Family Lore Research Articles

Telling Tales Out of Childhood: Artist’s Statement

LIKE HANSEL AND GRETEL and generations of other lost children, I have been following a trail. I first drew a girl with a house on her head after hearing my eight-year-old niece say her head was like a house, with rooms in which she could shut things she didn't want to think about and lock the door. I gave the house-headed girl a companion, dressed in a bear suit. The choice had to do with my own loving, yet fierce, sister and the contradictions inherent in teddy bears as a child's comfort when bears in the wild are so fierce. This led me to a sequence of images and stories from antiquity to the present of girls in animal skins: the ancient cult of Artemis that dressed girls in bearskins in the borderlands to do a ritual dance to ward off sexual life from coming on too soon; the tale of St Dymphna, patron saint of the mentally ill, who ran away with a monk to escape her father's incestuous advances, wearing a jester's hat (donkey's ears); the literary fairy tales of the seventeenth century onward that echo St Dymphna's tale of girls running away in bearskins, cat skins, donkey skins. My work is about childhood and negotiating traumatic experience. In a bigger sense, it is about how power structures create trauma and how the little folk survive within those structures. I want to understand how the stories we tell--whether they are family lore, fairy tales, or cultural myth-are woven together to create systems and identity as well as counterculture. My work is about finding my way through the dark forest and figuring out how to get out of the gingerbread house without being eaten. It is about storytelling and the ways that telling tales help us navigate emotionally difficult terrain. It is also about how all stories, even true stories, are just fragments. I deeply believe in the importance of myth and symbol, of narrative as a process rather than an end point. What matters to me is that my drawings conjure (and make light too) of our fears. I want them to make the viewer feel like it is okay to struggle and to ask questions about how we struggle, adapt, and survive through difficult circumstances. I want the pictures to vacillate: between truth and fiction, between past and present, between power and fear. In this way my work stimulates dialogue. This doesn't happen by chance. I use recognizable imagery rendered realistically through many details within a fanciful, surreal but somewhat familiar context so that people will become absorbed, perhaps lost in the magic of the illusion only to realize something's not right here and begin to ask questions: How should I feel toward these subjects? Are they in a state of change or is this their wholeness? …

Buried Traces

By the time I came to make this film, my grandfather had already passed on. There was no one in my family to speak about their experiences growing up Métis. It was in talking to Lorraine Freeman, a Métis community leader in Winnipeg, that I came to really comprehend the extent of racism and challenges of being a ‘halfbreed’ in the first half of the 20th century. My conversations with Lorraine helped me to see that the years of silence around our culture and identity was linked to a much broader colonial legacy.
 
 When I was growing up if you said who you were, somebody was duking it out with you on the baseball diamond at recess. That’s just the way it was ‘cause we were nothing but dirty halfbreeds. My uncle told me one time he was speaking Michif to a friend of his and the nuns put his head down the outside toilet cause he was speaking this abomination of a language.(Lorraine Freeman)
 
 Lorraine was able to say what my family wasn’t. It is as if through this film, I was able to engage with Lorraine’s memory, to access the difficult experiences of my grandfather, to make sense of my family’s silence. Remembering the assault on the body, embodying this past, searching for a voice within this fraught identity.
 
 Almond shaped eyes, lack of the carabelli cusp on the maxillary first molar, a wide space between the big toe and the second toe ...Dispelling the myths of what "Indians" look like (Duffy 2010)
 
