Young artists at play in Austin, 1974
In this post I feature two articles I published in 2024, both with a retrospective bent. Perhaps retrospection is the modality suiting my current stage of life, though I’d hate to rule out new incursions into the fabric of reality; in fact, I have a couple in the works so stay tuned. But it does happen that people turn to me for reprises these days, and two such queries set off quests that came to fruition in these 2024 articles:
“Revisiting Ostension in Folkloristics,” Semiotic Review 11 (April 2024)
https://semioticreview.com/ojs/index.php/sr/article/view/82
“On the Street with Austin’s Chicano Kids,” Children’s Folklore Review 42 (2024)
https://doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39022
In the first of these I look back on my earlier work with oral narrative and take us into the semiotics of performance, inspecting how the perception of immediacy can be created and conveyed by performing artists and experienced by their audiences. In the second article I look back on my dissertation research with Chicano children in Austin, Texas, and assess the process of doing ethnography in such settings and the insights that may accrue.
Taken together, these two acts of retrospection offer a decent portrait of my work in folkloristics, a research arena where the products of careful, even intimate, ethnography find their way into theoretical constructs intended to shine light on what makes us human and how we go about sorting things out in society.
In case any of this intrigues you, dear reader, I present below the abstract for each article; perhaps you will be enticed to visit the pages of these pieces via the links provided above!
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“Revisiting Ostension in Folkloristics”
Abstract
Semiotic analysis in folkloristics usefully centers on iconicity, ostension, and indexicality as modes of representation active in performances of expressive culture. In this essay I focus on the semiotic mode of ostension, wherein a thing is used to represent itself, which I have found helpful in thinking about the efficacy of artistic performances at the heart of my ethnographic research over the years. Here I draw on my previous work with a child’s fantasy play and with verbal narrative performance to signal the enormous analytical potential that lurks in this somewhat neglected member of the triad. In both of these instances, the turn to ostension stands in contrast to the enveloping framework of iconicity, representation through likeness, a move, I contend, that opens possibilities for an epiphany, a transcending of normally discrete ontological sectors. I close the essay with a treatment of ostension in a ritual setting, the mesa or ritual table of an Andean day of the dead ceremony, where it works in tandem with iconic and indexical elements to create a dynamic model of the cosmos, but with the specific mission of fostering remarkable levels of immediacy.
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“On the Street with Austin’s Chicano Kids”
Abstract
These pages offer a retrospective on my time with the Texas Children’s Folklore Project, which set me in motion to document the verbal play of Chicano children in Austin, Texas. After a short overview of the field collection assembled there, I address its core elements in relation to techniques that enabled me to get the work done, a small set of events that stand out in my memory as exemplary, and a surmise of analytical themes emerging from my encounter with those lively youngsters and their repertories. My essay is supplemented by a selection of rhymes and songs performed by the children, in the form of audio files and corresponding transcriptions and (as needed) translations.
Taita Bautista engages us in the Indigenous cosmos
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