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Ethnic identity in Yucatán can best be understood within the context of regional politics and the promulgation of a regional folk culture. While Yucatecan communities contain several named groups-mayero, catrin, blanco, ts’ul-and their share of ethnic enmities, members of these groups are also always "mestizos" or "Yucatecos," a regional identity that is fostered through poetry, dance, and humor. In exploring this phenomenon, I focus on the jarana, a popular folk dance that is thought to epitomize the unity of Maya and Hispanic culture and has become a familiar feature in political campaigns and tourist venues, as well as in the perennial village fiesta. While in theory the jarana is open to all residents, in practice it has become a spectacle in which well-to-do Yucatecans don the traditional folk costume and re-present themselves as cultivated mestizos, the first among equals.

The transformation of local culture into local color at the hands of the tourism industry is a global phenomenon. Tourist guidebooks, as markers of tourist "sights," play a major role in this process, and thereby help to construct the tourist gaze and the tourist experi- ence itself. In New Orleans, guidebooks from the Federal Writers' Project of the 1930s to commercial publications of the 1990s have included the Spiritual churches as local color. The descriptions of the churches in the guidebooks emphasize their link to Louisi- ana folk culture, especially voodoo. What is ignored is the complexity of the religion and the extent to which the churches' beliefs, rituals, and organization resemble mainstream Christian denominations. The perpetuation of this image of the Spiritual churches in the guidebooks is necessary, however, because markers have to point somewhere in their de- scriptions of Voodoo as a part of the local culture. A Short History of Tourist Guidebooks AMONG TOURIST DESTINATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES, Louisiana has long been a favorite. While the state as a whole has unique attractions, New Orleans has been the drawing card. Visitors stroll the streets of the French Quarter and Garden District, dine in Cre- ole restaurants, listen to traditional jazz, ride on streetcars along St. Charles Avenue, and visit the tomb of the area's most famous 19th-century voodoo practitioner, Marie Laveau. These are among the city's most popular attractions and constitute the core of the typical tourist experience. In contrast, city residents have access to places and events that can be described as the "backstage" (Goffman 1959). This is the local culture that visitors seldom see but sometimes witness as staged performances or read about in magazines and tourist literature. Among the backstage events in New Orleans, un- doubtedly the best known are the second-line parades organized by a variety of African American social clubs and benevolent societies. 1 In a recent analysis of second-line pa- rades as local culture, Helen Regis describes them as celebratory occasions that "trans- form urban space" creating an "alternative social order that private clubs actualize by 'taking it to the streets' in those very neighborhoods ordinarily dominated by the quotidian

The history of folklore scholarship has come under increasing scrutiny in terms of cultural representations of the folk, but the role of folk belief in the construction of the folk has not been thoroughly examined. An investigation into American folklore scholarship of the last 100 years reveals that folk belief has been used to justify both romantic images of the folk as wise and natural and scientific rationalistic images of the folk as pathological, with complex combinations of the two extremes. More recently, reflexive ethnography and cultural politics have offered ways of escaping the restrictions of these older paradigms in folk belief studies, although problems still remain.

Art historical commentary on work of South Asia, India in particular, has frequently focused on the temples and stupas of the region, or in some cases on cave work and other such sites. There is, however, a remarkable tradition of Indian miniature painting (many of these works being only inches or so on a side), in both the Hindu and Muslim traditions, that dates back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In perhaps an excess of zeal, the commentary on these works employs an even more pronounced Eurocentrism than is found in much of the critical work on other Indian art: the

While Mules and Men seems (and was, in fact, read by most of her contemporary reviewers as) a straightforward depiction of the humor and "exoticism" of African American folk culture, Zora Neale Hurston carefully arranged her folktales and meticulously delineated the contexts in which they were narrated to reveal complex relationships between race and gender in Black life. Underscoring the traditional subversive role of African American folklore, she highlights the continuing role folktales play in Black people's struggles with economic and racial oppression. Hurston also details the function of folklore in conflicts between Black men and Black women, showing both how men use folktales to reinforce and legitimate oppression of women and how women use them to fight against a subservient role and to assert their power.

