Browsing by Author "McDowell, John H."

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The Anatomy of Frivolity (On Taking Nonsense Seriously)
(Semiotica, 1982) McDowell, John H.
Thomas Kuhn (1962) portrays scientific enterprise as periodically evolving toward the discovery of the invisible, as the paradigms of normal science are modified to accommodate anomalous empirical observations. The history of folklore studies exhibits an interesting variation on this theme, the periodic enfranchisement of topics previously considered too trivial to merit serious scholarly attention. Folkloristic treatises are laden with gratuitous apologies and other gestures of hesitancy, reflecting the folklorist's anticipation of resistance to what is likely to be perceived as an excursion into the trivial. This rite of deprecation has been played out in a number of arenas, over a period of two centuries offolkloristic inquiry. At the dawn of systematic folkloristics, Bishop Thomas Percy in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) characterizes his materials as 'rude survivals of the past, deserving of a certain amount of attention as illustrating the language, the numbers, the beliefs and customs of bygone days, although as poetry they had no intrinsic value' (quoted in Bluestein 1962). A modern echo of this same attitude can be found in Roger Abrahams's Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Lore ji·om the Streets of Philadelphia (1964). Discussing sound patterning in one of the couplets in his collection, Abrahams throws in the caveat that 'this is not great poetry', but it is nonetheless worthy of some attention (1964: l05).
Animal Categories in Chicano Children's Spooky Stories
(Trickster Press, 1980) McDowell, John H.
The thesis to be advanced in this essay is that two common genres of folk expression, riddle and narrative, carve out distinct reaIms of experience for artistic representation, and that they treat these separate realms in contrastive fashion. Specifically, riddles focus on the familiar domains of experience and render them strange, while spooky stories focus on the strange to render it more familiar. Finally, this differential usage of experience impIies an underIying folk cosmology.
The Ballad of Narcomexico
(Journal of Folklore Research, 2013-08-10) McDowell, John H.
In the first years of the new millennium, Mexico experienced a wave of violence associated with the trafficking of illegal substances, and the deep-seated Mexican ballad tradition called the corrido has served as a chronicle of these events, facilitating a popular discourse couched in the sweet sonorities of Mexican song and bespeaking a heroic vision of history as witnessed at the grass-roots level. Here, in what was first delivered as an address to the American Folklore Society, I seek to get beyond the slick veneer of the narcocorridos, ballads that celebrate and glamorize the trade, to sample a zone of commemorative practice where narcocorridos share a space in the national consciousness with two additional manifestations of the contemporary genre: corridos of trafficking, which tell drug-world stories in a level-headed manner, and corridos of remediation, which seek to ameliorate the devastation wrought upon the Mexican people by the drug wars of the early twentyfirst century.
Beyond Iconicity: Ostension in Kamsá Mythic Narrative
(Journal of the Folklore Institute, 1982) McDowell, John H.
The notion has been much abroad lately, among folklorists and others dealing with narrative materials, that the essence of a narrative is preserved in the printed synopsis of its content. Claude Levi-Strauss, to cite only one prominent example, takes the synopsis of mythological texts as the ultimate empirical grounding, the raw material from which all analysis and interpretation proceeds. To be sure, these synopses are supplemented with ethnographic accounts when convenient, so that the mythologies are not treated in entirely disembodied form. But one part of the ethnographic background is conspicuously absent in Levi-Strauss' writing, namely, details of the performance settings fostering the creation of mythological discourse. This neglect is the result of a scholarly design aimed at revealing "how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact." In such an enterprise, one can readily disregard the rhetorical dimensions of mythological discourse, the musicality of its language, and its affective, artistic qualities, for these are matters that relocate the thrust of inquiry to the plane of situated human intercourse.
Book Review: The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression, and Intersubjectivity by Michael Jackson
(Journal of Anthropological Researc, 2003) McDowell, John H.
Michael Jackson has produced a valuable study of stories and storytelling as these enter into the lives of many different sorts of people-veterans of foreign wars, refugees from wars and genocide, Aboriginal children of the stolen generation in Australia, Kuranko villagers in the north of Sierra Leone, and the general public of his native New Zealand, among others. The subject matter of stories told by this array of humanity varies widely, as would be expected, but there is an underlying theme running throughout this sample, having to do with the appropriation of storytelling as a means of coping with the often disorienting and sometimes numbing character of human experience. At the source of all these stories is a core of raw violence, experienced directly or vicariously, but Jackson presents an ultimately optimistic portrait of storytelling as a path towards redemption.
Chante Luna and the Commemoration of Actual Events
(Western Folklore, 2005) McDowell, John H.
