Volume 9: Virtually Global

Terry Gunnell In Memorium: Ezekiel Alembi Articles JoAnn Conrad Mapping America: Re-creating in the Cartographic Imagination Responses by Casey R. Schmitt and Jill Terry Rudy

Pamela Conners Putting Words to Work: The Politics of Labor’s Vernacular Responses by Eugene Cooper, Barry Brummett, and Christina M. Smith

Kerstin McGaughey Food in Binary: Identity and Interaction in Two German Food Blogs Response by Lucy Long

Kimberly Ball UFO-Abduction Narratives and the Technology of Tradition Events and Debates Jack Zipes Sensationalist Scholarship: A Putative “New” History of Fairy Tales

Rebecca Elliott Contesting the Spectacle: Global Lives as Counterpublic in the Context of Celebrity Activism

Stina Marie Hasse Jørgensen The Global Lives Project: Making New Media Matter in a Global World

Cultural Analysis: An Interdisciplinary Forum on Folklore and Popular Culture Volume 9: Virtually Global

In Memorium: Ezekiel Alembi...... 1 Terry Gunnell Articles and Responses Mapping America: Re-creating in the Cartographic Imagination...... 3 JoAnn Conrad Responses: Casey R. Schmitt, Jill Terry Rudy

Putting Words to Work: The Politics of Labor’s Vernacular...... 39 Pamela Conners Responses: Eugene Cooper, Barry Brummett, Christina M. Smith

Food in Binary: Identity and Interaction in Two German Food Blogs....69 Kerstin McGaughey Response: Lucy Long

UFO-Abduction Narratives and the Technology of Tradition ...... 99 Kimberly Ball Events and Debates Sensationalist Scholarship: A Putative “New” History of Fairy Tales...... 129 Jack Zipes

Contesting the Spectacle: Global Lives as Counterpublic in the Context of Celebrity Activism...... 150 Rebecca Elliott

The Global Lives Project: Making New Media Matter in a Global World...... 146 Stina Marie Hasse Jørgensen

Book Reviews Cinderella in America: A Book of Folk and Fairy Tales (McCarthy)...... R1 Jessica Erberich Everyday Life in Central Asia: Past and Present (Sahadeo & Zanca)...... R2 Benjamin Gatling Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class (Kucich)...... R5 Michelle Robinson i Editorial Board Fekade Azeze, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia Pertti J. Anttonen, University of Helsinki, Finland Hande Birkalan, Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey Regina Bendix, Universität Göttingen, Germany Charles Briggs, University of California, Berkeley, U.S.A. Véronique Campion-Vincent, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, France Linda Dégh, Indiana University, U.S.A. Valdimar Tr. Hafstein, University of Iceland, Reykjavik Jawaharlal Handoo, Central Institute of Indian Languages, India Galit Hasan-Rokem, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem Jason Baird Jackson, Indiana University, U.S.A. Kimberly Lau, University of California, Santa Cruz, U.S.A. John Lindow, University of California, Berkeley, U.S.A. Sabina Magliocco, California State University, Northridge, U.S.A. Jay Mechling, University of California, Davis, U.S.A. Fabio Mugnaini, University of Siena, Italy Sadhana Naithani, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India Peter Shand, University of Auckland, New Zealand Francisco Vaz da Silva, University of Lisbon, Portugal Maiken Umbach, University of Manchester, England, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain Ülo Valk, University of Tartu, Estonia Fionnuala Carson Williams, Linen Hall Library, Belfast, Northern Ireland Ulrika Wolf-Knuts, Åbo Academy, Finland

Staff Editorial Collective: Ted Biggs, Anthony Bak Buccitelli, Karen Miller, & Tok Thompson Review Editor: Elaine Yau Website Developer: Brooke Dykman Copy Editors: Fionnuala Carson Williams, Maggi Michel, Melissa Royer, Heather Blackmore, Jason Canniff, Christian Palmer, & Christiano Tambascia ii In Memorium: Ezekiel Alembi:

IN MEMORIAM became a representative on the ISFNR board in 2008, later going on to serve EZEKIEL ALEMBI for more than ten years as the ISFNR (12.12.1960 – 17.01.2010) Vice-President representing Africa). Participation in these conferences brought n 17th January 2010, I received the him into contact with fellow academics in news that my good friend and Europe and America, and especially those Kenyan “brother” Ezekiel Alembi from Estonia and Finland where he first Ohad died of a stroke at his home in Nairobi took part in one of the Folklore Fellows at the tender age of 49. The news came as Summer Schools in Lammi in 1997. This a great shock to all of us who had come to brought him into close contact with Prof. know him over the years as a friend and Lauri Harvilahti at the University of fellow folklorist, not only because of the Helsinki. Lauri became a close friend and sudden loss to African folklore studies mentor, supervising Ezekiel’s Ph.D thesis (and folklore and ethnology in general), at the same university, “The Construction but more particularly for Ezekiel’s of the Abanyole Perceptions on Death extended family in Nairobi and Bunyore, through Oral Funeral Poetry” (2002), Kenya, and the countless students of which dealt with Abanyole death culture all ages (at home and abroad) who had in Ezekiel’s home area of Bunyore (see benefited from his teaching and positive http://ethesis.helsinki.fi/julkaisut/ encouragement over the years. hum/kultt/vk/alembi/). The story of Ezekiel’s education Typically, Ezekiel felt it necessary not is an example in itself, and no small only to add a summary to the thesis in achievement. Starting out in 1971 in the locallanguage of the people he was the local Ziwani primary school in the writing about, but also to defend the Vihiga region, in the countryside of thesis for a second time orally in front of Bunyore, in western Kenya, Ezekiel went the local people of Bunyore, an outdoor on to graduate from Ebwirany school in affair that lasted all day and included Kakamega, before taking his secondary not only deep discussions amongst the education in the Kakamega and Kangaru local people but also music and dance. Embu high schools in the same area. This, he felt, was the real defence (and the His university education in literature most difficult, even though his listeners and English language then took place proved to be very positive in the end). in Kenyatta University, Nairobi, where, Ezekiel Alembi’s approach to his in 1991, he wrote his MA thesis on local thesis was reflected in his other articles children’s songs. Soon after this, Ezekiel on folklore, such as “Telling Tales: The began teaching at the same university Use of Oral Narratives in Religious (in the fields of literature, drama and Sermons in Kenya” (Folklore: Electronic folklore), and in 1995 became a member Journal of Folklore, 13 [2000] 103-110) and of the International Society for Folk “Dawn of a New Era: Song and Dance Narrative Research, taking a regular and in Kenya’s Multi-Party Elections 2002” active part in the society’s congresses (he (Journal of Indian Folklore, 5,1 [2003]).1 All

of these works, dealing with his local a memorable visit to Kenya in 2007, Luhya people in his old home district of dealt with the essentially performative Bunyore (where he is now buried), show nature of storytelling—and the idea that a deep love and respect for his Kenyan if Africans had drawn up the borders culture, along with a firm belief that it between folklore genres and types of deserved equal attention to European art rather than Europeans, these borders and American folklore, and a sense that would have been very different (and the new generations of Kenyans should more multidisciplinary). As anyone grow up feeling a sense of pride in their could see when watching Ezekiel tell local culture and history, rather than stories, appearance, gesture, expression, a feeling of hopelessness or inferiority tone, rhythm, music and context were in comparison to the European culture as important as the words involved. I they meet daily in the media. This have a clear memory of the back half of same feeling of pride was reflected in a conference bus slipping into amazed Ezekiel’s demands of guests: those of silence in order to overhear the stories of us who visited him should experience Kenya he was privately—but loudly— Kenya as the Kenyans understood it, telling me. rather than from the balcony of a large The same interest in performance hotel or a university apartment. It was and drama could be seen in Ezekiel’s important that Kenyan culture should be tireless work on the annual Kenya understood from an African viewpoint if Schools and Colleges Drama Festival, it was to be understood more fully. for which he served as the National Ezekiel Alembi’s respect and hopes Chairman. These unique festivals, in for the potential of the young people of which hundreds of students of all ages his country (who he saw as representing and tribes come together to compete a concrete dream for a better future) were in plays and dance dramas they have similarly reflected in the over forty five put together themselves about subjects novels and biographies that he wrote that matter to their lives (ranging from for young Kenyan readers, something AIDS to children’s armies, government that earned him not only a literary prize corruption and genital mutilation), are in 2003 but also the respect of his peers an experience in themselves. They are in various spheres of life. Most of these also a clear statement of belief in the free books have a deliberately strong moral speech and increasing mutual respect that and educational message showing young recent generations of Kenyan children people fighting their way past immense had achieved after years of dictatorship. difficulties to find safety and achieve For Ezekiel, these children and their art new self respect in a changing world, represented a symbol of peaceful hope, principally if they manage to build on as well as a firm belief in the future and the older values of their culture. potential of his country. It is noteworthy Ezekiel was not merely a writer, that one of his final achievements was though: he was also a great storyteller the building and opening of a library and performer, and many of our designed for local children, set in the conversations at conferences, and during garden of the house where he grew up in Bunyore.

