Inconstant Companions: Archaeology and North American Indian Oral Traditions

As an historian of the American West, I find myself in the unusualposition of writing a review of a book, written by an archaeologist,for an audience of oral historians. But Ronald J. Mason's elegantlyprovocative Inconstant Companions: Archaeology and North AmericanIndian Oral Traditions cries out for interdisciplinary linkagesand understandings. Mason spent his professional years as anarchaeologist among anthropologists and is the author of thehighly acclaimed Great Lakes Archaeology (1981). In InconstantCompanions, Mason "addresses a fundamental historiographicalproblem in archaeology, history, and anthropology":     

The Italian American Experience In New Haven: Images and Oral Histories

Anthony V. Riccio's lavish new coffee table book, The ItalianAmerican Experience in New Haven: Images and Oral Histories,provides a fascinating look at the experiences of Italian immigrantsand their children in one east coast community. The field ofimmigration history has certainly benefited from the wealthof oral histories collected from immigrants and their descendants.Ranging from Al Santoli's New Americans, an Oral History: Immigrantsand Refugees in the U. S. Today (1988) to works such as La Merica:Images of Italian Greenhorn Experience (1985)     

Touch and Go

"Oh, to be remembered—isn’t that what this is allabout?" (216). This, claims historian, actor, radio and televisionpioneer Terkel, is the source of his success as an oral historian:logorrhea—the inability to stop talking. And yet Terkel'smemoir, written in collaboration with his longtime friend andassociate Lewis, is nothing short of incredible in its representationas The Oral History of The Oral Historian. Terkel's mesmerizingrecollection of everything from the history of silent filmsto Chicago politics and the impact of reality television, writtenat the age of ninety-four, is a unique and pioneering text. Touch and Go is in effect the     

The Shifting Fortunes of War: Patronage of the Wurttemberg Hofkapelle during the Thirty Years War

German courts have long been renowned for their support of music.How long could this support continue in times of war? This articleconsiders the fate of the Württemberg Hofkapelle duringthe Thirty Years War (1618-48), a conflict that forced manydistinguished Hofkapellen to close their doors for much of thewar's duration. The Hofkapelle (literally ‘court chapel’or music ensemble) was the focus of much music patronage atearly modern German courts, and typically consisted of an orchestraof strings, horns, and percussion, as well as adult male singersand a boys’ choir. Based on an analysis of church councilaccounts that list all expenditure for court music throughoutthe war, the article asserts that demand for music during religiousservices under both Protestant and Catholic control of the duchyremained relatively constant. This demand enabled the Hofkapelleto continue musical performances, despite the enormous constraintsthe war placed on court expenditure. Music patronage was significant in several ways. Payment forperformers and composers could be highly competitive among Germancourts, with the best musicians earning salaries often far exceedingthose of other officials. Foreign musicians were much in demandin Württemberg as elsewhere, such as English lutenist JohnPrice, who founded a group of English lutenists at the Württembergcourt in 1618 that lasted until the death of Duke Johann Friedricha decade later. While the hardship of wartime effectively endedthe payment of large salaries, forcing many top performers toleave, members of the court still called for music at church,even if they had to pay for performances themselves. A studyof music patronage during the Thirty Years War thus revealsnot only the extent to which the court sought to support thearts, but also how that support reflected the shifting fortunesof war.     

‘Let’s find out’: the historian laureate and participatory heritage discovery

ABSTRACT

Developing modes of engagement in the construction of public heritage knowledge emphasize participatory media and active collaboration with citizens. The City of Edmonton created the first historian laureate position in Canada in 2010, and related programs are still rare. This article considers the interaction of narrative content with social and technological contexts of production, viewing the role of the historian laureate as amateur historian and professional storyteller. The historian laureate operates primarily in accessible contexts of leisure, mediated in part through digital technologies, and can respond relatively directly to community interests as a heritage coordinator rather than expert. Rather than representing oppositional or disruptive power to official heritage discourses, the project enables the production of ‘small heritages’ through a series of story episodes. These stories focus on events, people, places and artifacts that typically fall outside the meta-narratives and monuments of a city’s heritage landscape. The historian laureate, embodying or articulating local experience in ways amenable to leisure activity, demonstrates capacities to produce largely indeterminate, diverse and porous ideas of place and histories as part of a bottom-up social generation of knowledge.     

A People's History of Industrial Philadelphia: Reflections on Community Oral History Projects and the Uses of the Past

Abstract: In this article the author reflects on three community oralhistory projects he conducted in Philadelphia between 1978 and1984. Brief histories of these projects are used as an opportunityfor reflections on urban folk history, and some of the forcesand often unacknowledged "purposes" of the oral historian thatshape interviews and the history that emerges from them.     