Transforming Tradition offers the first serious look at folksong revivals, vibrant meldings of popular and folk culture that captured public awareness in the 1950s and 1960s. Best remembered for such songs as "Tom Dooley" and for performers like the Kingston Trio and Joan Baez, the revival of that era gave rise to hootenannies, coffeehouses, and blues and bluegrass festivals, sowing a legacy of popular interest that lives today. Many of the contributors to this volume were themselves performers in folksong revivals; today they are scholars in folklore, ethnomusicology, and American and Canadian cultural history. As both insiders and analysts they bring unique perspectives and new insights to the study of revivals. In his introduction, Neil Rosenberg explores central issues such as the history of folksong revivals, stereotypes of "folksingers, " connections between scholarship and popularization, meanings of the word "revival, " questions of authenticity and the invention of culture, and issues surrounding reflexive scholarship. The individual studies are divided into three sections. The first covers the "Great Boom" revival of the late '50s and early '60s, and the next approaches the revival as a self-contained social culture with its own "new aesthetic" and in-group values. The last looks at revival activities in systems of musical culture including the blues, old-time fiddling, Northumbrian piping, and bluegrass, with particular emphasis on perceptions of insider and outsider roles. The contributors display keen awareness of how their own perceptions have been shaped by their early, more subjective involvement. For example, Archie Green explores his service as faculty guru to the Campu Folksong Club at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during the 1960s. Kenneth S. Goldstein considers how intellectual issues of the "great boom" shaped his work for recording companies. Sheldon Posen uses autobiography as ethnography to explain what happened to him w

The ultimate goal of teaching language is to teach something about the culture in which that language is spoken. Yet especially at the elementary levels of instruction, it is easy to lose sight of this goal as students struggle with the most basic aspects of language. What is the difference between the imperfect and the past perfect; how are the impersonal pronouns used; does the rather sleepy-looking student in the back row even know what an impersonal pronoun is? In this climate, it is difficult to make the leap between grammar and culture, between teaching the imperfect and teaching the complexities of culture that has produced the literature, art, architecture and scholarship which we ultimately would like our students to appreciate. I have found that folklore is an ideal tool for bridging the gap between language and culture in the classroom. By using folk and popular materials to illustrate or expand on grammatical points, students' attention can be drawn to broader cultural issues, including values, worldview, history, and even literature.' The study of folklore and the study of language share a historical link in their early nineteenth-century emergence. The idea of a national language and culture, with roots in the indigenous folk culture of peasants, took form during the eighteenth century under the pens of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried von Herder.2 Influenced by Herder's Romanticism, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm collected what would be later published as the Kinderund Hausmdrchen (1812). What is less well-known is that while Wilhelm had a poet's interest in the tales, Jakob worked more from an interest in German philology and comparative dialectology. Early folklorists such as Max Miller regarded aspects of folk narrative as a "disease" of language whose origins were to be found in philological inquiry. In the U.S. the great anthropologist Franz Boas collected myths from the Native Americans of the Northwest coast out of an original fascination with Native American languages. It was the language of the

Depuis sa creation en 1973, la Parade d'Halloween de Greenwich Village est devenue un evenement vital dans la vie festive de la ville de New York. Son succes tient a sa capacite a exprimer une multiplicite d'expressions et d'opinions : divers groupes de participants et de spectateurs ont souvent des perceptions contradictoires du sens de l'evenement. Ces vues refletent la transformation recente des voisinnages, de l'economies de la cite, ainsi que des changements nationaux globaux dans la societe et la culture locale