 For people who call themselves Métis, the ongoing battle of who belongs, the struggle for political inclusion, is played out in the contested body of the “hybrid halfbreed”. Who we are is framed between fragmented memories, memories denied, images, stories, rumors, and a legacy of colonialism’s crusade for assimilation if not extermination. In the early 19th century, the physiology of the inferior non Anglo-Saxon was his/her cultural identity, a racial classification wherein, as Shohat and Stam write, “a mania for classification, measurement, and ranking – expressed in such pseudo-sciences as phrenology and craniometry – left no domain untouched. Every detail was mastered in the name of abstract hierarchies” (1994: 91). This racism disguised as science was particularly vicious towards persons of mixed race, “dreaded by racists as a monster, an infertile hybrid” (Pieterse in Shoat and Stam 1994: 91). This view shaped the life experience of the Métis Nation in very concrete ways. Bonita Lawrence notes how colonial surveyors classified halfbreeds and Indians based on racial indicators (2004: 88). Those that “looked and acted Indian” were classified as Indians. Others assimilated into the white majority. Yet others of this “mongrel” race remained on the margins, surviving in isolated communities, many just outside the boundaries of the reserve. Some, pushed off their land base, scrip squandered, became the “road allowance people”, making a life and settling on the thin strips of undesignated land on either side of the roadways.
 I blur the boundaries between past and present – between Lorraine’s voice and my body, between historical footage and contemporary footage of me and my grandmother, between photos of Métis heroes and today’s prairie landscape. Contemporary lives and struggles are infused with the knowledge and experience of the past. I draw connections between current realities and the political repression and social exclusion that came before us. I layer images and suture fragments together. Our identities and memories are unstable and impermeable.
 I survey my own body: Do high cheekbones or almond shaped eyes make you an Indian? To what extent do lived experience, historical affiliation, family lore, blood quantum and physiology play into notions of cultural identity? Who decides? How does self-identification manifest itself in relation to policy decisions and struggles for rights and recognition?
 It is not my parents’ or grandparents’ experiences that I “remember”. They were silent about their trauma. Lorraine Freeman’s testimonial becomes my expression in a metaphorical sense, breaking down the division of past and present, infusing my own experience as a Métis person today with the knowledge and experience of this past. This “postmemory” invokes, as Lebow describes in reference to Chantal Ackerman’s work, “a broader, ancestral postmemory” (Lebow 2008 19) For me, Lorraine’s words reflect a collective experience that is life affirming and political. We are still here. We have survived.
 Buried Traces has been selected and featured in a number of recent festivals and galleries, including: Images Festival 2009, Gimme Some Truth, Festival Prescence Autochtones, GIV summer festival, Métis Media Festival, FIFA 2011, Traverses Festival Toulouse, Métis Health: Culture, Identity, History conference, NAHO; Galleries and Curated Collections: Alternator Gallery Kelowna, Urban Shaman Winnipeg, Topo-vidéographies: Territoires/Territorios Montreal. Copies of the work can be ordered via GIV http://www.givideo.org/ang/indexA/videosA/A-299.html.

A visitation of God: Northern civilians interpret the Civil War

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)In early 1960s, centennial reflections and observances of American Civil War, especially its deeper significance in national self-understanding, were largely overshadowed by looming presence of Cold War and recent memory of World War II. The young American veterans of 1940s global war in Africa, Europe, and Asia were now running country, leaning into future, and had adopted habit of relative silence about their personal memories of war. If their families had been in United States by 1860s, their grandparents would have known first-hand Civil War generation, former soldiers from both armies and, depending on where they had lived, perhaps they also knew sharecroppers or new north-bound laborers who were born into slavery.The family lore handed down to World War II by parents and grandparents would have insisted that the generation had already been determined a century before. Much of hundredth anniversary of Civil War, therefore, as those of us who were of school-age or older may recollect, was mainly festive, summarized by band-leader Mitch Miller's television chorus singing mid-nineteenth century hymns in musical arrangements that sounded like popular show tunes.The sesquicentennial of Civil War, however, from distance gained by twenty-first century, encourages a comparatively larger in-depth consideration of first greatest generation's lived experience. The field of study centered on 1860s today has exploded into an inexhaustible list and interpretation of fresh topics. The books coming to press now are more comprehensive than ever imagined by an older that was not very far removed from days of case-study battles, eccentric generals, and great political actors. Sean A. Scott's A Visitation of God , a cellular-level examination of a particular geography, its practices of piety, and frequent collision on home front between political positions and religious values, is a model of this important break-through in historiography. In addition, his work aims at a growing cross-over audience that allows general readers and specialists an equal share of profitable reading.Scott considers perspective of Civil War through personal letters, diaries, and news accounts by those left behind to run farms, businesses, households, and churches as their sons, fathers, brothers, and friends entered military service. He is looking for a different set of clues than similar primary sources have yielded other writers. Rather, he discovers that psychological tensions and complex spiritual life within religious institutions are more profound, confusing, and shifting than many students, who are accustomed to neatly drawn boundaries, may expect. Scott takes a new direction, away from mainstream focus on sermons, conditions of faith in soldier camps, or contextual theology that suggests Civil War really started in 1850s as an exegetical crisis and was largely an extension of that unbridgeable bifurcation in national pulpits.Scott's book is not a wide-angle study of all states in Union. He differentiates Northern from New England, Western, and Mid-Atlantic regions, so that small towns and prairie homes he explored are only in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa (seven states out of Union's twenty-five). …

La importancia de las cosas (review)

