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We’ve been completing work on the onsite residency and post-residency sections of the course site, so please thumb through these pages and sub-pages in order to get a sense of what’s next in the field school. We’ll have plenty of time while we are all in Beijing to discuss the details for assignments associated with these upcoming phases, but do formulate any questions and bring them along!
This photo essay link was passed along to us by Doug some time back, but I’ve only just remembered it. The photos depict Chinese copy artists: people who make their living by copying Western art paintings. A snippet of the blurb accompanying the photos reads:
China produces 70 percent of copies of famous masterpieces for export to North America and Europe. The fastest copy artists chug out 30 paintings a day. In his series Real Fake Art, photographer Michael Wolf took portraits of professional artisans next to the Lichtensteins, the Van Goghs and the many disproportionately giant Mona Lisas mass produced in this fascinating, multimillion industry, timeless classics and contemporary art blockbusters alike.
As we move out of the orientation phase and into the fieldwork phase of our field school, we can start applying the many questions and thoughts you all have generated to examples such as the copy artists. What kinds of tensions surrounding authenticity, creativity, or artistic practice emerge with this example? If ‘copying’ is a component of traditional artistic training (as it is in some Chinese visual arts), then how might we interpret the practice/industry of producing copies of prominent Western artists?
A live twitter feed associated with the field school has been added to the ChinaVine Connections page. When tweeting please include @ChinaVine as well as our hashtag #CVFS. This will allow you tweets to show up on both the ChinaVine twitter feed and the field school feed.
Robert Baron references Robert Kurin’s work as a culture broker in his assigned article for the field school. This concept is not unique to the field of folklore. Michael Michie’s “The Role of Culture Brokers in Intercultural Science Education” is an excellent personal and theoretical consideration of the concept. The history of usage of the term cultural broker is discussed along with its application to a variety of fields. The article includes a schematic of the theory as applied to disability services that can be useful to imagining how the model might be applied to our upcoming field work.
In approaching my contribution to this assignment, I started thinking about “my family” in two ways: the family setting I grew up in (my parents and siblings), and the family I have now (my wife and kids). These are not mutually exclusive, but do represent a shift between two kinds of domestic contexts or definitions of “family.” That is, my folks and sisters have become “extended” family to my kids, and my extended family has grown via my in-laws. As such, I realized that I grew up thinking about family as a quite small unit that included: parents, sisters, grandparents. Aunts, uncles, cousins—these were abstractions that did not necessarily enter our representations of ourselves, photographically or otherwise.
This photo represents an updated version of a scene that I experienced every year of my life on Christmas morning; I and my sisters (as they were added the family) would stand in a particular hallway in my parent’s house, with the tree and packages just out of our sight. My dad took a photo of us, and then we ran out into the living room to begin tearing through wrapping paper and such. In this shot, however, we are in my house, where my wife and I successfully hosted the winter holidays for the first time ever (my dad is reluctant to let go of family traditions…which in this case involves all of his “kids” being in his house during Christmas!). Here he snaps a photo of his three grandchildren (my kids are the two girls sitting down) in the equivalent of the hallway from my youth (unfortunately I do not have access to one of these historical snaps to post here…).
This is my version of the same photo:
My dad always took the photos in our family, and I guess I’ve inherited that “tradition” of domestic documentation in many ways. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my mother handle a camera (comfortably, at least), and while my wife takes photos (she’s a folklorist, after all) I definitely dominate the pictorial presentation of our crew (though the balance is shifting with the advent of a dual-iPhone house). I’ve been shooting photos since high-school, and studied photography in college as well as afterwards. Being an ethnographer, the camera has been an important part of my field research over the years, and I see it as being seamlessly part of my non-ethnographic life as well. What’s interesting about all of this in light of family and representation is the ways in which the shift to digital has impacted the way we look at our photos. The stuffed shoebox or mended album has given way to the iPad, Flickr, digital frame (though I’ve never really understood these…), or the phone. My kids can access photos in such different ways than I could, and there is a nostalgia (for me, at least) connected to digging into the drawer of photo albums at my parents house that must be quite distinct from that my kids have flicking through images of them and their lives on an iPad.
