Femininity reinterpreted: an ethnographic study of women's folk speech in kajarī folk song

Women faced prosecution as common scolds for their unruly speech in US jurisdictions until 1972, with Pennsylvania playing an outsized role in this history. Pennsylvania's treatment of common scolds reveals how the interplay of the law and the press perpetuated a construct of women's speech as gossipy, quarrelsome and disruptive of social order. Prosecutions occurred so frequently and continued for so long in Pennsylvania because of English common law's grip on the state's jurisprudence, reinforced by popular culture representations that stigmatised women's speech. Common law furnished formal legal precedents, while the press, driven by its own imperatives, readily propagated, amplified and validated the law's characterisation of scolds. Reports about scold cases, which fit easily into journalistic and cultural frames, often appeared as humorous vignettes that served as illustrations – if not warnings – about women's transgressive speech. Judges wondering about the continued legitimacy of this gender‐specific offense could take comfort from stories about prosecutions of scolds across the state and around the nation. The ordinariness of common scold cases also sheds light on community rules that regulated women's everyday speech – evidence about a fleeting activity nearly invisible to scholars before the digitisation of newspapers and obscure legal texts.

This article is based on an empirical study of women's folk songs of North India. Songs concern female deities, ceremonial of birth and weddings, seasons and festivals, and daily chores. It is a critical analysis of the folk songs that deal with women's common wishes, unexpressed emotions, unfulfilled desires, hopes, disappointments, and their reactions to their social environment. The portrait of woman as depicted in these songs is often at variance with the conventional stereotype of an obedient, acquiescent, and conformist woman that is conjured up in one's mind. This article highlights the very important safety-valve function of these folk songs in which women are afforded an opportunity to express their bottled-up feelings and their longings in a socially acceptable form. The data of this article have been collected in India as well as Holland.

When Their Eyes Were Watching God was first published in 1937, two earlier books had already proved Zora Neale Hurston's particular interest in black oral culture: Mules and Men (1935) and Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934). Hurston had collected the material for Mules and Men, compilation of folk tales, folk songs, folk speech, conjure formulas, root prescriptions, and various hoodoo rituals, during two-year stay in Florida under the supervision of Franz Boas, then one of the leading anthropologists in the United States. This book, dealing for the first time with Afro-American folklore from the perspective of the black rural community, is notable because it ties together the numerous stories in an overall narrative structure and thus gives the reader sense of the original context that produced them. But although this leads to certain fictionalization of the text, Mules and Men still retains an anthropological approach. It was not until Jonah's Gourd Vine that Zora Neale Hurston tried to embed her experience of black oral culture in an elaborate literary form, the modern novel.' Both Jonah's Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God are set in Eatonville, Florida, Hurston's birthplace, which, in the words of Robert Hemenway, was a proud, self-governing, all-black village that felt no need of integration and, in fact, resisted it, so that an Afro-American culture could thrive without interference. Furthermore, both texts are in some ways related to incidents and persons in Hurston's life. Although this autobiographical impulse is less perceptible in Their Eyes, she tells us in Dust Tracks on Road that after receiving Guggenheim Fellowship and leaving for Jamaica, she took the opportunity to come to grips with muddled love-affair and wrote new novel: So I sailed off to Jamaica and pitched into work hard on my research to smother my feelings. But the thing would not down. The plot was far from the circumstances, but I tried to embalm all tenderness of my passion for him in Their Eyes Were Watching God.3 The result, however is no ordinary love-story. Janie not only struggles against the anxieties and expectations of slave-born grandmother who raised her, but also tries to resist the violent attempts of her later husbands to break her will to self-determination and to restrict her behavior to traditional female roles. Only with Tea Cake, her third husband, is Janie able to arrive at something like romance. But even this relationship, far from being harmonious all the time, is not free from oppression and violence. Finally, after shooting Tea Cake in self-defense, Janie returns to Eatonville where she sits down on the veranda to tell her story to Pheoby, an old friend. At first glance, it looks as if Their Eyes is the story of woman's resistance to male