Reviewed by: La importancia de las cosas Joanne Lucena Rivera de la Cruz, Marta . La importancia de las cosas. Barcelona: Planeta, 2009. Pp. 413. ISBN 978-84-08-08564-5. Marta Rivera de la Cruz's latest novel, La importancia de las cosas, underlines the author's talent for narrating a story and keeping the reader enthralled to the end. The finalist for the Premio Planeta prize in 2006 for her novel En tiempo de prodigios once again demonstrates her astute portrayal of human relationships and people's need to establish connections in an otherwise alienating world. La importancia de las cosas opens with the suicide of Fernando Montalvo, a loner with a predilection for collecting, at first glance, random things. Mario Menkell, his landlord, is contacted by the agency through which Montalvo rented the apartment, and is told that he will be responsible for deciding what to do with the deceased's possessions because he had no next of kin. Menkell, who had employed a rental agency so that he would have no contact whatsoever with his tenant, is now forced to examine with great care, the minutiae that formed Montalvo's life. Menkell enlists the aid of his colleague, Beatriz Millares, who has separated from her husband and accepts Menkell's generous offer to live rent free in Montalvo's apartment. Menkell, who has secretly loved Beatriz for years but has never dared to express his sentiments, is ecstatic that the two will be working closely together. Montalvo's apartment is located within the big house where Menkel lives and the two quickly establish a routine that ensures many contact hours together. Rivera de la Cruz's description of the development of the relationship between the two colleagues is quite touching and maintains the reader's interest throughout the novel. The two become detectives while organizing Montalvo's things and unravel his many secrets, which involve travel to various cities in Europe and contact with a wonderful cast of supporting characters. The novel's title emphasizes the importance of the couple's discoveries and how it is not necessarily material mundane objects themselves that are important but rather the significance behind them as established by the owners. The novel's theme also underlines the adage: "one man's trash is another man's treasure." Rivera de la Cruz does a wonderful job depicting the petty world of academia in a small private institution. It is obvious that the author is familiar with both the private university system in Spain and the American university system to which she compares it. Menkell, who had published one highly acclaimed novel, is hired by the private university Luis de Cameons to teach creative writing part-time to students who can afford the exorbitant fees but who are not exactly Ivy League material (Rivera de la Cruz's comparison). Rivera de la Cruz sharply criticizes a system that is based entirely on wealth and not on intellectual capacity or hard work and whose professors are at the complete mercy of their students. The dean, Claudio Saldaña, who detests Menkell, aspires to absolute power in the university, and fame and fortune. He embarks on an ambitious project to provide internships for his students at a renowned publishing house, but the condition, determined by the top editor, is that Menkell write a new novel. Saldaña threatens to fire Mario if he does not produce the said novel, a condition that no other professor is forced to meet. La importancia de las cosas skillfully alternates between Menkell's search for Montalvo's identity and his attempt to maintain his job at the university in spite of [End Page 721] the internal politics involved. Anyone who has worked in academe can easily identify with Menkell's troubles and the arbitrariness with which decisions are often made in this venue. Rivera de la Cruz artfully portrays Menkell's angst upon being forced to generate a novel and the process entailed in picking out the subject matter. He does not understand the success of his first novel because he was just relating the story of his uncle's adventures, part of his family's lore that was...

There Is Always Something New Out of Africa

Lone survivor of seven sets of twins born to his mother, he started life as a legend among the Yoruba in Nigeria, who have one of the highest rates of twin births and infant deaths in the world. According to family lore, he was the spirit that kept trying to be born and kept being turned back, the child "born to die." Bamidele to his father, Olaniyi to his grandmother, Prince Twins Seven-Seven renamed himself in adulthood to commemorate newly found royal lineage and the circumstances of his birth, which colored his life and shaped his art. Deeply conscious of these aspects of his nature, he has conveyed in art his personal understanding of a world teeming with spirits and populated with myths.