So, back to the Christmas photo. It’s become iconic in my family, to the point that we did try to recreate it this year even though Christmas happened in a spot other than the house I grew up in—the site of 98% of these images in my family’s history (there were two or three years we did not celebrate Christmas at my folks’ house…). My sisters and I would consistently make fun of my dad as he lined us up for the photo (this became rampant as we all moved into college-age, young adulthood), and we joke about it to this day. No special symbols in the photos beyond pajamas and, eventually, coffee cups. Funny faces or smirks would appear sometimes, though discouraged by pops. As such, the photo-as-icon is symbolic of itself and of the family gathering around the holidays. We’ve often talked about scanning all of these (37 years worth!) for my dad as a gift one year, which would be quite fascinating to look at, and would embed a historical value in the tradition by gathering them all in one place, I suppose. Maybe this year is the year for that…
I don’t recall a lot of photos like this from my youth, but I like to take them in order to document big family meals. This is from the same Christmas discussed above, and represents a food tradition rather than a particular recipe. It’s a tradition that my wife and I have developed as our own over the past several years, and involves building a Christmas Day dinner from a fancy food magazine. While out shopping or enjoying that brief respite between the end of fall term and the start of holiday chaos, we grad a seasonal food magazine and choose several recipes to try out. In this way, we end up making different dishes every year, based on whatever the food writers and holiday consultants have determined is “it” that year. We have fun pushing beyond our culinary comfort zone (we both love to cook and try out different things, so this is not as dramatic as it sounds…), and fun sharing our experiments with family and friends. It’s a young tradition at this point, but one that I look forward to and that I hope continues to evolve as our kids become more of a presence in the kitchen!
I think the most important thing I took away from reading these three articles was the idea of framing and how that will be important for our time in China. After reading the three articles, I came up with a number of questions that I will keep in mind during our residency in China.
Questions for Hufford:
Questions for Pocius:
Questions for Baron:
Mary Hufford’s article on the study of expressive culture asserts that we cannot reflect on the flow of events that we are involved in while we are trying to be observers. We can only reflect on events which have occurred in the past. Contextualism requires us to “shift from absorption in a conjured world to abstract reflection upon it.” (532) This is true to the extent that events occurring in the past allow us the opportunity to examine them closely in a place of relative quiet and outside of the event we witnessed. Recording an event or taking field notes and then reflecting upon them at a later time allows for the analysis of notes to reach the individual researchers conclusions. I am thinking specifically of videorecordings where the fieldworker can capture the event and then closely examine it for detail at a later date. However, with the size and abundance of current technology that can capture good footage on portable materials like a cell phone how would fieldwork benefit from sharing the material examined with the people being recorded in the moment it is being recorded? What would the benefits be of examining material while we are in the “conjured world” since this would this allow for the input of the people practicing the behavior being captured in the setting it is being captured in?
Hufford notes the importance that folk practices have in creating identity, which must be situated in people, places and events as well as historical discourse. She notes the importance that historical discourse has in constructing a social world. (538) The larger framework means that individual practice is not only important for the individual but also for a sense of understanding a larger social sphere around the individual. Since this is my first time doing fieldwork from an etic perspective I am thinking about how the framework around an individual’s practice would best be constructed. The individual creating the work will have their own understanding of how their work fits into a historical perspective and the community around the individual will also have an understanding of the historical importance of the artisan’s work which might differ from the artisan’s perspective. I am wondering to what extent we should incorporate each of these perspectives.
Robert Baron’s article calls attention to several problematic elements of the discourse about public folklore and the presentation of folk artists. He states that public folklorists engage in a dialogue with the communities they represent in order to accurately frame that communities practices. (64) He suggests the evolution of this process might lead to the role of the folklorist being diminished as self-determination in a community is enhanced. The role of the folklorist could be interpreted to take the behaviour of a community and present it in a way which is accessible to outside viewers. However Baron also notes, when he sites van Buren, that greater agency might be reserved for some members of the community and not others when they are interacting with folklorists. This speaks to the question of who gets to represent heritage and tradition to people outside of the practicing community. Baron states that objectification can either be good or bad based on “whether the relationship is morally correct, occurs in a context of mutual respect, and allows for the agency of those who we represent.” (86) I think it is very important to think of who is speaking for the community. When we are doing fieldwork how can we be careful to include the voices of those who might not usually be able to speak for themselves and also respect the values of the community we are working with? The lessening of the folklorist’s role might be occurring as more communities are offered opportunities to speak for themselves, but there are still voices that need to be considered and drawn out of many communities. What methods can we use to advocate for this in the groups we are working with?