2 In Memorium: Ezekiel Alembi:

Ezekiel Alembi telling stories to Icelandic high school students. Photos by Terry Gunnell

3 Terry Gunnell In Memorium: Ezekiel Alembi:

In spite of his firm local roots, Ezekiel Notes was nonetheless also a man who proved 1 Other articles include “Singing and to be infinitely adaptable to changing Dancing the Rhythm of Life: Oral Poetry in environments (from the noisy Bunyore the Abanyole Community of Kenya” (2003 market, to the formal Nairobi campus, the Elore: A Scholary Online Journal in Folklore snow and ice of Finland and Iceland, and Studies 10: 1); “The Calling and Work of the rooftop heat of central Athens below the Parthenon where I saw him last). In Wellington Masatia Tambwa: A Traditional addition to his work in Kenya (Senior Healer from Bunyore, Kenya” (2004 Folklore: Lecturer in the Literature Department of Electronic Journal of Folklore 24 : 78-89); Kenyatta University from 2003, Chairman “Issues in the Socio-Cultural Perception of of the department between 2007 and 2008, Death as Reflected in the Abanyole Dirges” and then Director of Kenyatta University (2007 Indian Folklife 27: 15-20); and “The Radio Services until his death), and Abanyole Dirge: ‘Escorting’ the Dead with his memorable appearances at ISFNR conferences, Ezekiel also served on the Song and Dance (2008 Folklore: Electronic editorial boards of several American Journal of Folklore 38: 7-22). folklore journals (including Cultural Analysis) in addition to being a long- time member of the editorial board of the Estonian journal Folklore: Electric Journal of Folklore. As noted at the start, Ezekiel Alembi will be sorely missed by many. The sound of his deep, rolling laughter at life’s small absurdities will nonetheless continue to resound in our memories for years to come: sadly gone, but far from forgotten. Without doubt, his influence will live on in the work of his many students and colleagues. Terry Gunnell University of Iceland

4 Mapping America

Mapping America: culture, and the cartographic presenta- Re-creating in the Cartographic tion belies an ideological and historical shaping of the country that is anything 1,2 Imagination but natural. In fact, the sleight of hand by which the “irrefutable” materiality of the JoAnn Conrad ground that is presented and the scien- University of California, Berkeley tific cartographic processes by which the in-itself-material map is produced transform the ideological possession of that land into its own reality and into claims The Shaping of a National Citizenry that “we Americans” are here, coast-to- aps have long been part of the coast. This obscures alternative, often American cultural landscape. highly contested, mappings, and effaces Plotting military advances and the processes of coercion and consensus territorialM expansion; regulating and de- building which involve the interwoven marcating land through surveys, thereby strands of politics, economics, ideology, inextricably merging land and property, social change, power, and domination maps have shaped our sensibility of the that have resulted in a singular narrative landscape at the same time as they have of national identity, visualized in the map guided our movement through it. The of nation. mapped identity of the U.S. as the visual- This notion of continental integrity ized outline of the forty-eight contiguous fused with national identity is thus one states is, by now, a naturalized phenom- of an imagined and contested space, in enon both in the sense that it is taken for which neither the nation nor the space granted, and in the sense that the natu- it occupies can be postulated a priori as ral boundaries have been set by nature— preexisting or fixed, but is the outcome originating at the Atlantic and terminat- 3 of specific historical, narrative processes. ing at the Pacific Ocean. The shape of “America,” thus, ontologically, is not an the continental United States, established immutable, taken for granted “ground,” cartographically, unproblematically re- but a potentiality to be filled with meaning presented in road maps, railroad maps, and thus recognized as meaningful. atlases, school texts, advertisements, and Maps play a critical and yet largely news, has become iconographic. Inscribed unchallenged role in the ideological work onto the popular imagination, it has “en- of fixing such meaning. The apparent tered the national collective image bank capacity of the map to hold together the . . . [T]he shape of the United States is so nation from the internal and external ingrained in the minds of those who live forces of disintegration, the semiotic and here . . . that it stands for the nation as a rhetorical potency of the map, based, symbol”(Holmes 1991, 7), which is then in part, on the deceptive fixity of the conflated with the continent—“America”. mapped terrain and the naturalness of In this nation/continent homology, how- the continental nation, can be seen as ever, nature operates metonymically with the imposition of a hegemonic view

masquerading as “common knowledge.” a “naturalized geographical taxonomy” In other words, “it is the map that (Lewis and Wigen 1997, 8-9). The idea precedes the territory”(Baudrillard of this continental America thus justi- 1983, 2); “mappings do not represent fied continental conquest in the name of geographies or ideas; rather they effect national integrity, while the concept of a their actualization”(Corner 1999, 225). continental nation supported notions of In a sense, then, the maps of the con- American exceptionalism and privilege. tinental United States show the devel- Although this dominant narrative opment of an American [creation] myth seeks to organize the unified nation ideo- which “. . . functions to control history, logically through the cartographic image to shape it in text or image as an or- of an imaginary America which is natu- dained sequence of events. The world is ralized by the representation of a con- rendered pure in the process; complex- tiguous land mass, a reinvestigation of ity and contradiction give way to order, these maps reveals the sub-texts which clarity, and direction. Myth, then, can constantly threaten to destabilize and be understood here as an abstract shel- challenge the singular narrative strand ter restricting debate. But myth can also of American continental/national unity, function as ideology—as an abstraction as well as the historical changes that be- broadly defining the belief system of a lie this mythic unity—the recuperative particular group . . .” (Truettner 1991, 40). adjustments which seek to contain and But these ideologies which undergird the subdue alternatives. overdetermined sense of order in any map are only possible through the con- The Ties Bind the Nation tinued discarding, forgetting, and evacu- Although in the territorial uncertainties ation of those strands that run counter to of the colonial period the map of Amer- the main narrative; those counter map- ica was shifting and contested, the gen- pings which threaten the integrity of the eral impulse of continental expansion national space. was nonetheless dominated by an East- The narrative of “America,” with West logic (i.e., a N-S Frontier) until the hindsight as its perspective, presents a Civil War. Here, again, the cartographic seamless and naturalized series of such process inscribed the shatter belt of the myths—presumptions which subsume astronomically surveyed Mason-Dix- the Americas into a metageography on Line, rupturing the East-West logic, which obfuscates its ideological under- threatening to expose the disorder in pinnings: the myth of continents; the the apparent order of the map. As the myth of the nation state; and the myth of United States reinvented itself as a uni- the East to West progression of civiliza- fied, whole nation in the wake of the tion (Lewis and Wigen 1997, xiii), all of Civil War the West became even more which have been mapped onto the ter- central to the national mythos, and west- rain and the national consciousness. In ward expansion and continental unifica- this narrative, continents become fun- tion along the East-West axis resumed, damental building blocks of geography marked, significantly, by the completion which are reified, acquiring the status of of the transcontinental railway in May of

6 Mapping America

1869, joining the Union and Central Pa- points provided by the luxury hotels that cific Lines. grew up at such destinations along the The physical incorporation and link- rail lines. Situated alongside or nearby age of the mythic landscape of the West the spectacular sights of Nature — the to the rest of the nation provided the fo- Grand Canyon, Yellowstone,4 and Yosem- cus for American regeneration, reunifica- ite — tourists were guided in an act of tion and self-affirmation. The marriage of national communion and reaffirmation. mapping and the railroads served further As such, tourism initiated a new form of to solidify the image of the unified, con- collective citizenship; the embodied re- tinental nation, sutured and reinforced tracing of a shared destiny, and a shared by the iron rail grid. The story of these experience in the space of America. maps is one of masculine domination One of the earliest to reconfigure and and conquest over Nature in the form of repackage the landscape around the log- presidential acts rather than the story of ic of the rail lines and the new viewing those whose physical labor produced the tourist was Fred Harvey, who famously railways, or who were displaced or dis- repackaged the West as a series of motor- located as a result of them. car “detours” that took city “dudes” to The railroads, as major landholders various vista points in luxury cars that in the late nineteenth century, were to conveniently detoured from the rail line dominate the changing ways in which into landscapes in which imaginary “na- the nation was apprehended, not only tives” were colorful, silent, and static.5 through their linking of the continent, [Fig. 1]. but through the hastening of the in-mi- After the antagonistic and hostile nat- gration of settlers into more of the West, ural and human forces in the West had reconfiguring settlement patterns along been subdued, the tourist was able to ro- the narrow corridors of railroad devel- manticize and “experience” these forces opment. The American landscape was in a repackaged state.6 These decontextu- reduced to strips that criss-crossed the alized and recontextualized tourist des- mapped surface, with vast, unknown, tinations, then, became imagined places, and emptied territories beyond, many of the precursors to contemporary theme which had been stripped of their former parks, where reminders of suffering and significance. social conflict are removed from the tour- The growing strength of the railroads istic purview. These touristic itineraries and the increased demand for rail travel restaged narratives of conquest of the also ushered in a significant new pres- native peoples who were evacuated from ence into the landscape—tourism. Rail- the newly constituted national parks, put road tourism offered growing numbers on reservations, and presented as ethno- of the elite a comfortable way to view graphic remnants of “authentic” Indian and travel through the country. Tourism cultures in a decontextualized setting for became typified as the act of viewing— the consumption of tourists seeking a sightseeing preselected natural wonders palliative to the rigors of modern, urban from the comfort of the Pullman car win- life. dows, or, at the very most, from the vista

7 JoAnn Conrad Mapping America

Fig. 1. Harvey marketed itineraries as destination points on a map linked by the traces of roads and rail lines. With the emergence of the vacation as . . . [t]ourism had become intrinsically an individual right, and the configura- linked to the formulation of the indus- tion of touristic sights as encapsulating trial age, to the combination of Manifest the essence of the nation, tourism ad- Destiny, empirical knowledge, and ro- dressed and shaped a particular Amer- mantic thinking that typified the fin de ica and collective American identity. siècle” (Rothman 1998, 49). Tourism and nation building were con- joined—structuring the meanings of ex- Promotional Maps and Tour Itineraries perience, desire, visuality, mobility, and Nation, conquest, private enterprise, in- consumerism; defining the “good life” dustrial expansion, a new consuming as a social and moral imperative. Thus tourist class, and a radically different tourism, during this early period of rail- conceptualization and organization of road travel, allowed for an affirmation time and space focusing on an imaginary of the tourist’s rightful place at the head national landscape were merged and dis- of the social hierarchy and the American tilled in the emergent new phenomenon system. “In the spectacular vistas of the of promotional cartography. Technologi- West, in a growing obsession with native cal innovations such as the wax engraving peoples and their arts, Americans used process and the use of pulp paper, along a geographic place as mythical space with mechanized, industrialized produc-

8 Mapping America

tion, resulted in the increased availability map, tracing and anticipating the tour- of cheap road maps for an increasingly ist’s itinerary, both facilitated and lim- mobile public.7 The cartographically de- ited the individual’s movement. [Fig. 2] fined vision of the nation was thus tied to Space became known through a process the commercial interests of the railroads of miniaturization at the same time that and tourism, and as such was abstract- the individual was positioned in a com- ed and delimited according to financial mon social space. The map, then, like the imperatives. Despite the claims to car- book, could become a “talisman to the tographic accuracy and comprehensive- body, and an emblem of the self”(Stewart, ness, these maps reveal the competitive Susan 1993, 41) through which the re- motivation of advertising campaigns. inscription of personal itineraries onto Railroad maps, like the form of travel routes proffered by the printed map ef- they purport to represent, also emphasize fected the reinvention of the map which destination. Thus the type of informa- could then be displayed, revisited and tion contained in the maps, the emphasis re-presented. on sites along the routes at the expense of

Fig. 2. Mapping Destination. The U.S. visualized as a series of stops8 a broader, detailed relationship with the Blazing Trails landscape, guided the consuming public The railroads dominated American trans- in ways of seeing that would in turn af- portation and travel in the second half of fect the vision of the nation. The railroad the nineteenth century and the begin-

