the linguist Kenneth Pike, has proved key in the modern study of cultures. Originally conceived of as two levels of analysis (of system and of physical manifestation), it has been simplified in ways that strip it of much of its power and reduced into an insider/outsider or "their terms/our terms" distinction, with a positive valuation placed on the emic and a corresponding negative value given to the etic. While the analytic goal in the distinction as envisioned by Pike was an insider understanding, the insider understanding must be conveyed in outsider terms, creating a dialectic relationship between the two levels. One solution to the perceived problem of use of outsider terms in analytic description has been the tendency to use "native terms" (somewhat incorrectly understood as emic by most scholars). This decision, while laudable in many respects, is not without its consequences. This presentation will focus on a few of these consequences:
1. over specialization/provincialization of native terms. For example, scholars might use Hungarian furulya to mean "Hungarian blockflute" even though in Hungarian it refers to all blockflutes, thus replicating the notion that the English term is the general and the Hungarian the provincial.
2. Involvement of the scholar in political/ideological positions in the community. Very often terms are contested within a community. When a scholar adopts one of these terms at the expense of others, a hierarchy is set up in which one of potentially many terms is valorized as the normative one for the community.
3. Unintentional limitation/extension of terms. Native terms may be inappropriately understood by the receiving audience as meaning more or less than the native audience. Merely using the native term does not guarantee native understanding.
This presentation will illustrate the issue with examples from my work with Hungarian music and instruments and my background in linguistics and terminology theory. It will also show that a proper understanding of the power of emic/etic distinction can help scholars avoid some of the problems the commonly arise from its oversimplification.
More than Music: Modeling and Cultural Learning in the Jingju (Beijing Opera) Classroom Ania Peczalska
The acquisition of a culture is an ongoing process. When a child is born, he or she does not have the capabilities to read, communicate, or interact. These abilities, which are not genetically programmed or non-instinctive, are learned through interactions, observing, and imitating parents and other members of the community. This process of learning one's own culture is called enculturation. Shari Tishman, Eileen Jay, and David N. Perkins, three education researchers, describe enculturation as occurring in three interdependent methods: cultural exemplars, cultural interactions, and direct instruction in cultural knowledge and activities. Furthermore, they state that in a classroom environment teachers employ all three methods to teach material, occasionally unknowingly passing on unwanted behavior in the process. Using their enculturation model as a form of analysis, I will argue in the first part of the paper, through the lens of a jingju (Beijing Opera) classroom, that teachers transmit cultural values through modeling behavior and interactions with the students. The second part of the paper concerns what cultural values are transmitted in the jingju classroom and how they are observed in both teachers and students.
Four Score and Two Centuries Ago: Emancipation in the Shlimil, Shlimazl, and Picaro Literary Tradition Kevin Herzner
Previous scholarship addressing the shlimil, shlimazl, and picaro literary traditions has focused on the aspects of dark humor and the rogue nature of these literary figures. The investigations have examined these traditions separately and discuss their value as bungling, ineffectual personages who are easily victimized. Consequently, the image produced by recent scholarship portrays the shlimil, shlimazl, and picaro as agents lacking autonomy and unable to make conscious choices. It is my thesis that the shlimil, shlimazl, and picaro are necessary agents for social emancipation; an agent that not only postpones the emancipatory potential of a particular social movement but also serves as the catalyst for the next social movement.
Important for the idea of agency within the shlimil, shlimazl, and picaro character is the underlying theme of displacement. This themeoften overlooked or only briefly commented uponis a literary device necessary for an agent of emancipation. The displacement experienced by and through the shlimil, shlimazl, and picaro creates a new space on a "higher plane" in which the potential for emancipation may be realized. In other words, the ambiguous space created and inhabited by these literary figures is in actuality a new social space that moves society one step closer to emancipation.
My own investigation will comparatively examine the picaresque tradition within German literature and the shlimil and shlimazl in Yiddish literature. I will utilize Walter Benjamin's negative dialectic to reveal universals within both traditions that have transcended cultural boundaries. Examinations of the trickster and lantukh, emancipation and redemption, and messianism demonstrate that the characteristics of these socionarrative themes are not absolute since they emblematize the transitional field between everyday life, fiction, tale and myth. The fluidity of these themes is not lost on the picaresque or shlimil/shlimazl traditions, thus a comparative study may reveal not only how the literary traditions in a particular culture inform and are informed by other cultures, but also how this influence is translated by a particular culture into something of its own. The shlimil/shlimazl and picaro emblematize a common human desire to finish the act of creation, emancipate oneself from a less than perfect world, and bring about redemption. Engagement in this project demonstrates that the shlimil/shlimazl and the picaro are indeed autonomous agents capable of making conscious choices. Having seen through the illusion of a particular social movementto be in an awakened stateand the movement's failure to realize emancipation, the shlimil/shlimazl and picaro become agents who perpetrate a radical epistemological reconfiguration of space for the potential for emancipation.
