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Posted by: Stephen Winick
The following is a guest post by Jennifer Cutting. Continuing on the momentum set by the American Folklife Center’s symposium Women Documenting the World: Women as Folklorists, Ethnomusicologists & Fieldworkers (September 26, 2019), we’d like to showcase some women ethnographers who are very close to home. This blog post takes a scrapbook-style look at photographs …
Posted in: AFC History, Women's History
Posted by: John Fenn
This is a guest post by Todd Harvey, reference specialist and acquisitions coordinator at the American Folklife Center. Todd worked closely with John Cohen in recent years, and was able to conduct an oral history interview with him in 2012. The American Folklife Center sadly notes the passing of collection donor and longtime friend, John …
Posted in: AFC History, John Cohen
Posted by: Michelle Stefano
With 31 digitized AFC collections now online at loc.gov, AFC staff has long been thinking of ways to promote and enhance meaningful uses of them. In the past couple of years, these discussions have focused on the digitized, ethnographic survey collections, such as the Montana Folklife Survey, South Central Georgia Folklife Project, Rhode Island Folklife …
Posted in: AFC History, Archival Practice
Posted by: Stephen Winick
The following is a guest post from Tom Rankin, a member of the AFC Board of Trustees. A folklorist and photographer, Tom is Director of Duke University’s MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts, and was formerly the Director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke. Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi, who held his seat from …
Posted in: AFC History
Posted by: Stephen Winick
This is a guest blog post by Carl Fleischhauer. It presents a version of the talk he gave at our Alan Jabbour tribute event earlier this year. It has been edited for presentation in this blog. These remarks are about Alan Jabbour as founding director of the American Folklife Center: his thinking, activities at the …
Posted in: AFC History
Posted by: Stephen Winick
On January 18, 2018, AFC sponsored a special event in our Benjamin Botkin Folklife Lecture Series. Alan Jabbour, 1942 – 2017: His Legacy in Folklife and Traditional Music brought together speakers who worked closely with Alan to examine the contributions he made during his career to cultural documentation, the promotion of traditional music, and …
Posted in: AFC History
Posted by: Stephen Winick
Note: the following is a guest post by our colleague Kate Stewart, former AFC archivist and former Folklife Today blogger. If you have a memory of Peter to share, please do so in the comments on the blog post at this link. In the spring of 2011, I had just begun learning the ropes of working at …
Posted in: AFC History
Posted by: Stephen Winick
The American Folklife Center is very sad to report the death of our longtime staff member, Peter Bartis. Peter died on December 25, 2017, from cancer. He had been in hospice for several days, with his spouse Ben, his brother Jim, and several AFC staff members visiting him daily. At the time of his retirement …
Posted in: AFC History
Posted by: Michelle Stefano
In the last “Folklife at the International Level” post, Wend Wendland, Director of WIPO’s Traditional Knowledge Division, recounted that the Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore (IGC) was formed by WIPO member states in 2000. The aim was to discuss issues relating to the protection of TCEs (called at …
Posted in: AFC History, Fieldwork, Intangible Cultural Heritage, Native American History, WIPO