Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World – serie

Changing from child to young adult is difficult everywhere. But to experience childhood in continuous flight from conflict, then move into adolescence as a refugee in a radically different culture, is a more than usually complicated transition for teens and for their parents, communities, teachers, and social workers.Improvised Adolescence explores how teenagers from southern Somalia, who spent much of their childhood in East African refugee camps, are adapting to resettlement in the American Midwest. The collapse of the Somali state in 1991, and subsequent chaos in the Horn of Africa, disrupted the lives of these young people educationally, culturally, and developmentally. Folklorist Sandra Grady has intermittently observed the lifeworld of these teens—their homes, their entertainment choices, their interaction with classmates and teachers at school, and their plans for the future—for more than seven years to understand the cultural tools they’ve used in their journey from this disrupted childhood. They negotiate two sets of cultural expectations: in the resettled Somali Bantu community, traditional rites of passage continue to mark the change from child to adult; in the surrounding U.S. culture, an unfamiliar in-between category—“adolescent”—delays adulthood. Offering analysis that is both engaging and theoretically grounded, Grady tracks the emergence in this immigrant community of an improvised adolescence.

Ukrainian Otherlands is an innovative exploration of modern ethnic identity, focused on diaspora/homeland understandings of each other in Ukraine and in Ukrainian ethnic communities around the globe. Exploring a rich array of folk songs, poetry and stories, trans-Atlantic correspondence, family histories, and rituals of homecoming and hosting that developed in the Ukrainian diaspora and Ukraine during the twentieth century, Natalia Khanenko-Friesen asserts that many important aspects of modern ethnic identity form, develop, and reveal themselves not only through the diaspora’s continued yearning for the homeland, but also in a homeland’s deeply felt connection to its diaspora. Yet, she finds each group imagines the “otherland” and ethnic identity differently, leading to misunderstandings between Ukrainians and their ethnic-Ukrainian “brothers and sisters” abroad.An innovative exploration of the persistence of vernacular culture in the modern world, Ukrainian Otherlands, amply informed by theory and fieldwork, will appeal to those interested in folklore, ethnic and diaspora studies, modernity, migration, folk psychology, history, and cultural anthropology.

East Boston has long been known as an Italian neighborhood and Southie as an Irish one, while nearby North Quincy has seen in recent decades an influx of Chinese Americans and immigrants. Such urban spaces in America can become intimately intertwined with ethnic identities (Little Italy, Greektown, Chinatown, Little Havana). Yet local residents often readily acknowledge an underlying diversity—both historically and as a result of more recent changes—that complicates such stereotypes.Digging into the ever-shifting terrain of American ethnicity and urban spaces, Anthony Bak Buccitelli investigates folk practices, social memory, and local histories in three Boston-area neighborhoods. He looks at the ways locals represent their neighborhoods and themselves via events, symbols, stories, and landmarks, from the shamrock to the Chinese flag, whether the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Southie or the Columbus Day parade in East Boston, from urban graffiti and websites to the Dorchester Heights Monument. City of Neighborhoods exposes the processes of selection and emphasis that produce, sustain, challenge, and change understandings of urban spaces as ethnic places.

A deeply humanistic ethnography of prison workers and their dark humorAmerica is fascinated by prisons and prison culture, but few Americans understand what it is like to work in corrections. Claire Schmidt, whose extended family includes three generations of Wisconsin prison workers, introduces readers to penitentiary officers and staff as they share stories, debate the role of corrections in American racial politics and social justice, and talk about the important function of humor in their jobs.In a state that locks up a disproportionate number of men and women of color, white prison workers occupy a complicated social position as representatives of institutional authority and bearers of social stigma. The job, by turns dangerous, dull, or dehumanizing, is aided by a quick wit, comedic timing, and verbal agility. The men and women who do this work rely on storytelling, practical jokes, and sarcasm to bond with each other, build flexible relationships with inmates, and create personal identities that work in and out of prison. Schmidt shows how this humorous occupational culture both upholds and undermines prisons as social institutions.Issues of power and race, as well as sex and gender, infuse Schmidt’s groundbreaking analysis, and she also engages with current scholarship about identity, occupational folklore, and family narrative. This eye-opening, provocative book reveals the invisible culture, beliefs, and aesthetics embedded in workplace humor.

This eloquent ethnography reveals the daily lives and religious practice of ordinary Muslim men in Tajikistan as they aspire to become Sufi mystics. Benjamin Gatling describes in vivid detail the range of expressive forms—memories, stories, poetry, artifacts, rituals, and other embodied practices—employed as they try to construct a Sufi life in twenty-first-century Central Asia.Gatling demonstrates how Sufis transcend the oppressive religious politics of contemporary Tajikistan by using these forms to inhabit multiple times: the paradoxical present, the Persian sacred past, and the Soviet era. In a world consumed with the supposed political dangers of Islam, Gatling shows the intricate, ground-level ways that Muslim expressive culture intersects with authoritarian politics, not as artful forms of resistance but rather as a means to shape Sufi experiences of the present.