Folklore students solicited faculty and fellow student input about the core texts that have been useful in preparing their reading lists for candidacy exams. Below is a very in-progress list. Please feel free to email us at cfs@osu.edu to contribute to this shared list.
- Folklore and Gender Studies
- Jo Radner's Feminist Messages: Coding in Women's Folk Culture (1993
- Patricia Sawin's Listening for a Life: A Dialogic Ethnography of Bessie Eldreth Through Her Stories and Songs(2004)
- Angela Bourke's "Reading a Woman's Death: Colonial Text and Oral Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Ireland" in Feminist Studies (1995)
- Legends
- Linda Degh and Andrew Vazsonyi's “Legend and Belief” in Folklore Genres (1976)
- Barbara Rieti's Making Witches: Newfoundland Traditions of Spells and Counterspells (2008)
- an Brunvand's stuff
- Folklore and Literature
- Cristina Bacchilega's “Folklore and Literature” in A Companion to Folklore edited by Regina F. Bendix and Galit Hasan-Rokem (2012)
- Alan Dundes' “The Study of Folklore in Literature and Culture” (1965)
- Fairy-Tale Studies
- The Journal of American Folklore Special Issue: The European Fairy-Tale Tradition between Orality and Literacy (2010) edited by Dan Ben-Amos
- Alan Dundes' “Fairy Tales from a Folkloristic Perspective” (1986)
- Alessandro Falassi's "Cinderella in Tuscany” (1982)
- Donald Haase's “Decolonizing Fairy-Tale Studies” (2010)
- Donald Haase’s “Feminist Fairy Tale Scholarship: A Critical Survey and Bibliography” (2004)
- Christine A. Jones and Jennifer Schacker's Marvelous Transformations: An Anthology of Fairy Tales and Contemporary Critical Perspectives (2012)
- Maria Tatar's The Classic Fairy Tales: Norton Critical Edition (1999)
- Kay Turner and Pauline Greenhill's Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms (2012)
- History and Overview of the field; Landmark Works
- Abrahams, Roger. 1976. “The Complex Relations of Simple Forms,” in Folklore Genres, Dan Ben-Amos, ed. 193-214.
- Bauman, Richard. 2008. “The Philology of the Vernacular,” in Journal of Folklore Research 45(1):29-36.
- Ben-Amos, Dan. 1984. “The Seven Strands of Tradition: Varieties in Its Meaning in American Folklore Studies,” Journal of Folklore Research 21(2-3):97-131.
- Blank, Trevor and Robert Howard. 2013. Tradition in the Twenty-First Century: Locating the Role of the Past in the Present. Salt Lake City: Utah State University Press.
- Briggs, Charles and Richard Bauman. 1992. “Genre, Intertexuality and Social Power,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2(2):131-172.
- Cashman, Ray, Tom Mould and Pravina Shukla, eds. 2011. The Individual and Tradition: Folkloristic Perspectives. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University. [selections]
- Dundes, Alan. 1980. “Who are the Folk?” Pp. 1-19 in Interpreting Folklore. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
- Dundes, Alan. 1980. “Text, Context and Texture.” Pp. 20-32 in Interpreting Folklore. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
- Dundes, Alan. 1999. International Folkloristics: Classic Contributions by the Founders of Folklore
- Foster, Michael Dylan. 2013. “Inviting the Uninvited Guest: Ritual, Festival, Tourism and the Namahage of Japan.” Journal of American Folklore 126(501):302-334.
- Hakamies, Pekka and Anneli Honko, eds. 2013. Theoretical Milestones: Selected Writing of Lauri Honko. (from Honko 1989:8) Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia Academia Scientiarum Fennica. [selected]
- Hobsbawm, Eric J. and T. O. Ranger. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. New York:
- Cambridge University Press.
- Noyes, Dorothy. 2003. Fire in the Plaça: Catalan Festival Politics After Franco.
- Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
- Noyes, Dorothy. 2006. “The Judgement of Solomon.” Cultural Analysis Vol. 5.