Corn

Corn Roy Jacobstein (bio) Quixotic quest, this seeking out people who knew my mother, though when I find them I’m glad they remember her, her voice, her wit, offer an anecdote or two, even if the memory it embraces reshapes my own and I’m the butt, once more. Like how a friend’s father who otherwise couldn’t cook a lick grilled his signature dish and set it before all of us with a flourish, and asked to render expert opinion evidently the pre-teen I shrugged Corn’s corn, a locution that entered family lore on the spot, this friend last seen three decades ago relates. My call: a distant warble from the everywhere and nowhere we call the past, unlikely to be heard by him again—yet here we sit in the warm current of his neighborhood bistro, regaling each other over Chianti and veal, and soon we’re sharing trails: work spoor, marriage spans, the hard names of our antilipidemics— and I realize all this time I was with him, he with me, fixed within some gyrus of cerebral cortex to Miss Ten Eyck and her lime perfume and the Dred Scott Case, so if New York’s late fall rain blows horizontal and cold across the windowpanes as we redeem our coats, our tread is lighter, our hair less salt, for the corn, we see, newly shucked, golden, was corn and was not. [End Page 130] Roy Jacobstein Roy Jacobstein is the author of Fuchsia in Cambodia (TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern UP). His earlier books, A Form of Optimism (UPNE) and Ripe (U Wisconsin P), won the Morse Prize and Pollak Prize, respectively. Copyright © 2009 University of Nebraska Press

Barry O'Donnell: Irish surgeons and surgery in the twentieth century

With the birth of the new Irish Free State in 1922, Willie Phelan was, at the age of 25 years (!), appointed to be in charge of the newly created Kilkenny Central Hospital comprising the old Workhouse Hospital, the County Infirmary and the Fever Hospital. These remnants of eighteenth and nineteenth century Irish medicine were amalgamated to make the new Kilkenny County Hospital in 1942 (thanks to the Irish Hospital sweepstake) and Willie became the county surgeon, a post he held until his death in 1963. Willie Phelan was a relative of mine and the family lore was that he smoked while operating, cheerily commenting that ash was sterile and not to worry if some of it fell into the wound. The Babcock forceps was especially useful for holding the cigarette during the trickier moments of surgery. Willie Phelan’s career nicely encapsulates what this book is about. It describes the men (and they were all men) who worked tirelessly, often in poor conditions in Ireland throughout the twentieth century to help their fellow citizens. In 1922, only one hospital was in existence for less than 80 years. In the early years of the century, surgeons could not achieve very much; appendicitis had a 10% mortality (Edward VII was lucky) and a strangulated hernia was fatal. Fractures were treated and abscesses drained, but an anaesthetic longer that 1 h might easily put one into the ‘‘dead’’ level of anaesthesia. As the century progressed, facilities, training and technology improved greatly and effective health-care systems slowly emerged. Today, surgeons (many women) are highly trained professionals who deliver state-of-the-art surgery to the population in hospitals, which are being transformed into high quality networks. The people who caused these changes to happen and worked hard at their task throughout the last century are the subjects of this book. One of the most interesting and amusing sections of the book relates to the way surgeons were paid for their services before the modern era. In 1912, P. J. Keogh, an ENT surgeon, travelled by train from Dublin to Kildare to drain a quinsy. When asked why he charged a fee of £17 4 s 10 d (€1500.00 in today’s money) he replied: ‘‘It was all the money she had in the house’’. The monocled, cigar-smoking surgeon (Johnny) McArdle from St Vincent’s Hospital also had a penchant for especially reserved trains to carry him around the country to see patients. When the consultation fee had risen (fallen?) to three guineas in the 1960s, one doctor’s secretary would make sure that the £1.17 s change was readily at hand as ‘‘it’s the shillings that pay your salary’’. Robert Dwyer Joyce (1938) is attributed with saying ‘‘Fifty guineas for one cataract equals one housemaid for a year’’. The greater part of this book, however, comprises short biographies of virtually all the surgeons of the twentieth century in Ireland, some by their own choice were excluded. The two Irelands North and South are here, and to be included one had to have retired or died before 2005. The result is 673 biographies, which include all the surgical specialities, the great and the good, the presidents, the professors, the soldiers, the knights (no Lords) and the men who simply turned up day after day and did the job. This is an outstanding tribute to our surgical fathers and grandfathers and gives a wonderful slice of Irish social history. Writing this book was a phenomenal undertaking. Reading it is like catching up with one’s extended family, you knew the names, but now you know who they were, whom they P. A. Grace (&) University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland e-mail: pagrace@eircom.net

A 1918 Flu Memoir

My grandfather was an amazing man, biologically speaking. He lived until age 103, so healthy that family lore has it that his cancer-ridden prostate actually grew back, apparently normal enough to ...

John O’Hara Tobin

What to write about my virologist father for his trade journal when I myself am not in the trade and cannot write knowledgeably about his work? After all, any reader...

