Simon J. Bronner | |
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 Portrait of Bronner | |
| Born | April 7, 1954 Haifa, Israel |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation(s) | Folklorist; ethnologist; historian; sociologist; educator; college dean; author |
Simon J. Bronner (born April 7, 1954 in Haifa, Israel) is an American folklorist, ethnologist, historian, sociologist, educator, college dean, and author.
Bronner's parents were Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivors who immigrated to the United States from Israel in 1960. His childhood in the U.S. was spent in Chicago and New York City. His undergraduate study was in political science, history, and folklore (mentored by European and American folklorist W.F.H. Nicolaisen and political-social theorists Harold L. Nieburg and Louis C. Gawthrop) at Binghamton University (B.A., 1974) and then he received his M.A. in American Folk Culture at the Cooperstown Graduate Programs of the State University of New York (1977), where he also studied social history, ethnology, and museum studies (including work with historically oriented ethnologists Louis C. Jones, Bruce Buckley, and Roderick Roberts). He stayed in Cooperstown to work for the New York State Historical Association as director of the Archive of New York State Folklife, before moving to Indiana University, Bloomington, where he completed his Ph.D. in Folklore and American Studies (1981) and worked for the Indiana University Museum of History, Anthropology, and Folklore (now the Mathers Museum of World Cultures), and was assistant to Richard M. Dorson on the Journal of the Folklore Institute (now the Journal of Folklore Research ). In 1981, he became assistant professor of American Studies and folklore at the Pennsylvania State University in the graduate American Studies Program at Harrisburg, and was promoted to the rank of Distinguished University Professor in 1991. He has also taught as Walt Whitman Distinguished Chair in American Cultural Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands (2006), Visiting Professor of Folklore and the History of American Civilization at Harvard University (1997–1998), Fulbright Professor of American Studies at Osaka University in Japan (1996–1997), and Visiting Distinguished Professor of American Studies at the University of California at Davis (1991). He was a scholar-in-residence at the Latvian Academy of Culture, Riga, Latvia, in fall 2017. In 2018-2019, he held the Maxwell C. Weiner distinguished professorship in humanities at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, part of the University of Missouri system.
In 1990, he was founding director of the Center for Pennsylvania Culture Studies (now the Pennsylvania Center for Folklore) and in 2007, the Center for Holocaust and Jewish Studies at thePennsylvania State University, Harrisburg. He served as Coordinator of the American Studies Program at the college from 1987 to 2002, founding director of the college's doctoral program in American Studies in 2008 (and subsequently chair of the expanding program that included B.A., M.A., Ph.D., and two certificate programs in folklore and ethnography and heritage and museum studies), and received the Mary Turpie Prize from the American Studies Association in recognition of his program building, teaching, and advising. The American Folklore Society bestowed a similar award on him, the Kenneth Goldstein Lifetime Achievement Award for Academic Leadership, and Penn State honored him with its Graduate Program Leadership Award. From 2002 to 2004, he served as interim director of the School of Humanities at the college. He also received awards in the areas of research, teaching, and service from the college. He received a teaching and advising award in doctoral education from the Northeast Association of Graduate Schools. He has edited the journals Folklore Historian (1983–1989), Material Culture (1983–1986), and book series Studies in Folklore and Ethnology (Lexington Books), American Material Culture and Folklife (UMI Research Press), Material Worlds (University Press of Kentucky), Pennsylvania German History and Culture (Pennsylvania State University Press), and Jewish Cultural Studies (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization), recipient in 2021 of the National Jewish Book Award for education and identity. In 2011, he was named the editor of the Encyclopedia of American Studies online (published by Johns Hopkins University Press). He was elected to the Fellows of the American Folklore Society in 1994 and received the Wayland Hand Prize for best article on history and folklore and the Peter and Iona Opie Prize for best book on children’s folklore from the Society. In 2017, he received the lifetime achievement medal from the American Folklore Society for his work on children's folklore, sociology, and ethnography, followed by the Society's award for lifetime scholarly achievement in 2018. In 2020, his book The Practice of Folklore: Essays Toward a Theory of Tradition received the Chicago Folklore Prize for the best book-length work of folklore scholarship for the year; the prize is the oldest international award recognizing excellence in folklore scholarship. He also received the John Ben Snow Foundation Prize and Regional Council of Historical Societies Award of Merit for Old-Time Music Makers of New York State and the Encyclopedia of American Folklife was designated an outstanding academic title by Choice and "Editor's Choice" by Booklist/Reference Books Bulletin for 2006. He received a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship in 1984 at the Winterthur Museum, Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (1978–1981), and two Fulbright Program lecturing awards (1996–1997, 2006). In 2019, he became Dean of the College of General Studies and distinguished professor of social sciences at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.