- Noyes, Dorothy. 2016. Humble Theory: Folklore’s Grasp on Social Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
- Ó Giolláin, Diarmuid. 2000. Locating Irish Folklore: Tradition, Modernity, Identity. Cork: Cork UP.
- Wilson, William 1973. “Herder, Folklore and Romantic Nationalism,” Journal of Popular Culture, 6(4):819-835.
- Webber, Sabra. 2015. Folklore Unbound: A Concise Introduction. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.
- Critical Theory and Ethnographic Methods
- Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1991. “Writing Against Culture.” Pp. 137-162 in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Richard G. Fox, editor. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research.
- Behard, Ruth and Deborah Gordon, eds. 1995. Women Writing Culture. Albany: SUNY Press. [see Introduction, essays by Gordon and Behard]
- Borland, Katherine. 2004 (1991, 1998). “That’s not What I Said: Interpretive Conflict in Oral Narrative Research.” Pp. 522-534 in Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber and Patricia Leavy, eds. Approaches to Qualitative Research: A Reader on Theory and Practice. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Comaroff, John and Jean Comaroff. 1992. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder: Westview Press.
- Clifford, James and George E. Marcus. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. [selected chapters below]
- Clifford, James. “Introduction: Partial Truths,” 1-26.
- Pratt, Mary Louise. “Fieldwork in Common Places,” 27-50.
- Rosaldo, Renato. “From the Door of His Tent: the Fieldworker and the Inquisitor.” 77-97
- Clifford, James. “On Ethnographic Allegory.” 98-121.
- Fischer, Michael M. J. “Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory,” 194-233.
- Rabinow, Paul. “Representations are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropology,” 234-261.
- Marcus, George. “Afterward: Ethnographic Writing and Anthropological Careers.” 262-266.
- Clifford, James. 2012. “Feeling Historical.” Cultural Anthropology. 27.3: 417-426.
- Fortun, Kim. 2012. “Ethnography in Late Industrialism.” Cultural Anthropology. 27.3: 446-464.
- Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. [selected]
- Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson, eds. 1997. Culture, Power, Place: Exploration in Critical Anthropology. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
- Hage, Ghassan. 2005. “A Not So Multi-sited Ethnography of a Not So Imagined Community.” Anthropological Theory. 5.4:463-475.
- Jenkins, Richard. 1992. Pierre Bourdieu.
- Jackson, John. 2012. “Ethnography Is, Ethnography Ain’t.” Cultural Anthropology. 27.3:480-497.
- James, Allison, Jenny Hockey and Andrew Dawson. 1997. After Writing Culture: Epistemology and Praxis in Contemporary Anthropology. London & New York: Routledge. [Intro.]
- Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. 1991. “Objects of Ethnography.” in Exhibiting Culture. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Levine eds. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.
- Lockman, Zachary. 2010. Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
- Lorde, Audre. 1980 (1981). “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Pp. 98-101. In Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Azaldua, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.
- Marcus, George. 2012. “The Legacies of Writing Culture and the Near Future of the Ethnographic Form: A Sketch.” Cultural Anthropology. 27.3: 427-445.
- Modan, Gabriella Gahlia. 2007. Turf Wars: Discourse, Diversity and the Politics of Place. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
- Ong, Aihwa and Stephen J. Collier, eds. 2005. Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. [Chapter 1]
- Ortner, Sherry B. 1995. “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal.” Comparative Studies in Society and History. 37.1:173-193.
- Paredes, Américo. 1995 (1977). “On Ethnographic Work Among Minority Groups: A Folklorist’s Perspective.” In Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border. Richard Bauman, ed. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. 73-110.
- Rutherford, Danilyn. 2012. “Kinky Empiricism.” Cultural Anthropology. 27.3: 465-479.
- Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
- Shuman, Amy. 1993. “Gender and Genre.” Pp. 71-88 in Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, Susan Tower Hollis, Linda Pershing and M. Jane Young, eds.
- Swartz, David. 1997. Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu.
- Tsing, Anna. 2000. “The Global Situation.” Cultural Anthropology 15.3:327-360.