Oregon Places: Forty-One Cents: The Pendleton—Pilot Rock Stage Line

OREGON PLACES Forty-One Cents The Pendleton-PilotRock StageLine byJamesJ. Kopp AQUARTER, A DIME, A NICKEL, a penny. One coin from each of the slots in the cash register drawer. Fast, efficient, and simple enough that many of thosewho had topay itcould retrieve the coins without looking. Forty-one cents. For nearly three decades, from the early 1950s through the 1970s,forty-one cents was the charge for shipping as much as thirtypounds on the freight linebetween Pendleton and Pilot Rock, two easternOregon towns separated by fifteenmiles of wheat fields, a bowl ing alley, a grange hall, a reservoir, a golf course, some sagebrush, and, on many days, a strongwest wind. Over those years, forty-one cents repre sented the simple and sincere service that characterized this small business and the families that operated it. And in the twentyplus years since the last package was transported between Pendleton and Pilot Rock for that amount, forty-one cents continues to be remembered as the symbol of the Pendleton-Pilot Rock Stage Line. It is also the basis for family lore,because the storyof thePendleton-Pilot Rock Stage line isasmuch about family as it is about business. Family-run "short-haul carriers," such as the Pendleton-Pilot Rock Stage Line operated throughout the state formost of the twentieth cen tury,with routes from Coos Bay to Powers; fromBaker toHalfway; from The Dalles to Shaniko, Arlington, and Heppner; and from Portland to many different cities and towns. One of the few documents that provides a snapshot of these common carriers is a report issued in 1969 by the Trans port and Logistics Research Center of the College of Business Adminis tration at the University of Oregon. The forty-eight-page report, Oregon Short-Haul Regularly Scheduled Com mon Carrier Trucking Characteristics, examines some of the reasons for the severefinancial problems encountered by the short-haul carriers. Thirty-two ? 2oo6Oregon Historical Society Kopp, The Pendleton-Pilot Rock Stage Line 607 short-haul carriers are included in the study, fourteen of them with fewer than ten employees in 1968.Of those, fivewere included inClass III of the Oregon Public Utility Commission Classification, with operating revenues of less then $50,000 ? Halfway Garage & Sales, Pendleton-Heppner Freight Line, Pendleton-Pilot Rock Stage Line, Sandy Truck Line, and Tigard-Sher wood Truck Service.1 The average length of haul for the short-haul carriers was 59miles (one way), with the longest distance being 201miles and the shortest being 15miles. The 15-mile trekwas that covered by the Pendleton-Pilot Rock Stage Line. IT WAS IN1926 THATMY FATHER, Bill Kopp, was asked todrive a truck for a friend ofthe family,Evan Cameron, who ran a stage line between Pendle ton and Pilot Rock for freightand pas sengers. When Bill agreed to drive the Model T truck for a few days, neither he nor anyone else imagined that he would be operating the freight line for the next sixty years. Cameron was at tending a convention inPortland and injured his legwhile on the trip, somy father's short-term commitment was extended. The injurydid not heal in a timelyfashion, and Cameron askedmy father to join him in a partnership in the company. Soon, Cameron decided to get out of the business altogether and offered the company to Bill. In the agreement between Evan Cameron andWilliam J. Kopp, dated October 22, 1926,my father purchased "the Buss [sic] line between Pendleton, Oregon, and Pilot Rock, Oregon, for the sum of $600.00." He also agreed "to carry theUnited States Mail, on said Buss line From Pendleton, Oregon, to Pilot Rock, Oregon, and From Pilot Rock, Oregon, to Pendleton, Oregon." The operation of both the freight and mail component and the passenger business, then consisting of a seven passenger Paige touring car,was more than a one-person operation, so my father asked his older brother Joe to join him in the business. In late 1926, the Kopp brothers took over ownership and management of the Pendleton-Pilot Stage Line and were issued permit number 83 from the Public Utility Commission.2 Bill and his brother JoeKopp were the sons of Franz (Frank) Kopp (1858-1930) and Katharina Adams Kopp (1864-1951...

Uncertain Beginnings: Baseball and Long Bob Ewing in Early-Twentieth-Century-Cincinnati

