A flatlander by inclination

I love flatlands. There is something about a big sky and an uninterrupted horizon that speaks directly to me, and some of my fondest memories of place involve an unbroken wash of sky. (The sort of place, as comedian Rich Hall described the plains of Montana, that’s ‘so flat you can see the back of your own head’). Not the least intriguing thing about these places is that they require careful management and maintenance. They are very deliberate landscapes.

 

The North Kent Marshes. The Somerset Levels, with their strange punctuating polyps Glastonbury Tor and Burrowbridge Mump. I’ve known and loved Romney Marsh, which is four marshes really, since I was a child, visiting its shingle headland and farming inland regularly over many years. (My parents spent their last 20+ years here, as my mother had grown up nearby). I made my first stab at fieldwork here, too, discovering that flatlands offer certain advantages to those of us who don’t drive but can cycle. Over decades, now, I’ve seen shifting patterns of habitation across the Marsh, and I’ll be reflecting a little on changing land use and attitudes to the terrain in marginal reclaimed water areas at the Folklore Society’s forthcoming annual conference on ‘Folklore,Geography and Environment: Ways of Knowing Water, Landscape and Climate in the Anthropocene’. (I’m looking forward to getting back to Hull, too, somewhere I haven't been in too many years).

 

The other flatland that occupies a major part of my imagination is the Cambridgeshire Fens. I still recall one magical January afternoon being driven across a snowy grey wasteland. Ahead of us we could see a snowstorm as a discreet column of weather. Sometimes we had to drive through it, and out the other side. Sometimes, as the roads turned around the waterways, the storm would temporarily obstruct our view of Ely Cathedral, the most prominent building breaking the skyline.

 

So I was delighted recently to find a cheap second-hand copy of Edward Storey’s The Winter Fens. Storey was from Whittlesey, near Ely, and wrote several books on the area. But this particular copy has more than just its contents going for it.

 

It is inscribed with the name of a previous owner, and in the same hand a short poem is written inside the back cover. A brief and thus far cursory search online has revealed no authorial source for the poem, so until I discover otherwise I will treat the poem as likely written by Joan Bush. It is a rather nice little piece of verse:

 

January is the month of Xmas bills

Leaking ceilings and sore throat pills

The month that kids lose mittens in

And the cat has 13 kittens in

To top it all the car won’t go

It’s sitting in a bed of snow

January would be a curse

If February didn’t promise worse.

Hi ho, hi ho ...

I'm busily gearing up for a couple of conferences, and finding that my fascination with the history of folklore is moving on apace.

Tomorrow I'm off to the Folklore Society's annual conference. This year's theme is 'Working Life: Belief, Custom, Ritual, Narrative'. It looks, as ever, a fascinating event (it's always the central point of my intellectual year, I must say), and I'll be talking essentially about the folklore of folklorists. This has been raised and discussed before, but I'll be considering the lore that we deploy to consolidate our understanding of our own thinking and practice: like any occupational group, folklorists use folklore to consolidate our social cohesion and to consolidate our occupational practices. It may be a slight topic - I don't want it just to be an exercise in navel-gazing, but it's also not the main event in folkloric research - but its personal significance for all of us makes it rather special to me.

When I get back I'm working again on some earlier folklorists, but in the meantime I've also written a guest blog post for Twitter's #FolkloreThursday crowd. When I started my Folklore MA in the much-lamented National Centre for English Cultural Tradition at Sheffield, Julia Bishop asked us 'Ok, then, you're all interested in it: so what is folklore?' And we struggled for an answer. At the end of that module Julia asked us again 'After a whole term's study: what is folklore?' And we realised that it hadn't been a trick question, after all, but finding ways of explaining succinctly what folklore is involves some knowledge of how it had been understood and explained previously. I'm happy to find that I've been doing this quite a bit of late, but this blog post, '"Folklore"? What do you mean? And why?' marks another attempt by me to set out some of the issues, highlight some of the problems, and hopefully still make it all as fascinating as I find it.

Once I'm back from the 'Working Life' conference I'm intending to get down to some more serious work on one or two of these questions. I've described my paper tomorrow as 'another love letter to my discipline', and I'm standing by it.

Getting back to it

It's been over a year since I posted here. Latterly such an absence has usually indicated some health catastrophe (my 'career dogged by injury', to borrow the footballing phrase), but the last year has finally seen me getting back into the swing of things a little. I've given papers at conferences and symposiums (including my first international trip since the major medical interruption), I've done a couple of more popular talks and events (the first large-scale outing for my singing voice since 2014, for example), started to get used to indexing Folklore (in my second year at it), drafted a long-awaited chapter for an edited collection, and taken part in various other events and ventures that begin to feel like me finding my place in the world of folklore again. As someone who's still a little wary of his own physical fragility I'm surprised by how much I actually have done in the last year.

