Humble theory : folklore's grasp on social life / Dorothy Noyes.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Noyes, Dorothy, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Folklore--Philosophy.

Folklore.

Folklore--Study and teaching.

Ethnology--Philosophy.

Ethnology.

Ethnology--Study and teaching.

Physical Description:

vii, 459 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, [2016]

Summary:

Celebrated Folklorist Dorothy Noyes offers an unforgettable glimpse of her craft and the many ways it matters. Folklore is the dirty linen of modernity, carrying the traces of working bodies and the worlds they live in. If is necessary but embarrassing, not easily blanched and made respectable for public view, although sometimes this display is deemed useful. The place of folklore studies among modern academic disciplines has accordingly been marginal and precarious, yet folklore studies are foundational and persistent. Long engaged with all that escapes the gaze of grand theory and grand narratives, folklorists have followed the lead of the people whose practices they study. They attend to local economies of meaning; they examine the challenge of making room for maneuver within circumstances one does not control. Incisive and wide ranging, the fifteen essays in this book chronicle the "humble theory" of both folk and folklorist as interacting perspectives on social life in the modern Western world. Book jacket.

Contents:

Humble theory

Group

The social base of folklore

Tradition : three traditions

Aesthetic is the opposite of anaesthetic : on tradition and attention

Voice in the provinces : submission, recognition, and the birth of heritage in lower Languedoc

The work of redemption : folk voice in the myth of industrial development

Festival pasts and futures in Catalonia

Hardscrabble academies : toward a social economy of vernacular invention

Cultural warming? : Brazil in Berlin

Fairy-tale economics : scarcity, risk, choice

On sociocultural categories

The judgment of Solomon : global protections for tradition and the problem of community ownership

Heritage, legacy, zombie : how to bury the undead past

Compromised concepts in rising waters : making the folk resilient.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Noyes, Dorothy, author. Humble theory.

ISBN:

9780253022912

0253022916

9780253023148

0253023149

OCLC:

953617653