Baron suggests the term objectification must be viewed differently than it is viewed is discussions about media and feminism. He suggests that communities might be objectified but they can struggle to present their traditions on their own terms by advocating for their own agency. Even when communities are confronted with hegemonic practices they will still have methods for dealing with these practices. Baron also states “On stage, traditional artists are performing in a special space that serves to validate and legitimate their art.” (72) Are there ways to present folk art and folk music in ways that are more in line with the traditions of the specific performers and artisan’s that rely on the systems of valuation within those communities to legitimate the practice? Validation does not always have to occur through the definitions of success used in Western models, although they can assist artists in gaining visibility in certain forums.
Pocius states the goal of studying art from a folkloristics perspective is to “construct as accurately as possible the categories of art of those we study and to determine how art is assessed by that culture.” (414) For instance is the “best” art something ordinary or something that expresses the exceptional skills of the individual artist? As Pocius mentions this can lead to attempts to analyze art from a culturally relativistic perspective which can be problematic. When we are thinking about the material objects we will be analyzing in our fieldwork our discussion can be informed by the dialogue between art and craft in the contemporary American art scene. The resurgence of certain crafts (weaving, knitting and fiber arts to mention a few) and the dialogue between these crafts and art forms (such as painting, sculpture etc.) has brought this dialogue to the forefront of discussions about contemporary art. What is the boundary between art and craft? As this boundary becomes blurred in some ways (commercially) and more distinct in others (the dialogue about what is art and what is craft conceptually) what direct effects is this having on the practitioners of certain crafts? I would be interested to incorporate their perspective on how the artisan’s work fits into the market for craft and for art.
Pocius mentions that art is situated in a particular way based on the group being studied. Is it considered “esoteric, limited or collective” (425) within the group being analyzed. A group arrives at a certain consensus and the individual artist manages the dialogue about this consensus in their artwork. So is artwork some expression of the individual, which should be understood only as a process this individual engages in, or is it reflective of a standard of cultural norms within a community. (426) Does the artisan view their role within the community as changed as the role of traditional crafts changes within specific society?
I read the article “Art” in Journal of American Folklore by Gerald Pocius. I wasn’t exactly clear about the guidelines of the homework so I decided to write two questions I would like to ask the artists using the ideas of this article.
1. “The term art often is subtly associated with class, or money, or a particular historical period, and perhaps with categories of writing, performances, or objects. Such popular stereotypes mean that the concept of art for the general public is frequently influenced by deep-seated cultural attitudes” (413). How has the artists’ artworks influenced their lives? How did they start out designing and creating what they are making? Each persons sees and interprets art differently. How has their culture, family, and how they were brought up influenced their perception of art?
2. This next question refers to basically the whole article. “…does an actual category of art exist in every culture? Is the concept of art alien to many people of the world? What exactly is art?” (414)… “…no matter what type of questions we raise, we might think about our concern with art under three different emphases: art as product, art as process, and art as behavior” (418). What do the artists consider as art? As stated in this article, everyone sees art differently. Since we will be meeting many different artists with different talents and artwork, I want to know what they consider as art? Do they have a stronger or more lenient opinion towards what art is?