Navigating the Print Line: Shaping Readers’ Expectations in Booker T. Washington’s Autobiographies BOOKER TALIAFERRO WASHINGTON WAS NOT AN EASY PERSON TO KNOW. “He was wary and silent,” recalled W. E. B. Du Bois. “He never expressed himself frankly or clearly until he knew exactly to whom he was talking and just what their wishes and desires were.” A skillful diplomat, Washington mastered the prickly art of sycophancy. Tactfully, he navigated the precarious minefield, the problematic “color-line” to use Du Bois’s words, in America. In her Works Progress Administration interview, Sarah Fitzpatrick expressed a more pragmatic view of the late African American leader. Booker T. Washington, the former Alabama slave recollected, “wuz a wise man . . . he al’ays let de white man shine, so he could live an’ wurk he’er.”1 More recently, Louis R. Harlan likened him to the artful Br’er Rabbit of African A N T O N I O T. B L Y Antonio T. Bly is an Assistant Professor of History at Appalachian State University. His work explores the interplay between African American Studies and the history of the book in America. A version of this article was presented at the SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing) 9th Annual Conference at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, on July 22, 2001. Much like Booker T. Washington, I am indebted to my ghostwriters. In that regard, I would like thank William Carroll, Joanne M. Braxton, and Robert A. Gross, all of whom have encouraged my interest in Washington. I also wish to thank the anonymous readers of the Alabama Review and of course its editorial staff, especially Carey Cauthen. As always, I owe a special debt of gratitude to my wife Donnamaria who has endured me, my work, and has commented on several drafts of this article. 1 Interviews with former slaves were recorded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), 1936–38. WPA interviewers were instructed to record the dialect used by these former slaves as they recounted their experiences in order to capture the “essential truth” present in their words. “These life histories [were] taken down as far as possible in the narrators’ words. . . . Rich not only in folk songs, folk tales, and folk speech but also in folk humor and poetry, crude or skillful in dialect, uneven in tone and treatment, they constantly reward one with earthy imagery, salty phrase, and sensitive detail.” Works Progress Administration for the District of Columbia, Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves (Washington, D.C., 1941), viii–x. J U L Y 2 0 0 8 191 American folklore who used craftiness to outsmart his adversaries and deference to achieve influence and sway. Those who have taken Washington’s “conventional public utterances,” he went on to explain , “as evidence of a simple mind have underestimated the man. He manipulated platitudes as though they were checkers in the game of life, sometimes crowning platitude on platitude to increase their force. His aim was not intellectual clarity, but power. His genius was that of stratagem.”2 Perhaps nowhere is Washington’s genius better exemplified than in his autobiographical work. Shortly after he rose to prominence in 1895, Booker T. Washington set about publishing two different accounts of his life story. Autobiography, he believed, gave him an opportunity to spread his philosophy of industrial education, thrift, and progressive social reform. To that end, the principal of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute employed two separate ghostwriters to assist him in the work, two copyeditors to oversee the proofs, and two publishing firms who commanded different segments of the book industry. In true Washingtonian fashion, the Wizard, as many of his contemporaries dubbed him, had two separate audiences in mind when he decided to write. In 1900, The Story of My Life and Work appeared in print. It was written primarily for rural, southern African American readers. Less than one year later, Doubleday, Page, & Co. published Washington’s Up from Slavery. It was written largely for urban , northern whites.3 2 W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an...

Foklore is part of oral tradition have positive values and deserving of preserved, developed, and utilized to supporting society life. Besides, folklore still scattered in verbal type that function as reveal nature thoughts, attitude, and supporting culture values, on eventually towards new culture forming wider. Folklore included cover (1) people language (folk speech), as patois, epithet, traditional position, and nobility title; (2) traditional expressions, as proverb, adage, and pameo; (3) traditional questions, as puzzle; (4) people poems, as poetry, poe, and poem; (5) prose stories, as mite, legend, myth; and (6) folk songs.

