Dear Colleagues,
We are recirculating the following updated call for papers for the special journal issue “Disturbed Traditions: Folklore in the Anthropocene.” This issue will now be submitted for intended publication with the Journal of Folklore Research.
Call for Papers: Disturbed Traditions: Folklore in the Anthropocene.
Renowned folklorist Barre Toelken once described how, while growing up in one of the small Massachusetts towns that was destroyed in 1938 in order to build the Quabbin Reservoir, members of his local community “and their descendants [continued] to gather near the shore for picnics and nostalgic conversation, and photos from early times there were saved like holy relics” (Toelken 1996, 411). This maintenance of a shared sense of place and local identity in the face of human-induced destruction is not unlike many others that folklorists have documented. Timothy Tangherlini, for example, studied the process by which Korean Americans reasserted a sense of place in Koreatown, Los Angeles, following the 1992 riots though “the public staging of culturally informed performances…and the repeated telling of narratives that emphasized place” (Tangherlini 1999, 155). More recently, the wave of folklore scholarship that followed the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster examined the push for “narrative coherence,” often from outside the affected communities, in establishing a public memory of disaster (see, for example, Horigan 2018, 7), as well as the ways in which researchers can help empower affected communities, not by providing this coherence, but by offering the resources and social capital to allow them to reassert a collective sense of community and agency through the sharing of narrative (see, for example, Lindahl and Foster 2017). Working with a predominantly African American community in Pinhook, Missouri, folklorists David Todd Lawrence and Elain Lawless similarly traced the long road of survivors of a major flood event there toward the reestablishment of their community in the form of the strengthening of shared social and traditional bonds of place, even without the full reclamation of physical space; as Lawrence and Lawless put it, their participants built a sense that “community resides in a space separate from the physical location of their town” (Lawrence and Lawless 2018, 5).[i]
While each of these projects, and many more, have offered us new insights into the ways in which community members use tradition, perhaps especially narrative, to heal, reveal, reclaim, revive, or remake the bonds of social and cultural support they shared with each other —as well as reassert claims to place and identity within a wider public— these works have generally homed in on specific disaster events and their aftermath. However, increasingly, we are coming to understand that the arc of human-induced disaster is broader than any single event. With the recognition that we are in the midst of the “anthropocene,” the geological age in which humans have come to be the most significant force in shaping the natural world, scholars have begun to reframe the often-discrete way we have treated disaster events, as well to question some of the grand narratives that have sustained the Western understanding of human relations with the natural world for centuries.
In a recent article for the New York Review of Books (December 8, 2022), for example, philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum challenges the basic, everyday distinction we often make between human society and “the wild.” She writes:
Here, in a nutshell, is the Romantic idea of Nature: Human society is stale, predictable, effete. It lacks powerful sources of energy and renewal. People are alienated from one another and from themselves. The Industrial Revolution has made cities foul places where the human spirit is frequently crushed (as in Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills”). By contrast, out there somewhere—in the mountains, in the oceans, even in the wild West Wind—there beckons something truer, deeper, something uncorrupt and sublime, a type of vital energy that can restore us, because it is the analogue of our own deepest depths. Other animals are a large part of this “wild”: of Nature’s mysterious and vital energy (think of Blake’s “Tyger, tyger, burning bright”).
Interestingly, she also notes a point already familiar to folklorists: that this Romantic strain of thinking was also applied to different segments of human society (and correspondingly underwrote the foundations of our own discipline): “Many nineteenth-century Romantics even had the idea that peasants and other poor people were part of Nature or closer to Nature, and ought to stay there in rural poverty rather than venture into the city and try to get educated.”
Moving beyond the Romantic view means, Nussbaum argues, understanding that these dichotomies (whether they are between human society and “the wild” or between civilized elites and rustic peasants) no longer exist, if they ever did. Therefore, to talk about, for example, a need to reestablish “wild” spaces to counteract human environmental degradation is to talk nonsense. This line of thought, Nussbaum writes, “presupposes that there is such a thing in the world as “wild” Nature: spaces that are not under human control and domination. It presupposes that it is possible for humans to leave animals alone. That presupposition is false. However large the tracts of land may be, all land in our world is thoroughly under human control.”
Nussbaum’s view echoes that of anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, who argues that the condition of the Anthropocene, a creation of modern capitalism, is not one of stability at the center and precarity around the edges, but rather one in which precarity is the norm of human society and the natural world (Tsing 2015, 20). As a result, Tsing calls for a revised understanding of the interconnections of human society, the global economy, and the natural world, one that also jettisons notions of progressive, scalable advancement that have frequently dominated both critical and celebratory discourses from the Enlightenment onward:
For humanists, assumptions of progressive human mastery have encouraged a view of nature as a romantic space of antimodernity. Yet for twentieth-century scientists, progress also unselfconsciously framed the study of landscapes. Assumptions about expansion slipped into the formulation of population biology. New developments in ecology make it possible to think quite differently by introducing cross-species interactions and disturbance histories. In this time of diminished expectations, I look for disturbance-based ecologies in which many species sometimes live together without either harmony or conquest (Tsing 2015, 5).