Much of Bronner's scholarship has been on the issue of tradition, especially in relation to modernity, folk culture and popular culture, and creativity. [1] He has been an advocate of "structuralist" and "symbolist" approaches to the interpretation of cultures integrating historical, ethnographic, sociological, and psychological perspectives with particular attention to developmental issues across the life course and ethnic process and practice. He has also highlighted the politics of tradition and culture and the ways that contested public debates can be symbolically analyzed in behavioral, material, and verbal rhetoric to show systems of belief and communication in conflict. [2] Examples are the animal rights protest movement, [3] the national campaign of Joseph Lieberman for vice-president, [4] and anti-hazing campaigns in the Navy. [5] He has proposed in Grasping Things and The Practice of Folklore: Essays Toward a Theory of Tradition a folkloristic perspective on practice theory using an analytical perspective on cultural "praxis," i.e., cultural practices and processes that symbolize socially shared ways of thinking and draw attention to tradition as an adaptive strategy. [6] Many of his essays raise questions about traditions regarding the personal motivations and psychological states, historical conditions and precedents, social identities, and underlying mental processes that explain the function and persistence of cultural expressions.
Bronner's main area of study has been the United States and he has been a figure in the academic development of American cultural studies with attention to ethnic, religious, occupational, and age groups, particularly Jews, Pennsylvania Germans, and African Americans. His work in Jewish studies includes founding the Jewish Cultural Studies Series for the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization (6 volumes), and authoring Jewish Cultural Studies (Wayne State University Press, 2021) with a practice-theory perspective on folklore and literature, Jewish humor, scholarship on Yiddish, Jewish material culture, adapted and invented rituals, and Holocaust memorialization and social history. He has also promoted international comparative studies, with field research in Japan, Poland, England, Israel, and the Netherlands. Bronner’s major scholarly contributions have been in the topics of material culture and folklife (particularly in folk art and architecture) in books such as American Material Culture and Folklife , Folk Art and Art Worlds, The Carver’s Art, and Grasping Things, consumer culture (Consuming Visions), history and theory of folklore studies (Folklore: The Basics, Explaining Traditions: Folk Behavior in Modern Culture, Following Tradition: Folklore in the Discourse of American Culture, and American Folklore Studies: An Intellectual History), ethnic studies (particularly for Jews, Pennsylvania Germans, and African Americans), ritual and belief (Crossing the Line), masculinity studies (Manly Traditions), American roots music (blues and old-time music) in Old-Time Music Makers of New York State, animal-human relations (in practices such as hunting and gaming), and developmental psychology and culture across the life course (particularly in childhood and old age) in American Children’s Folklore, Piled Higher and Deeper: The Folklore of Student Life, and Chain Carvers: Old Men Crafting Meaning. He followed work in material culture with studies in physical culture, the analysis of the body and social processes of embodiment in sports and strength athletics. Another scholarly trajectory arising from his studies of technology and media is in digital culture and its social psychology. He has also contributed to the study of literary journalism with Lafcadio Hearn's America and articles offering a psychological profile of the famous nineteenth century writer Lafcadio Hearn who worked in America and Japan. He edited the most comprehensive reference work in American folklife studies, Encyclopedia of American Folklife, in 4 volumes (2006) and followed with the methodogical reference work Oxford Handbook of American Folklore and Folklife Studies for Oxford University Press (2018).
As a prominent educator and academic administrator involved in restructuring higher education to meet cultural and technological changes in the twenty-first century, Bronner has been a frequent consultant and presenter on curricular reform, general and interdisciplinary education, online delivery of academic programs, enhancing cultural diversity, and community outreach. Universities he has served and for which he has created reports include the University of Texas, University of Iowa, University of North Carolina, Trinity College, University of Mt. Union, Roger Williams University, and Hong Kong University.