9 JoAnn Conrad Mapping America

ning of the twentieth century, and during As car travel eclipsed train travel so this period railroad maps continued to was the nature of travel transformed; an inform the American continental imagi- elite, highly-structured cultural tourism nary. Gradually, however, road maps was replaced by a more personal type of began to have a presence. Initially, these experience-based recreational tourism. In maps and the associated “Good Roads the transformation, tourism focused less Movement,” were local and discrete in on destination and more on the experi- nature, catering to cyclists. In 1908, as ence of the road, and yet destination and the first production-line Model T Ford experience still existed within the same appeared, systems of travel, touring and nationalistic symbolic rhetoric: the grand mapping in the U.S. began to change. national parks of the West still stood for Henry Ford’s revolution transformed America’s might; the historical parks of the ways in which Americans lived for- the East reframed the war of indepen- ever, and did so rapidly: in 1900 there dence and celebrated the birth and glory were eight thousand cars registered; in of the new nation; while the ethnograph- 1910, one million; by 1915, at the onset of ic displays of Indians in museums and at WWI, two million (Yagoda 1998, 35); by arts and crafts shops all reinscribed a par- 1920, eight million; and by 1930, twenty- ticular social order and the privilege of three million (Rothman 1988, 146). But the tourist class. All of these assumptions Fordism’s effects went deeper: in his operated on the by-now invisible back- assembly-line worker, in the homogene- ground of the continental United States, ity and standardization of his product, and all were narratives that naturalized and in the assurance of a decent wage, conquest—the tourism of hegemony. Ford initiated a consumerist regime of As more cars and more drivers with demand-driven economics, and created vacation time and the desire to exercise a middle-income class with money to their freedom and independence began spend and leisure time in which to rec- to hit the road, they were met by the reate. This Fordist revolution initiated a newly established Highway Associa- change in individuals’ attitudes toward tions of local businesses and commercial the land—at once more distanced (in enterprises ready to capitalize on this terms of labor and production) and more new market. These early associations es- intimate (in terms of car travel and the tablished the “Blazed Trails Program”— individualized travel through space). the first system of marked and mapped Early car travel upset the “hegemony regional routes. Routes with evocative, of the intellectual message encoded in rugged names benefitted travelers’ own railroad travel” (Rothman 1988, 144) by images and expectations—The Black putting the car owner in the “driver’s Horse Trail; Dixie Highway; Erie Trail; seat” to deal with the many unexpected Yellowstone Trail. Probably the most fa- contingencies of road travel. This was mous of these was the Lincoln Highway, the “democratization” and appeal to the which traced a line from New York to San sense of individualism and adventure Francisco.9 In 1916 it was estimated that that early car travel offered middle-class five to ten thousand motorists made the Americans. entire transcontinental journey across the

10 Mapping America

Lincoln Highway (Joy 1917), which was (Weingroff 1996b). After WWI, highway mapped by Rand McNally in 1913 using construction, mapping and signing con- previous continental railroad maps as a tinued, and the standardized federal template. Thus, although car travel ef- highway numbering system, initiated in fected a democratization of tourism in 1926, signaled the demise of the older, contrast to the more exclusive earlier rail more regional Blazed Trail system. It was tourism, the accompanying road maps during this period that the road map and which interpellated an even larger por- road travel began to truly shape a unified tion of the citizenry into the discipline national consciousness: of the nation did so according to a preexisting grid. The creation of the national highway system in the United States was guid- The map referred as much to an imag- ed by the hope that it would eliminate inary terrain as to any “real ground,” the last natural barriers to national and the mapping of the continental road integration. And thus early auto road systems, like those of the railroads ear- maps were relied upon to conquer the lier, was often prior to the actual pres- vast American space, to invite trans- ence of the roads. In Emily Post’s diary continental travel by car. American of her transcontinental road trip across auto touring ever since has had less to the Lincoln Highway, her companion’s do with travelling in the country than comments bear witness to this: “It’s an through it. The bold-line, sparsely imaginary line like the equator . . . [o] detailed aesthetic of American road maps reflects this detachment from the nce you get beyond the Mississippi the countryside. (Akerman 1993, 79) roads are trails of mud and sand . . . [t] hese are not towns; they are only names These road maps, stripped down to on a map”(Post 1925, 7; cited in Aker- the essentials of the road trip’s demand man 1993, 79). That people planned their for movement, showed only what was itineraries based on these lines on a map appropriate for road travel, and this is a testament to the power of the map minimalist presentation and limited to effect its own reality, naturalizing an topographical relief effected a distantia- imaginary landscape. tion from the landscape, opening up the map space which could then be “filled Constructing National Unity in” with sights, tourist destinations, and Increased demands for long-distance imaginary places projected onto the sur- travel and transportation required new face of the map. As these sights became types of road construction, and in 1916 the the destination, they also portrayed the Federal Aid Road Act appropriated $75 road trip as an “experience,” and thus million to the standardization not only of the reproduction of these sights—the road construction, but of road designation post cards, photos, souvenirs—not only (Weingroff 1996a). Hampered by the de- made the sight “real,” but also validated, mands of WWI, highway construction materialized, and commemorated the ex- stalled until the passage of the Federal perience into the future. Highway Act of 1921, ushering in the During the Depression and the sub- heyday construction period of the 1920s sequent New Deal Era, the federal gov-

11 JoAnn Conrad Mapping America

ernment became even more involved in military bases, as well as being promi- the work of cultural production, shap- nently exhibited in bookshops, depart- ing the American citizenry in accordance ment stores, hotels, transportation de- with the unifying goals of Progressivism. pots, and advertisements throughout the subway system. By mid-1936, 431 As part of the WPA, in 1935 the Federal radio stations were using Works Prog- Writers’ Project was allotted $6,288,000 ress Administration radio material. and employed sixty-five hundred writ- (Bold 1999, 12) ers to produce the American Guide Se- ries, a collection of over 400 volumes The widespread dissemination of the of “regional guide books”(Bold 1999, 11 10 message of the guides, as well as the xiv). These writers, although guided “documentary style” they assumed, by certain preconceptions about what served to naturalize not only a particu- constituted points of regional and lo- lar text of American-ness and the natu- cal interests, were also managed and ral order of existing social relations,12 but incorporated into the overall agenda of also served to naturalize the ritualistic the national agency. The central office in act of traveling along a prescribed route Washington ultimately arbitrated local through this American landscape. In con- variation in order to map out a uniform trast to the dislocation and displacement and unified America onto a retraceable of the Depression, the New Deal and the grid. The guidebooks’ promise, beyond guidebooks in particular stressed “pur- a make-work project, was pedagogical: poseful movement” that was destination teaching the American public how to oriented—to see the sights, to relive his- not only read the newly remapped and tory, and to know one’s country.13 The re-presented landscape, but how to be in guides, issued at a particular moment in it. Road travel became insistently work, American cultural history just before the national duty, as well as play. In this, onset of mass tourism, served as the texts the guidebooks were informed by not of the rhetorics of nationalism, and their only the dictates of the WPA, but also a structure and presentation of the land- cluster of agencies that included the scape of America, the sights and points National Park Service, the Department of touristic consumption, were to set of the Interior, and also state, and local the template for tourist guides to come14 agencies, which, through “preservation, which would replicate the form as well education, and display. . . were closely as the power relations that inhered in the tied, by production and rhetoric, to the assumptions implicit in the guides’ pre- New Deal’s vision of the United States as sentations. a nation of communities”(Kammen 1991, Not until the challenges to the nar- 299-527; quoted in Bold 1999, 4). Guide- rative of national unity and harmony in books also had widespread distribution; the 1960s did the model set by the guides standardizing and normalizing the vi- suffer. But, as with all cultural produc- sion of American unity: tion, once the genie is out of the bottle, Volumes in the American Guide Series the control of meaning and dissemina- were distributed to public schools, to tion is imperfect. Those images and de- refugee centers, and to the libraries of scriptions of the guides of the 1930s, un-

12 Mapping America

moored from their original context and magazine ad for the Ford Ranch Wagon social signifiers, float freely in a complex proclaims, “There’s always room for one set of cultural scenarios and imaginary more, in a FORD Ranch Wagon!”(Rugh landscapes, becoming the sites of nostal- 2008, 22). gic reappropriation and reconfiguration, Cars were one part of the equation; as well as objects which, through con- freeways were another. In 1956 the Fed- sumption, possession, and ownership, eral-Aid Highway Act was signed, al- reinsert the tourist into an entirely new locating federal funds for the construc- imaginary landscape. tion of an interstate freeway system, argued, by then-President Eisenhower to The Road Trip be necessary for national security. The Geography became political destiny and consequences of the introduction of the personal fantasy in the post-WWII fam- freeways, however, are much more pro- ily vacation—the road trip. The road trip found and long-lasting. Freeways effect- fully emerged in the post-WWII era in a ed a completely different way of being perfect convergence of social, economic, in space: they facilitated the rise of the and political factors, becoming the iconic suburbs by making commutes fast and encapsulation of the “good life” and the without stops, and thus inevitably lon- “American Dream.” Americans were ger; they standardized road travel, incor- ready, after the austerity of the war effort, porating freeway design into the nation- for movement and consumerism, and al model; they distanced the driver and the post-war economic boom provided passengers from the surrounding coun- the capital incentive. Car ownership was tryside, thus defining any car trip by the climbing: in 1948, fifty-four percent of points of departure and destination; and families owned cars; by 1960 this was they institutionalized the association of seventy-seven percent (Rugh 2008, 18). being American and being “on the road,” There were nine car manufacturing com- since freeways by definition were not lo- panies, unable to keep up with orders, cal, and tended to decentralize and seg- and generally, the demand for all petro- regate zones of activity, and did so, pri- leum products, after war time rationing, marily, to the exclusion of other modes rose eighty percent between 1945 and of transportation. Clustering around the 1957 (Jakle and Schulle 1994, 67). And infrequent turnoffs were new subsidiary cars got bigger. This was the era of the industries: gas stations, fast food chains, station wagon, big enough to accommo- strip malls, and motels, all positioned to date the growing Baby Boom generation. facilitate travel along the freeway, but Car manufacturers, and the expanding also to be within the view of the motor- ad industry that accompanied them, not ists from the road, and all of these indus- only spoke to this growing market, but, tries became increasingly standardized through the advertising images displayed across the entire system. These tended to in magazines and on television (itself a change the ways in which Americans in rapidly expanding post-war socializing the post-war era configured their work experience), tended to normalize the and leisure times to be in conformance very family it was appealing to: a 1954 with the logic of the freeway – minimiz-