Part 1:
My history and knowledge of family is relatively fractured with big chunks missing. I have an extremely small family tree that has basically made it’s own history in the past generation, discarding tradition and blazing it’s own trail rather than preserving artifacts or a comprehensible storyline. I think a lot of this has to do with how early many of my relatives have passed away. I had very little interaction with anybody down my family line further than my parents. Even my grandparents were relatively removed from my life as a child, and all of them had died by the time I was twelve. Both of my parents were kind of on their own and very independent from their parents. As a result I feel that I’ve never really experienced an authentic passing down of cultural tradition. My family usually remembers particular people, places and events mainly through pictures. Oftentimes these pictures represent ancestors whom we know very little about. Despite the lack of background associated with these pictures, it still feels good to have that proof that you came from something with a defined culture that has culminated with you. Apart from pictures, my parents usually use word of mouth to remember things. The dinner table is where these stories usually come out. I remember watching the news during dinnertime and listening to my parents relate current events to the events of their past, highlighting differences and similarities and letting me give my own input. There aren’t very many objects with stories related to them that have circulated within my family. The one I can think of is an old sword from the civil war that has been passed down through my father’s side, but we don’t even know how it came into our older relatives’ possession and how it was used. Many of the objects with stories related to them have only entered our familial sphere in the past two generations. One object that comes to mind is a photograph of a sculpture made by an old family friend and teacher of my parents when they were in college named Bruce Rod. He also mentored me during my final year of high school. He died of lung cancer in 2008 and left a fair amount of his artwork to my parents. Bruce was a great person and very important to my parents from a very young age. I realize that the photograph of his doesn’t quite carry the same historical and cultural impact of an object that has been passed down from generation to generation, but it is nonetheless a reminder of the type of person he was and the things he created, as well as the influence he had on my life and ideas about art. One of the few familial oriented objects that we have is an old letter written by some of my relatives concerning the selling of a pig from the 1600’s. My family uses photos a lot to remember things. My father is a professional photographer, and therefore we have thousands of photos boxed up in the storage area of my parents’ apartment in Portland. He is the primary photo taker, and takes care and consolidates almost all of them. Every once in a while he will take a huge chunk of them, scan them and archive them digitally on his computer. A good deal of them are physical photos, but at this point I believe the majority of them are stored on a hard drive or on CDs. The oldest photos we have are a few of my great grandparents on my father’s side from the early 1900’s and a picture of my great great grandparents on my mother’s side from the late 1800’s. We usually look at these photographs on holidays when all of us are together in one place. Christmas time is usually the primary holiday that we break out the photos because we keep a lot of them in the same boxes we keep the Christmas ornaments and decorations.
Part 2:
A Cherry Pie Baked By My Father
I chose this picture more as a symbolic reference to this idea of developing your own culture. It is a picture that my father took of a cherry pie that he made about 3 days ago. I actually hate pie, and the only kind I’ll eat is pecan pie. However, some of my earliest memories of my father are of him in the kitchen baking cherry pie, which is his favorite fruit, and flavor concerning candy. Despite my dislike for pie, it’s become something that has kind of defined my family. My parents are known for making great pies for potlucks and gatherings. There isn’t a singular story that I can remember relating to my father’s cherry pies, but I can recall numerous occasions during an annual 4th of July neighborhood gathering in which I was told by almost everybody that it was delicious. I find it interesting that something I don’t like the taste of evokes fond memories of everything from Fall and Winter holidays to school-free, warm summer days in my old neighborhood in Eugene. I think that the cherry pie is a perfect representation of my family’s culture because my parents have essentially created their own culture within their own generation, being largely independent from a very young age. There is a popular saying, “As American as cherry pie” that perfectly sums this up. The picture is a great representation of the cultural attitude that America is a country that encourages independence and living your life any way you want, which I believe my parents are an excellent example of.
Part 3:
If the last section was any indicator, food has been and is a very important part of my family. The main staples of foods passed down through my family are principally Scandinavian and German, although my dad really likes to experiment with everything from Italian to Asian. The distinctive foods that my grandparents and great grandparents ate were extremely Scandinavian. Lutefisk was a favorite of my ancestors. It is a Nordic food, gelatinous in texture that consists of aged stockfish that is salted and placed in lye. I’ve never had any, but I can say that it smells absolutely terrible, which is why I’ve never partaken. My mother said that coffee has always been an integral part to my ancestral diet, which is interesting because it’s one of the things that I cannot stand. As far as Scandinavian foods go, butter and tuna casseroles have always been a family favorite. In my experience, my father’s side of the family has always been dominated by my grandmother’s cooking sensibilities, which consisted of what she always referred to as American/Southern. She would cook pies, pulled pork sandwiches, barbecue, collard greens, cornbread and all sorts of what many would refer to as Southern comfort food. One of the things that my aunt just revealed to me was that my grandmother loved to make cucumber sandwiches with cream cheese. Over the past year this has become one of my favorite meals and I eat one almost every day for lunch. Strangely enough, I didn’t know that it was a staple of my grandmother’s diet until this assignment!