Bronner has been active in community institutions serving the public, serving as consultant and curator for many museums, festivals, and historical and cultural organizations. In 2018 he received a fellowship from the Smithsonian Institution's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation related to his work on physical culture and previously he was a NEH fellow at the Winterthur Museum. He received a lifetime achievement award for his contributions to public folklore and folklife from the New Jersey Folk Festival in 2015. These activities combine with his development of the academic field of heritage studies, also called "public heritage," focusing on issues of public presentations of history, art, society, and culture, especially as communities interpret their legacies for themselves. [7] His book Popularizing Pennsylvania (1996), for example, examined the links of Progressive politics, environmental conservation, and public history and folklore in the career of Henry W. Shoemaker (1880–1958), America’s first official state folklorist, chairman of the Pennsylvania Historical Commission, ambassador to Bulgaria (1930–1933), and prominent newspaper publisher. Bronner has been the project scholar for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives Oral History Project, chair of the Cultural Heritage Advisory Board for the Pennsylvania Heritage Affairs Commission, and Commonwealth Speaker for the Pennsylvania Humanities Council. In 2018, the American Folklore Society bestowed its Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award on Bronner.
Folklore is shared by a particular group of people; it encompasses the traditions common to that culture, subculture or group. This includes tales, myths, legends, proverbs, poems, jokes and other oral traditions. They include material culture, such as traditional building styles common to the group. Folklore also includes customary lore, taking actions for folk beliefs, and the forms and rituals of celebrations such as Christmas, weddings, folk dances, and initiation rites. Each one of these, either singly or in combination, is considered a folklore artifact or traditional cultural expression. Just as essential as the form, folklore also encompasses the transmission of these artifacts from one region to another or from one generation to the next. Folklore is not something one can typically gain in a formal school curriculum or study in the fine arts. Instead, these traditions are passed along informally from one individual to another, either through verbal instruction or demonstration. The academic study of folklore is called folklore studies or folkloristics, and it can be explored at undergraduate, graduate and Ph.D. levels.
Folklore studies is the branch of anthropology devoted to the study of folklore. This term, along with its synonyms, gained currency in the 1950s to distinguish the academic study of traditional culture from the folklore artifacts themselves. It became established as a field across both Europe and North America, coordinating with Volkskunde (German), folkeminner (Norwegian), and folkminnen (Swedish), among others.
Folk art covers all forms of visual art made in the context of folk culture. Definitions vary, but generally the objects have practical utility of some kind, rather than being exclusively decorative. The makers of folk art are typically trained within a popular tradition, rather than in the fine art tradition of the culture. There is often overlap, or contested ground with 'naive art'. "Folk art" is not used in regard to traditional societies where ethnographic art continue to be made.
Ethnopoetics is a method of recording text versions of oral poetry or narrative performances that uses poetic lines, verses, and stanzas to capture the formal, poetic performance elements which would otherwise be lost in the written texts. The goal of any ethnopoetic text is to show how the techniques of unique oral performers enhance the aesthetic value of their performances within their specific cultural contexts. Major contributors to ethnopoetic theory include Jerome Rothenberg, Dennis Tedlock, and Dell Hymes. Ethnopoetics is considered a subfield of ethnology, anthropology, folkloristics, stylistics, linguistics, literature and translation studies.
Benjamin Albert Botkin was an American folklorist and scholar.
Public folklore is the term for the work done by folklorists in public settings in the United States and Canada outside of universities and colleges, such as arts councils, museums, folklife festivals, radio stations, etc., as opposed to academic folklore, which is done within universities and colleges. The term is short for "public sector folklore" and was first used by members of the American Folklore Society in the early 1970s.
Applied folklore is the branch of folkloristics concerned with the study and use of folklore and traditional cultural materials to address or solve real social problems. The term was coined in 1939 in a talk by folklorist Benjamin A. Botkin who, along with Alan Lomax, became the foremost proponent of this approach over the next thirty years. Applied folklore is similar in its rationale and approach to applied anthropology and other applied social sciences, and like these other applied approaches often distinguishes itself from "pure" research, that which has no explicit problem-solving aims.