13 JoAnn Conrad Mapping America

Fig. 3. Family values, consumerism, and the Road Trip Family Vacation, circa 1954

ing deviation, eroding the possibility of consensus”(Stephens 1999; Conrad a different, “uncharted” excursion. The 1999a, 324-328), linking political policy speed of travel that the new freeways and “family values” as it merged do- enabled opened up the potential for the mestic and national containment. “The cross-country family road trip, enhanced Cold War era generation, in the wake by the comfort and familiarity of stan- of the disruption of World War II and dardized fast food, uniformed gas station the uncertainty of the new, nuclear age, attendants, and motels that, like Howard looked “homeward” to the isolated, Johnson’s, offered rooms in which “kids stable, sexually charged safe haven of stay free,” and whose motel pool offered the home and family”(Conrad 1999b, “roadside entertainment” included in the 145). Families were “re-domesticating” night’s price. and suburbanizing “in the intersecting The 1950s thematized nuclear fam- currents of Cold War ideology; the do- ily was the embodiment, enactment mestic, family romance; consumerism; and justification for the “Cold War and the rapid technologizing of mass

14 Mapping America

the nuclear family, recreating in the vacation landscape, linked family life to the car-centered, freeway-accessed lifestyle, and also to larger political discourses of nationhood.15 The family vacation on the road became a moral and national (security) imperative, and the nuclear family, inward- ly focused, was ideally suited to perform one of the most important national du- ties—consumption. Through the insistent and redundant mediated images of the 1950s American families were in- structed how to be and how to have fun. Television sitcoms, ads for theme parks, for Kodak film and Cameras, ads for cars and gas all interwove their primary message with that of the normalizing message of the family that is strengthened by togetherness—and that togetherness was most effectively and emphatically enacted on the family vacation. [Fig. 4] The model of the nuclear family was Fig. 4. Documenting and Commemorating bifurcated along spatial, temporal, and the Family Road Trip 16 gender lines into the feminized home sphere and the masculinized work arena media”(Ibid). The “family vacation,” in away from the home. During the two- this context, became the model of family week vacation, these spatial, temporal, togetherness: “Taking a family vacation and gender relations were temporarily was justified by adherence to the ideal reorganized around a masculinist imper- of family togetherness, out of a belief ative, when the father reinserted himself that a vacation would strengthen fam- into the day-to-day sphere, albeit “on the ily bonds”(Rugh 2008, 12) and thus, by road.” The vacation was determined by extension, the strength of the nation. The the father’s work schedule, and leisure newly emerging concept of the “family time was scheduled, regularized, and vacation” was an aspect of the processes rationalized in a process made manifest that this age of high industrialism and in the road trip itinerary and road map. wealth intensified—processes which in- That the road trip was under the stew- cluded massive social reorganization, ardship of the father is explicitly illus- lifestyle changes and expectations, in- trated in road maps and other gas station creased scheduled leisure time, the rise of promotional material in which station consumerism, and the valorization of the attendants seemed to be speaking di- nuclear, domestic sphere. [Fig. 3] Thus rectly to a male driver/consumer—the

15 JoAnn Conrad Mapping America

head of the household who maintains The intertextual representations of/ control “at the wheel.” At the same time, on the Road enabled the enactment of the domestic sphere was maintained on fantasies of power, individuality, au- the road, particularly with the rise of the tonomy, and freedom onto pre-imagined motel, complete with kitchenette. Vaca- landscapes as part of the mapping of tions thus served to reaffirm the famil- an American identity. The road trip, as ial, and by analogy national, order and cultural practice, ritualized personal en- hierarchies. Additionally, through the gagement with a reconfigured and man- road trip, retraced across the regulating aged landscape as it shaped identity. The and unifying grid of the national high- mapped, organized, and pre-scripted way system, each individual and family landscape naturalized its own construc- was interpellated into the physical and tion as it naturalized our passage through symbolic national landscape which was it. We were invited to “Discover Ameri- interpreted and presented for consump- ca!”20 — the act of “discovery” masking tion in the standardized road map and the artificiality of reconfigured land- the tour guide. And while the family va- scapes, presenting them as inevitable. cation was directed out into the touristic Furthermore, in the touristic consump- landscape of the nation, the family, trav- tion of and (re)enactment through these eling in its “home away from home” was imaginary landscapes, individual family increasingly insular, with leisure and rec- stories are woven back into the national: reating linked to asocial consumerism. scripted landscapes of desire which are In the geography of the imagination reinscribed, and memorialized in the the road trip epitomized the unfettered snapshot memory. Landscape thus, as freedom of the open road, with the driv- W.J.T. Mitchell reminds us, “…circulates er as the master of his own destiny, and as a medium of exchange, a site of visual thus fulfilled the escapist fantasies of appropriation, a focus for the formation rugged individualism and personal au- of identity”(Mitchell 1994, 2). tonomy.17 The road trip was a compact As highways became more ubiqui- and elegant metaphor for the “American tous and standardized, car travel faster, Dream” of democratic opportunity and maps more abstract, and the tourist itin- individualism (Patton 1986, 9). The es- erary more insistent, the contingency/ capist realm of the road trip, enabled by adventure of the open road and the ap- mechanized labor and mechanical repro- peal to individualism remained only in duction, was apprehended as a “break” the imagination. In fact, the roads and the from the routine of the work-day world,18 prepackaged destinations and sights that a move from creation to recreation. The the road map/tour guide promised came road trip exemplified and shaped a par- to homogenize the experience into an in- ticularly American collective identity, creasingly predictable series of themed mapping a system of meaning onto the environments, in which fast food chains, landscape and its citizenry, and structur- gas stations, chain stores, and motels of- ing the meanings of experience, desire, ten merged into one giant roadside site. visuality, mobility, and consumerism by This disjuncture between the lived and which the “good life” was defined as a the represented — this text of nostalgia social and moral imperative.19

16 Mapping America

and longing — allowed for the collective ing and ways of being in the land, were re-membering of a non-existent place, the embedded in the road map. Knowing fertile ground of identity formation and one’s country, touring those sites acces- maintenance. These sites of longing were sible from the road and highlighted on necessarily experienced as sites of com- the map and in the tour guide, became pensatory consumption, increasingly ex- a personal reenactment of the narratives perienced through the road-side attrac- of America’s destiny and thus a patri- tions in what Mark Gottdiener has called otic duty. This duty was fulfilled by the the “theming of America” and Umberto ritualistic, embodied interiorization and Eco has referred to as “hyper-reality”— personalization of the nation through its locality as simulacrum (Conrad 2004, surrogate, the map of the nation. Maps 181), realized fully in theme parks, which provided the totalizing national space achieved their quintessential expression into which diversity was subsumed. in Disneyland and Disneyworld. Through the retracing of the specified routes, the road trip was the enactment Know Your Country! Wider Horizons of this unifying principle, showcasing Makes Better Citizens the local/regional/ethnic as commodity, standardizing the roadside experience (never far from the interstate), en- joining all in the same endeavor: “Know your Country!” But this knowledge (and movement) was doubly prescribed; onto the road that cuts through the land and onto the trace of the road on the map. Us- ing the map thus became a disciplinary, rationalizing exercise, in which we were directed to consume the landscape and the products of tourism (evidence of our journey), and were incorporated into the larger national premise—consumerism, masquerading as re-creation. The road trip was not only a way to facilitate and affirm one’s personal and family autonomy, it was a way to do so within the context of a larger national destiny. Promo- tional road maps thus replicated preex- Fig. 5. “Travel Strengthens America” isting master narratives of progress, mobility, independence, and destiny. [Fig. The narrativization and the representa- 5] 21 In following the trails inscribed and tion of the national landscape, directed illustrated in these maps, tourists could specifically towards this new type of car retrace and reenact the nation’s history: touring in which tourism and national- [Fig. 6], ritually and corporeally experi- ism combined to dictate ways of see- encing the national narrative.

17 JoAnn Conrad Mapping America

for many who were nonetheless exposed to the commercial images. As the narrative of nation excluded a multiplicity of versions and voices, so too the presumed consumers of the road trip, the audience to whom the road trip imaging was most obviously directed, was that middle-class, white, heteronor- mative, suburban family with the father at the helm; that social realm which most perfectly reflected the imagined nation, and to which all were encouraged, espe- Fig. 6. Retracing a Generalized History — cially through the commercial media, to U.S. 40 National Old Trails Road, Registered aspire.27 Service International, 1924. Osher Map Col- lection. Note how the “historical” trace con- Diversity was subsumed under unity flates and rewrites the generalized narrative in this narrative and rendered peripheral of Westward Movement. to the experience of the road trip itself, in the form of silent and invisible workers whose labor made the touristic experi- Touring American was an act of con- ence possible [Fig. 7], and also in the im- sumption that partook in the markers of agery of postcards, souvenirs, and maps America’s might—industry, monuments in which racialized others have become to government and democracy, as well part of the roadside attractions associat- as natural wonders which were met- ed with touristic consumption [Fig. 8].28 onymically and metaphorically linked to political and military might. Road maps also frequently retraced the steps of pioneers,22 encouraged the development of a national mythology surrounding the “Fathers” of the nation,23 and established battle sites as pilgrimage destinations in a sacralizing of the secular.24 These imaginaries of freedom, independence, and the lure of the open road, however, were overlain onto imaginaries of conquest,25 dominance, and violence.26 Thus the homogenizing experience of the pre- Fig. 7. Scrap-book post card of a road-trip charted road trip existed within a much Motel. http://www.thepostcard.com/cs- larger system of signification and spoke scan/6700/6706.jpg. Available for purchase to a particular vision of America and for $4.50; decontextualized nostalgic “Ameri- a limited version of its history, one in cana.” which many actors were erased, making the touristic participation in “American” history essentially a foreign experience

