Jack Santino

Yellow Ribbons and Seasonal Flags: The Folk Assemblage of War

derived color motifs. Moreover, both the ribbons and the flags were often displayed in conjunction with the usual holiday decorations appropriate to the season. Using a variety of symbols, people created folk assemblages that commented on and reflected issues of war and politics, and that mediated individual opinions and community expression. In these folk assemblages of war we see the creation of tradition out of elements offolk, popular, and mass culture; and the dynamic use of traditional forms in society.

Characteristics of Occupational Narratives

December 13, 1976: The grade school auditorium was filled with the sizzle and smell of deep fried foods, which hinted at the delights of the feast that would be enjoyed that night. I was there visiting the monthly meeting of the Central Office Club, a social organization of telephone company workers in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. About sixty men, all of them white, sat in groups playing cards, laughing, talking, and joking. I did my best to explain to the men that I wanted to hear the stories that they tell to each other on the job and on occasions such as these. I told them that I was especially interested in stories about characters, and otherwise outstanding individuals. At the request of one of the men, Joey Hall,’ I sat down at his table, turned on the recorder, opened a beer, leaned back and enjoyed myself. Soon the men were eagerly swapping stories with each other. Joey turned out to be an excellent storyteller. Bill Farmer was at the table, telling a lot of stories, mostly on himself. Bobby King, a young man who had been with the company for eight years, divided his attention between my microphone and his card game; while Bob Jones, who was sitting at the other end of the long table, occasionally contributed a story and an idea.

Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle: The Negotiation of Black Occupational Identity Through Personal Experience Narrative

PULLMAN PORTERS ARE HIGHLY INTERESTING as an occupational group because, even though groups of them meet regularly in cities across America, the occupation that has formed the basis of their identity and of their expressive culture no longer exists. Pullman porters were black men who worked on luxurious railroad sleeping cars. They were personal servants for the passengers on the cars, and they tended to their every need as well as to the preparation and tidiness of the cars themselves. The Pullman Company, and the job of Pullman porter, developed during and immediately after the Civil War and continued into the 1960s.

Occupational Ghostlore: Social Context and the Expression of Belief

In certain occupations, such as mining and sailing, researchers have documented the belief in ghosts who are said to warn former colleagues and comembers of danger and impending accidents and to help them in times of disaster. Recently, this belief has been important to members of the airline industry. Such beliefs are often encapsulated in narrative as legends and are shared by some members of the industry, but the researcher who studies these beliefs and their narrative expressions must consider the context of the interviewing and collecting situation as major determinants in the nature of the expression itself. Three recountings of the belief in the ghost ofa flight engineer who perished in a crash landing, all told by the same individual in very different circumstances, are compared.

A Servant and a Man, a Hostess or a Woman: A Study of Expressive Culture in Two Transportation Occupations

The article examines stories and testimony of airline fight attendants and Pullman sleeping car porters of the railroad. Workers in these passenger-service positions are also responsible to superordinate personnel (pilots, conductors) who arepresent during the trip. Many of the stories are thematically parallel, butflight attendants engage in an active, ongoing pranking relationship with pilots while Pullman porters had no such tradition and thus had nofictive meansfor expressing occupational tensions. The lack of this traditional genre is largely due to extraoccupationalforces.