|
|
The following articles by Dufferin Murray, Justin Partyka, and Ian Brodie were recently presented at Brown Bag Lunch presentations. Please contact organizer Gary Lundrigan if you are interested in presenting at a Brown Bag Lunch, a great way to communicate and discuss your research! An Arborist Alone – Reconsidering Robert McCarl’s “Occupational Folklife: A Theoretical Hypothesis.” by Dufferin Murray Robert McCarl’s approach to the folkloristic study of occupational groups involves “an understanding of the … complex techniques, customs, and modes of expressive behavior which characterize a particular work group [and] comprises its occupational folklife” (3). Based on three years of fieldwork/ apprenticeship with an arborist, I propose that McCarl’s concen-tration on work groups needs to be re-tooled in order to discuss those occupations that are performed by an individual whose occupational technique is expressed without the presence of group. The arborist I have worked with is the owner and operator of an independent business and generally works alone. When he requires another body for a job, he will hire an assistant. My fieldwork/ apprenticeship is a by-product of performing the duties (the ground work) of an assistant. McCarl’s reference to technique as a “form of interaction with tools, environment, and other workers that connotes expertise and esoteric knowledge” (6) is particularly salient when applied to an examination of the arborist’s occupation, especially in terms of the relationship between the worker, the tools and the environment. That is, in the case of the arborist I have worked with, it is precisely his technique that distinguishes him from any type of (imagined) occupational peer-group. This arborist is fond of recounting how he is the only arborist in the region who does 80-90% of his work with hand tools (saws and pruners) rather than with gas- or electric-powered tools such as chainsaws. As a non-arborist, I find myself in the position of being able to describe his technique(s), but as a co-worker, I am in no way qualified to comment upon the efficacy of his application of his technique. Thus, this self-characterization put forward by the arborist attempts to posit an occupational identity, via his technique, in opposition to the canon of technique expressed by other arborists. In other words, where McCarl suggests that technique “is the pattern of manipulations, actions, and rhythms which are the result of the interaction between an individual and his or her work environment and which are prescribed by the group and used as criteria for the determination of membership and status within it” (7), my case suggests that technique also can be considered as a method of differentiating one’s occupational self from the prescriptions of a group. While my informant works as an individual, he does have some, though little, interaction with others arborists, though there are few practitioners in his immediate geographic area. But, in all, there is no community of arborists of which he is a part and thus no group to which he feels he must turn to for validation of his occupational technique. Rather than turn to a peer group for evaluation of his technique, this arborist seeks a sense of personal gratification and awaits the response of the trees he has helped to nurture and heal. It is, he suggests, the continued growth and health of the trees that best speaks of the efficacy of his technique. 1. McCarl, Robert S. “Occupational Folklife: A Theoretical Hypothesis.” Working Americans: Contemporary Approaches to Occupational Folklife. Ed. Robert H. Byington. Los Angeles: California Folklore Society, 1978. 3-18. Folklore Fieldwork and the Aesthetics of Documentary Photography: In Search of a Visual Folkloristics by Justin Partyka At the one-hundred year anniversary meeting of the American Folklore Society in 1988, Bess Lomax Hawes delivered a paper entitled: “Happy Birthday American Folklore Society: Reflections on the Work and Mission of Folklorists.” During this paper, she makes the statement that: “Fieldwork … no matter how grudgingly performed, [or] how brief the encounter—remains the absolute sine qua non of the folklore profession” (68). My own personal journey into the study of folklore resulted partly from an interest in folksong, but mainly because I wanted the fieldwork “experience.” Following Hawes’s comment, it is my opinion that, if you are privileged enough to be able to study folklore, the least you can do in return is to do good fieldwork. If you are doing good fieldwork, it should accepted that you are using photography. As folklorist David Taylor points out: “Photography is an invaluable tool for recording many subjects of cultural significance, from single artefacts to complicated events” (34). And to emphasise this point – at the 2002 AFS meeting, during a panel entitled Photography in the Field, Henry Glassie remarked that, “I never trust an ethnography without photographs.”1 Since heavily utilising photography during the fieldwork for my MA thesis two years ago, I have been contemplating the role that photography has within the fieldwork process.2 Often photo-graphs are used as a basic means of information or illustration. Or folklorists take cameras into the field and use them as a visual note pad, to assist in remembering, to facilitate the ethnographic experience. Such approaches are perfectly justifiable, and if that is how you want to use a camera during your fieldwork, that is