18 Mapping America

were given away free were certainly “ordinary”29 and unremarkable. The mundane aspect of the road map, however, obscures the political labor of collective memory which necessitates the forgetting, evacuation, and reconfiguration of the past, reinforcing and reinscribing a highly racialized presentation of “Amer- ica.” These images, inserted into these ordinary maps, themselves become less Fig. 8. Vintage SUNNY SOUTH remarkable and more firmly interwoven Souvenir from 1937, on sale on Ebay 1/09. into the fabric of dominant American culture, and serve to circulate ideologies Touring Race: Recreating in the Play- of race in and through such common- ground of the Imagination places. The systems of signification that consti- Pictorial maps are a particular genre, tute and represent the bourgeois Ameri- the superposition of images onto the can subject continue to reinforce en- road map, a conflation of the “scientific” trenched ideologies of race, naturalizing and the “playful” that produces an inte- racial hierarchies and oppression in their grated text of Americanness with deep ubiquity and “ordinariness.” But the ra- ideological foundations which are re- cialized “other” is not only the subject of produced without drawing attention to this oppression, it is fundamental to and themselves, hidden in the “ordinariness” constitutive of a naturalized, normaliz- of the roadmap. The genre of the promo- ing American-ness. Writing specifically tional pictorial road map reached its peak about representations of African Ameri- during the 1930s and 1940s, continued in cans in literature, Toni Morrison has de- popularity and distribution during the scribed notions of “American-ness” as “golden age” of the road trip—the post responses to a “dark, abiding, signing WWII era — and gradually fell out of Africanist presence” (Morrison 1993, 5), use along with the free road map as the which has enabled the constitution of road trip was supplanted by other forms the new white male as the site of Ameri- of travel and tourism. Pictorial maps can privilege and power. This racialized were usually on the back side of more presence also played a role in the map- conventional road maps, and signified ping of American-ness, through the pro- a modulation from the public to the pri- duction, consumption, and reproduction vate, from macrocosm to microcosm, and of pictorial road maps and other tourist represented both commodity and knowl- ephemera related to road travel, as well edge, fact and fiction (Stewart, Susan as through the systems of racialized im- 1993, 41). The exaggerated, fictive and agery to which these are intertextually re- playful nature of the pictorial road map lated and from which they derive mean- with its childlike and infantilizing illus- ing. Road maps in the mid-20th century, trations, lack of detail, and inattention to in their ubiquity and in the fact that they scale contrasts sharply with the claims of

19 JoAnn Conrad Mapping America

objectivity and accuracy implicit in the greatness and power that could be used stark, surveyed road map on the reverse in analogy to that of the nation itself. side. The standard road map’s emphasis A close reading of one such pictorial on the lines inscribed by the traces of the map [Fig 9]—“A good-natured map of roads themselves, in contrast to pictorial the United States setting forth the ser- maps in which roads merely locate the vices of The Greyhound lines and a few place of images, serves to resolve the ten- principal connecting bus lines,”33 serves sion between the linear teleology of “pas- to illustrate: The offhand manner in sage,” with the stasis and idiosyncrasy of which the imagery is presented as just “place”. “good-natured” distracts attention from Although there are hundreds of picto- the intertwined discourses of the nation, rial maps in existence, generated primar- tourism, and commerce, which ultimate- ily by oil companies as free promotional ly give meaning to the map’s surface. An gimmicks until the 1960s,30 most used investigation into the specific images on and reused extant imagery that consti- the map [Fig 10] reveals a highly complex tuted a “common sense” set of attitudes system of racialized social hierarchies en- towards race relations. This makes a spe- coded in the presented or absented bod- cific historical reading of these images ies, and reveals a process by which the more difficult, as they are reproduced racialized other is available and exposed over a period of several decades, decou- to the presumed subject’s view, while the pling them from any claims to context, subject remains invisible. and pointing to a metaphysics of racism In the South, illustrations carrying as well as the semiotic potency of all such racial significance operate within an in- racialized imagery. tertextual semiotic sphere in which these Replicating the western progress of maps, tour guides, postcards, as well as civilization – settlement, railroads, and non-tourism-related images all relate to a finally interstate highways —American general semiotics of “blackness”—infan- national maps are to be read East to West. tilized, backwards, bestial, consumed by Pictorial maps of New England and the sexual and gustatory urges, criminal, and Eastern Seaboard read as centers of civi- marked by speech that is “inferior”—a lization, and history is represented by marker of backwardness, but also an ex- markers of progress — buildings, bridg- clusion, a devoicing. These images of the es, sites of historic battles—and emptied South were ubiquitous, and as most of of human figures. The reader’s eye is then the production of printed images in the directed West and South, reenacting the form of maps and postcards originated narrative of Manifest Destiny. The South in the North, specifically Chicago, coin- is the province of raw material and raw cident with the migration of Blacks into labor, epitomized by the Black field work- that city, it can perhaps be suggested that er.31 The Southwest is an ethnographic the emphasis on rural Blacks in the South encounter of another sort with a dehisto- not only points to a desire for the “good ricized relic from a nonexistent past—the old days of the happy plantation darkie” “native” in full regalia.32 The Far West is rather than the urban racial tensions in the land of spectacular nature, awesome daily life (note the absence of any human

20 Mapping America

presence in Chicago on the map), but also a distancing, a quarantining and segregation of Blacks in their “proper place.” The infantilized, brightly-colored, stereotypic, cartoon-like figures of Na- tive Americans, African-Americans, and Mexican-Americans masquerades as a cultural diversity of sorts, effacing the violence behind these images. The “casual innocence” of the Greyhound map can’t Fig. 9. A Good-natured Map of the U.S.— fully mask the terror implicit in the image Greyhound Lines, 1938 of the Black boy eating watermelon in a patch near Augusta, the barefoot Black woman and her diapered baby picking cotton near Macon, or the Plains Indi- ans in full regalia alongside their teepees in Montana, ironically placed close to a cartoon depiction of the Battle of Little Big Horn. These pictorial maps attest to and distract the viewer from the “evacuated presence” of racist subjugation, dismemberment, annihilation and pre- mature death that constitutes the larger non-White experience, and, it could be argued, the reproduction and repeated consumption of these images metaphorically continues this process. To continue Fig. 10. “Good-Natured” Images of the to reproduce such images “innocently,” to “South” include: protest that they are “just tourism” sug- An Alligator chasing a black man up a palm gests the possibility of “memory without tree—South Florida consequences”(Lippard 1999, 119). In Black mother and pickaninnie in cotton fields fact, it represents an erasure of memory, picking cotton—Georgia a collective amnesia, which obscures a Boy in a watermelon Patch—South Carolina “life-and-death struggle between memo- Black Boy holding up a possum, “Jes dinnah, ry, denial and repression”(Ibid) in which das all”—Alabama the invisible operations of power main- Black cotton pickers, man and wife, “Honey, tain an entrenched network of privilege we sho is pickin lots of cotton”—Texas and domination. Texan Law man, with a 10-gallon hat and handle-bar moustache, “Thar’s room in Texas Consuming Citizenship for all of Yurrup and half of Africa, yes suh,” Road maps, with their standardized and Police man and other man with gun near authorized routes, are regulatory; travel Memphis—“Crossroads of the South” is delimited, prescribed by the route.

21 JoAnn Conrad Mapping America

Fig. 12. Page from Scrapbook with menu memorabilia, themselves located on a map. 35

book, while the national is transformed into the personal through the process of Fig. 11. Post card of Route 66 and points of miniaturization. interest in California. From a Scrapbook in Scrapbooks speak to the labor of the Newberry Library collection. leisure—the labor of cultural (re)pro- Pictorial road maps, the superposition duction. Leisure is thus in the process of images onto this grid, contextualize of becoming commoditized, becoming those routes; informing, shaping, in- work in its own right. The act of scrap- structing and pre-interpreting our move- book making, the cultural production ment across the mapped landscape. of family, nation, and middle America, Along with the use of road maps to plan, was the “work” of the feminized sphere; trace, and plot travel itineraries however, women and children who were thus in- tourists of this age of road travel also en- terpellated into the larger consumerist gaged in a series of memorializing proj- regime, and into the ideological regimes ects [Fig. 11] — souvenir and memento at work in the representations that were collection, photography, and scrapbook recontextualized in their own “personal” production. In these individualizing acts, scrapbooks. Ironically, the memorializa- American subject-hood was constituted tion of this vacation time was also an act in the incorporation of images and “per- of mechanical reproduction along regu- sonal” experiences into commemorative, larized, scripted lines. The use of photo- narrativized scrapbook projects that use graphs and postcards, and the organiza- the road itinerary as a template. Gener- tion of these into a linear, chronological ic post cards become personal proof of progression often mirrored the route in- passage when collected in a trip’s scrap- scribed by the highways and interstates,

22 Mapping America

and in fact, maps were often included in ings that accrue to these images, enhanc- trip/vacation scrapbooks of this era [Fig ing their potency, and also points to the 11].34 rhetorical moves that insistently effect Personal photographs do not usually the persistence of ideologies as “com- find their way into travel scrapbooks. monplaces.” The imagery of everyday Instead, they are filled with postcards, life—that found on promotional road purchased photographs, pictures from maps, postcards, matchbooks, food, res- road maps, brochures, promotional ma- taurants — in its ubiquity, attests to and terial from various sights, and memen- distracts the viewer from the evacuated tos, such as napkins, place mats, menus, presence of racist subjugation which con- etc. [Fig 12]. The rejection of personal stitutes the larger non-white experience, photographs and the inclusion of textual and, in fact, the reproduction of these im- material directly from the postcards and ages is part of this, reinscribing the pos- brochures is an attempt to authenticate sessive investment in Whiteness (Lipsitz the experience: “I was there…,” while 1995). The fact that many of these imag- simultaneously claiming the authority of es — often described as “adorable” and the “experts”—converting the scrapbook “wonderful”— circulate today on eBay into a testimony of the “more real than and among post card and map dealers real.” seriously undermines any denial that a Travel scrapbooks, linked to pictorial major subtext to the American narrative 36 maps and tour guides by their shared im- is that of racism. These images now cir- ages, can provide insight into the recep- culate freely, untethered to their original tion, incorporation, recapitulation, and context. Now the signifiers of race have sometimes recontextualization of ideolo- been decoupled from the signified, from gies at the individual level, suggesting, any context other than that of racism it- again, the diffuse operations of power. self, and operate metaphorically, disin- The scrapbook is a prosthesis, the func- vested of consequence. This resonates tion of which is to generate an external with the larger argument of this article interiorized space—an exteriorized sub- that ordinary “commonplaces” are repli- jectivity. The bourgeois subject can cre- cated in physical throw-away commodi- ate and revisit his/her own creation of ties that reinscribe disposable images self, consuming a recontextualized and of caricatured people inhabiting an ab- repackaged narrative of both travel and stracted place, while these maps of ab- longing, and in this way, the images be- stracted space facilitate our journeys into come reinserted into narratives of long- our vacation selves where we “dream of ing and desire as well as of order and au- escape” while, at the same time enact the thority. “simple life” of relaxation. In comparing the images on maps and other mass produced items with America Mapped those used in scrapbooks made by indi- We live in a cartographically realized and viduals, some emerged more frequently informed world. This is not to say that and emphatically than others, and these maps were not discursive battlegrounds suggest the intertextual field of mean- in pre-modern times,37 but they are now

