Greatest Hits Reading List Suggestions

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.