JAMES THOMAS IS A GIFTED BLUES MUSICIAN, tale teller, and clay sculptor in Leland, Mississippi, the heart of the Mississippi Delta. I have followed the evolution of his sculpture over the past six years. Already, in four years, my earlier study of his work is dated, reflecting Thomas' speed and creativity in developing new sculptural forms.' Research on Thomas' art has raised questions about the study of AfroAmerican folk art within western intellectual frames. Anthropologists and folklorists generally define folk culture as a spectrum of songs, tales, and material culture passed on from generation to generation within a community. This approach to Afro-American culture is linear and is classically illustrated in Melville Herskovits' The Myth of the Negro Past where folk traditions are traced from African forms to New World survivals.2 Scholars thus assume that master

In this fascinating analysis of eighteenth-century vernacular houses of Middle Virginia, Henry Glassie presents a revolutionary and carefully constructed methodology for looking at houses and interpreting from them the people who built and used them. Glassie believes that all relevant historical evidence unwritten as well as written must be taken into account before historical truth can be found. He in convinced that any study of man s past must make use of nonverbal and verbal evidence, since written history the story of man as recorded by the intellectual elite does not tell us much about the everyday life, thoughts, and fears of the ordinary people of the past. Such people have always been in the majority, however, and a way has to be found to include them in any valid history. In Folk Housing in Middle Virginia Glassie admirably sets forth such a way. The people who lived in Middle Virginia in the eighteenth century are almost unknown to history because so little has been written about them. After Glassie selected the area roughly Goochland and Louisa counties for study, he selected a representative part of the countryside, recorded all the older houses there, developed a transformational grammar of traditional house designs, and examined the area s architectural stability and change. Comparing the houses with written accounts of the period, he found that the houses became more formal and lee related to their environment at the same time as the areas established political, economic, and religious institutions were disintegrating. It is as though the builders of the houses were deliberately trying to impose order on the surrounding chaotic world. Previous orthodox historical interpretations of the period have failed to note this. Glassie has provided new insights into the intellectual and social currents of the period, and at that time has rescued a heretofore little-known people from historiographical oblivion. Combining a fresh, perceptive approach with a broad interdisciplinary body of knowledge, ha has made an invaluable breakthrough in showing the way to understand the people of history who have left their material things as their only legacy. Henry Glassie is College Professor of Folklore at Indiana University. He is the author of Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States, passing the Time in Ballymenone, Irish Folktales, and The Spirit of Folk Art. He has served as president of the Vernacular Architecture Forum and the American Folklore Society. "

midst the myriad changes occurring in America's black community since the sixties has been the blossoming of gospel music in settings once reserved exclusively for formal repertoires of European origin. Gospel music is no longer a stranger to university classrooms and concert halls, in which it has been receiving its due accord as a significant manifestation of black creativity and spiritual depth. Less publicized but representing profound change is the adoption of gospel forms within America's black Roman Catholic community-traditionally a bastion of liturgical conservatism. With the upsurge of movements to affirm and glorify black identity in the past two decades, the Catholic church has begun to realize the benefits of a truly indigenous form of spiritual expression for its congregations of predominantly black cultural background.2 Only in the mid-1970s has the city of Los Angeles begun to see the effects of this quiet but spirited revolution in the church's musical offerings. The aim of this paper is to analyze the change and differentiation in the adoption of gospel music and the impact it has made on three different Catholic churches in south central Los Angeles. Gospel is a musical style that originated from the grass roots of black society, a social setting that is markedly different from the stereotypical black middle-class Catholic community. While black Catholics have generally chosen to identify and adhere to European cultural values in worship and their lifestyle, those individuals who are responsible for the development of gospel represent black folk culture. In other words, it is the advocates of gospel that have maintained an identity that is distinctly black and in many ways is closely akin to traditional African culture. Because of the historical development of gospel in Pentecostal3 churches and its association with black folk traditions, it can be assumed that when religious groups such as black Catholics decide to use the style, they are also making a social statement. Members of one group have made an effort to accept characteristics of another culture into their own. Because of its roots and development in black culture, the gospel-music