On the first of January in 1891, a train departed Brownsville, Texas, on its way to Point Isabel on the Gulf Coast, with a large shipment of gold and silver. At a point known as Loma Trozada, where the narrow-gauge track passed through a small incline, this train was derailed by a gang of robbers who then locked the passengers in a boxcar and made off with the loot. It became clear that the leader of this gang of Robbers was a Texas-Mexican named Jose Mosqueda, who was eventually brought to justice and sentenced to life in prison.
Coaxing the Corrido: Centering Song in Performance
(Journal of American Folklore, 2010-04-11) McDowell, John H.
Drawing on ballad performances on Mexico's Costa Chica, I seek to isolate and identify a niche in the performance sequence that I refer to as "coaxing the corrido," an interlude during which ballad performers indulge in muted renderings of the next song to assure their control over its words and music. I argue that comparable episodes are most likely present in many or most of the world's performance traditions and that attending closely to them holds the promise of insights into the management of musical performance, the dynamics of artistic collaboration, and native modes of experiencing these art forms.
Coherency and Delight: Dual Canons of Excellence in Informal Narrative
(Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University, 1974) McDowell, John H.
Collaborative Ethnopoetics: The View from the Sibundoy Valley
(Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000) McDowell, John H.
Those of us who transcribe and translate the speech art of indigenous communities in Latin America effect transformations on several fronts: of a spoken source into a written product, of "oral style" into "literary style," of discourse in an isolated or endangered language into discourse in a major world language, ofa culture at the margins to one at the center of world influence and power. In this enterprise we experience the frustrations of all translators, the impossibility of lifting and conveying "signifieds" from one language to another, the necessity of creating "signifying instruments" disth1ct from the original medirnn of signification. But we incur additional obligations in an arena that conjoins politics and aesthetics. The translation of verbal art from the world's indigenous enclaves situates us in a setting ofrecuperation, preservation, even advocacy. We become, whelher we like it or not, defenders of neglected or oppressed peoples and traditions.
Collage of Colors: Processing Place through Fantasy Play
(Children’s Folklore Review, 2018-08-09) McDowell, John H.
In this article, I examine an episode of fantasy play, and a related theatrical production, as arenas for the creative processing of a child’s experience. My five-year-old son, Michael, constructs a microcosm of our field site in Acapulco, Mexico, and animates a drama featuring dinosaurs in mortal conflict. My intention is to explore the ways a child makes sense of place through imaginative play, and, further, to address the role of artistic expression in the child’s growing mastery over his material and social environments.
The Community-Building Mission of Kamsá Ritual Language
(Journal of Folklore Research, 1990) McDowell, John H.
The Kamsa Indians, resident in Colombia's Sibundoy Valley near the headwaters of the Putumayo River, confront the vagaries of human existence (which they define in terms of querulous spirits) through two complementary remedial measures, the blessing and the cure. Each pays homage to the ancestors (the "first people" or "grandfathers of our grandfathers"), finding in the ancestral period a formative moment in cosmic time, when the first people interacted directly with the celestial deities, when the spirits of plants and animals could take human form and speak as humans, when people could readily assume the form of animals, and when Our Lord and the saints and culture heroes walked the earth pronouncing judgments and setting precedents for all time. Blessing and cure hark back to this primordial epoch with its constitutive spiritual power as the key to health, happiness, and success in the modern world (see McDowell 1989).
Corridos of 9/11: Mexican Ballads as Commemorative Practice
(Routledge, 2007) McDowell, John H.
In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the makers of Mexican ballads known as corridos created a rich body of narrative songs commemorating and commenting on these events. In this essay, I examine these “9/11 corridos” and the dynamics of their cultural production in a zone of what I term “commemorative practice,” taking note of stylistic and functional features that link this specific corpus to the larger corrido tradition, and ascertaining the range of attitudes they express toward the events of 9/11 themselves. I propose that we regard the 9/11 corridos as mediated ballads of mass communication, performed on a global stage and addressing issues of international consequence, a far journey from their point of origin as local ballads responding to matters of primarily local and regional interest.
Cultural Evolution and the Singing, Dancing Throng: An Objective Approach to Intellectual History
(Folklore Annual, 1973) McDowell, John H.
Intellectual history tends to distort and discredit the material upon which it practices. The insistence on orderly presentation inevitably organizes the thinking of whatever epoch under consideration into schools. These are, if possible, to be seen as polar opposites of one another. The oversimplification involved in the shuffling of diverse thinkers into a few imaginary "schools" must of necessity occasion great misrepresentation.