Panel 4
Living in a Material World: Preserving Culture
Consistency and Variability in an Interracial Southern Utility-Quilt Aesthetic Teri Klassen
Since about 1970, some folklorists and art historians have been interested in quiltmaking as an arena of expression for a distinctively African-American aesthetic. This aesthetic is described as improvisational and is often linked to an African heritage. I argue here that quilts said to exhibit this aesthetic have much in common with the American utility-quilt genre practiced by both black and white women in rural areas of the Old Southwest in the early to mid 1900s. I argue that this genre has its own aesthetic, separate from that of formal quilts and little represented in quilt history books until recently. To illustrate my discussion of traits of utility quilts and formal quilts, I will show slides of quilts said to express a distinctively African-American style, of quilts from the Tennessee state quilt book, and of quilts from my recent fieldwork with black and white quiltmakers in Alabama and Tennessee.
Drawing from previous scholarship as well as my fieldwork, I will present evidence that quiltmaking frequently has served as a realm of interracial interaction. I contend that this evidence justifies a racially inclusive, place-based approach to the study of quilt styles in the rural South, viewing quiltmaking as an arena of exchange and hybridity that can transcend as well as affirm social borders. I argue that this is the methodological approach needed to document the development of twentieth century utility-quilt styles and of the style associated by some scholars exclusively with African-American quiltmakers.
Drum, Art, or Artifact?: Examining the Expectations of Crafting Sound's Stakeholders Suzanne Godby Ingalsbe
Traditional Arts Indiana (TAI) and the Bloomington Area Arts Council (BAAC) partnered to mount Crafting Sound: Indiana Instrument Builders in September 2007. Featuring handmade instruments by twenty-three active instrument makers, the exhibit posed unique challenges in display and interpretation for both organizations. TAI does not usually create museum-type exhibits; the BAAC typically displays paintings, textiles, and/or sculptures. Addressing the concerns and sometimes conflicting expectations of participating artisans added another layer of complexity.
All participating groups gained new audiences by transforming their roles, but were their other expectations met? BAAC goals included hosting a show appealing to both returning gallery visitors and new attendees. TAI viewed the exhibit as a way to build on its mission of expanding public awareness of Indiana's traditional practices and nurturing pride among Indiana's traditional artists, so concerns included the representations of the instrument builders, displays of their work, and provision of a representative sample. Many featured instrument makers viewed the project as a chance to network, share their music, and learn about other instrument makers.
This paper examines these expectations and motivations and draws upon the experience of curating the exhibit, feedback from participants and visitors, and relevant literature. Supporting evidence in the form of exhibit labels and documentary photographs provides demonstration of how various stakeholders' priorities were addressed. The analysis is informed by contemporary concerns in public folklore and museums and gives insight into what can happen at the intersection of these arenas.
Had-Gadya: A variant of a European folksong, translated into Old Aramaic and given post hock Jewish meaning Michael Kovnat
According to William Newell's 1905 article, "The Passover Song of the kid and an Equivalent from New England", there is a class of rhymes, that "increase and then reverse, which in English are called accumulative." [Kid = young goat]. Had-Gadya, a song recited [only] by Jews of German-Central-Eastern European descent on the holiday of Passover, is one such example. (Newell, 1905 and others). Had-Gadya is found in a Hagada [booklet containing the Passover service] made in Prague in 1590, but it could be an example of folklore because it has no known author, and the fact that it is very similar, both in structure and in content, to the other acumulatives that Newell presets, suggests that it could have been in oral circulation before being written. Although most Jewish sources acknowledge that Had-Gadya is similar to other European folksongs, these sources do not compare and contrast Had-Gadya with to the other European Accumulatives. Throughout this paper, I will provide such an analysis. My viewpoint will be Had-Gadya, but I will provide ample analysis of the non-Jewish versions, in order to demonstrate that the similarities between Had-Gadya and the similar European songs are greater than the differences.
