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Posted by: Stephen Winick
The American Folklife Center's 2021 Mummers play is about a zoom meeting that gets invaded by a hacker who won't let the participants leave until he gets a bitcoin ransom. 2021 has felt like a zoom meeting that wouldn't end, so we hope our audience can relate! Find a video of the play and the complete annotated script in this blog!
Posted in: christmas, Folk Drama, Holidays, Mumming, Uncategorized
Posted by: Stephen Winick
This post is part of an occasional series about ethnography and folklore in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Find the whole series here! In our last look at the foodways of Dickens’s classic story A Christmas Carol, we examined the joy the Cratchits take in their small but serviceable Christmas goose, as Scrooge and the Ghost …
Posted in: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, christmas, Holidays
Posted by: Stephen Winick
Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol reveals an interesting fact about Victorian London: many working class people lacked cooking facilities, with only a hearth fire in their homes. In this post, we'll see some of their strategies for cooking a meal by looking at the Cratchits, the only working class family depicted in the book in a detailed way. We'll also look beyond the Cratchits to other London families in the same boat, and show how Dickens expresses social and political ideas about foodways through Scrooge and his interactions.
Posted in: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, christmas, Holidays
Posted by: Stephen Winick
In this post, we read segments of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol ethnographically, exploring the aspects of cultural context that stand out as different, surprising, and in need of explanation. In particular, this year we'll examine unusual aspects of Dickensian foodways. In this first post, we'll find out how to determine what Scrooge ate on Christmas Eve, and discuss supernatural belief and folk medicine along the way.
Posted in: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, christmas, Holidays
Posted by: Stephen Winick
It's been a while since we posted a Homegrown Plus post! In this ongoing series, we present Homegrown concerts that also had accompanying oral history interviews, placing both videos together in an easy-to-find blog post. We're continuing the series with PIQSIQ, an Inuit style throat singing duo who characterize their style as being "galvanized by darkness and haunting northern beauty." PIQSIQ is composed of sisters Tiffany Kuliktana Ayalik and Kayley Inuksuk Mackay. These talented performers come together to create a unique duo, performing ancient traditional songs along with new compositions. The two grew up in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, with roots in Nunavut, Canada's northernmost territory. After years of hard work on their music, they have developed their own form, blending haunting melodies and otherworldly sounds. As PIQSIQ, they perform their songs with live improvisational looping, creating a dynamic audience experience that changes with every show. In this blog, you'll find their November 2020 concert and their February 2021 oral history interview.
Posted in: Homegrown Concert Series, Homegrown Plus, Native American History
Posted by: Stephen Winick
The following is a guest post by AFC Senior Folklife Specialist Nancy Groce. All photos except the above are by Nancy Groce. Adaptation. New Yorkers are nothing if not adaptable – and creative. Both traits are essential for surviving and flourishing in one of the world’s busiest and most complex cities. The Covid-19 pandemic has …
Posted in: Material Culture, Vernacular Architecture
Posted by: Stephen Winick
La Llorona, the Weeping Woman, is a spirit that haunts the folklore of Mexico and other Latin American countries. In some versions she's a ghost, but in others she's an immortal wanderer, not dead but not really alive either. So far in the series, we've introduced the legend, given some of its history, explored songs related to La Llorona, and discussed the story's role in growing up. Now, we present a telling of the tale. The post contains audio and a transcript of a performance by Joe Hayes, one of the best known storytellers from the American southwest. Hayes's bilingual Spanish-English storytelling has earned him a distinctive place among America’s professional storytellers.
Posted in: Día de los Muertos, Día de Muertos, Halloween, Halloween Stories, Hispanic American History, La Llorona
Posted by: Stephen Winick
Halloween and Día de Muertos are almost here! So, believe it or not, Season 4, Episode 1 of the Folklife Today Podcast, our 2021 Halloween and Día de Muertos episode, is ready for listening! It features interviews about the Weeping Woman, La Llorona, a spirit from Latin American folklore, plus related songs and stories. The people interviewed are Juan Díes, leader of the Sones de Mexico Ensemble, Camille Acosta, who wrote her masters thesis on La Llorona before interning at AFC, and Allina Migoni, AFC's Latinx subject specialist. This blog contains links to download the podcast, background on our guests, and links to full audio of the songs.
Posted in: Día de los Muertos, Día de Muertos, Folksong, Halloween, Halloween Songs, Halloween Stories, La Llorona, Podcasts
Posted by: Stephen Winick
This is the fourth blog post in a series about La Llorona, the Weeping Woman, a spirit that haunts the folklore of Mexico and other Latin American countries. We'll present comments on the legend by the writer Rudolfo Anaya, the scholar Domino Renee Perez, our former intern and Llorona expert Camille Acosta, pioneering Costa Rican writer Manuel Argüello Mora, and Esperanza Sernas, a restaurant worker interviewed in 1977 by fieldworker Philip George for AFC's Chicago Ethnic Arts Project. This blog also contains one of the most gruesome traditional descriptions of La Llorona we've seen so far! The whole series will be published in time for Día de Muertos (aka Día de los Muertos) 2021, so stay tuned....
Posted in: Día de los Muertos, Día de Muertos, Halloween, Halloween Stories, Hispanic American History, La Llorona, Uncategorized