A favorite family recipe that I absolutely love and is attached to a lot of great memories with my loved ones is my grandmother’s silver dollar pancake recipe.
Here’s the recipe:
1½ c. white flour
3 Tbsp. sugar
1½ tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. salt
1½ c. milk (we use skim)
3 Tbsp. butter, melted
2 large eggs, beaten
Heat a large non-stick skillet over medium heat with a small pat of butter.
With a whisk, combine all ingredients in a large bowl, mixing until they are just combined. (If batter seems too thick, add cold water by the tablespoonful until it is corrected.)
Drop batter onto the pan in small circles (about 2-3 inches across), and cook until the tops start to bubble. Then flip and cook another couple of minutes, until the bottom is browned. Take the pan off the heat in between batches, adding a new small pat of butter each time. Serve immediately.
This particular recipe is one of my favorites because it always brings everybody in my family together. Family gatherings usually consist of my, my mom and dad and my aunt. We have an extremely small, but close-knit family and when it comes to cooking the pancakes, we all contribute in some way. We usually have the silver dollar pancakes on a Sunday or a holiday, usually a time when we’re prepared to lay around the house and just enjoy each other’s company and relax. My mom always gets all of the ingredients out of the cupboards and measures them out for my father who begins to mix and prepare them. My aunt usually prepares bacon and washes either grapes or apples to be put on the side. My role is almost always setting the table and helping to clean up after we eat. While the pancakes are being prepared, my family members usually bustle around the kitchen trying not to get in the way of each other. I never really have to do anything until it’s time to eat, so I kind of just sit at the table and listen to my parents argue about who does what. It’s unpleasant but enjoyable at the same time to hear them bickering because they always do it and it has become a kind of ritual associated with the pancakes, or any other type of cooking that they participate in together. Another thing that really sticks in my mind about the pancake preparation is that the radio is always on in the kitchen, usually tuned to NPR or playing some sort of blues or jazz. There’s something oddly relaxing about the radio playing lazily over the smell of the bacon and gentle hiss of the cooking pancakes as they are dropped onto the griddle.
I believe that a good meal consists of a collaborative effort between all those involved. I enjoy being a participant in the creation of the meal and being able to see exactly how it is made. A good deal of this enjoyment also comes from observing my parents cook and how much care they put into it. Knowing that this is something that they are preparing for me to eat and enjoy makes the meal that much better. I don’t care much for dainty serving of meals. I like to have a big portion of food plopped down on the plate, nothing skimpy or over elaborate, just something that looks substantial and good.
Part 4:
If I were to make a documentary concerning the information above I’d choose to focus more on my immediate family and cultural traditions because that’s what I’m most comfortable with and most familiar with. I wouldn’t totally neglect my heritage further back in the past, but I’d certainly be more inclined to focus on the traditions that have come into existence within my family within my parents’ generation.
The documentary would most likely focus on how my parents broke away from many of their traditions and developed their own unique ones. I would want to really emphasize the fact that they grew up and shaped their lives as independent people from a very early age and essentially let the culture around them form who they are today. At the same time I would also highlight the aspects of their primarily European traditions that they chose to keep, consciously or otherwise.
I have an extremely small family, so the characters in the documentary would have to be limited to my parents and possibly my aunt. Other than that I don’t really have any relatives older than 64. I would want a good amount of interview footage featuring my father concerning cultural foods within our family. I suppose if I wanted to include some sort of scholarly source I could feature a historian at the University of Oregon or elsewhere that specializes in Scandinavian and German culture to confirm whether the traditions carried through my family align with the documented cultural norms. The characters would all be the people I would interview on camera. Other characters that I would not include in interviews would consist of my grandmother, Gladys, since she is the only grandparent that I have any memory of, and I have a better idea of her history and background through my aunt and father.
