Gregory Hansen

Intangible cultural heritage and the better angels of folklore’s nature

Abstract Folklore research in the United States typically is completed either through academic departments or in organisations designed to create public presentations of traditional expressive culture. These two approaches are termed ‘academic folklore’ and ‘public folklore’. The intellectual history of both approaches has recently been critiqued. One result of this deconstruction is an ambivalence over the historical legacy of key concepts in the study of folklore. Assessing elements of the critical study of folklore’s history – in both academe and the public sector – suggests opportunities for reconstituting the study of traditional culture to establish a more socially responsive approach that is relevant to ways that heritage professionals assess folklore as intangible culture heritage.

The Thistle and the Brier: Historical Links and Cultural Parallels between Scotland and Appalachia (review)

young folkies from New York—Guy Carawan, Frank Hamilton, and Jack Elliott—take a summer trip in 1953 to the Blue Ridge Mountains and other points south in search of authentic American folk music, where they have a memorable meeting with an irascible and suspicious Bascom Lamar Lunsford at the Ashville Folk Festival. As a general survey, Rainbow Quest is a useful resource. The book covers many figures, recordings, important performances, and other events that made up the folk revival era and may serve as a text for popular culture or folklore courses that examine the social and historical context of the music and its principal performers. Even as a survey, however, the book can be frustrating in its often cursory coverage of any given performer or topic.

Hill Folks: A History of Arkansas Ozarkers and Their Image (review)

came about through the loss of epistemological and theoretical innocence in ethnographic filmmaking—that people like Roger Sandall were somehow innocents with cameras. I will argue to the contrary that filmmakers like Sandall were far from innocent and that Loizos’ perceived movement to a self-consciousness in filmmaking is too simple an account of the changes that took place in the 1970s and 1980s in Australia. (p. 76)