fine. However, I would like to introduce the idea that the potential exists to utilize photography on a more sophisticated level within folklife studies. As I have explored this relationship between photography and fieldwork, I have immersed myself within the work of documentary photographers, specifically those that work on projects which can be considered within the defines of folklife. Folkloristics prides itself on the freedom to draw upon other disciplines and approaches of study. I consider that the time has come for the field of documentary photography to become another one of our resources—an idea which was highlighted at the 2002 AFS meeting during the panel, Folklife and Documentary Photography: A Conversation Between Disciplines.3 Upon investigating the field of documentary photography, it became apparent that the best documentary photographers have the ability to capture an underlying sense of feeling or emotion—an underlying aesthetic, which exists within the people and cultural environments they photograph. Rob Amberg, a documentary photo-grapher, who specialises in the documentation of rural folklife in North Carolina, points out that: “Photographs can teach us to look at the very texture and feeling of life around us” (xii). As folklorists, we are trained in the ability of a sensitive perception of subtle cultural expressions, along with the awareness and understanding of informal and traditional behaviour and ways of life. With these skills, doesn’t the potential exist for us to produce the best documentary photography that is possible? Although some may argue that such a heightened awareness is intuitive, I believe that with practice and hard work, along with the careful consideration of, and an openness to, the concept of artistic expression, all of us are able to locate and document photograph-ically this underlying cultural aesthetic. Whilst on a basic level a photograph is visually immediate – one of its strengths being its accessibility – we must not trivialize the complexity and important value of photographs within the logo-centricity of the academy. This concern has recently been addressed by the American Folklife Centre photographer, Carl Fleischhauer. In discussing the American Folklife Centre’s 1981 publication, Blue Ridge Harvest: A Region’s Folklife in Photographs, for which Fleischhauer was both a photographer and joint editor, he remarks that one of the main criticisms of the book was its “near absence of text.” As a photo-grapher, Fleischhauer adeptly responded by suggesting that “people should learn to ‘read’ the photographs, to study them as you would an event seen during fieldwork in order to extract meanings from them” (174). This idea needs to be given greater consideration by folklorists, especially graduate students. I am amazed by the number of theses submitted to the Folklore Department at MUN which do not feature a single photograph. Many students seem to perceive photographs as page-fillers, believing that the inclusion of photographs devalues their work academically. Obviously this is true with poorly used photographs, but when used well, photographs will only greatly enhance one’s work. When thoughtfully constructed, the photographic image is able to reveal to us aspects of a place and its people in a unique, stimulating, and exciting way, therefore allowing us the potential to add a further dimension to both our work as documentarians and our understanding of culture. To reach these goals, we inevitably need to seek out new ways of seeing, to photographically approach familiar subjects in ways not done before. As the master documentarian John Cohen proposes, borrowing the words of Josef Albers, his art teacher at Yale, we should undertake “‘a search, not research’” (emphasis mine, 24). Perhaps it is only when we break free from the shackles of previously established method-ology can we start to fully incorporate the potentials of documentary photography into our studies – creating original, pioneering work in the process, in the quest to form a visually based sub-discipline of folkloristics, along the same lines as visual anthropology. To put these ideas into practice, I spent six weeks during September and October 2002 photographically documenting the rural folklife of a region in Great Britain known as the Fens. The Fens is a unique area, consisting of 1300 square miles of a predominantly man-made landscape. At one time the Fens was mainly covered by swamp and marshland, with smaller settlements and towns existing as islands on isolated areas of higher ground. This all started to change in the early seventeenth century, when moves were made to gradually drain the region for arable farmland, a process which took until the 1850s to complete, with smaller sections being drained right up until the 1940s. With most of the land lying below sea level, the extensive drainage system of the Fens is still crucial in maintaining the landscape as it appears today. With no major urban industrial centres, as found in the North of Britain, the economy of the Fens has always been dependent upon the landscape. Prior to drainage, this was marsh and water based, including reed and sedge cutting, eel catching, wild fowling , and peat digging. The emphasis gradually shifted to arable farming as the drainage process developed. Today, whilst agricultural land predominates the area, the economy has expanded to include increasing retail and service industries. These have been crucial in providing employment to those no-longer needed in an ever developing mechanized agricultural industry. My own interests in rural and occupational folklife influenced the kinds of subjects which I documented. I was mainly concerned with the importance of the landscape and the role it has in people’s lives. Even today, both modern, and the remnants of an older traditional dependence on the landscape can still very much be found. Ultimately, I attempted to document a unique sense of place and its people, through carefully made photographic images of regional folklife. Works Cited Amberg, Rob. Sodom Laurel Album. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002. Cohen, John. There Is No Eye. New York: powerHouse, 2001. Eiler, Lyntha Scott, Terry Eiler, and Carl Fleischhauer, eds. Blue Ridge Harvest: A Region’s Folklife in Photographs. Washington: American Folklife Center, 1981. Fleischhauer, Carl, and Neil V. Rosenberg. Bluegrass Odyssey: A Documentary in Pictures and Words, 1966-86. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001. Hawes, Bess Lomax. “Happy Birthday American Folklore Society: Reflections on the Work and Mission of Folklorists.” Public Folklore. Eds. Robert Baron and Nicholas R. Spitzer. Washington: Smithsonian Institution P, 1992. 65-73. Taylor, David A. Documenting Maritime Folklife: An Introductory Guide. Washington: American Folklife Center, 1992. Notes 1 During this panel the following papers were presented: Ray Cashman, “Places: Evoking Locality in Nothern Ireland;” Pravina Shukla, “Public Presentations: Photography of Celebration;” Karen Duffy, “Artistic Process: Documenting Potters at Acoma Pueblo;” Henry Glassie, “The Portrait: A Sign of Ethnographic Integrity.” 2 Justin Partyka, “The Occupational Folklife of a Norfolk Lurcherman,” MA thesis, Department of Folklore, Memorial University, 2001. 3 During this panel the following papers were presented: Rob Amberg, “Sodom Laurel Album;” Cedric N. Chatterley, “Looking Down the Road: The Intersection of Documentary Photography, Folklore, and History;” Tom Rankin, “The Lure of the Picture and the Nature of the Tradition.” The Hermeneutics of Adhesion, or, The Principles of Stick-to-It-iveness: Post-It Notes and the Insight Legend by Ian Brodie The origins of this brownbag lecture came from the classic Folklore 6030 exercise of three approaches to an object of material culture. My object was the Post-It Note, and one of my approaches was a folk literary analysis applying Thompson’s Motif Index, Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, and Olrik’s “Epic Laws of Folk Narrative” to the narratives concerning its origins. I discovered that, over time, the tale was transformed into a pattern that resembled other legends of discovery, most notably Archimedes’ discovery of the principles of hydrostatics. Prior to my folklore studies, my central research interest has been the work of Bernard Lonergan, the Canadian Jesuit philosopher. His two main works, Insight (1957) and Method in Theology (1972), were originally envisaged as one long opus. Combined, they were an effort to introduce the stringency of a philosophy grounded not in a priori assumptions but in a solid cognitional theory to the operations of the academic enterprise. The eponymous “method” of the latter work has proven fruitful in fields as disparate as theology, chemistry, linguistics, and economics, as it incorporates the methods particular to a specific discipline and demonstrates patterns of interrelations on both an intra- and interdisciplinary level. It would be most helpful to many of the current debates in folkloristics, particularly the relationship between public sector folklore and the academy. The former work, Insight, was an effort to develop a cognitional theory. The book takes as one of its premises that understanding requires an “insight into phantasm.” By phantasm is meant any structuring of the data so that the superfluous disappears and the elements necessary to elicit the insight remain. To understand understanding, then, requires a phantasm which illustrates the act of understanding, or the act of insight into phantasm. To phrase it more cumbersomely, there is required an insight into a phantasm which is of an insight into a phantasm. Lonergan’s own illustration is a retelling of the Archimedes’ bathtub legend. The brownbag lecture, therefore, took as its start a diachronic analysis of the Archimedes legend, from its first telling in Vitruvius’ Ten Books on Architecture to contemporary internet sources, including examples from both Lonergan’s Insight and another work of cognitional structure, David Perkins’ The Eureka Effect (previously published as Archi-medes’ Bathtub). Using an approach similar to Gillian Bennett’s in her “The Phantom Hitchhiker: Neither Modern, Urban, Nor Legend?”, Labov’s paradigm was used to discern the five elements essential to the legends: (1) question; (2) tension of inquiry; (3) phantasm; (4) insight into phantasm; and (5) answer. The precipitating event, which is the phantasm, is in the narratives a tableau. A structure having been discovered, I then applied it to other legends or narratives concerning discoveries and insights: Newton’s Apple, Kekulé’s dream, the invention of the Post-It Note, and others. What I found was that, as the precipitating events of a discovery are told and retold, the narrative tends to conform more and more to the pattern of a precipitating event leading to an immediate realisation, even when (a) the