Uncertain BeginningsBaseball and Long Bob Ewing in Early-Twentieth-Century Cincinnati Mike Lackey (bio) George Lemuel "Long Bob" Ewing was born in 1873 on a farm near the village of New Hampshire in Auglaize County, Ohio. According to family lore, he started out pitching potatoes against a target on the barn. He first attracted notice in the mid-1890s while playing for Wapakoneta, latterly in a semiprofessional "trolley league" of small towns connected by the electric interurban railways that crisscrossed the western part of the state. He signed his first professional contract at the relatively advanced age of twenty-four with the Toledo club in the Inter-State League, known—then as now—as the Mud Hens. Ewing toiled three-plus summers for Toledo before moving up to Kansas City, where he helped the Blues win the Western League pennant in 1901. The turning point in his career came shortly after the season's end. On October 10, 1901, pitching for an amateur team in Sidney, Ohio, Ewing faced the Cincinnati Reds on a postseason barnstorming tour and held the big leaguers to a 3-3 tie. Within two weeks he was under contract to pitch for Cincinnati in 1902. It was the beginning of an eleven-year Major League career. But it wouldn't be an easy beginning. Cincinnati, perched on a bend in the Ohio River, had become in the nineteenth century an important terminus of western migration. The self-styled Queen City of the West had also become an early center of the meatpacking industry, "the nation's premier hog-slaughterer and supplier of cured hams."1 In Bob Ewing's day, Cincinnati was still nicknamed Porkville or Porkopolis, and the ball club was called the Porkers or Porkopolitans. In 1902 Cincinnati, with just over 325,000 people, was the second-smallest city in the National League. Though the population increased by nearly 12 percent over the next several years, Cincinnati would be outstripped by Pittsburgh and by 1910 would be by far the smallest city in the league. But no city had a longer or more vigorous history in baseball. Cincinnati was home to the first [End Page 1] all-professional nine, the illustrious 1869 Red Stockings, and was a charter member of the National League. Expelled from the league in 1881 for refusing to give up Sunday ball and beer sales at the ballpark, Cincinnati spent nearly a decade in exile in the American Association—otherwise known as the Beer and Whiskey League—before returning to the fold in 1890. Beer was part of the culture in heavily German Cincinnati. German immigrants and German Americans made up the largest identifiable segment of the population. The city had dozens of German labor unions, social organizations, and charitable societies; extensive German-language instruction in the public schools; two major German-language newspapers; and twenty-six breweries that produced 1.4 million barrels of beer annually. Nowhere was a ball club more representative of its community. So many players of German ancestry performed for the Reds that the team was sometimes called the Heinies. "Where in the world does the Cincinnati club get these fellows with the funny names?" asked former National League manager Tom Loftus. "When I look at a scorecard in Cincinnati, I always feel as if I was looking over a brewery payroll. They get more Steins, Bachs, Stimmels, Gueses, Peitzes, and other noodle soup names on the scorecard here than any other town in the world."2 Much of the team's talent was homegrown, or at least harvested nearby. Throughout the dead-ball era, Cincinnati was fertile ground for baseball ability. Only St. Louis produced slightly more Major Leaguers relative to population, with Cincinnati and Cleveland in a virtual dead heat for second place.3 Ewing, though not a native, typified the regional nature of the team's scouting. Over his eight years with the Reds, 25 percent of all spots in the opening-day lineup were occupied by players born within 100 miles of Cincinnati's League Park—18 percent by players born within 35 miles. Ewing's first Major League manager was John Alexander "Bid" McPhee. McPhee was an institution...

Funk & Wagnalls

Funk & Wagnalls

If Your Mother Were an Animal, What Animal Would She Be? Creating Play‐Stories in Family Therapy: The Animal Attribution Story‐Telling Technique (AASTT)

In this article, I describe a therapeutic story-telling technique that requires family members to attribute an animal counterpart to each member of the family and then tell a short story--with a beginning, a middle, and an end--about the animal protagonists. The technique was applied in private practice to numerous families with a presenting problem of one or more children referred by the local school system labeled as suffering from conduct disorders and/or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This story-telling technique offers a predictable structure to sessions, thus facilitating the engagement and participation of children of all ages in the therapeutic process. The animal name attribution to family members creates a fun, nonthreatening atmosphere that helps to promote the description of personality traits and interpersonal relationships through the various animal counterparts. The ensuing story allows each family member to describe situations, feelings, wishes, and more as belonging to the animals and not to themselves. This is an active process. It enables the expression of conflictual feelings, the clarification of erroneous beliefs about the self and others, and the externalization of wishes, fears, aggressive feelings, and fantasies within a safe context. The combined use of animal selves and creative narrative takes into consideration children's developmental capabilities and utilizes their spontaneous pleasure in the world of make-believe to minimize anxiety. In adults, this combination helps to overcome resistance and uncovers issues that are otherwise seldom verbalized. Further, play-stories facilitate dialogue between family members and provide working metaphors that later become an integral part of the therapy sessions and of family lore.

