Professor Anthony Bak Buccitelli’s Roundtable Talk from Feb. 26, 2021 is now available on our Youtube channel. You may access it here.

Abstract: Theories of performance in the study of folklore, first articulated mainly in the context of face-to-face oral narration in the 1960s and 70s, were instrumental in shifting the study of everyday forms of expression from a “product” view (focusing on folklore as text) to a “process” or “communications” view (focusing on folklore as situated performance). Despite the terminology, the study of performance in folklore studies is less concerned with formal, staged performances, then with the dynamics of communication and social interaction between a “performer” and “audience” in everyday, informal settings. However, these influential theoretical frameworks at best do not fully suit, and at worst actively misinform, the study of everyday expression in online or hybrid online-offline settings. In previous research, I have made the case that folklorists should examine digital technologies as “places” of performance, rather than simply as “texts” transmitted online, or as recordings of offline human activity. In this lecture, I will turn to two other crucial but little-examined avenues for the study of folklore and the digital: the role of technology in everyday face-to-face performances and the creative construction of online folklore forms that are intended to provoke haptic responses in offline settings.

Anthony Bak Buccitelli is Associate Professor of American Studies and Communications at the Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg. He currently serves as Director of the Penn State's Center for Folklore, coordinator of its Graduate Certificate in Folklore and Ethnography, and editor of the international journal Western Folklore.

Buccitelli’s research centers on vernacular culture and communication, in connection with digital technology, memory, narrative, space and place, and race and ethnicity. He regularly teaches and lectures on topics in technology and culture, folkloristics, ethnography, and race and ethnicity. He is the author of the book City of Neighborhoods: Memory, Folklore, and Ethnic Place in Boston (2016, University of Wisconsin Press). He is also editor of Race and Ethnicity in Digital Culture: Our Changing Traditions, Impressions, and Expressions in a Mediated World (2017, Praeger Books), a two volume collection that explores the role of folklore in the changing definitions, practices, and performances of race and ethnicity in the digital age. He has published more than 20 research articles and scholarly book chapters, which have appeared in the Sage Research Methods Foundations, The Oxford Handbook of American Folklore and Folklife, Journal of American Folklore, Oral History, and Cultural Analysis, among other venues.

Open House for Prospective Students

Welcome!

The Folklore department recently hosted its open house for prospective students via Zoom. You may watch the open house here to learn more about the M.A. program and its requirements.

Email folklore_archive@berkeley.edu for more information!

You may watch the talk, recorded with Zoom, here.

Abstract:

We focus on deriving the underlying generative narrative frameworks in social media posts related to Covid-19 conspiracy theories. Building on earlier work on conspiracies and conspiracy theories, we present an automated pipeline that discovers and aggregates the central actants (people, institutions, places, things) and the interactant relationships that allow us to understand the complex interconnections that narrators build as they move toward creating monological narratives explaining phenomena such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Our model operationalizes aspects of narrative theories first presented by Algirdas Greimas, Joshua Labov and William Waletzky, and Alan Dundes. In this work, we explore the interactions in social media of (i) pre-existing conspiracy theories, such as the globalist cabal behind the pandemic, (ii) emerging conspiracy theories, such as the role 5G telecommunications plays in triggering the virus, and (iii) the intersection or absorption of narratives into totalizing conspiracy theories, such as Q-Anon.

Welcome!

The Folklore department will be hosting its open house for prospective students on December 4th 2019. Join us to learn more about the M.A. program requirements and to chat with faculty and current students.

Interested applicants who cannot attend in person may also choose to video chat during the first two sessions. Email folklore_archive@berkeley.edu for more information!

Agenda:

9:15-10:30: Program overview and general Q&A

10:30-12:00: Meet other faculty and graduate students

12:00-2:00: Participation in Anthro 262A (Traditionalities and Modernities) Seminar

2:00-3:00: TBA

5:15 PM-7:00PM
221 Kroeber Hall, Gifford Room
UC Berkeley

How can an ancient religious ritual convey current social and political needs? This question emerged from eight years (2007-2015) of documentation of Sukkot, the Jewish festival that annually commemorates the Israelites’ Biblical journey through the Sinai Desert to the Promised Land. This talk explores the holiday’s central rite of building and “dwelling” in temporary structures—makeshift shelters that evoke the physical and
metaphoric experience of wandering in the wild. The flexibility of this tradition is revealed by the rich material diversity of constructions. Significantly, in 2010-2011, Sukkot coincided with the global Occupy Movement and the migration of African asylum seekers into Israel, highlighting the contemporary search for “home” in daily as well as
ritual life. In secular and orthodox communities, suburban and urban settings, minority and majority Jewish populations, Jews build sukkot to reconcile their dreams with reality.

Gabrielle A. Berlinger is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Folklore, and Babette S. and Bernard J. Tanenbaum Fellow in Jewish History and Culture, at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. As a folklorist and ethnologist, she studies the nature and significance of vernacular architecture and ritual practice, particularly in contemporary Jewish communities. She is author of Framing Sukkot: Tradition and Transformation in Jewish Vernacular Architecture (Indiana University Press, 2017).

Co-Sponsored by Department of Jewish Studies

2019 Alan Dundes Lecture

by Professor John McDowell
Thursday, March 14th
5:00 PM-7:00PM
221 Kroeber Hall, Gifford Room
UC Berkeley

Drawing on speech act theory, this presentation elaborates the concept of ecoperformativity to assess the impact of strategic vernacular discourse in settings of environmental crisis. When certain felicity conditions are met, ecoperformative discourse can shape people’s attitudes, move them to action, and help assuage the trauma of ecological precarity. This talk will address ecoperformativity in two Andean settings where indigenous peoples draw on a spiritual connection to the land in confronting existential threats to their survival.

John Holmes McDowell is Professor of Folklore at Indiana University and former Chair of the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology; he has researched speech play, verbal art, ballads, and other forms as instruments of social process in Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and the United States.

Sponsored by the Berkeley Folklore Graduate Program
folklore_archive@berkeley.edu

March 8, 2019

The Berkeley Folklore Roundtable Presents:

"For Our Future Generations: Bringing Karuk Baskets Back Home"

Professor Carolyn Smith
Wednesday October 17, 2018
4:30 PM
221 Kroeber Hall, Gifford Room
UC Berkeley

"This presentation explores Karuk Tribe efforts of bringing baskets back home through repatriation. I focus on the historical and contemporary narratives of Karuk engagements with museums and anthropologists, which have shaped the western definitions of Karuk baskets. Countering the categories of "utilitarian/ceremonial" vs. "made for trade" baskets, I illustrate how baskets are considered social beings—belongings—that “cry out” to be back where they came from. Finally, I describe what it means to weave pikyav (to-fix-it) and how this responsibility energizes Karuk dedication to bring baskets and other belongings back home."

Carolyn Smith (Karuk) is a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow at University of California,
Berkeley in the Department of Ethnic Studies, where she is continuing her research on the
interconnections of the ontology of basketry, museum practice, and repatriation.

Sponsored by the Berkeley Folklore Graduate Program