movement from event to realisation is slower, more arduous, and not as direct and (b) the precipitating event, as it is retold, does not actually serve to illustrate the insight that sprung forth. Newton’s Apple, for example, in many of its versions, has Newton sitting under a tree. He either sees an apple drop or is hit on the head with a falling apple, and “discovers” gravity, or in slightly nuanced versions, has the impetus to figure out gravity. In his own accounts, what was of actual interest to Newton was not that things fall – a fairly banal insight – but that the apple fell while the moon, which he could see at the same time, did not. But it is the apple, and not the moon, which is the stock image of the incident. Thus a narrative predilection for conformity to a pattern comes at the expense of logical (or historical, or scientific) accuracy. Not all insights conform to the Archimedes pattern, but there seems to be a desire to make them so. What this conformity implies is beyond the scope of this paper. Nancy New Years: Hogmanay in the New World? by Jodi McDavid When I was five years old my mother remarried and we moved from the city of Campbellton in northern New Brunswick (population 10,000) to a small farm in Flatlands (population 100), about fifteen minutes away. At that age, everything done on the farm was intriguing and fascinating, and above all new and definitely alien to my experience. There were various customs that took place on the farm, but most of them had to do with seasonal harvesting and were adult-orientated. The one exception to this was New Years celebrations. ‘Nancy New Years’ was explained to me as a small fairy that brought gifts on New Years Eve. It was also explained that even if Nancy New Years had never come to you before, that was simply because you did not know about her. Once you were told about the fairy, you too would be visited by her on New Years Eve. Nancy New Years was typically discussed as visiting only children, however, in practice, this was simply not the case, as parents often bought gifts for each other as well. The types of gifts brought by Nancy New Years were typically small, as Nancy was a small fairy that could carry neither large things nor a large number of things. On New Years Eve only one’s Christmas stocking would be filled with gifts from Nancy New Years. The custom of Nancy New Years was not widespread, and seemed to be hinged on certain families. As a child I encountered people in my community that did not practice it as well as people who did. The community was continually “converting” people to the tradition because of the fact that according to local narrative, knowledge of her existence is all that is required for her visitation. For the past few years, I have casually been trying to figure out why Nancy New Years exists in such as small area with a population of less than one hundred people. Why did this tradition begin and what does it stem from? The families in the area are largely thought to be Irish, however, this is not necessarily so, as many people immigrated from various places and married Irish settlers in the area. Many of the families in the area have the influence of Scottish and English backgrounds as well, and a huge influx of families was felt here after the American revolutionary war when United Empire Loyalists were given land in the area. Included in this group were those of Dutch descent. Gift giving on New Years Day is found in many European countries, although, to my knowledge, there are not any gift-giving fairies. It is my guess that this New Years eve custom is an old world tradition that was given a new twist in the new world. Because the gifts are received at a time when children have little interaction with school friends (people here are bussed outside the community) the tradition stays localized. Today, many people still practice the tradition, although, much like Christmas, each family has their own variation. Typically, among my friends and the children that I babysat for on New Years eve, Nancy New Years would bring fruit, nuts, candy, chocolate, small games or puzzles, a magazine or book, special necessities and other miscellaneous items. There would typically be one larger or more expensive gift, such as a watch, earrings, a toy, or a collectable. From a functionalist standpoint, Nancy New Years gave parents some much needed sleep on New Years Day after a late night of revelry. I remember that for most children, parents had to be woken at Christmas before gifts could be opened, but for most families, Nancy New Years had no such stipulation. Something that only struck me much later, when I was in charge of getting Nancy New Years gifts for my brother and husband, was that many of the Christmas related items such as candy (and even non-Christmas items) are on discount at this time and so Nancy New Years can fill a stocking for the fraction of the cost that Santa Claus can. Nancy New Years typically brings things that are fun, inexpensive and necessary anyway, such as fruit, and personal items like soap and shampoo. With the lack of employment opportunities in the area and the increased mobility of North Americans, it is probable that the custom of Nancy New Years is more widespread than one might think due to out migration. It also seems that people of my parent’s generation, unlike those of my grandparent’s generation, are practising the custom longer, buying more, and extending the gift giving to each other.
|