23 JoAnn Conrad Mapping America

ubiquitous, everyday, their rectilinear through it, and our incorporation of this logic enacted with each venture into the cartographic knowledge is one way in street. We use Mapquest and GPS guid- which American identity is organized by ance systems, deferring to and depend- continuity and reciprocity between polit- ing on the imposed logic of the grid. But ical/institutional/commercial and per- maps tenaciously assert an empirical log- sonal levels of interaction. Ideology, cul- ic whose demonstration is founded on a tural productions, personal enactments, fragile deceit: and belief systems engage in recursive loops, entangling personal and collective Maps are highly symbolic and abstract memories, individual and institutional systems of signification which operate landscapes of fantasy and power, inter- at least two conceptual layers of re- weaving us into their microphysics of move from the “ground” they claim to power as our personal reenactments are represent. The precise scale and linear demarcations of contemporary maps at once authorizing and infantilizing. Or- are a desperate claim to accuracy, re- dinary, even disposable everyday items sisting the inherent inadequacies of carry signification beyond their immedi- a two-dimensional representation ate functions, and serve to continuously of three-dimensional space. Spatial and invisibly38 reinforce hierarchies of meaning is enacted through the sym- power. These items, existing at the nexus bolic medium of cartography which is of folklore, popular culture, commercial increasingly permeated by additional, interests, pedagogy, consumerism and invisible meaning the more it is used ideological rhetoric are critical to the con- and incorporated into everyday life, struction of contemporary subjecthood, allowing for a vernacular interpretation and penetration of “official” space and an interrogation of these can begin (Conrad 2004, 178). to shed light on those processes by which we are all interpellated into the project of We draw maps on napkins and “give di- nation-hood. rections” in a manner that offhandedly disregards the disciplinary imperatives Notes of scale. We also internalize road layouts 1 Much of the initial archival work on this (those lines on the map) and improvise article is the result of participation in the our own itineraries based on a more NEH supported summer institute: “Popular complex, but highly localized, knowl- Cartography and Society” at the Hermon edge of conditions and shortcuts. Similar to the ways in which the regulatory tour- Dunlap Smith Center for Cartography at the guide itinerary becomes miniaturized Newberry Library in Chicago, during the and personalized in the scrapbook, these summer of 2001. Special thanks go to the personalized directions/maps/routes of director James Akerman, for all his help, daily use have become part of the cultur- and to seminar co-participant Dr. Michael al landscape, itself an ongoing recursive Crutcher of the Univ. of Kentucky, for many engagement between the official and the insights on the relays between postcards/ personal. Maps and itineraries shape souvenirs and social discourse. our place in space and how we move

24 Mapping America

2 This article is dependent on visual imag- use of wax-engraved, and thus cheaply re- ery. Most of the maps and map-related im- producible railroad maps, issued their first ages referenced, however, are available on- machine-colored railway map of the U.S. line in various exhibits. Wherever possible, and Canada in 1874.” then, to maximize the use of these images, 8 http://www.cardcow.com/47037/fred- links to these high quality images are pro- harvey-hotels-and-restaurants-hotels/ vided in lieu of their reproduction here. 9 In 1952 National Geographic, itself a culture 3 It was John Quincy Adams who, in the broker, featured an article about a (typical) 1820s identified the Pacific Coast as the “nat- American family, the Grays, and their family ural” boundary of the Continental U.S., but vacation along the Lincoln Highway, pro- this claim was anticipated by, among others, viding another mediated model for families Lewis and Clark’s expedition to the head- to aspire to, as well as reiterating the nation- waters of the Missouri River and eventually alistic and pedagogic imperatives of such to the Pacific Coast. This declaration of unity trips. See Gray. was more of an expression of intent, how- 10 By the time the program was shut down ever, since at the time Great Britain shared in 1943, “Time magazine estimated that its rights to Oregon and Washington with the total expenditure was $27,89,370,” ultimate- U.S., Spain claimed rights to the Pacific coast ly employing “approximately ten thousand up to northern California, and the Russians writers” (Bold 1999, xiv). also had territorial and military ambitions in 11 The WPA guides were produced from California. 1935-1941, and produced over 400 volumes. 4 See http://www.fruitfromwashington. 12 For example, in the 1955 North Carolina com/History/railroad_images/nprr4. Guide, racial segregation is not only present- jpg “Northern Pacific — mainstreet of the ed as matter of fact, but the documentary Northwest” and sightseeing tours in the style suggests that this is the natural order of West by rail at http://www.fruitfromwash- things: “Throughout the town [Durham] are ington.com/History/railroad_images/ parks and playgrounds for both races” (169); nprr3_lg.jpg “a dirt road leads to CHOWAN BEACH (for 5 See http://www.azpbs.org/arizonalodg- Negroes) (419). Robinson. es/grfx/looptourmap.jpg and http://www. 13 A knowledge that was based in move- classicrail.com/paper/atsfindiandetour. ment through space, and thus geographi- JPEG cal, and insistently visual—“taking in the 6 See, for example, the cover of Clauson’s sights.” Touring Atlas of the United States. From the 14 The Guides, produced with Federal fund- Osher Collection http://usm.maine.edu/ ing and oversight, were replaced by local maps/exhibit9/images/100.jpg agencies, and by membership-based Au- 7 See Woodward. Also see Peters: 66—“Chi- tomobile Association, such as AAA, which cago-based Rand McNally, pioneers in the provided members with “personalized” trip

25 JoAnn Conrad Mapping America

itineraries. tesy of the Newberry Library collection. 15 This ad for the 1954 Chevrolet Delray 17 It’s no accident that Ford Motor Com- Coupe has the accompanying text: “That pany’s 2001-2002 ad campaign for its line of family up there has everything it takes to SUVs is entitled “NO BOUNDARIES,” and enjoy a wonderful vacation—a fine place to that in several of its TV ads, the company, go and a fine new Chevrolet to get there.” speaking through its president, the great- Not only are the cabin and new car unques- grandson of Henry Ford and Firestone, tioned markers of privilege available only speaks of the original Ford and Firestone, to some, the additional presumption of the alone with Edison, and “whoever was presi- ad prescribes the terms of wonderful time dent at the time” touring off road in their as wholesome family activity in accordance Model Ts as being the “original off roaders.” with the gender segregated domestic sphere. These ads are not only clearly commodified Ad from the Newberry Library’s collection. nostalgia, with their sepia-toned replicated 16 This ad for Eastman Kodak Film reasserts “home movies,” but also locate a spirit of the normative American nuclear family rec- “American” individualism firmly with a reating together in the car. But against this white male upper-class power block. taken-for-granted background, another sig- 18 Not, however, a break from either the nificant aspect of the “mapping of America” domestic sphere, now traveling, or from the is evident: the commemorative practice in- family. Additionally, the labor of maintain- volved in the “vacation snapshot,” by which ing the sense of leisure, labor that was to re- family members are located within the min- main invisible, not only fell to nameless and iaturized landscape of the vacation, which faceless domestics and other service sector anticipates its narrativization and consump- workers, but, internal to the family it fell to tion in the future, in the scrapbook (see be- the wife/mother for whom “vacation” often low), and thus underscores the importance entailed the addition of chores, not a lessen- of photographs within the landscapes of ing of them, and additional work in creating desire and nostalgia. Not only does the in- the elaborate charade of making this work troduction of cheap cameras democratize appear either invisible or leisure (chopping photography, it begins to shape the ways and prepping raw meat, and the clean up in which vacationers insert themselves into from BBQ). the landscape, and in fact the ways in which 19 Although the road trip defined the nor- their vision of the landscape it framed, be- mative American family vacation, it was, in coming an anticipation of the photograph. fact, a more encompassing national ritual. The act of photographing the site becomes Icons of the counter culture, such as Hunter primary to the experience; the particular S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac worked ways we configure our pose within the land- within the road trip theme. Hunter S. scape becomes pre-scripted, a replication of Thompson fetishizes the road trip, cruising the others that have come before. Ad cour- in a top-down convertible Cadillac, while

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dismantling the “American dream” itself. exhibit9/images/33.jpg. Chicago: Rand 20 http://www.discoveramerica.com/ McNally &Co., for Standard Oil. Part of the 21 http://usm.maine.edu/maps/exhibi- Osher Collection. tion/9/3/sub-/selling-an-image. In this 27 Esso New Jersey Road Map (post WWII). case, a 1942 Map entitled “Travel Strength- http://www.library.yale.edu/MapColl/old- ens America,” there is an emphatic connec- site/map/12A.jpg; Esso Road Map of Penn- tion made between travel and US military sylvania, 1951. http://www.library.yale. success and might in WWII, as well as an edu/MapColl/oldsite/map/12B.jpg ). intertextual reference to Manifest Destiny, 28 See also: Road Map of Arkansas, 1931. particularly in the militaristic flag-clad http://usm.maine.edu/maps/exhibit9/ large female figure, again facing West. The images/32.jpg). Chicago: Rand McNally & Progressivist agenda is also clearly evident Co. for Louisiana Oil Refining Corporation, in the scientific and engineering command Osher Collection. over nature, and, by extension, over the en- 29 Here is it particularly relevant to insert emy. the meaning that Kathleen Stewart (2007) as- 22 (Sun Oil Co. Road Map and Historical cribes to this notion of the ordinary as “…a Guide—front and back covers, post WWII. shifting assemblage of practices and practi- http://www.library.yale.edu/MapColl/old- cal knowledges, a scene of both liveness and site/map/12C.jpg) exhaustion, a dream of escape or the simple 23 Map of Principal Events in the life of life”(xi). George Washington—Standard Oil,1952. 30 The “Big Three” map making firms: The http://usm.maine.edu/maps/exhibit9/ Rand McNally Company, The H.M. Gousha images/114f.jpg); Company, The General Drafting Company 24 The Shrines of George Washington. — were responsible for the majority of all www.usm.maine.edu/maps/exhibit9/ road maps and atlases produced in the U.S. images/115f.jpg. See also, “Autotrails to during the 20th century, (by the 1960s the and from Gettysburg.” Chicago: Rand three were producing over 200 million “oil McNally&Co. for the Gettysburg Chamber maps” per year. Aerman 1996:1) and their of Commerce, 1925. images of race were to be reproduced and 25 Parco Petroleum Products Road Map of consumed by a huge touring public for Nebraska cover 1931. http://usm.maine. several generations. Road Maps and tour edu/maps/exhibit9/images/116f.jpg. From guides were often the first impression trav- the Osher Collection. This cover was also elers had of a region to which they were used for the 1930 Kansas Road Map, at the travelling, dictating the encounter and pre- Newberry Library’s Rand McNally Road ordaining the perpetuation of such images Map collection. even when they were not found to correlate 26 Crown Gasoline Auto Road Map of Geor- to any “on the ground” reality. gia, 1925. http://usm.maine.edu/maps/ 31 http://usm.maine.edu/maps/exhibit9/

