John Holmes McDowell | |
---|---|
Born | 1946 |
Nationality | American |
Occupation | Professor |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | University of Texas at Austin |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Anthropologist |
Sub-discipline | Folklore |
Institutions | Indiana University Bloomington |
John Holmes McDowell (born 24 September 1946) is a Professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University Bloomington. He also serves as Director of the Diverse Environmentalisms Research Team (DERT) headquartered at Indiana University. Broadly speaking his work is centered on performance and communication as well as the interplay of creativity and tradition. Geographically most of his fieldwork has been in Mexico,Colombia,Cuba,Ecuador,and Ghana. His interests include Speech play and verbal art;the corrido of Greater Mexico;music,myth,and cosmology in the Andes;ecoperformativity;commemoration;folklorization;ethnopoetics;Latin America;the United States.
He graduated from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 1969 with a B.A. in music. He received a Ph.D. in anthropology (Folklore) from University of Texas at Austin where his outside minor combined Folklore and Linguistics. His dissertation is titled The Speech Play and Verbal Art of Chicano Children:An Ethnographic and Sociolinguistic Study.
He is the author of five books:Children’s Riddling [1] (1979),Sayings of the Ancestors:The Spiritual Life of the Sibundoy Indians (1989), [2] “So Wise Were Our Elders”:Mythic Narratives of the Kamsá (1994), [3] based on fieldwork with an indigenous community in Colombia,Poetry and Violence:The Ballad Tradition of Mexico’s Costa Chica (2000), [4] a study of the ballad tradition in southern coastal Mexico,and ¡Corrido! The Living Ballad of Mexico's Western Coast (2015). [5] He was also editor or co-editor of the following books or volumes:Andean Musics. Andean Studies Occasional Papers. V.3 Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (1987), [6] Andean Cosmologies through Time:Persistence and Emergence (1992), [7] Stith Thompson’s A Folklorist’s Progress:Reflections of a Scholar’s Life (1996), [8] Dancing the Ancestors:Carnival in South America (2001)., [9] and [10] Additionally he has published more than 30 articles on subjects ranging from the Mexican corrido to speech play and verbal art to Indigenous folklore of the Andes to children's folklore. He is co-editor of [11]
He has been involved with video documentaries and website productions related to his scholarship. With his wife Patricia Glushko he produced video documentaries “Que me troven un corrido”("Write me a corrido") and “Brass Bands of Guerrero”addressing the music of Mexico. He also runs a website on student folklore at Indiana University. [12] He served as editor for the Journal of Folklore Research from 1986 to 1992,editor of Special Publications of the Folklore Institute from 1990 to 1995 and 1999–2009,and the online Journal of Folklore Research Reviews from 2006–present.
Oral tradition,or oral lore,is a form of human communication wherein knowledge,art,ideas and cultural material is received,preserved,and transmitted orally from one generation to another. The transmission is through speech or song and may include folktales,ballads,chants,prose or verses. In this way,it is possible for a society to transmit oral history,oral literature,oral law and other knowledge across generations without a writing system,or in parallel to a writing system. Religions such as Buddhism,Hinduism,Catholicism,and Jainism,for example,have used an oral tradition,in parallel to a writing system,to transmit their canonical scriptures,rituals,hymns and mythologies from one generation to the next.
Word of mouth or viva voce,is the passing of information from person to person using oral communication,which could be as simple as telling someone the time of day. Storytelling is a common form of word-of-mouth communication where one person tells others a story about a real event or something made up. Oral tradition is cultural material and traditions transmitted by word of mouth through successive generations. Storytelling and oral tradition are forms of word of mouth that play important roles in folklore and mythology. Another example of oral communication is oral history—the recording,preservation and interpretation of historical information,based on the personal experiences and opinions of the speaker. Oral history preservation is the field that deals with the care and upkeep of oral history materials collected by word of mouth,whatever format they may be in.
A riddle is a statement,question or phrase having a double or veiled meaning,put forth as a puzzle to be solved. Riddles are of two types:enigmas,which are problems generally expressed in metaphorical or allegorical language that require ingenuity and careful thinking for their solution,and conundra,which are questions relying for their effects on punning in either the question or the answer.
Thomas Albert Sebeok was a Hungarian-born American polymath,semiotician,and linguist. As one of the founders of the biosemiotics field,he studied non-human and cross-species signaling and communication. He is also known for his work in the development of long-time nuclear waste warning messages,in which he worked with the Human Interference Task Force to create methods for keeping the inhabitants of Earth away from buried nuclear waste that will still be hazardous 10,000 or more years in the future.