In Our Own Voices: a Guide to Conducting Life History Interviews with American Jewish Women

The valuable oral history guidebook, In Our Own Voices: A Guideto Conducting Life History Interviews with American Jewish Women,opens with this quote by Nen Lederkremen, "Without roots wecannot grow." The Jewish Women's Archive, an organization thatwas founded in 1995, has done an excellent job in enabling AmericanJewish women to record their roots. The Jewish Women's Archivefelt that women's contributions had been missing from the accountof the American Jewish experience. To rectify this, they pioneeredthe use of community-based oral history projects with Jewishwomen in Boston,     

Producing African-descent: afro-peruvian music,intangible heritage,authenticity and bureaucracy in a Latin American music compilation

ABSTRACT

Policy and actions for the safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) are laced with politics of representation and meaning-making of expressive culture within and outside communities. This article explores how ICH experts, practitioners, activists, and other actors negotiate and re-construct ideas of racial identity and authenticity in one such initiative. Sponsored by CRESPIAL in 2012, the album Cantos y Música Afrodescendientes de América Latina is a compilation of music of Afro-descendant communities in Latin America. Conceived as a project for safeguarding the musical ICH of these communities, it involved participation from thirteen Latin American governments. This paper, centered on the Peruvian participation in this project, studies the bureaucratic intricacies of this project, exploring how ideas on racial identity and authenticity overlap with political agendas and administrative requirements in order to produce a unified representation of ‘Afro-Latin American’ music. My analysis highlights 1) the local knowledge systems that inform the ideas of racial identity and authenticity advanced by the project’s actors; 2) their adopted strategies within Peru’s bureaucratic network of heritage management; and 3) the positionality, capacity and agency of each actor for achieving their particular goals in this collaborative project.     

The Embers of Hiroshima: From Author to Subject in a Transnational Oral History Collaboration

This paper examines an international oral history collaborationinvolving the "translation" of the American book, Atomic Fragments:A Daughter's Questions, by Mary Palevsky, into the Japanesedocumentary film, Memories of the Trinity Bomb, directed byYoshihiko Muraki. The author utilized oral history and personalnarrative to chronicle her inquiry into the legacy of the atomicbomb in the lives of its creators. Japanese scholar, KayokoYoshida, translated Palevsky's summary of Atomic Fragments intoJapanese for Muraki, working with the filmmaker throughout theprocess. For the film, the author conducted interviews withManhattan Project scientists and was interviewed in sites ofpersonal and historical significance. This paper explores themethodological challenges underlying three essential featuresof this transnational project: the transformation of audience,from American to Japanese; the transformation of medium, frombook to film; the transformation of identity,from researcherand author of a book to subject of a film.     

Breaking the Silence: Mexican Children and Women's Confrontation of Bracero Family Separation, 1942–64

On 6 August 1942, the Mexican and US governments’ recruitment of Mexican men into the temporary contract labour programme known as the Bracero Program initiated a process that would deteriorate Mexican children and women's personal wellbeing and relationships to each other. The Bracero Program left children to endure the absence of their bracero fathers, while married women and caretakers transitioned into single motherhood under conditions and terms that drove an uncalculated number of these women into undocumented migration to the United States. Separation from their mothers further devastated children. The silence concerning the programme and the whereabouts and intentions of their immigrant parents alienated children from the mothers and caretakers left to care for them. Hence, mothers, caretakers and teachers came together to listen and talk to their children and each other about the dangerous realities of the programme in order to overcome the alienating silence driving them apart within the borders of Mexico. Using archival sources and the oral life‐histories of fifty Mexican children and women who endured the programme's separation of their families in San Martin de Hidalgo, Jalisco, Mexico, I argue that the anxiety and loss of Mexican children and women inspired mothers, caretakers and teachers to transition into instilling a gendered and transnational understanding of the dangers of the programme to their children and among themselves to prevent the onset of permanent alienation from each other.     

Social Archaeologies of “Utopian” Settlements in Ireland

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century a number of “Ideal” or “Utopian” type settlements were established across Ireland. These tended to be religious groupings or “model” communities associated with industry. In the southwest a number of short-lived cooperative communities were established along Owenite principles which continue to play an integral part in the radical histories of the country. This paper examines the archaeologies of these sites and analyses the role of individual in their formation and collapse and addresses the social archaeology of their construct and layout. It is suggested that contemporary hierarchical norms were actually reproduced in these communities and this segregation is reflected in the physical morphology of the settlements.     