I would love to make a documentary highlighting cultural traditions within my family primarily through food. It figures very heavily into my life and I have countless memories of traditional meals from my father’s side of the family to dip into. I believe that making a documentary exploring my familial values and tradition would yield the most informational value and be the most enjoyable to make. Therefore the activities featured in the documentary would include the preparing of a variety of traditional dishes by my father that were introduced to him by my grandmother. Interviews would accompany these activities that would explain how he learned these recipes and any changes he may have made to them that deviate from his mother’s recipes. I’d definitely want to capture the atmosphere created during the cooking of these foods as there is often a lot of dialogue exchanged between my mother and father while they are preparing the food. I think this would be interesting in showing the relationship between my mother and father and show the intertwining of their unique cultural traditions to create brand new ones that have been instilled in me. Keeping the aspect in mind that I am the result of this cultural mixing, I think it would be appropriate to have me as the narrator. I’d want to include narration as it may be kind of confusing showing footage and images sans informational value.
I’d try to stray away from traditional music in my documentary as neither my parents or I really know how strong my ancestors’ musical interests were. I think it would be much more appropriate to include a soundtrack that applied to my strongest sonic memories of my parents, which is miles away from what my older relatives’ (granparents’) tastes. Therefore I would include the music that I’d hear being played at Christmas time and holidays, during morning breakfasts and during dinner and in the car. My father pretty much dominates the record player whenever music is on, which usually means a lot of Blues, Jazz and Soul. Also, it isn’t necessarily music, but I was forced to listen to A LOT of public radio growing up, and I think this would be a great thing to include as a kind of ambient noise at certain points throughout the film.
As far as photos or historic video footage go, I think that photos would be a must for my documentary. My family has a goldmine of old photos from the late 18th and early 19th centuries of my ancestors and it would be a shame not to use them, even if we don’t know the stories behind many of them. I would also try to use historical footage of major global events that may have been relevant to my ancestors just to provide a little background and give a better idea of the passage of time in relation to them. This may include footage from major wars, the civil rights movement ect.
For at least four generations, dogs have been important to my family. Both sets of my great-grandparents on my mother’s side raised sheep and cattle near High Hill, Ohio and had working dogs. When my mother’s parents moved into Zanesville, Ohio from the “country” in the first decade of the 20th century dogs became pets.
My father’s family were city dwellers. For them dogs were always pets. The snap shots below are of my dad, known to his friends as “Hank.” They were probably taken in the early 1930s by a friend or family member with my dad’s folding bellows camera.The airedale was my dad’s dog. The other dog is unknown to me.
From the time I was nine or ten there was a family dog. However, knowing the care and companionship I know a dog needs, I wasn’t able to bring one into my home until I moved to Eugene. Around 1989 a golden retriever named Harvey joined my household. Here he is as a pup with my son Brendan and my daughter Lydia.
Rufus, the chocolate lab, is our current family dog. I once suggested to him that he consider being a working dog by fetching the newspaper for me in the morning. He did that for about a week and then decided it was not for him. Rufus has taught me that dog’s are able to experience their fullest potential when allowed to have a say in decisions.
Its risky to place this cake so close to Rufus. He has been known to help himself from time to time.
My partner Linda and I, being suburban children of the 1950s, grew up on a lot of commercially packaged foods. Our mothers had the primary responsibility of meal preparation in both of our homes. Both worked professionally and felt liberated by the availability of commercially canned and frozen food. During this period the consumption of sugar also increased to just over one hundred pounds per capita by 1972.
When Linda and I started living together in 1975 the “natural foods” movement was in its early stages in the US and we began collecting cookbooks associated with that movement such as Diet for a Small Planet and The Moosewood Cookbook. When are son Brendan was born in 1982 the following Cran-apple Walnut Cake from the Moosewood Cookbook was his birthday cake in 1983. It has remained a family favorite since that time.
Cran-Apple Walnut Cake
9 x 13 cake pan well greased
1 3/4 cup light brown sugar, 1/2 cup vegetable oil, 2 cups flour (can use 1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour), 1tsp baking soda, 1/2 tsp nutmeg, 1 tsp cinnamon, 1 tsp salt, 2 eggs, 2 cups sliced apples, 1 tsp vanilla, 1/2 cup walnut pieces, 1/2 # fresh whole cranberries.
Cream oil and sugar. Add eggs and vanilla and beat well. Sift flour and dry ingredients again. Add first mixture and stir. Combine and stir in apples, cranberries, and walnuts.
Bake at 350 degrees for 45-50 minutes
If a birthday add the appropriate number of candles.