A Hearer's Insight into Deaf Sign Language Folklore

The article discusses Estonian deaf lore, which comprises all folklore genres including specific language creation or sign lore characteristic of the deaf. Estonian sign language lore contains material of local as well as of international origin. The latter group includes several humorous tales that have spread mostly through the cultural contacts of the younger generation of the deaf. Hearers’ lore has also exerted its influence on deaf lore. Local deaf lore includes memories of school years and family lore of members of the Estonian deaf community, sign lore based on Estonian sign language, etc. The main features of Estonian deaf lore are (i) the specific communicative form, i.e. sign language performance; (ii) the minority group of lore transmitters, i.e. the Estonian deaf community; (iii) group-centred interpretation of hearing loss.

Landscape and identity in early modern Rome: villa culture at Frascati in the Borghese era

Part I. The Roman Setting: 1. Papacy and aristocracy 2. The Borghese Part II. Frascati in the Renaissance: Tusculo Restituto: 3. The revival of villeggiatura in the Farnese era 4. The first papal villas Part III. Frascati in its Heyday: the Borghese at the Villa Mondragone: 5. Architecture and ceremony 6. Otium cum negotium Part IV. Land, Landscape, and Family Lore: 7. An agricultural enterprise 8. A dynastic seat 9. Land into landscape.

Genealogical thinking, Hesiod'sCatalogue, and the creation of the Hellenes

Genealogy was important in early Greece. One thinks readily of aristocratic lineages proudly recited by Homeric heroes, and the family lore carefully recorded by epinician poets; but passing remarks are even more revealing. In the seventh book of theIliadNestor tells of an embassy he once led north to Phthia, where he hoped to enlist the aid of Peleus' mighty son in the coming campaign. Welcoming his Argive guests, Peleus asks eagerly about their ‘ancestry and descent’, and hears the answers with much pleasure:In Peleus' part of the country southerners were not often seen. He seeks by his questions to relate the unknown to the known; he is hoping that somewhere in the pedigree a familiar name will turn up to give him a point of reference. Genealogy gives him his bearings. For those within the system a genealogy is a map. They can read its signs. To the names are attached stories, thousands of them; collectively they gave the listeners their sense of history and their place in the world. Hence Peleus' great pleasure in hearing the answers. Centuries later, the Greeks were no different; the sophist Hippias says that the crowds at Olympia like to hear nothing better than his recitations of genealogies.

Political Economy, Politics and Religion: Intertwined and Indissoluble Passions

When I returned to Cambridge at the end of August 1997 after two terms of leave in my native Australia, I was delighted to find waiting for me a letter from Professor Szenberg asking me to contribute to his ongoing series on the life philosophies of economists. In recent years I have written a number of essays which circle around this theme. His request gave me the opportunity to bring the various strands together and, it is hoped, into focus. Let me begin at the beginning. I was born in Melbourne, Australia on 27 June 1931 at the height of the Great Depression, the younger of twin sons of Marjorie and Kenneth Harcourt. According to family lore, I was not expected. The doctor had packed his bag after delivering my brother, John, in the double bed of the home in which John still lives, when the midwife alerted the doctor to my presence, a presence he initially was reluctant to accept. Following a breach birth I spent my first minutes with no clothes on, until my grandmother was contacted to bring some spares. This experience may have something to do with my hedonism in later life.

Wise Circe’s Cult of Nature

During the Renaissance, the philosopher, Giordano Bruno promoted “a religion of love” and a “cult of nature” to replace the authoritarian Christian religions. The Inquisition had him burned at the stake for his heresy. Lori Bruno, who believes the martyred Bruno is her ancestor, is a priestess of stregheria, an Italian family tradition of nature worship and witchcraft. Relatives who taught her this religion also conveyed the belief that their ancestor Bruno was a witch. Lori had transformed this historical figure into a culture-hero by enhancing family lore with historical research and personal visions of Bruno. In this paper we learn how family lore becomes coven lore and how historical figures inspire religious practice when they acquire sacred status.