The Dark Tree: Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles

In her 2005 article, "The Long Civil Rights Movement and thePolitical Uses of the Past," Jacquelyn Dowd Hall called on scholarsto complicate the story of civil rights by looking beyond atraditional narrative that begins in 1954, ends in 1965, focuseson the South, and features Martin Luther King, Jr. as the leaderof a single-voiced chorus of interracial activists who overcameracial barriers nonviolently. The recent wave of histories aboutarts movements in African-American communities (e.g., Pointfrom Which Creation Begins: The Black Artists’ Group ofSt. Louis, by Benjamin Looker, 2004,     

In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965-1969

French and Burgess have added yet another book to the enormousliterature on the Space Race. Based partly on oral history interviewsand partly on written and e-mailed statements and other documents,In the Shadow of the Moon focuses on the American side of thesecond half of the Space Race. (French and Burgess dealt withthe first half of the Space Race in a previous work, Into thatSilent Sea.) Between March 1965 and July 1969, the U.S. launched fifteenmanned space missions. In four years and four months, NASA wentfrom     

The Face of Decline: the Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century

The term "deindustrialization" did not come into popular usageuntil the late 1970s as American heavy industry went into aprecipitous decline and the industrial heartland became the"rust belt." For the people of the anthracite coal mining regionof eastern Pennsylvania, deindustrialization came much earlieras Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht graphically demonstrate inThe Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in theTwentieth Century (2005). This work joins a growing body ofliterature that examines the rise, decline, and fall of communitiesimpacted by the slow erosion of heavy industry. Recent workssuch as Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America's RustBelt (2003) by Steven High,     

快速城市化背景下佛山传统祠堂文化景观变化以及地方认同的建构

祠堂曾经是佛山标志性的文化景观,但随着城市化的快速发展,祠堂文化景观也发生了改变。在对佛山市区现存祠堂景观全面普查的基础上,选择位于城乡边缘带和城中村的典型社区进行深度访谈。研究表明,佛山传统祠堂文化景观在空间和功能上都发生明显变化。尽管其呈现出现代化、多元化的倾向,但通过集体记忆和怀旧空间的地方形塑,仍然强化了以祠堂为中心的地方认同感。而且,在快速城市化、全球化过程中,地方与认同的关系既受到外生文化渗透的影响,又有内生文化认同作用的增强。祠堂文化景观的改变,一定程度上反映了当前地方社会关系的急剧变化,与之相应,地方认同也正在重新构建。     

The Oral Historian as Memorist

This paper explores some issues in relation to oral historyand memory that emerge in Alessandro Portelli's The Order HasBeen Carried Out. I examine the contemporary role of the oralhistorian, the relationship between the present and the pastin memory work, and make some comments about how we might articulatethe field of oral history with memory studies more closely forthe enrichment of both.     

Exportando “marginalidad”: Consuelo Tamayo Hernández, “la Tortajada” (1867–1957)

Abstract

Although nowadays barely remembered, the dancer and singer Consuelo Tamayo Hernández, “la Tortajada” (1867–1957), once was a Spanish performer of considerable talent. She was a diva skilled at self-fashioning who knew how to exploit her public image both on and off stage. Born in Santa Fe (Granada, Spain), Tortajada hardly ever performed in her country of birth. But although her presence on the Spanish stage was merely marginal, as a “Spanish dancer” she achieved celebrity status in the music halls of Europe and the United States. Tortajada perfectly exemplifies the mobility and cultural transfer that took place between the cosmopolitan stages at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. This article explores how Tortajada obtained international fame and success, not so much because of the authenticity of her performances—which were often contaminated by the music halls where she performed—but because of her ability to export a certain idea of Spanish “otherness” and “marginality” by staging a series of traditional movements and dances. It is by skillfully embodying a stereotype construction of “Spanishness” (elapsing it into an Oriental fantasy) and a certain type of femininity that the artist achieved international celebrity.     

Handcraft as Cultural Diplomacy: The 1968 Mexico Cultural Olympics and U.S. Participation in the International Exhibition of Popular Arts

Mexican post-revolutionary cultural institutions excelled at implementing Mexican art and popular arts as key elements in cultural diplomacy. However, while there is abundant research regarding these arts and their inclusion in international exhibitions during the first part of the twentieth century, there is little research on their role in international cultural diplomacy during the second half of that century. In the first part of this article I present a historiographical appraisal of the 1968 Mexican Cultural Olympiad and the resolutions of the “First Latin American Seminar on Popular Arts and Crafts” sponsored by UNESCO in Mexico City in 1965. In the second, I examine the case of U.S. participation in the “Exposición Internacional de Artesanías Populares” (International Exhibition of Popular Arts), which was part of the 1968 Cultural Olympiad’s programme – largely neglected by the historiography of the XIX Olympics – to explain how popular arts were made to perform as agents of cultural diplomacy in Mexico and the U.S. during the Cold War. In addition, I argue that U.S. participation in this exhibition also reveals negotiations and redefinitions of the concepts of handcraft and arte popular, and the economic and social situation of their makers in the United States.