Customizing Myth: The Personal in the Public
(Indiana University Press, 2011) McDowell, John H.
On the surface of the matter, it would seem that mythic discourse is a quintessential form of what Basil Bernstein terms “public language,” that is, “a language which continuously signals the normative arrangements of the group rather than individuates experiences of its members” (1960:181). This assumption is amply reinforced by the important community work attributed to myth in the many definitions and roles devised for it by scholars over the centuries. Any folklorist could assemble a list of impressive public or communal duties assigned to myth in the last century or two, a list that might include (among other entries) Max Müller’s ideas about “mythopoeic thought,” G. L. Gomme’s tidy characterization of myth as “the science of a pre-scientific age,” Bronislaw Malinowski’s thesis that myth establishes a charter for social institutions, and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s notion that “myths operate in men’s minds without their being aware of the fact” (1969:12). Whatever formulation is chosen, we find ourselves in a discourse that would seem to largely exclude the personal in favor of the impersonal, the communal, and the collective. Practical facts conducive to personalization of the narrative, such as the age of the storyteller, the composition of the audience, the occasion for the storytelling event, are a matter of indifference in these frames of reference.
Discourse Authority in the Sibundoy Valley
(Opción, 1995) McDowell, John H.
There has been much speculation that verbal instrurrients of cosmology are less important in the Andes than in other settings. This paper identifies a central Andean cosmological principie, captured in various forms of the Quechua verbal root camay, which involves "instilling life force in some physical entity". In the ceremonial and ritual speech, and the mythic narratives, of the Sibundoy pebple of Andean Colombia, accomplished speakers use traditional speech forms linked to the example of the ancestors to claim authority for their speech. Two methods of accessing the ancestors are prevalent: referencing entails atrributing speech to ancestral prototypes, while sampling entails the invocation of ancestral presence. In view of the prominente of Andean speech that is camasca, laden with cosmic resonance, this paper argues for a revision of the thesis that verbal instruments are of secondary importance in Andean societies.
Exemplary Ancestors and Pernicious Spirits: Sibundoy Concepts of Culture Evolution
(Indiana University Press, 1992) McDowell, John H.
FOLK F736 Ethnopoetics
(2006) McDowell, John H.
This syllabus was used in spring 2006 in a graduate seminar in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University. As with all Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology syllabi made available in IUScholarWorks, the course instructor who created the syllabi retains all relevant rights to it as a creative work.
Folklore and Sociolinguistics
(Humanities, 2018-01-22) McDowell, John H.
Folklore and sociolinguistics exist in a symbiotic relationship; more than that, at points—in the ethnography of communication and in ethnopoetics, for example—they overlap and become indistinguishable. As part of a reaction to the formal rigor and social detachment of Chomsky’s theoretical linguistics, sociolinguistics emerges in the mid-twentieth century to assess the role of language in social life. Folklorists join the cause and bring to it a commitment to in-depth ethnography and a longstanding engagement with artistic communication. In this essay, I trace key phases in the development of this interdisciplinary movement, revolutionary in its reorientation of language study to the messy but fascinating realm of speech usage. I offer the concept of performative efficacy, the notion that expressive culture performances have the capacity to shape attitude and action and thereby transform perceived realities, as a means of capturing the continuing promise of a sociolinguistically informed folkloristics.
Folklore as Commemorative Discourse
(The Journal of American Folklore, 1992) McDowell, John H.
This article inspects a ballad performance to assess the relationship beween poetic and prose narrative, between the language of the song and the language that surrounds it in the singing event. Contrasting discourse types, the informative and the commemorative, are identified and discussed. Commemorative utterance exhibits regularized acoustic textures in presenting what are taken for immanent truths. Such discourse possesses remarkable efficacy, due in part to the impact of measured and allusive speech on the central nervous system, and to the exploitation of these effects in appropriately orchestrated social settings.
From Expressive Language to Mythemes: Meaning in Mythic Narratives
(Indiana University Press, 2002) McDowell, John H.
It is no secret that there are many ways of thinking about myth, or that myths have multiple layers and levels of meanmg. These certainties provoke a number of uncertainties when we attempt to define myth or interpret its meaning. In this essay I will have relatively little to say about the problem of defining myth, but will rather occupy myself which interpretive strategies rooted in the study of language. If we can agree that myth can or must be a story, and that stories are necessarily composed of narrative discourse, then we are well on the way toward recognizing the importance of language as one parameter for assessing the meaning of myth. But our quest will deliver us into some curious paradoxes, when we learn that scholarly programs originating in the study of language can arrive at very different places, and that the very notion of story may be deleted altogether from the enterprise.