Folklorists are starting to become invested in this kind of holistic, interconnected, anthropogenic view of the world as well, and to contend with what our role in addressing it may be. For example, a 2023 conference of the UK’s Folklore Society will tackle the topic “Folklore, Geography and Environment: Ways of Knowing Water, Landscape and Climate in the Anthropocene.” It presents as its centrals questions: 1) What…kinds of knowledge might inform our responses to the challenge of increasingly volatile relationships with water: what can anthropologists, folklorists, and human geographers tell flood and climate science about human/water/landscape relationships? and 2) How we can make that other knowledge intelligible to mainstream climate and flood science: how is knowledge about the human/water/landscape relationship coproduced and reproduced? What distinctive perspectives can scholarship from outside the physical geosciences bring to the urgent need to develop realistic, Anthropocene-ready resilience strategies?
To these excellent questions, the present special issue adds several broader ones: how should a recognition of the pervasiveness of human influence, in the form of commodity chains, global flows of media, and the intervention into or disruption of the natural environment, reorient our thinking about folklore? How should looking at disaster events not as discrete occurrences, but as part of this larger web of human-induced changes in the environment shift how we understand the processes of recovery, resilience, and sustainability through folklore that we have so well demonstrated in the past? How should we acknowledge the significance of digital spaces as local and global focal points for shared social memory, commiseration, and recuperation within the framework of expanding environmental crises and place-based folklore? This Special Issue relaunching at The Journal of Folklore Research will seek to offer answers to these and other pressing questions. We call for the submission of works that address one or more of these or related questions, and are particularly interested in essays that can also examine how these impacts and responses should be understood in terms of larger questions around issues such as race, ethnicity, class, identity, and inequality.
We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and a long abstract of 400–600 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send this to the guest editors (abb20@psu.edu and sed287@psu.edu). Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the special issue. Full manuscripts will undergo peer review prior to acceptance with JFR.
Works Cited
Andersen, David M. 1974. “The Los Angeles Earthquake and the Folklore of Disaster.” Western Folklore 33 (4): 331–36. https://doi.org/10.2307/1498550.
Horigan, Kate Parker. 2018. Consuming Katrina: Public Disaster and Personal Narrative. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Lawrence, David Todd, and Elaine J. Lawless. 2018. When They Blew the Levee: Race, Politics, and Community in Pinhook, Missouri. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Lindahl, Carl, and Michael Dylan Foster, eds. 2017. We are all Survivors: Verbal, Ritual and Material Ways of Narrating Disaster and Recovery. Vol. 58 (1–2). Special Issue of Fabula. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/fabula-2017-0001/html.
Mechling, Jay. 1986. “The Folklore of a Public Disaster: An Editor’s Introduction.” Western Folklore 45 (4): 241–42.
Milspaw, Yvonne J. 1981. “Folklore and the Nuclear Age: ‘The Harrisburg Disaster’ at Three Mile Island.” International Folklore Review: Folklore Studies from Overseas 1 (Journal Article): 57.
Nussbaum, Martha C. December 8, 2022. “A Peopled Wilderness.” New York Review of Books. Accessed March 7, 2023. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/12/08/a-peopled-wilderness-martha-c-nussbaum/.
Tangherliini, Timothy R. 1999. “Remapping Koreatown: Folklore, Narrative and the Los Angeles Riots.” Western Folklore 58 (2): 149–73. https://doi.org/10.2307/1500164.
Toelken, Barre. 1996. Dynamics Of Folklore. 1 edition. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2017. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Reprint edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Tentative completion schedule:
- Abstract submission deadline: 15 March 2024
- Notification of abstract acceptance: 1 April 2024
- Full manuscript deadline: 1 July 2024
Dr. Anthony Bak Buccitelli
Manuscript Submission Information
All submissions must be in either Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx) format or Rich-Text Format (.rtf). The text, quotations, and endnotes should be single or double-spaced with 1-inch margins for copy-editing and should conform to the 17th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. If you do not have ready access to the Chicago Manual, please consult a recent issue of the Journal of Folklore Research or consult their style guide.
If a manuscript includes notes, endnotes should be used rather than footnotes. All submissions should be accompanied by an abstract of no more than 200 words, as well as a 50-word author biographical statement.
Visual elements should be submitted in digital form. Please scan images (including slides) at a resolution of 300 dpi, in TIF or EPS format. Size all images to no more than 5 inches horizontally. All images, tables, diagrams, and figures should be uploaded as supplemental files rather than embedded in the manuscript itself. In the text file, please indicate where each graphic should appear by placing a "callout" description in the appropriate location (e.g., <figure 1 about here>). Drawings and maps must be submitted in a form suitable for publication without redrawing. Submit captions for all graphic elements by completing the supplemental file information form during the manuscript submission phase.
All articles should include keywords of the author's choosing. These help to index JFR publications when they are electronically distributed through services like JSTOR. If you are uncertain which keywords to use, consult the American Folklore Society's Ethnographic Thesaurus.
Contact Info:
Dr. Anthony Bak Buccitelli
Associate Professor and Chair
American Studies Program
Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg
Sean Edward Dixon
PhD Candidate
American Studies Program
Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg
[i] And, of course, folklorists have been documenting folk responses to disasters, human-induced, and otherwise for decades. See, for example, Andersen 1974, Milspaw 1981, and Mechling 1986.
Sean Edward Dixon
Dr. Anthony Bak Buccitelli