27 JoAnn Conrad Mapping America

images/32.jpg. of Eurasia/Africa, and unknown regions of 32 Fred Harvey, in plotting the rail tourists’ land and ocean inhabited by fantastic be- Southwest adventures, is famous for his ings. The map embodies the epistemological “invention of the Southwest.” See: The Fred contradictions of the time, simultaneously Harvey Collection, “Traveling the Rail in framing and centering the world while its Grand Style: Photographs and Supplemental frame is penetrated by the suggestion of Materials of the Fred Harvey Hotels, 1896- uncontrollable and unknown landmasses, 1945,” http://harvey.library.arizona.edu/ beings and phenomena. finding_aid/7nm/4/welcome.html. Also 38 There is considerable irony here, as it is see: Luke. primarily through visual media that this 33 This map, from the 1938, is part of the cultural production unfolds, and yet, in the Rand McNally map collection at the New- ordinariness of the items, their ubiquity and berry Library (RMcN AE190). disposability, they circulate “unobserved” 34 This page from one such scrapbook dis- and are thus, arguably, ideologically most plays Route 66 across California, the route potent. itself becoming destination. This is from an unmarked scrapbook box, part of the New- berry Library’s Map Library. Works Cited 35 Unmarked scrapbook collection, New- berry Library. Map Exhibit Websites “Going Places?: Gender and Map Use in 36 There are an estimated 50,000 collectors 20th-Century Road Map Art” Text of “Black Americana” according to Karen by Christina Dando (University Lee Ziner. See also Pilgrim. of Nebraska at Omaha © The 37 Although the “discovery” of American Newberry Library, 2002.) http:// by Columbus is a consolidating moment in www.newberry.org/smith/ America’s national mythology, the carto- slidesets/ss33.html graphic and cosmographic crisis it engen- “Hitting the Road” Road Maps From the Map Collection of Yale dered reveals the contradictory and opposi- University Library (Text from tional discourses on the order of the world Hitting the Road: The Art of that raged for at least 100 years after Co- the American Road Map, By lumbus. See, for example: the Typus Cosmo- Douglas A. Yorke, Jr. and John graphicus Universalis of 1532 (http://xroads. Margolies. San Francisco: virginia.edu/~MAP/holbein.jpg), 40 years Chronicle Books, 1996.) http:// after Columbus’ first voyage. It combines www.library.yale.edu/MapColl/ oldsite/map/road.html the Ptolomaic graticule with a cosmology “Road Maps: The American Way” and that includes wind cherubs, the world as On-line exhibit from the Osher limited and surrounded by oceans and con- Map Library and Smith Center stituted by the tri-partite continental mass for Cartographic Education at

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the Univ. of Southern Maine MIT Press. http://www.usm.maine.edu/ Belasco, Warren James. 1979. Americans maps/exhibit9/history.html on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1920-1945. Baltimore: Archival Collections Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. The Bancroft Library, University of Berlant, Lauren. 1997. The Queen of California, Berkeley. America Goes to Washington City: The Hermon Dunlap Smith Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Cartographic Center at the Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press. Newberry Library, Chicago. Bold, Christine. 1999. The WPA Guides: Rand McNally Map Collection, Mapping America. Jackson: Univ. Newberry Library, Chicago, of Miss. Press. Illinois. Conrad, JoAnn. 2004. Mapping Space, Claiming Place: The (Ethno-) Books and Articles Politics of Everyday Geography Akerman, James, R. American in Northern Norway. In Creating Promotional Road Mapping Diversities: Folklore, Religion in the Twentieth Century. and the Politics of Heritage. Ed. Cartography and Geographic by Anna-Leena Siikala, Barbro Information Science 29 (July 2002): Klein, and Stein R. Mathisen. 175-91. Helsinki: Studia Fennica: 165- _____. Blazing a Well-Worn Path: 189. Cartographic Commercialism, _____. 1999a. Lost Innocent and Highways Sacrificial Delegate: The Promotions and Automobile JonBenet Ramsey Murder. Tourism in the United States, Childhood 6. 3: 313-351. Cartographica 1880-1930. 30 _____. 1999b. The Docile Bodies of (1993): 10-19. (Im)Material Girls: The Fairy- _____. Gousha and National Survey Tale Construction of JonBenet Gifts Enlarge the Newberry’s Ramsey and Princess Diana. Holdings of American Road Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy- Mapline Maps. 96 (Spring 2003): Tale Studies 13. 2: 125-169. 1-4. http://www.newberry.org/ Corner, James. 1999. The Agency of smith/Mapline/articleindex.html Mapping: Speculation, Critique _____. Selling maps, selling highways: and Invention. In Mappings. Ed. Rand McNally’s ‘Blazed trails’ by Dennis Cosgrove. London: Imago Mundi program. 45 (1993): Reaktion Books: 213-252. 77-89. Cosgrove, Denis. 1999. Introduction: Mythologies Barthes, Roland. 1973. , Mapping Meaning. In Mappings. trans. Annette Lavers. London: Ed. by Dennis Cosgrove. Granada Publishing. London: Reaktion Books: 1-23. Simulations Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. , Eco, Umberto. 1990. Travels in trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, Hyperreality, trans. William and Philip Beitchman. New York:

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Weaver. NY and London: Family and Nation in Postwar Harvest Books/Harcourt Brace Photojournalism. Philadelphia: Jovanovich. Temple Univ. Press. Faulkner, Janette and Robbin Lewis, Martin W. and Kären E. Wigen. Henderson. 1982. Ethnic Notions: 1997. The Myth of Continents: Black Images in the White Mind. A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley, Ca: Berkeley Art Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press. Center. Lippard, Lucy. 1999. On the Beaten Track: Gottdiener, Mark. 2001. The Theming of Tourism, Art, and Place. New America. Boulder, Co.: Westview York: The New Press. Press. Lipsitz, George. 1995. The Possessive Gray, Ralph. 1952. Vacation Tour Investment in Whiteness: through Lincoln Land. National Racialized Social Democracy Geographic Magazine 101: 141-184 and the “White” Problem in Holmes, Nigel. 1991. Pictorial Maps. N.Y.: American Studie. American Watson-Guptil Publications. Quarterly 47. 3 (Sept): 369-387. Hummon, David M. 1988. Tourist Luke, Timothy. 1995. Inventing the Worlds: Tourist Advertising, Southwest: The Fred Harvey Ritual, and American Culture. Company and Native American The Sociological Quarterly 29. 2: Art, The Heard Museum, 179-202. Phoenix, Arizona, September 29, Jakle, John A. 1985. The Tourist: Travel in 1995-May 4, 1997,” http://www. Twentieth-century North America. cddc.vt.edu/tim/tims/Tim464.htm. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press. Mitchell, W.J.T., ed. 1994. Landscape and Jakle, John A. and Keith A. Sculle. Power. Chicago: University of 1994. The Gas Station in America. Chicago Press. Baltimore and London: The Mechling, Jay. 1987. The Symbolic Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. Alligator. In American Wildlife in Joy, Henry. 1917. The Traveller and the Symbol and Story. Ed. by Angus Automobile. Outlook 115 (April K. Gillespie and Jay Mechling. 25): 739-742. Knoxville: University of Kammen, Michael. 1991. Mystic Chords Tennessee Press: 73-98. of Memory: The Transformation _____. 1996. Florida Seminoles and the of Tradition in American Culture. Marketing of the Last Frontier. New York: Knopf. In Dressing in Feathers. Ed. By Kerouac, Jack. 1976. On the Road. New Elizabeth Bird. Boulder, CA: York: Penguin. Westview Press: 149-166. Kincaid, James. 1998. Erotic Innocence: Morrison, Toni. 1993. Playing in the The Culture of Child Molesting. Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press. Imagination. New York: Random Klein, Norman. 1998. The History of House-Vintage. Forgetting. New York: Verso. Nichols, John. 2000. Some Thoughts Kozol, Wendy. 1994. Life’s America: on Humiliation. In Dancing

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on the Stones: Selected Essays. Sorkin, Michael, ed. 2001. Variations on a Albuquerque, NM: UNM Press: Theme Park. New York: Hill and 75-83. First printed in Discovered Wang. Country: Tourism and Survival in Stephens, Sharon. 1997. Nationalism, the American West. 1993. Ed. by Nuclear Policy and Children in Scott Norris. Albuquerque: Stone Cold War America. Childhood 4.1: Ladder Press. 103-123. Patton, Phil. 1986. Open Road: A Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Celebration of the American Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press. Highway. New York: Simon and Stewart, Susan. 1993. On Longing: Schuster. Narratives of the Miniature, Peters, Cynthia. 1984. Rand, McNally the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the and Company in the Nineteenth Collection. Durham, NC: Duke Century: Reaching for a National Univ. Press. Market. In Chicago Mapmakers: Truettner, William H. 1991. Ideology Essays on the Rise of the City’s and Image: Justifying the Map Trade. Ed. by M. Conzen. Westward Expansion. In Chicago: Chicago Historical The West as America. Ed. by Society for the Chicago Map William Truettner. Washington: Society.: 64-72. Smithsonian Institution Press: Pilgrim, David. 1991. New Racist 27-53. Forms of the 21st Century, at Weigle, Marta and Barbara Babcock, http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/ eds. 1996. The Great Southwest of the newforms/homepage.htm. Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Post, Emily. 1925. By Motor to the Golden Fe Railway .Tucson: Distributed Gate. New York: Century. for the Heard Museum by the Robinson, Blackwell P., ed. 1955. The University of Arizona Press. North Carolina Guide. Chapel Weingroff, Richard F. 1996a. Federal Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina Aid Road Act of 1916: Building Press. the Foundation. In Public Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. Culture and Truth: Roads On-line 60. 1 (Summer). The Remaking of Social Analysis. U.S. DoT, Federal Highways Boston: Beacon Press. Administration. http://www. Rothman, Hal K. 1998. Devil’s Bargains: tfhrc.gov/pubrds/summer96/ Tourism in the Twentieth-Century p96su2.htm American West. Lawrence: Univ. _____. 1996b. From 1916 to 1939: The Press of Kansas. Federal-State Partnership at Rugh, Susan Sessions. 2008. Are We Work. In Public Roads On-line 60. There Yet? The Golden Age of 1 (Summer). U.S. DoT, Federal American Family Vacations. Highways Administration. Lawrence, Kansas: Univ. Press of http://www.tfhrc.gov/pubrds/ Kansas. summer96/p96su7.htm Woodward, David. 1977. The All-

