Collecting Material Folklore: Motivations and Methods in the Owen and Hasluck Collections

As contributor to the mistakenly conceptualised concept of “belief legend,” I want to survey the historical antecedents and the circumstances that at a certain stage prompted researchers to identify this category, formerly classified as mythical or demonological legend. This was the time when legend scholars began field-collection, experiencing the profound attachment of narratives to living local folk religion. After decades of meticulous field observation, which has led to the accumulation of a more dependable stock of legendry from diverse national, subcultural, occupational groups, it becomes clear that folk belief is a part of any legend, therefore there is no need to maintain the term “belief legend.” Belief is the stimulator and the purpose of telling any narrative within the larger category of the legend genre; it is also the instigator of the legend dialectic. The current confusion caused by the whimsical application of terms such as “truth,” “rationality,” “belief,” and “believability” in scholarly legend interpretations, should caution us to avoid making biased, outsider's judgements instead of presenting the viewpoint of tellers and audiences.     

IMAGES DES ETATS-UNIS DANS LE ROMAN QUEBECOIS MODERNE (IMAGES OF THE UNITED STATES IN CONTEMPORARY QUEBEC NOVELS)

Although most Quebec novelists are not preoccupied with the United States, the presence of the huge southern neighbour makes itself felt now and again. One is struck by the similarities in the images of the U.S. when it does appear in literature: Quebec novelists seem to see it as a powerful attraction and as a dangerous threat. Three novels, representing three different approaches, illustrate this point: Ringuet's Thirty Acres, Roger Lemelin's The Plouffe Family and Anne Hébert's Kamouraska (other novels are cited where relevant in the original paper).

The attraction of the U.S. is most oftén presented in French-Canadian literature by the theme of escape, frequently for economic reasons. Ringuet's novel explores the reasons for large immigrations southward, and in so doing exposes the myth of the “easy” life in the U.S. versus a “hard” life in the North (cf. Maria Chapdelaine). But the novel shows how misleading this myth can be: once Quebeckers taste the bitterness of economic depression in the U.S. in the 1930's, they begin to look back to the North with the same kind of illusions of economic independence which brought them South.     

Drifting Along or Dropping into Homelessness: A Class Analysis of Responses to Homelessness

Abstract: Prominent assumptions about street homelessness and how it should be addressed originate primarily from middle class domiciled worldviews. This article draws on interviews with 58 street homeless people to develop a typology for explaining different forms of homelessness resulting from differences in class of origin. The concepts of social distance and abjection are used to illustrate how class politics manifests in street homelessness and in responses to this issue. Many of our homeless participants referred to two broad groupings of homeless people who display distinct experiences and cultures in their daily lives on the streets. Drifters are people who do not experience homelessness as a sharp disjuncture from their previously housed life. Street homelessness is a continuation of the hardships of their lower class backgrounds. Droppers are people who have “fallen” on hard times and aspire to return to mainstream middle class lifeworlds. Differentiating between these two groups provides a space for defamiliarizing dominant understandings of, and current generic responses to, homelessness and foregrounds the need for reorienting services to better meet the needs of drifters.     

Material constraints to popular imaginaries: The extractive economy and resource nationalism in Bolivia

Widespread neoliberal-era privatizations in South America's extractive economies rekindled longstanding social movement demands for nationalist control of non-renewable resources and propelled the region's left political turn over the last decade. In Bolivia, where resource extraction has dominated exports since colonial times, social movements employing resource nationalist master frames overturned governments in 1952, 2003, and 2005. In 2005 indigenous leader Evo Morales was elected president promising to direct resource wealth to generate economic development, but the structural constraints created by an extractive economy have made these goals impossible to achieve over the short and medium term. This article suggests that the clash between resource nationalist imaginaries embedded in contentious social movements and the realities of long-term extractive dependent economies not only limits government policy options but also fuels continued social protest.     

