A collaboration with the Program in Folklore, University of California at Berkeley
Inaugurated in 2007 by Charles L. Briggs of UC-Berkeley, this international working group considers the career of vernacular traditions under globalization. As cultural forms circulate ever more widely, recycled, restructured, and hybridized as they travel, regimes of value insist increasingly on point of origin. Since economic value is predicated upon scarcity, in a global framework cultural objects are marked—and marketed—as local. Form itself is fetishized as social interaction becomes attenuated. Rather than contesting the reification of culture into exchangeable goods, the resistance of impoverished groups and social movements increasingly takes shape as a struggle for control over the manner of commodification and the profits thereof. In the face of restructurings of value initiated by the World Trade Organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, free trade agreements, and transnational corporations, intellectual property rights become a key locus of contention between distributors and cultural producers. The public component of this year's group meeting will explore form and value as both categories of action and tools of analysis. We hope that attendees will help us with the work of comparison and synthesis.
Program
9:00Breakfast
9:30 I. Folklorists in Circulation
Bridges: Local, Global and Transnational Sadhana Naithani, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
The Little I Know: The Incompatibility of UNESCO and Folkloristics Lee Haring, Saugerties, New York
Our Circulatory System (or Folklore Publishing in the Era of Open Access, Corporate Enclosure and the Transformation of Scholarly Societies) Jason Baird Jackson, Indiana University, Bloomington
11:00Break
11:15II. Moving Objects and the Persistence of Form
"Give Me a Saying and I'll Give You a Man": Folklore and the Making of Men in Nairobi's Urban Spaces Mbugua wa-Mungai, Kenyatta University, Nairobi
Classical Poetry as Cultural Capital in the Proverbs of Jews from Iran: Transformations of Inter-textuality Galit Hasan-Rokem, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Circuitous Thinking: Ideas of the Region in a Globalizing World Candace Slater, University of California, Berkeley
12:45 Lunch
2:00 III. Stigma, Ennoblement, and the Production of Value
The Stigmatized Vernacular Amy Shuman, The Ohio State University, Columbus
Treasures, Trophies, and Relics: Thoughts on the Tradition of Objectification in Western Europe Dorothy Noyes, The Ohio State University, Columbus
Afro-Peruvian Music, Cultural Rights and the Invocation of Culture as an Economic Resource Javier León, Indiana University, Bloomington
3:30Break
3:45 IV. The Value of Distinctions
Local Value in a Globalizing World? Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, University College Cork
Against Circulation Charles L. Briggs, University of California, Berkeley
4:45 Closing Remarks
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