The corrido is a popular narrative metrical tale and poetry that forms a ballad. The songs are often about oppression,history,daily life for criminals,the vaquero lifestyle,and other socially relevant topics. Corridos were widely popular during the Mexican Revolutions of the 20th century,and in the Southwestern American frontier as it was also a part of the development of the New Mexico music style,where it later influenced Western music. The corrido derives largely from the romance,and in its most known form consists of a salutation from the singer and prologue to the story,the story itself,and a moral and farewell from the singer. It is still a popular genre today in Mexico.
Camsá,also Mocoa,Sibundoy,Coche, or Kamemtxa / Camëntsëá,is a language isolate and native language of the Camsápeople who primarily inhabit the Sibundoy Valley of the Putumayo Department in the south of Colombia.
Stith Thompson was an American folklorist. He is the "Thompson" of the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index,which indexes folktales by type,and the author of the Motif-Index of Folk-Literature,a resource for folklorists that indexes motifs,granular elements of folklore.
Miguel Ángel Gutiérrez Ávila was a Mexican anthropologist whose work focused on the state of Guerrero. In 1988,he developed an approach in his work on the Costa Chica of Guerrero where "the corrido poet is a social critic who praises violent action when it is justified and condemns it when it is not".
Willis Barnstone is an American poet,religious scholar,and translator. He was born in Lewiston,Maine and lives in Oakland,California. He translated works by Jorge Luis Borges,Antonio Machado,Rainer Maria Rilke,Pedro Salinas,Pablo Neruda,and Wang Wei,as well as the New Testament and fragments by Sappho and pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus (Ἡράκλειτος).
Américo Paredes was an American author born in Brownsville,Texas who authored several texts focusing on the border life that existed between the United States and Mexico,particularly around the Rio Grande region of South Texas. His family on his father’s side,however,had been in the Americas since 1580. His ancestors were sefarditas,or Spanish Jews who had been converted to Christianity,and in 1749—along with Joséde Escandón—they settled in the lower Rio Grande. The year of Paredes’birth was the year of the last Texas Mexican Uprising,which was to portend the life Paredes was to lead. Throughout his long career as a journalist,folklorist and professor,Paredes was to bring focus to his Mexican American heritage,and the beauty of those traditions.
The Journal of Folklore Research:An International Journal of Folklore and Ethnomusicology is a triannual peer-reviewed academic journal covering research on folklore,folklife,and ethnomusicology. It was established in 1942 and is published by Indiana University Press.
Ronald L. Baker is an American folklorist,historian,scholar of literature and onomastics,educator,and author.
Richard Bauman is a folklorist and anthropologist,now retired from Indiana University Bloomington. He is Distinguished Professor emeritus of Folklore,of Anthropology,and of Communication and Culture. Before coming to IU in 1985,he was the Director of the Center for Intercultural Studies in Folklore and Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas and a faculty member in the UT Department of Anthropology. Just before retiring from Indiana,he was chair of the IU Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology,as well as an important member of the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Communication and Culture.
Jason Baird Jackson,Ph.D. is Professor of Folklore and Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. He is "an advocate of open access issues and works for scholarly communications and scholarly publishing projects." At IUB,he has served as Chair of the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology and as Director of the Folklore Institute. According to the Journal of American Folklore,"Jason Baird Jackson establishes himself as one of the foremost scholars in American Indian studies today."
Dan Ben-Amos is a folklorist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania,Philadelphia,where he holds the Graduate Program Chair for the Department of Folklore and Folklife.
Archer Taylor (1890–1973) was one of America's "foremost specialists in American and European folklore",with a special interest in cultural history,literature,proverbs,riddles and bibliography.
Helen Damico was a scholar of Old English and Old English literature.
The Persian term for riddle is chīstān,literally 'what is it?',a word that frequently occurs in the opening formulae of Persian riddles. However,the Arabic loan-word lughaz is also used. Traditional Persian rhetorical manuals almost always handle riddles,but Persian riddles have enjoyed little modern scholarly attention. Yet in the assessment of A. A. Seyed-Gohrab,'Persian literary riddles provide us with some of the most novel and intricate metaphors and images in Persian poetry'.
Judith McCulloh was an American folklorist,ethnomusicologist,and university press editor.
With His Pistol in His Hand is a book about Gregorio Cortez written by Américo Paredes. It was published by the University of Texas Press and first printed in 1958.