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.     

Bruce Smith,Edward Shann,W.K. Hancock: The Economic Critique of Democracy in Australia

This paper argues that there were a number of writers in Australia from the late 1880s to the early 1930s who developed what is best described as an economic critique of the workings of democracy. The three writers considered by this paper, Bruce Smith, Edward Shann and W.K. Hancock, all developed critiques of Australian democracy along similar lines. The central feature of their argument was that Australian majoritarian democracy was making poor policy decisions because it attempted to override the laws of economics in the name of the popular will and ethics. They seemed to have believed that this problem would only be resolved once Australia possessed a mature and economically literate population.     

Petrography as a technique for investigating Iroquoian ceramic production and smoking rituals

Petrographic data and macroscopic observations are used to examine some of the social contexts and functional considerations underlying the production of pottery containers and smoking pipes at Antrex, a Middle Ontario Iroquoian village site located in southern Ontario. Results suggest that while pottery was produced by small groups of people for widespread consumption within the community, pipes were made by individuals for their own personal use. Overall, this research supports the hypothesis that by the beginning of the Late Woodland period, a shift away from communal ritual practices led by ritual specialists or shamans had occurred. Smoking might have, in some contexts, become a solitary religious experience.     

Dynamic Stability and Design of C-Bent Columns

Symmetrically reinforced bridge columns with a horizontal cantilever in one direction, called C-bent columns, tend to deform predominantly in the direction of applied moment when subject to strong earthquake shaking. For this reason, the strength in the direction of applied moment is generally increased in design. This article describes the use of inelastic dynamic time history analyses with a suite of ground motion records to quantify the amount of strength increase required to minimize likely peak and permanent displacement demands. It is shown that the strength should be increased by approximately 2.3 times the applied moment in design.     

Politics and Policy in the 103rd and 104th Congresses: Evaluating the Effects of Divided Government in the Postreform Era

The 1980 Reagan transition and the 1988 Bush transition offer important case studies for understanding the challenges of presidential transitions. Although not without its shortcomings, the 1980 transition was, at least comparably, the most successful of the transfers in power since the modern era of presidential transitions commenced with the Carter effort in 1976. 1988 offers useful lessons about "friendly takeovers": the passing of power from a president to a president-elect of the same party. The 1988 transition is also of interest because it offers the only instance of a sitting vice president elected to the presidency since Martin Van Buren in 1836. The 1988 transition, moreover, marked the ascendancy of President George W. Bush's father to the office, and it was a transition in which he and several members of this administration participated, Chief of Staff Andrew Card most notably.     

Quakers,North Carolinians and Blacks in Indiana's Settlement Pattern

Indiana had an unusually sizeable Quaker population by 1850 that formed the state's fifth largest denomination and comprised the fourth largest number of Quakers in the United States. Quaker churches were concentrated in east-central Indiana. Most of the Quakers came from the South, particularly North Carolina. Southern Quakers had freed their slaves by 1800 and were actively opposed to the “peculiar institution,” and many free blacks lived near them. When economic and political conditions in North Carolina became intolerable for the Quakers and blacks, many of them moved to Indiana together. Although some blacks migrated separately and settled different areas, many chose to locate close to the Quakers due to their antislavery and humanitarian philosophy. As a result, there was a close association in Indiana among natives of North Carolina, Quakers and blacks by 1850.