More interesting to readers here is the fact that I haven't just been picking up old threads. I have been doing that, of course, because it's essential - the book chapter sees me reviewing some of my thinking about ghost beliefs and new religious syncretism, for example, while last week I was giving a Vaughan Williams Memorial Library lecture on ghostlore in traditional songs - but it's not been static. My ongoing engagement with the history of the discipline has become ever more a way of introducing non-academic non-specialist audiences to its full range (I've just written a forthcoming guest post for the Folklore Thursday blog), as well as a way of trying to negotiate the survival of academic folklorists and other interested academics in a university world that offers us little security or support.

It's also seen me getting interested in some new figures and areas: I spoke twice last year (at the splendidly titled 'Folklorists Are Fallible' conference in my beloved Tartu, and then at the third Folklore Society/Royal Anthropological Institute 'Folklore and Anthropology in Conversation' seminar) about the 20th century field collector and writer Violet Alford, and will be speaking about her again this summer. My paper at the forthcoming Folklore Society conference is also very much about how we are as folklorists, what we do to identify as such and how we interact with other folklorists. Later in the year I'll be going back to the question of ghost belief and religious syncretism (particularly around Spiritualism) for a major conference in Oxford.

I actually have things to blog about again, it seems, so I will.

Part of this reorientation/reawakening has involved some apparently cosmetic fiddling with my library, refiling and reshelving books and copies of papers. In doing so I also moved around a lot of my fieldnotes. One sheet caught my eye as it fell loose. It dates from early in my MA researches (2004-6), when I asked co-workers in the Civil Service department where I was temping for their recollections of childlore, skipping games etc. The following was remembered by a woman in her late 20s from her schooldays in South Essex:

1, 2, 3 Mother caught a flea
She put it in the teapot and made a cup of tea
The flea jumped out,
Mother gave a shout,
And down came father with his winkle hanging out.

It's good to be back.

SIEF Congress and questions confronting fieldworkers

I'm just back from Tartu, where I had a brilliant and exhausting time at the SIEF Congress. (I took this picture of the university building on my 'phone because I was so overwhelmed by its scale and elegance).
 I'd had to miss the 2011 SIEF Congress in Lisbon because I was busy writing up my thesis. The last one I'd attended was Derry in 2008, so it was very nice to meet up again with some old friends and admired colleagues I hadn't seen since then: one or two even remembered me. I was particularly happy to run into Barbro Klein, whom I had only met once before, at an Anglo-Scottish Young Folklorists Conference in Edinburgh in 2005. (The picture below was taken at that event by Gunnella Þorgeirsdóttir).

One reason the Congress was so exhausting was the sheer volume of papers and discussion. I couldn't possibly summarise the event as a whole, but I found one recurring topic of discussion particularly interesting. It's possible I identified it because it's always been of interest to me, but it cropped up in a number of panels and sessions.

It was first flagged in a panel on archives and their use. Discussing making archive material available to a broader public, Kelly Fitzgerald of University College Dublin raised a question that was left hanging somewhat: what are the implications of this for fieldworkers? She was questioning above all what this meant for the training of future fieldworkers. I found this highly thought-provoking: are we in danger of trying to structure incoming field collections, and thus shaping field collection itself, in line with future output? How are archives to deal with the slightly random and unpredictable character of fieldwork? How are fieldworkers to deal with it?

This was followed a day later by a stimulating panel discussion on the role and responsibilities of the fieldworker in politically controversial and ethically contested situations. John Helsloot had given a brilliant opening presentation dealing with the concerns raised by Zwarte Piet (see, for example, the Zwarte Piet is Racisme campaign). Michael Herzfeld had contributed some interesting comments on the responsibility of the fieldworker both to express disagreement with participants and to engage politically on their behalf where necessary.

It was disappointing, then, to find that position expressed in a rather more conservative way in Michael Herzfeld's subsequent keynote address. Herzfeld's warning against prostration before arguments alleging evolutionary inevitability ('things are changing and there's nothing you can do about it') is sound enough, and is a useful corrective to a progressive positivism that was certainly voiced during the Congress, but in the absence of an articulated alternative there is a danger that this just leads us back to an uncritical nostalgia for what already exists. Some speakers in the floor discussion highlighted this in relation to the examples he had advanced.