"MY GRANDMOTHER TOLD ME TO GUARD MYSELF FROM MEN for they are a danger. I don't protect myself from work. The thing I'm afraid of is men."' This quotation is an expression of the attitudes of many women in the Mexican folk culture.2 Why do so many women of this culture hold this view with respect to men? How do Mexican women view their life situation? And, finally, do the games they play as children express and reflect these views? Between March and November of 1973, I collected games and songs and interviewed thirty-seven women in Mexico between the ages of fifteen and sixty-three and seventeen women between the ages of twenty-two and fifty-nine born in Mexico but now living in the United States. For evidence in this study I am using both these collected materials and studies done by other scholars to demonstrate that some of the games Mexican women play as young girls and recall vividly as adults reflect their views of themselves and their life situation and that this situation reflects an adult life that is distressing-a life of invasion, betrayal, abandonment, and forced seclusion. Although I rather strongly state that, in general, the position of women in the Mexican folk culture leaves much to be desired, it would be unjust to give the impression that all women share the experiences and attitudes expressed here. Nor do I wish to suggest that all Mexican men regard women as being something less than human; this is simply not true. I offer evidence of a situation that existed very commonly in the Mexican folk culture in the past and still exists now, though to a lesser degree; this situation is reflected in some of the games Mexican girls play. Of course, Mexico is undergoing great changes, using the United States as a model, and these changes are affecting every aspect of Mexican culture, including the position of women in the folk culture. Men regard women in a very distinct and particular way in Mexico. Arnulfo

A LIFE STORY IS, simply, a person's story of his or her life, or of what he or she thinks is a significant part of that life. It is therefore a personal narrative, a story of personal experience, and, as it emerges from conversation, its ontological status is the spoken word, even if the story is transcribed and edited for the printed page. The storyteller trusts the listener(s) and the listener respects the storyteller, not interrupting the train of thought until the story is finished. That is not to say the listener is passive as a doorknob; he nods assent, interposes a comment, frames a relevant question; indeed, his presence and reactions are essential to the story. He may coincidentally be a folklorist, but his role is mainly that of a sympathetic friend. This essay is directed to folklorists whose fieldwork, like my own, involves talking to people and finding out about their lives. My intention is to define and develop an approach to the life story as a self-contained fiction, and thus to distinguish it sharply from its historical kin: biography, oral history, and the personal history (or "life history," as it is called in anthropology). Among the dimensions of folk culture which Richard Dorson observed during his 1968 field trip to Gary, Indiana, and East Chicago, was something he called "personal history." In the 1970 article which resulted, "Is There a Folk in the City?" he told folklorists to cast aside worries over whether the personal history is a traditional oral genre, and urged them to collect the "thousands of sagas created from life experiences that deserve, indeed cry for, recording."' Dorson caught the documentary spirit of the times. The following decade witnessed a rebirth of interest in the experiences of ordinary Americans, especially blue-collar workers, racial and ethnic minorities, and

n the winter of 1931, when Charles Seeger first joined a group of composers deliberating on music and social change, he was 45 years old and a respected instructor at New York's prestigious Institute for Musical Arts. How did this urbane professor, a founder of the august New York Musicological Society, come to write anthems of class struggle? This activity occurred amidst the massive human suffering of the Depression years; Charles Seeger found in the Collective not only social expression but a musical outlet. For the first time in a half-dozen years, he began to compose, inspired by the possibility of giving music a meaning for the "audience beyond the seminar" (Green 1979:398). When Seeger entered the Collective in 1931, he was, by his account, both disenchanted with the course of fine art music and scornful of folk and popular music. By his departure from the group in November 1935, Charles Seeger was determined to use traditional American folk music to unify diverse sectors of America, a quest he continued in his work in New Deal agencies and in the Pan American Union. (Later he passed this mission along to his musician children: Pete, Mike, and Peggy.) His evolution from an outspoken anti-folk song stance to a later exploration of folksong materials traces a larger journey of left-wing intellectuals toward folk culture in the 1930s. Among Seeger's colleagues at the Composers' Collective were his former student, Henry Cowell, and Marc Blitzstein, Elie Siegmeister, Herbert Haufrecht, Henry Leland Clarke, Earl Robinson, and Norman Cazden. Hanns Eisler and Aaron Copland visited the group (Dunaway 1980; Reuss 1971). The Collective itself was an offshoot of the Communist Party's International Music Bureau and the Pierre Degeyter Club (named for the composer of the "Internationale"). In 1934 and '35, Seeger adopted the nom-de-plume Carl Sands to write what he later called "affective" music criticism for the Daily Worker. The overall goal of the Collective was to create a new music, simultaneously revolutionary in