Folk Song and Folk Speech

Zlogovanje v ljudski pesmi

The article is devoted to the modeling of the linguistic personality of the generalized type of midwife, who takes an active part in all rituals of the Ukrainian rite of childbirth. In ritual discourse, this woman reflects the norms of ethnic linguistic culture. The purpose of our research was to analyze the linguistic personality of the collective type of midwife on ethnographic materials and materials of folk songs that accompanied the rituals in the rite of childbirth. The object was the linguistic and cultural personality of the generalized type of Ukrainian woman, who took an active part in antenatal and post partum rituals, as well as during childbirth performed all necessary work to save the lives of mothers and children. The subject was modeled on the verbal and nonverbal communicative levels of linguistic personality of the midwife, grandmother, as she was called by the people. In the process of work we used the following general and special linguistic methods: analysis and synthesis, descriptive method, as well as methods of induction and deduction; contextual-interpretive method and the method of modeling the language personality of the generalized type. The main attention was paid to the linguistic and spiritual state of this woman. In ritual discourse, the midwife reflects the norms of ethnic linguistic culture. The collective type of such a linguistic personality is represented by an elderly woman who can no longer have children. She is revered and respected not only in the village where she lives, but also far beyond. Her craft is passed down from generation to generation within the family. The midwife, who is often called the grandmother, is a connoisseur of sacred texts. The article analyzes the verbal and non-verbal means of communication through such texts with supernatural forces, including God and the Mother of God. Midwife has the secrets of folk medicine, she gives advice to the mother before childbirth, helps to correct the situation if there are complications during childbirth, and when the family already has children and parents do not want to give birth, prepares contraceptives for women. Grandmother is a good psychologist, she feels the woman’s condition during childbirth and calms her down with her words. The midwife’s dialogues or monologues have a suggestive effect on the midwife, who calls her mother, entrusting her life and the life of the child to the grandmother. The midwife is a modest and responsible woman. She can never refuse a request for help during childbirth: she gathers quickly and always has a set of ritual items that she carries with her. These are bread, holy water, candles, cloth, and so on. In turn, the new parents give the grandmother, who can, but always give bread and a towel. After that, the midwife becomes a member of the family, she prepares the first bath for the child, organizes a ritual of purification for herself and the mother, participates in baptisms and more. Folk songs preserve the glorification of the grandmother and the boundless gratitude for her work, which this woman always does conscientiously, without expecting a reward. The collective type of such a linguistic personality is characterized by knowledge of oral folk art, free possession of elements of folk speech. In the future, we see it possible to model a generalized type of linguistic personality of Ukrainian women in ritual discourse in a broad sense.

There is an apocryphal legend that when Louis Armstrong was asked whether he considered his music to be folk music he replied: ‘Wal, yeah, I guess so: leastways, I never heard of no horse making it.’ If and when we talk of Bob Dylan as a folk singer, we do so partly of course in this fundamental sense: his music is of, about and for people. But we also mean — as Satchmo's interviewer must have done — that Dylan calls on resources and techniques that pertain to oral cultures rather than ostensibly to our own. Unlike ‘real’ folk song, Dylan's words and music are written down; yet what is notated is no more than an approximation to the sounds heard, which are created empirically for each performance, from verbal inflection and from the body's gestures. Dylan is a ‘folk’ artist in that his sources are absorbed at a more or less pre-conscious level: from the monody and banjo-picking of ‘poor white’ Americans and the traditions of white British folk music behind them; from the black blues and the African heritage it stemmed from; and from some more sophisticated, or at least literate, sources such as white hymn, march and parlour ballad. To these musical roots there are literary parallels: Dylan's verses have been deeply influenced by rural folk ballads, by the poetry of the blues, by the Bible, by Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (scarcely less pervasive in the Bible belts than the Good Book itself), by Hymns Ancient and Modern, by children's rhymes and by runic verse of all kinds, including Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, which are close to the core of Dylan's experience and which, although literary, were sung by the poet himself to improvised, presumably folk-like, tunes. In his early days Dylan operated with his voice — untrained, ‘natural’, veering between speech and song — and his acoustic guitar.

The aim of the article is to justify the concept of a contrastive dictionary of the language of Kuban Cossacks’ folk song culture. This dictionary should demonstrate the bilingual nature of the Kuban Cossacks’ song folklore in the context of Russian and Ukrainian folk speech traditions, and become the basis for identifying the ethnolinguistic and ethnopsychological features of the Kuban Cossacks – a subethnos that has formed its own special traditional culture for over three centuries. The contrastive analysis of each culturally significant lexeme is organized in two blocks depending on the research base: Russian-language songs (songs of the Kuban Line Cossacks and Russian folk songs), Ukrainian-language songs (songs of the Kuban Black Sea Cossacks and Ukrainian folk songs). The article presents the concept of contrastive dictionary of the Kuban Cossacks’ folk songs; its originality is determined by the peculiar forming conditions of the Kuban folklore language caused by the settlement history of the Kuban territory. The existing experience of compiling contrastive dictionaries cannot be fully applied to the language of Kuban folklore, in which Russian and Ukrainian language folk traditions are mixed in a complex way. The dictionary is based on the ideographic principle. The thematic approach fully reflects a particular fragment of the linguistic world-image and provides great opportunities to study the place of separate language units in this fragment. Due to the significance of the task, attention is focused on one thematic group – “Man’s World”. The structure of the dictionary entry of the developed dictionary reflects linguistic features of lexemes: it gives an idea of the lexical and morphological paradigmatics, family of words (within the analyzed lexicon), their co-occurrence properties (syntagmatic aspect), and the originality of use (functional aspect). Such a structure of the dictionary entry allows not only describing the linguistic features of the analyzed lexeme, noting the presence of qualitative (cultural, conceptual) asymmetry in equivalent lexemes, but also identifying the deep implicit meanings reflected in the co-occurrence properties of the word and understanding the concept verbalized by the analyzed lexeme. The justified concept of the contrastive dictionary of Kuban folk songs should contribute to the solution of many problems of modern lexicography – studies of the possibilities of using contrastive dictionaries in folklore and author’s (writer’s) lexicography, lexicography of a multicultural region.

