Imagined States.pdf

Western Folklore, 2024

The modern concept of the nation and the political form of the nation-state were deeply influenced by folklore scholarship. Johann Herder envisioned the nation-state as a political model made possible by keen attention to cultural communities. Now, at the end of modernity, how can contemporary folklorists come to better understand the new global communities, traditions, and identities, and their implications? How could folklore once again provide new models for identity, community, and (ultimately) governance, in the age of global communications?

Modern political conceptions of Nationhood reflect the vision and agency of humans: land is dead and we divide it up to be used and governed. But in many classical and modern cultures, land seen as governed by the gods and spirits who dwell within it. In fact, personhood, agency and space take on a whole new meaning. This chapter gives an informal discussion of the way that sacred-land in countries reaching from Thailand to Peru, Japan to India offers a thought-provoking alternative model of government.

2007

Reviewed Medium: book Authors: Pertti Anttonen Year: 2005 Pages: 215 Publisher: Finnish Literature Society ISBN: 951-746-665-X Prices: $28.00

Western Folklore, 2024

This is a response to the Archer Taylor Lecture/article by Tok Thompson. In this issue of Western Folklore (83.2, 2024), there is another response by José E. Limón, and a related essay by Domino Renee Perez.

This article examines how the search for statehood determines the literary production in stateless cultures. By focusing on the Catalan case, I argue that literatures without a state are impelled to contribute to the political stabilization of the national community. To put it differently, only state literatures have access to the representation of subjective experiences that are not directly affected by the process of building a state. In stateless literatures, by contrast, the search for statehood becomes a structural determination that forces literary texts to negotiate their own articulation of meaning with this political injunction.

Annual Papers of the Anthropological Institute, Nanzan University, 2019

Foreign homeland. Folklore and national attitudes of ethnic minorities / Zagraniczna ojczyzna. Folklor a postawy narodowe mniejszości etnicznych The article aims to present the relationship between folklore and the formation of national attitudes in members of ethnic minorities. The issue is considered on the example of two ethnic groups: Silesians from the Trans-Olza (Czech Republic) and Touts living in the region of Serbian Banat (Republic of Serbia). Folklore is presented from an anthropological perspective, as communication practices of specific communities, which manifest what the communicative community considers important in terms of content and form of communication, as well as what it regards as axiologically acceptable. Performing their world-forming function, texts of folklore have an impact not only on shaping cognitive habits, but also on forming collective memory or directing social moods. In the case of minority groups, it is inspiring to observe the nation-forming function of folklore, as well as the influence of folklore texts on defining the boundaries of an ethnic group.

This transnational collection discusses the use of Native American imagery in twentieth and twenty-first-century European culture. With examples ranging from Irish oral myth, through the pop image of Indians promulgated in pornography, to the philosophical appropriations of Ernst Bloch or the European far right, contributors illustrate the legend of "the Indian." Drawing on American Indian literary nationalism, postcolonialism, and transnational theories, essays demonstrate a complex nexus of power relations that seemingly allows European culture to build its own Native images, and ask what effect this has on the current treatment of indigenous peoples.

Beyond the Border: Tensions across the Forty-Ninth Parallel in the Great Plains and Prairies, 2013

American Ethnologist, 1999

The ethnographic record of the colonial and post-colonial world is replete with new religions that promote the emblems, narratives, and technologies of modern nation-states. Let me give a few examples. Jean Rouch's astonishing film, Les Maitres Fous, registers the practices of one such religion in Ghana. At a ritual site on the outskirts of Accra, viewers witness Hauka spirits descending on their mediums as officials of the British colonial administration. The Hauka manifest themselves through their engagement in the business of rule as the sergeant major, chief justice, train conductor, and governor-general with egg on his head (a plumed helmet, that is). With the frothing self-importance of high office, they rush around the ritual site, enacting bureaucratic directives, debating policy, and defending the colonial state. Another example is that of the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake who claimed to have converse in a trance with George Washington . He reported that they spoke at the President's house as George relaxed with his dog on the verandah. Some Melanesians built airfields for the magical planes they believed were coming to deliver trade goods. Others, observing that power over cargo seemed to depend on letters dispatched between administrators, dressed in European clothes and exchanged magically encrypted pieces of paper. Throughout what many call the religious market of Latin America, a multitude of cults maximize the magical powers of each of the so-called three founding races by hybridizing African slaves, European nation builders, and Indian princesses into one pantheon of spirits. Recent religions in Brazil, Japan and California focus on flying saucers, radio beams, and high-energy molecular transfers to generate, through complex discourses about science, law, industry, and telecommunications, their chiliastic powers of cure and salvation. 1