Revisiting black medical school extinctions in the Flexner era

Abraham Flexner's 1910 exposé on medical education recommended that only two of the seven extant medical schools for blacks be preserved and that they should train their students to "serve their people humbly" as "sanitarians." Addressing charges of racism, this article traces the roots of the recommendation that blacks serve a limited professional role to the schools themselves and presents evidence that, in endorsing the continuance of Howard's and Meharry's medical programs, Flexner exhibited greater leniency than he had toward comparable schools for white students. Whether his recommendations to eliminate the other five schools were key factors in their extinction is addressed here by examining 1901-30 enrollment patterns. Those patterns suggest that actions of the American Medical Association and state licensing boards, combined with the broader problem of limited premedical educational opportunities for blacks, were more consequential than was the Flexner report both for the extinction of the schools and for the curtailed production of black doctors.     

E. H. Carr,Norman Angell,and Reassessing the Realist–Utopian Debate

While the realist argument presented by E. H. Carr in The Twenty Years’ Crisis has received much attention from scholars, recent scholarship has suggested that traditional interpretations of the work and the debate in which it figured have not accurately reflected the inter-war discourse. In this article, the author provides detail to support these claims through an examination of Carr's landmark work in comparison with prominent ‘utopian’ counterparts, primarily Norman Angell but also others such as Leonard Woolf and Arnold Toynbee. The conclusion of this article calls for increased emphasis on the works of internationalist writers of the inter-war period. It also echoes other scholars in calling for renewed focus on early twentieth-century internationalist thought and a critical reappraisal of Carr's landmark work through the prism of his policy recommendations and the critique he received during the original ‘great debate’.     

De la caída de Tenochtitlán al decaimiento del Make Sicko Seedy de Carlos Fuentes: Ciudades en crisis,mundos por nacer

Carlos Fuentes's 1987 carnivalesque novel, Cristóbal nonato, criticizes Mexico's prehispanic past through a satire of Tenochtitlán-Mexico City in the neoliberal, postnational era. This study consequently juxtaposes criticism, theory, and analysis from both imperial Aztec Mexico and nationalist modern Mexico. While the bulk of this 600-page novel confronts readers with a highly negative (although often risible) view of both Mexicos, it ultimately leads to a happy ending with a didactic twist: If Mexicans will stop abandoning Mexico for the North or other green pastures, and instead stay in Mexico despite its many problems, they can turn things around by their altruism and their activist determination.     

Non-destructive chemical characterization of ceramic sherds from Shipwreck 31CR314 and Brunswick Town, North Carolina

The purpose of this study was to chemically and texturally characterize ceramic oil jar sherds from North Carolina Shipwreck 31CR314 and to explore the utility of environmental scanning electron microscopy/X-ray energy dispersive spectrometry (SEM/EDS) for that purpose. The oil jar sherds, widely dispersed about Shipwreck 31CR314, are morphologically similar to each other, which suggests they could be from a single jar, but with so few joins this could not be concluded with certainty. Therefore, an aim of this study was to investigate whether chemical or textural characterization of the sherds might reveal unique attributes that could distinguish individual jars; results of characterization perhaps could give information on their origin and possibly site formation processes, such as whether environmental forces could have scattered sherds of a single jar during and after sinking of the ship. Previous studies have indicated this shipwreck is likely the remnants of the Queen Anne's Revenge, flagship of the pirate Blackbeard. Sherds from this shipwreck were compared with similar oil jar sherds excavated from a land site, Brunswick Town, North Carolina, to explore the use of composition and texture as hallmarks. The chemical components of the artifacts were determined by SEM/EDS. This method of analysis is valuable for archaeological research because it is rapid and non-destructive to the ceramic artifacts. Both groups of lead-glazed coarse red earthenware sherds were texturally similar except for the glazed sides of all 31CR314 sherds that exhibited small tracks of unique crescent-shaped marks. These marks may be due to manufacturing effects and immersion in seawater, and the marks may serve as hallmarks for individual jars or potentially individual manufacturers. The sherds were generally similar in composition, but the two groups exhibited distinct differences. Brunswick Town sherds consistently contained more phosphate on unglazed sides, an average 1.46 wt.% P₂O₅, and also contained trace elements not detected in the Shipwreck 31CR314 sherds. These distinct differences could be due to different manufacturing origins for Shipwreck 31CR314 and Brunswick Town ceramics but also could reflect their subjection to different environments during use and loss prior to archaeological recovery.