The critical response brought out, too, that this nostalgia had led to a misreading of the evidence. Where Herzfeld read the lack of sociability with other customers in chain coffee shops as a destruction of social exchange, other speakers pointed to it as demonstrating new forms of social interaction. People on their mobiles and using social media on their laptops aren't failing to be sociable just because they're not being sociable with the staff and other customers of the coffee shop they're using as a venue. That may not be ideal, or even to be celebrated, but ethnologists, folklorists and anthropologists have a duty to understand how such new forms of social interaction work for our informants and participants. Otherwise any political engagement on their behalf is likely to be misjudged.

These are not easy questions, and I enjoyed the opportunity to think about them in the company of some really excellent scholars. I hope that I can bring them to bear in some useful way on my own work.

FLS AGM Conference on 'The Supernatural'

I'm looking forward to the Folklore Society AGM and Conference at Leeds Trinity and All Saints University College, Horsforth, Leeds. It takes place between 26 and 28 March, and is dedicated to 'The Supernatural'. You can still (just about) get the advanced booking rate. The registration details are available here. There is now a draft programme available. There's lots of interesting things I'd actually go and hear even if I wasn't giving a paper myself (which isn't true of all the conferences I've been to, I must say).
Friday 26 March
Registration opens at 2pm, and tea will be available. The Folklore Society AGM, which is restricted to FLS members only, is at 3pm. At 4pm Eddie Cass will give the President's Lecture, which is open to all. This is on the subject of 'Alex Helm and His Collection of Folk Performance Material'. It will be followed at 5pm by a wine reception, and dinner at 6pm.
Saturday 27 March
9:00 Jacqueline Simpson (FLS), 'The Ambiguity of Elves'
9:45 Ariella Feldman (University of Birmingham), 'Jane Eyre: Fairy and Witch Power: A Study of Gender'
10:30 Mikel J. Koven (University of Worcester) and Gunnella Þorgeirsdóttir (University of Sheffield), 'Televisual Folklore: Rescuing Supernatural from the Fakelore Realms'
11:15 Coffee
11:45 Nickianne Moody (Liverpool John Moores University), 'Contemporary Urban Fantasy and the Lessons of Folklore'
12:15 Maureen James (University of Glamorgan), '"Tatterfoals, Will-o-the-Wykes, and the Old Lad": Exploring Supernatural Beliefs in Lincolnshire'
1:00 Lunch
2:30 Peter Robson (University of Sheffield), 'Thomas Hardy's Ghosts'
3:15 Paul Cowdell (University of Hertfordshire), '"I Have Believed in Spirits, From That Day unto This ...": Oral Narratives, Belief, Literary Adaptation, and Transmission'
4:00 Tea
4:45 David Clarke (Sheffield Hallam University), 'The Supernatural Content of the MoD UFO Files'
The day's proceedings end at 5.30.
Sunday 28 March
9:30 David Hunt (FLS), 'Perception of Time in Folklore: Transitions between Mortality and Immortality'
10:15 Gideon Thomas (FLS), '"Lady Margaret Was Standing in Her Own Room Door ...": The Roles and Meanings of Revenants in a Selection of Traditional Ballads'
11:00 Coffee
11:30 Irene Petratou (Panteion University of Athens/Kapodistrian University of Athens), 'Supernatural References in Advertising: The Case of "Supernatural Women"'
12:15 Lunch
2:00 Close

Exploring the Extraordinary

I find it quite difficult to blog about my current research. Discreet items of collectanea are one thing, but I'm cautious about pre-empting my longer-term analysis. So, it's nice to be able to mention what a good time I had yesterday at the Exploring the Extraordinary network's first one-day conference in York. (The bill is here, if you want to see what you missed).

I've developed something of an aversion to interdisciplinary conferences: too often there's no sharing of disciplines, no searching for points of contact, just some monomanic shouting and no listening. Yesterday, by contrast, was a rather pleasurable sharing of methods and interests. I had little in common with most of the speakers - I'd go so far as to say that I probably disagree quite strongly with some of them - but there were points at which our researches overlapped, and we were able to share material at those fringes. (I had an interesting chat with David Woollatt, for example, who's working on contemporary Spiritualism: it's peripheral but not unimportant in my work on ghost beliefs). I enjoyed it greatly. (Thanks Hannah and co for the efficient organisation, too).

I think the network's a useful resource, and will become even more useful the wider the breadth of scholarly approaches and disciplines it embraces. The JISCmail list is here, if you want to sign up, and they also have a Facebook group.