Fragile Testimony: Family Photographs and Kelly McKaig's Dreamworlds

In discussing her recent photographic work, Chicago-based artist Kelly McKaig quietly claims, I've completely reinvented my grandmother. Watching old family films, McKaig reads gestures, expressions, and patterns, testing family lore against the shadows that flicker across her screen. In the images of her grandmother, she sees a young woman she never knew. Lifting these unknown figures from their fixed frames, McKaig spins new stories for these pictures, transforming her grandmother into a woman only she can ever know. McKaig works in the unsettling terrain in which our faith in images as records of our lives, of our families, of our ancestral pasts falls apart. She collects reflections and discarded documents, working in dreams and forgotten photographs. McKaig's work is unnerving, uncanny. It sends us back to our own albums, inviting us to think about the photographs through which we anchor a tenuous sense of self, of family, of community. It demonstrates the failure of the photographic record to testify, to tell, to remember, to repeat. And in replicating that failure, McKaig's work investigates our desire for permanence, connection, stability of self, of family, of community, and our obsessive attempts to preserve, to reject passing. McKaig's work invites us to tell the stories our images only hint at, the truths that frame our smiles for the camera. But McKaig's unraveling has a strangely tender touch. While McKaig's work disrupts our stable stories, it does not abandon us in a deconstructed space of emptiness. For as she demonstrates the failure of our photographic records, she also gathers them up, honoring the attempt to assert presence, to proclaim belonging. She transforms lost images into records of another kind. Photographs may not fix what we imagine them to preserve; they may not help us to remember our grandmothers, but they may enable us to reinvent them.

Yellow Fever, Black Goddess: The Coevolution of People and Plagues (review)

Reviewed by: Yellow Fever, Black Goddess: The Coevolution of People and Plagues John H. Ellis Christopher Wills. Yellow Fever, Black Goddess: The Coevolution of People and Plagues. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1996. xii + 324 pp. Ill. $24.00. The title under which this book was first published in Britain, Plagues: Their Origins, History, and Future, is a fair representation of its content. But the title given here—surely an embarrassment to the author, an English-born geneticist now at the University of California, San Diego—affirms the adage that you can’t judge a book by its cover. The words YELLOW FEVER in inch-and-a-quarter saffron letters stand out boldly against a black stripe at the top of the jacket, and they also adorn the black binding. A mosquito appears on both. In fact, however, yellow fever receives only the barest passing mention on three pages (pp. 33, 161, 163) tangential to a discussion of malaria. Although cholera, on the other hand, is actually considered, the use of BLACK GODDESS (black letters against a saffron stripe) in the title is also tenuous. While observing worship of the Hindu deity Kali, the Black One, the goddess of disease and death, at the temple of Kalighat in Calcutta, Wills was led to wonder whether the very-dark-to-black appearance of some cholera victims could mean that Kali was the ancient goddess of cholera. If so, he reasons, perhaps the disease has ravaged India for much longer than historians have thought. Be that as it may, Wills is an engaging storyteller, using as he does an abundance of anecdotal material, much of it drawn from family lore and his own extensive travels, in presenting a lively, well-written narrative. The story that Wills tells follows the by-now-familiar theme, found in both popular and academic literature, of humanity as an inveterate, if not incorrigible, disturber of the natural order of stable ecosystems. “In this book,” he writes, “I would like to explore with you a biologist’s view of just how and why such disturbances of the ecological balance can give rise to plagues” (p. 8). While focusing on the great epidemic and pandemic occurrences, remote and recent, of bubonic plague, cholera, typhoid, malaria, syphilis, and, of course, AIDS, Wills also notes the far greater impact of endemic diseases and their effect in promoting biological diversity. In his view, the evolution of living organisms, to a significant degree, is a disease-driven process in which both host species and pathogens modify toward genetic diversity in order to survive. Wills is keen on [End Page 715] diversity: the word is used so often, sometimes with obvious political and social rather than scientific implications, that its importance to him is unmistakably evident. “In the genetic herd-immunity model,” he contends, “there is safety in diversity” (p. 267). As might be expected, the familiar stories of Dr. Snow and the Broad Street pump-handle, of Yersin, Manson, Ross, Ehrlich, and others, are also recounted here. But since there are no reference notes as such, only suggestions for further reading, serious students of the history of disease should be directed to more authoritative, recognized scholarship. Very possibly, however, the book might well provide an extremely interesting exercise for a graduate seminar in the history of science. Unfortunately, as mentioned above, the book’s title contains a flat-out misrepresentation. How it could have passed even the most tolerant editorial scrutiny is anyone’s guess. On perhaps a more serious note, the marketing of prescription drugs directly to the general public nowadays by the large pharmaceutical houses is just the latest phase of a cultural trend that includes the marketing of ideologies. It is but fair to say, as a statement on the jacket indicates, that Professor Wills’s work is addressed primarily to a general audience. Nevertheless, whatever the composition of his readership may be, popular or professional, the fact that he is an unusually talented popularizer of science makes even a whiff of genetics as politics, or social science, bad business. John H. Ellis Bethlehem, Pennsylvania Copyright © 1997 The Johns Hopkins University Press