THIS PAPER DEALS with the value of a local ballad in a study of folk culture and with local history in a process of formation. That the ballad of the Williams family did not attain wider circulation is not our present concern, although it will be obvious that the ballad and legend are only subtypes in American balladry and legendry. Our study amply supports Herbert Halpert's contention that the local folksong is often the most important song in a community., We further emphasize that the investigation of the background of a local ballad may be of prime importance to an understanding of a folk culture. But the investigation must be a direct one: of all our collectanea, only one item was volunteered in answer to a request for "old songs." The locale of this ballad is south-central Kentucky and north-central Tennessee, on both sides of the Cumberland River, which in the past made of the neighboring counties a culture area. Most of the area lies outside of what is officially classified as Southern Appalachia, but the culture is, in our judgment, predominantly Appalachian. Until recently it was a land of small farms and of restricted communication with urban, industrial culture. Thirty years ago there was scarcely a paved road in the area, and rail lines still reach only to Glasgow, in neighboring Barren County. The lifeline was the Cumberland River, stretching from Burnside in eastern Kentucky to Nashville, Tennessee. Folk memory, or tradition, reaches back to the eighteenth century in tales claiming a local site in Monroe County as the first settlement in Kentucky. There is a tale and alleged proof-though informants are reluctant to furnish all details-that Abraham Lincoln was actually born in Monroe County and in circumstances befitting an epic hero. Some citizens speak as if it were yesterday of Joe Coleman, the only white man hanged in Cumberland County, whose execution in 1847 left in its wake a number of legends and a song.2 This is Cordell Hull country. The career of the late Secretary of State, who was

t should not surprise anyone who is already aware of the restricted content of our published folksong collections and superficial samplings of folksong from a few of our regions, that recent research, more thorough and wider in geographical scope, has brought to light fresh material which has provided us with new notions hitherto unsuspected from such folksong publications as Matray's, Szini's and Bartalus'. We now know that the five-tone scale, a criterion for judging the beginnings of many, if not all peoples', musical culture, exists and flourishes in our tradition since Bela Bart6k first discovered a large number of pentatonic melodies among the Szekely of Transylvania in 1907. Where are such melodies to be found? Besides the Szekelys, we are able to ascertain that melodies of the pentatonic type are well known among the Csangos of Bukovina. There are traces of pentatonicism in the folklore of Trans-danubia as well as among the Hungarian population of the Northern Carpathian Mountains. In other words, everywhere where vestiges of an old folk culture still survive. That this folk culture was once unified is conjecturable from the surprising analogy among the fragments that have been collected from the various regions. At one time, the so-called "Magyar scale" was regarded as the most characteristic feature of Hungarian music. This has long since been recognized as a misconception. If we look for features which distinguish the music of the Magyar folk from that of her neighbors, we single out as the foremost feature, next to rhythm, the presence of pentatonicism. Construction of the scale. Our five-tone scale is a "natural," or "melodically descending," minor scale from which the second and sixth degrees are omitted. If we select, for instance, g as the tonic note, the scale comprises the notes g'-b-tlat"-c"-d"-f". The majority of melodies extend below the finalis g' to f', and touch the octave of the tonic, g". On rare occasions it also extends to the upper 3rd, the b-flat". Thus, the widest possible melodic range is: f-g'-b-flat"-c"-d"-f"-g"-b-flat"'; and the narrowest: g'-b-flat"-c"-d". The latter melodies comprise only four notes, in which case one could speak of "tetratonicism." However, these melodies are exceptional. Since half steps do not occur, our scale is of the anhemitonic pentatonic type.