Henry Glassie College Professor Emeritus at Indiana University Bloomington, has done fieldwork on five continents and written books on the full range of folkloristic interest, from drama, song, and story to craft, art, and architecture. Three of his books -- Passing the Time in Ballymenone, The Spirit of Folk Art, and Turkish Traditional Art Today -- were named among the "Notable Books of the Year" by The New York Times. Glassie has won many awards for his work, including the Charles Homer Haskins Prize of the American Council of Learned Societies for a distinguished career of humanistic scholarship. A film on his work, directed by Pat Collins and titled Henry Glassie: Field Work, had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019.
W.K. McNeil was a prominent American folklorist, historian, record producer, and author specializing in Ozark and Appalachian mountain cultures.
Wilhelm Fritz Hermann Nicolaisen was a folklorist, linguist, medievalist, scholar of onomastics and literature, educator, and author with specialties in Scottish and American studies.
Dorothy Noyes is an American folklorist and ethnologist whose comparative, ethnographic and historical research focuses on European societies and upon European immigrant communities in the United States. Beyond its area studies context, her work has aimed to enrich the conceptual toolkit of folklore studies (folkloristics) and ethnology. General problems upon which she has focused attention include the status of "provincial" communities in national and global contexts, heritage policies and politics, problems of innovation and creativity, and the nature of festival specifically and of cultural displays and representations generally.
Roger David Abrahams was an American folklorist whose work focused on the expressive cultures and cultural histories of the Americas, with a specific emphasis on African American peoples and traditions.
Austin Edwin Fife and Alta Stevens Fife are the pioneering Utah folklorists for whom the Fife Folklore Archives, the Fife Folklore Conference, and the Fife Honor Lecture are each named at Utah State University. This husband and wife duo dedicated much of their time for collecting and preserving the cultural expressions of the American West and Mormon folklore. The Fifes’ work has influenced not only the generations of folklorists who have tried to follow in their footsteps but also the lives of countless Utahans, who have enjoyed a richer cultural experience because of the many folk festivals and folklore programs inspired by the Fifes’ dedication and service.
Family folklore is the branch of folkloristics concerned with the study and use of folklore and traditional culture transmitted within an individual family group. This includes craft goods produced by family members or memorabilia that have been saved as reminders of family events. It includes family photos, photo albums, along with bundles of other pages held for posterity such as certificates, letters, journals, notes, and shopping lists. Family sayings and stories which recount true events are retold as a means of maintaining a common family identity. Family customs are performed, modified, sometimes forgotten, created or resurrected with great frequency. Each time the result is to define and solidify the perception of the family as unique.
Museum folklore is a domain of scholarship and professional practice within the field of folklore studies (folkloristics).
Kay Turner is an artist and scholar working across disciplines including performance, writing, music, exhibition curation, and public and academic folklore. She is noted for her feminist writings and performances on subjects such as women’s home altars, fairy tale witches, and historical goddess figures. She co-founded “Girls in the Nose,” a lesbian feminist rock punk band that anticipated riot grrl.
Folk and traditional arts are rooted in and reflective of the cultural life of a community. They encompass the body of expressive culture associated with the fields of folklore and cultural heritage. Tangible folk art includes historic objects which are crafted and used within a traditional community. Intangible folk arts include forms such as music, dance and narrative structures. Tangible and intangible folk arts were developed to address a need, and are shaped by generational values derived from family and community, through demonstration, conversation and practice.
Don Yoder was an American folklorist specializing in the study of Pennsylvania Dutch, Quaker, and Amish and other Anabaptist folklife in Pennsylvania who wrote at least 15 books on these subjects.
Michael Owen Jones is an American Folklorist and Emeritus Professor in the World Arts and Cultures/Dance Program at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
C. Kurt Dewhurst is an American curator and folklorist. Dewhurst is Director for Arts and Cultural Partnerships at Michigan State University (MSU) and also a Senior Fellow in University Outreach and Engagement. At MSU, he is also Director Emeritus of the Michigan State University Museum and a Professor of English and Museum Studies.
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