Panel 5
Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better: Performing Gender
Love and The Girl Detective Jeremy Stoll
Who is the girl detective? From Nancy Drew to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Temperance Brennan of TV's Bones, women in popular media have taken on the role of the detective, resolving conflict through reasoning. Whereas in the past, the pulp, male detective was able to transform the potentially subversive female, these modern heroines have turned the narrative tables. In taking on the role of reason, typically masculine characteristics become feminized, such as rationality and action, and vice versa, with Bones' sidekick becoming a 'feeling' man who makes the intuitive jumps she cannot. However, these strong women draw upon a history of fairy tales and other folk narratives where women used reasoning to deal with extraordinary problems. With a basis in folk and popular culture, this paper looks at what it means for a female character to take on men's role as the arbiter of reason. When hierarchies of gender are flipped, can balance be achieved both in the stories and in the minds of the audience? When the girl detective can save the male lead and help him to become a functioning part of society, what becomes of heterosexual love? By first developing modern and folk precedents, this paper will analyze how the inversion of gender, and thus power, in these stories represents a break and a continuation with the past, one that may help individuals renegotiate their own social identities and vernacular experiences of love.
Beyond the Western Pass: Tracing a Journey Through Song Levi Gibbs
This paper will examine the interrelationship between song, music, local culture, and locale in a historic migratory phenomenon in north central China known as "zou xi kou" ("going beyond the Western Pass"). Related through various versions of folksongsand "errentai," a regional music drama popular in northeastern Shaanxi province, northwestern Shanxi province, and parts of Inner Mongolia, these songs express the pain of separation when men from Shaanxi and Shanxi were forced to leave their loved ones behind, walking great distances beyond the boundaries of the Great Wall in order to find work in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia. Despite attempts by the Qing government to keep the Mongols and Han separated, these men were willing to brave the threat of bandits, freezing temperatures, and starvation to try their luck in distant, unknown lands. In this paper, I will look at the geographic and historical roots of this phenomenon as outlined by Ma (2000), including frequent droughts and unequal population distribution. The paper will also draw on the work of Jones (2004), Rees (2000), Schimmelpenninck (1997), and Bender (2007) in terms of the relations of song and music to local culture and locale. What do the songs tell us about the culture that grew out this migration, and how did this migration lead to the blending of a Mongolian-Han hybrid culture? Together, we will look at how this experience was expressed in song, and what those song lyrics now tell us about this historical phenomenon.
Swahili Beauty and Bonding Nicole Rearick
Beauty and beautification processes, although often seen as narcissistic and shallow, can have multiple implications. For Swahili women in Mombasa, Kenya, beauty and its processes, offer something more than just vanity and adoration. It gives them friendships and an outlet for socialization. By using different theories to critically look at the beautification processes of Swahili women I will creates a fresh outlook on my experiences abroad. This paper will look more methodically at my time in Kenya and at the various scenes I witnessed. By explaining them in more depth and with added social theories, I complicate the events so as to make it clear that there is always more to a person's actions than what meets the eye. The influential factors may not be easily viewed, but mundane things like beauty, as will be seen, can play a large part in the lives of people.
Following reexamination of research done on the Kenyan coast, two key themes seemed to emerge: feminine modes of sociality and feminine modes of self-presentation. The nature of the feminine modes of sociality specific to Swahili women, allow forcertain feminine modes of self-presentation to surface. Therefore, beauty, for Swahili women, not only enables them to build relationships, socialize, and unite, but simultaneously it generates specific ways for these women to present themselves to others in different settings.
Panel 6
You're In or You're Out: Drawing Boundaries
"The Ballad of Sussanna Cox" and the Transformation of Community
Joanna Spanos
"The Ballad of Susanna Cox" first circulated in 1809 as the broadside ballad "Ein Neues Trauer-Lied, Enthaltend die Geschichte der Susanna Cox, die in Reading wegen den Mord ihres Kindes hingerichtet wurde." "Susanna Cox", as this balled is most often called, relays the true story of a young servant who is condemned to die for killing her newborn baby. The emotional core of Susanna's act is not at the center of the text as in many other infanticide ballads, nor is the focus on her actions or shame. Instead, the text focuses on the aftermath: how Susanna was treated by the law as well as by the Pennsylvania German community in which she has lived all of her adult life.
Guilt both the individual guilt expressed by Susanna and the corporate guilt acted upon by her community pervades the text. The portrayal of the community's actions on Susanna's behalf will be explored to explain the high degree of financial, spiritual, and emotional support she received after her conviction. Susanna Cox was not Pennsylvania German by birth and, by all accounts, was not fully integrated into the life of the community. So why, when she is condemned for committing a capital crime, does this same community rally around her? I intend to look both at issues of the treatment of Susanna as an Other, and how the guilt generated by the community's initial lack of concern allows them to begins to understand this Other and, therefore, accept it into their corporate self-definition.