The basis of the article is the authors’ field materials recorded in 2017 from the words of the residents of the village Stovpiahy (Pereiaslav region). The main topics of the study are Ukrainian women's folk clothing and Ukrainian women's folk jewelry.This material presents facts that were not reflected in the official documents, but they are important as materials of personal origin. They reflect factual material saturated with observations and thoughts of the respondents about described events, details of people's lives and their moods. In addition, these field ethnographic records contain invaluable information about peasant life, customs, rites, calendar rituals, information about the native village from the point of view of children's and youth's observations. All recorded information is divided into separate sections.The study of the cultural phenomena specifics of both past and present generations of Ukrainians is based on the live connection between the recorder and the interviewer. During this reconnaissance methods of search, survey, generalization, and observation were used. The survey method is one of the main methods of collecting certain information about individual structural components of the traditional domestic culture of Ukrainians, their functioning as a certain system, application to persons having direct experience or knowledge of a subject or events.These ethnographic materials can be used for a thorough study of our own land, our own historical region, one's state, and further research of various areas of the material and spiritual culture of Ukrainians.

Musical and dramatic creativity by Olena Pchilka in the development of children musical theater in Ukraine

Important and coherent centers for what is ethnic, what is regional, in the literatures and cultures of Americans can be found in private, unassuming space and time and folk tradition. Like other folk groups, families have well-developed, traditionally persistent and artistically recreative bodies of oral narrations as well as their own proverb forms and folk speech, rhymes and rituals, folk poetry, music and song. Families generate and transmit jokes and anecdotes, homilies and hero legends and whole fictions which celebrate and tell of current and historic circumstances; aspirations, failed and realized; and exploits of the famous, infamous and ordinary among their kin and kind. Indeed, the entire life cycle of the family is framed in narrative performance.1 Families will mark funeral and reunion gatherings in some quiet or clatterful corner of traded and topped reminiscences about a deceased member. All the while storytelling turns on the lamentable drunkenness, or the remarkable cheerfulness, or the uncompromising honesty of the dead kinsman, he is remembered alive by the surviving family. His very words are part of the dramatically performed dialogues which carry the action of the tales. He is, in these circumstances, still counted a member of the group, at the same time that the tales about him serve to reintegrate, entertain and console his remaining relatives.2 When my maternal, Scotch-Irish, upper-Appalachian Solley kin gather in late summer for their central Pennsylvania Church of the Brethren homecoming and family reunion, the after-dinner storying often reiterates and explicates the tandem Solley family traits of stubbornness and York State Yankee ingenuity. Invariably, my grandad, Leo Solley, is remembered, once again alive, and often more contrary than a mines mule by his younger brother, Roscoe, who connects contrariness and cleverness won out.

This paper examines how Swazi women use folk songs to depict gendered power relations as they exist in the Swazi society. It goes further to show how the women sing/talk about female sexuality in ways that undercut male-authored discourses about female sexuality, as well as how they subvert and question patriarchal discourses and practices that work to the detriment of women. This is achieved through the reading of a selected body of women's songs performed during Swazi traditional marriage rites such as umtsimba 1, kumekeza 2 and in various social and communal gatherings. This paper reads the songs as social texts and argues that the song is a political space in which women (re)write the self in ways that oppose patriarchal discourses on female sexuality and a space where power is negotiated. Finally, the paper concludes that the song is a contested, effective and a political space, which women can use to articulate their views

The aim of this article is to explore one way through which Swazi women voice their perceptions of themselves in relation to patriarchal values in Swaziland. The folk songs analysed in this article are composed orally and are passed down orally from one generation to the next. They belong to society and remain the property of society. Some members of society may use them for their own economic benefit. The songs to be analysed are those that relate to the themes of love, marriage, disappointment and challenge to patriarchal values. These songs are composed and sung with the intention of celebrating the pleasures of love within the institution of marriage. However, the same songs contain elements of satire which give them the potential to be used as “spears” for fighting for social justice and change in society.