For more than three decades now, a small, dedicated, and vibrant community of folklorists have worked to advance the field of environmental folklore, the relationships between human lifeways and ecology, and the political and economic forces that either sustain or destabilize cultural practice. From Burt Feintuch’s The Conservation of Culture: Folklorists and the Public Sector (1988) and Mary Hufford’s Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage (1992), to the founding of Goucher’s Master’s program in cultural sustainability in 2010, these folklorists have helped usher in a generational shift within our field. They have not only expanded the disciplinary boundaries of our field and demonstrated the inextricable connections between culture, ecology, economics, and politics, but they have also helped expand the scope of public folklore into the realm of advocacy and activism. Although still somewhat outnumbered in the field by those folklorists working with more classic genres (like narrative, material culture, or belief), the significance of this work will only grow in relevance, as climate change invariably impacts all aspects of human existence. The potentially catastrophic impacts of climate change will have profound impacts on our forms of cultural expression, and savvy culture workers can work in ways that at least mitigate the cultural impacts for the communities we work within.
In their recent co-edited volume, Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change, John Holmes McDowell, Katherine Borland, Rebecca Dirksen, and Sue Tuohy bring together folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and cultural anthropologists to consider environmental folklore in an era of climate change. The book emerges from several parallel and interwoven themes that recur in most of the chapters: we perform and transmit culture through interactions with our environments; widespread ecological shift has already had profound impact on these cultural practices; creative cultural response to ecological change can help lessen eco-cultural devastation, and in some cases can even locally heal an exhausted environment.
With an emphasis on theory, the volume is most intended for researchers with interest in environmental folklore and ecomusicology, or for use in graduate seminars. A few chapters (more rooted in ethnographic case studies) may also be suitable for undergraduate classrooms. In addition to an introduction by the editors and an afterword by Eduardo S. Brondizio, the book features ten contributing chapters spanning an impressive geographic and cultural range (fieldwork emerges from more than ten nations on four continents), broken down into three sections: Perspectives on Diverse Environmentalisms; Performing the Sacred; Environmental Attachments. A brief summary of the contributing chapters follows.
In John Holmes McDowell’s “Ecoperformativity: Expressive Culture as Spiritual, Pedagogical, and Activist Resource,” McDowell uses the notion of speech act theory to map out a theory of ecoperformativity, a framework which illustrates how ecological interaction serves as a communicative form of expressive culture. McDowell applies this framework to interpret eco-communicative interactions of Kamënstá and Inga storytellers in Colombia’s Sibundoy Valley, as these stories assert cultural and ecological sovereignty of the region's Indigenous peoples in contested spaces.
Mary Hufford’s “The Witness Trees’ Revolt: Folklore’s Invitation to Narrative Ecology” turns attention to local residents of West Virginia’s southern forests, as local patterns of use are challenged by loggers and environmentalists alike. Looking at these forests as a place of contested social imaginaries, Hufford centers and legitimizes vernacular perceptions of forest, showing how attitudes, values, beliefs, and the ecosystem itself are perpetuated by locals through everyday acts of expressive culture.
In his essay “The Critique of Being: Educating for Diverse Environmentalisms and Sustainable Lives in the Anthropocene,” Rory Turner suggests that traditional Western cultural logics that dichotomize culture and nature (or learned scholar and the folk) are incompatible with the epistemological and ontological shifts we must make as a species to address the climate crisis. Drawing inspiration from a pair of fieldwork experiences with Igbo and Balinese collaborators, Turner looks at the significance of the ethnographic encounter in creating eco-centric ways of living, being, and knowing.
Aaron S. Allen, in his chapter “Diverse Ecomusicologies: Making a Difference with the Environmental Liberal Arts,” Allen explores the tensions of the word sustainability (inclusive of both continuity and change) to consider change as essential to continuation of life on the planet. Concerned about how humanists can produce work that matters, he connects these shifts to emerging changes within ethnomusicology, in looking toward ecomusicology as a way to advance ecocentric thought within the discipline.
In Chie Sakakibara’s comparative ethnography, “Singing for the Whales: Whaling People and Shared Heritage in Arctic Alaska and the Azores,” Sakakibara highlights compulsory cultural change and the maintenance of continuity within two whaling communities half a world apart. In the face of profound cultural, economic, and political shifts, the deep connections to whales remain spiritual, color all aspects of folklife, and serve as the focus of cultural maintenance efforts today.
Rebecca Dirksen’s and Lois Wilcken’s “The Drum and the Seed: A Haitian Odyssey about Environmental Precarity” investigates colonial and capitalist environmental decimation in Haiti and how a collaborative theatre project and work to promote regrowth of the sacred mapou tree work to recenter Haitian Vodou practices and values that restore balance with local ecologies. Whether reforesting with native species or using Vodou lwa to understand ecological crisis, Dirksen and Wilcken demonstrate the value of traditional knowledge in cultivating resilient ecologies and cultures on the ground.
Jeff Todd Titon’s chapter, “An Ecological Approach to Folklife Studies, Expressive Culture, and the Environment,” returns to Appalachia, exploring agrarian notions of husbandry and “right relations” in religious folklife, expressive forms, and land use. Titon chronicles how several stressors (overpopulation, blight, industry, agricultural shift) caused the decline of sustainable farming in northern Appalachia, and how the community today lives in relation with—and cultivated resilience through—the memory of this formerly sustainable way of life.
In her essay “Ecology, Mobility, and Music in Western Mongolia,” Jennifer Post looks at the disruptive impacts of relocation on Kazakh migratory pastoralists to western Mongolia, and how environmental degradation, and economic and socio-political factors, have altered the deep relationships between the Kazakhs and their environment. In turn, these changes radically and rapidly are reflected in folklore and musical traditions, and the processes through which Kazakhs construct identity.
Assefa Tefera Dibaba’s “Ecopoetics of Place: Reclaiming Finfinne, Past and Present” illustrates the dispossession of Finfinne (currently known as Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) from the Oromo people. Chronicling a series of political, cultural, and ecological disasters in Finfinne, Dibaba urges folklorists to engage with the complex social and political challenges of “broken places” such as this one. By doing meaningful, politically and environmentally engaged work, folklore will remain relevant as a discipline and contribute meaningfully in building a better world.
In Mark Pedelty’s “‘The Sound of Freedom’: Military Jet Noise in a Contested Sound Commons,” Pedelty extends the debate over environmentalisms to the soundscape of northwestern Washington state, where military fighters produce noise that is at once disruptive to humans and wildlife. Pedelty examines the contesting factions arguing over the nature of sound within a shared commons, suggesting that even vibrations in the air are ascribed with politicized meaning.
Collectively, the book advances important scholarship on a number of different fronts. The volume’s first essays outline a missing theoretical language for understanding ecoperformativity for the ethnographic disciplines. These theoretical approaches are valuable for researchers of environmental folklore, particularly in places of conflict and change. Further, as individual case studies, each of these essays serves as stand-alone and impactful models in how local environmental perceptions matter, and why they continue to matter in the sustaining of environments, economies, and cultures—particularly in times of environmental, political, and economic crisis. Finally, this volume carries forward in important ways the discourse of cultural conservation and cultural sustainability by putting it into dialogue with the crises that have come to define life in the twenty-first century. Increasingly, humanists must produce scholarship that is responsive to the crises of our times, to continue to remain relevant, and this volume serves as an important call to action.
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[Review length: 1,315 words • Review posted on September 25, 2023]