Anatomy of a Town Character Mary Hoefferle
Most small towns have at least one "town character" or "local legend" that becomes part of the community's shared experience and ultimately part of the group's collective memory. In this presentation, I will introduce the audience to Hank Thompson and Jim Bauer, two of Ontonagon, Michigan's town characters, and explore how they used folk art and folk music to aid their transformation from ordinary members of the community to local legends. Hank Thompson, a five-foot-tall joke-teller and accordion player used his music to entertain, earn drinks at the bar, and lead the annual Labor Festival kiddie parade. Jim Bauer channeled his creative energy into over-decorating his yard and the local paper mill for Christmas and into family float building for Ontonagon's Hometown Christmas and Labor Festival parades. The men's art and music are public windows into their personal humor, folly, idiosyncrasies, and life stories stories that became part of the heritage and history of the local culture.
Edible Identities: The Performance of Food in Afro-Guyanese Kweh-kweh Rituals
Gillian Richards-Greaves
Since time immemorial, food has functioned in diverse ways for humankind. While food is necessity for human existence, it also serves to facilitate dialogue, to provide education, to inflict harm, and to assert various identities, among other functions. It is through the performance of food that Guyanese in Guyana and abroad are able to assert and display conceptualizations of national- and ethnic identities. Although "Guyanese food" encompasses dishes from diverse regions of the world, including China, India, and various parts of Africa, Guyanese often distinguish themselves from other ethnic groups through the foods that they collective consume. In this paper, I will examine the ways that Afro-Guyanese in the United States utilize "Guyanese food" in kweh-kweh, an Afro-Guyanese pre-wedding ritual system, to assert and display national and ethnic identities. I will also interrogate the ways that various ethnic dishes, subsumed by the label "Guyanese food," enable Afro-Guyanese to create differential identities, which distinguish them from other ethnic groups in Guyana and United States.
Gerbilling, Reconsidered Christopher Lewis
My paper will reconsider the contemporary legend of gerbilling. In 1994's "The Case of the Missing Gerbil," Norine Dresser argues that the story endorses and perpetuates homophobia via its stigmatization of anal sex (232). She also reveals it to be an untrue legend (232). I respect her assessment and, indeed, shared it at one time. But the legend seems to leave room for the act perhaps most identified with gay men: anal sex. The gerbilling legend informs listeners that gay men insert gerbils up their rectums for pleasure and simultaneously evaluates the act as depraved. A gerbil, according to the legend, is not something one should stick up his butt. Thus, this question is begged: what is an appropriate thing to stick up one's butt? In the legend, the use of the gerbil as a sex toy is the depraved act, not the act of rectal insertion in general. Anal sex itself is not chided, but gerbilling is.
My paper will make sense of this by reading the legend alongside Roger Abrahams's "Equal Opportunity Eating: A Structural Excursus on Things of the Mouth," published in 1984, and considering how the mouth and the rectum fill the same motifemic slot in legends told by dominant cultures about the foodwaysand sexwaysof marginalized groups.
First, I will argue that the gerbil occupies the same motifemic slot in its legend as the raccoon, possum, and dog in legends about the foodways of African American, Appalachian, and Chinese peoplelegends that Abrahams discusses in his essay. I will explore why these animals are taboo as foods and sex partners to many Americans using Abrahams's folk categories of animals: livestock, pets, scavengers and vermin, wild animals, and game (3132). Groups with different relationships to animals than these categories allow for will be seen as suspect by many Americans. (This is complicated by the fact that no documented cases of gerbilling exist. But, of course, legends work regardless of whether or not they are based on truth.)
Next I will discuss the similarities between the mouth and the rectum as "provid[ers] [of] access to our selves that must remain inviolate except in the most privileged moments, when openness is valued more highly than protection" (Abrahams 19). This discussion will further illustrate that legends about foodways and sexways work similarly to marginalize groups, as both kinds of legends stigmatize people for what they let enter their bodies.
Finally, I will return to my claim that the gerbilling legend actually allows for anal sex and even seems fascinated by a presumed connection between luxury (the soft fur of the gerbil, the movie star who most often occupies the legend) and gay men. I will explain how, in the legend, gay sex becomes synecdochal of gay culture. And my conclusion will consider how the development of "sufficient flexibility and adventurousness of taste" in dominant American foodwaysso much so "that we can eat the traditional foods of those we have called dogs and monkeys in the past" (Abrahams 34-35)may reveal, when applied to telling of the gerbilling legend, a willingness among heterosexual tellers of the story to explore "traditional" gay sexways themselves.