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American Map: Wax-Engraving and Its Influence on Cartography. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Yagoda, Ben. 1988. Unfolding the Nation. American Heritage 39. 3 (April): 34-36, 38, 40-41. Ziner, Karen Lee. n.d. “Collecting Items of a Hurtful History,” at http:// www.projo.com/special/black/blk. htm

32 Mapping America Responses

in turn, perceive and understand their Casey R. Schmitt national environment only scratches the surface of the larger concept of cultur- University of Wisconsin-Madison ally-instigated place-creation. Conrad’s paper, however, in its concentration upon hat is true of a picture of a the depiction of a space, reaches beyond place,” writes geographer Yi- the discussion of railroad and highway Fu Tuan, “is also true of a real maps alone and holds implications for place”W (1991, 692). Those stories we tell, the analysis of other texts, images, and those images we depict, and those leg- the like which have contributed, over ends we spread all actively engage and time, to American concepts of nation- shape the spaces around us, influencing hood. the means by which we perceive our im- In the simplest of its forms, “space,” mediate and non-immediate environ- writes Tuan, “can be variously experi- ments. JoAnn Conrad’s article on the enced as the relative location of objects role of road maps in shaping American or places, and—more abstractly—as the national sentiments and identity serves area defined by a network of places,” as a kind of case study for the application whereas “place” represents more fixed of the more essential premise articulated objects and ideas (1977, 12). An Ameri- by Tuan. can space, in this sense—as defined by Conrad deftly demonstrates the role the borders and boundaries, roadways that road maps, tourist brochures, and and waterways, densely labeled cities other commercially motivated visual and unmarked open regions on any giv- representations of American territory en map—is a collection of relationships have played in the creation of that terri- between those places identified by the tory’s shared cultural meaning. Indeed, mapmaker. Many have written on how “official” American discourses continue human discourse selectively identifies to prioritize narratives of Manifest Des- these places and relationships, influenc- tiny, personal freedoms, and civilized ing the ultimate meaning of the space progress into uncharted territories (Nash (Agnew and Smith 2002). Conrad is far 1973; Slotkin 1992; LeMenager 2004). To from the first. Henri Lefebvre perhaps argue that railroad companies, travel most notably argues that space is a con- agents, automobile manufacturers, and struct, a creation of cultural, social, and the proprietors of any of the countless economic drives, experienced through a American vacation destinations would bodily filter and perceived by the human embrace such themes in the pursuit of being to resonate with the very qualities personal profits, thus encouraging their that the human being him or herself has prevalence in American society through thrust upon it (1991). Tuan recognizes the their widely distributed promotional ways in which the words, stories, and materials, seems almost simplistic. Con- means of cultural expression used to de- sidering only one type (or sub-set) of pict a landscape shape the human percep- the many, many representational forms tion and reaction to that landscape. “In- through which Americans depict and, dividual words,” he writes, “and, even

33 JoAnn Conrad Mapping America

more, sentences and larger units impart idea; it surfaces in the late 1800s work of emotion and personality, and hence high Frederick Jackson Turner and has, of late, visibility, to objects and places” (1991, reemerged in the work of Richard Slot- 685). When physical sensations of place kin (1992), Roderick Nash (1973), Mary become shared within a community as Lawlor (2000), and Stephanie LeMenager words, conventional sayings, and stories, (2004), all writing on the importance of the connotative and symbolic forms of the Western frontier legend in American landscape solidify. “The meaning of an culture. The glorification of the Western actual physical place,” he writes, “is the expanse in American—and, thus, the glo- result of a historical and social process, rification of personal space and freedom, built up over time by large and small of exploration and progress—undoubt- happenings” (1991, 692). It is the depic- edly draws from companies and individ- tion of these types of events—the Civil uals seeking to capitalize on a resource- War, westward expansion, wagon train rich frontier, as well as the narratives of incursions, family vacations, and men American history/destiny they produce. eating watermelons—that Conrad exam- Conrad, however, calls attention to an ines in her work. aspect of the frontier legend that Slotkin, For this reason, it is perhaps a bit curi- Nash, Lawlor, and LeMenager do not. ous that Conrad does not draw more di- Her consideration of the rail and road rectly upon the work of Lefebvre, Tuan, map, in particular, illustrates how con- and other such theorists. Her argument’s cepts of national space in mass-produced most radical difference from this work imagery find their way into the lived ex- rests in its concentration upon imagery perience of the average American. She over text—a difference that, quite sim- reaffirms what others have said—that ply, is not all that radical at all. Conrad’s “neither the nation nor the space it oc- assertions that the ways in which we de- cupies can be postulated a priori as pre- pict and represent our nation shape our existing or fixed, but are the outcome of own personal and collective identities specific historical, narrative processes”— or that the spread of such representation but delves especially deep into a single reifies the dominant national narrative at case study to show how even those items the expense of “alternative” or “counter tucked away in glove compartments or mappings” have been made before and slid beneath passenger seat cushions can are rarely contested (Lefebvre 1991; Slot- influence personal perceptions of Ameri- kin 1992; Agnew and Smith 2002; LeMe- can nationhood as much as any patriotic nager 2004). What, then, is the merit of banner, newsprint, film, or novel. Conrad’s contribution? Conrad does not, perhaps, do quite I would argue that this article’s value enough to explain why road maps, rail lay in its especially strong attention to maps, and the like differ from any oth- the commercially driven nature of the er personally encountered depictions of texts, images, and other documents that American nationhood—that is she fails have contributed to and directed the de- to explain why maps might influence velopment of the American national nar- our collective visions of nationhood in a rative in particular. This, too, is not a new particularly unique manner when other

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objects, like children’s toys (such as G.I. personal travel add to Conrad’s argu- Joe™ and Barbie™, for instance), sport- ments? What might they force Conrad to ing events (such as baseball and the change? How do they, too, influence “the material culture surrounding it), and picture of a place” and the “real place” it- even food (such as apple pie, perhaps, self? I look forward to Conrad and others or Coca-Cola™) all certainly contribute addressing these questions in the future. to collective notions of American-ness as well, but her case study works quite Works Cited suitably to call our attention to those of- Agnew, John A, and Jonathan M. ten less-considered cultural objects that Smith, ed. 2002. American Space/ influence self-perceptions. Conrad might American Place: Geographies of the strive, in future work, to examine more Contemporary United States. Ed- closely how the individual interacts with inburgh: Edinburgh University the map in his or her understanding of Press. national space. For instance, what does it Lawlor, Mary. 2000. Recalling the Wild: mean for an individual to push thumb- Naturalism and the Closing of the tacks into a U.S. map to trace where he American West. New Brunswick: or she has been? What does it mean for Rutgers University Press. a person to ignore landmarks and high- Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Social Produc- way signs in favor of trusting the infor- tion of Space. Translated by Don- mation printed on a map? I would sup- ald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: pose such actions (both of which I have Blackwell. witnessed personally on more than one LeMenager, Stephanie. 2004. Manifest occasion) represent an internalization of and Other Destinies: Territorial the national space, a unification of -per Fictions of the Nineteenth-Century sonal history with prescribed narrative, United States. Lincoln, Nebraska: but a further study must be conducted University of Nebraska Press. before any true conclusions can emerge. Nash, Roderick. 1973. Wilderness and the Finally, Conrad might also consider American Mind, Revised Edition. the role of the map in the age of air travel, New Haven: Yale University Internet, and personal electronic devices. Press. Her article does a fine job of exploring Slotkin, Richard. 1992. Gunfighter Na- the past influence of maps on American tion: The Myth of the Frontier in nationhood, but has little to say about in- Twentieth-Century America. Nor- creasingly popular online mapping web- man, Oklahoma: University of sites (like Google Maps and Mapquest), Oklahoma Press. Internet phones, and personal GPS sys- Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The tems in an age when fewer and fewer Perspective of Experience. Minne- people utilize printed roadmaps and apolis: University of Minnesota more and more opt to fly from destina- Press. tion to destination, leaving roadside sites _____. 1991. Language and the Making and regions in between unexperienced of Place: A Narrative-Descriptive and unseen. What do these new devel- Approach. Annals of the Asso- opments in mapping technologies and ciation of American Geographers

35 JoAnn Conrad Mapping America

in conjunction with discussions of na- Jill Terry Rudy tional identity moving into discussions Brigham Young University of transnationality. Expanding the theoretical frame of interpellations with more contemporary work on mapping will hile I counter JoAnn Conrad’s only enhance this project. statement that “maps play Given this article’s images of maps a critical and yet largely un- from the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe challengedW role in the ideological work” Railway (AT&SF) and its affiliated Fred of fixing the meaning of “America” (5), Harvey hotels and restaurants, it is not I appreciate her focus on maps as dis- surprising that the current discussions posable everyday items and their links of mapping include concerns of Na- with cultural production and the “proj- tive American scholars and scholars of ect of nation-hood” (Ibid). Conrad in Native America. Guest editors of a re- this sweeping historical and geographic cent special issue of American Quarterly study approaches maps as “throw-away on “Alternative Contact: Indigeneity, commodities” that attain a power to in- Globalism, and American Studies” use terpellate American citizens by replicat- Shari M. Huhndorf’s Mapping the Ameri- ing “ordinary ‘commonplaces’ of the cas (2009) to applaud the shift from na- national imaginary” (23). She is justly tionalism to transnationalism (Lai and concerned that these commonplaces and Smith 425). Yet, these editors promote commodities encourage tourism while Huhndorf’s transnationality over the perpetuating images that designate some nationalistic approach of Native Ameri- national subjects as “caricatured people can scholars like Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, inhabiting an abstracted place” while Craig Womack, Robert Warrior, and Jace others enter this “abstracted space” as Weaver without fully acknowledging escaping vacationers seeking simplicity why these scholars would start with a and relaxation (Ibid). There is no reason focus on native communities. Huhndorf to counter the eclectic examples convey- criticizes the nationalist approach, “The ing Conrad’s convincing view that maps concern of nationalism with cultural and play a critical role in this ideological political restoration deflects questions work. about the economic, environmental, and Yet, this role of maps is hardly unchal- social changes that ongoing colonization lenged. Back in the late 1980s a college has brought to Native America” (Lai and acquaintance of mine announced that Smith 425). But her critique deflects at- she could no longer even look at maps tention from what native communities because her graduate studies in literary already know about the consequences theory had taught her that maps con- of colonization and that the need for trol and falsely represent people and the “cultural and political restoration” is the world. Although concerns about the role overt acknowledgment of the “econom- of maps have been going on for decades, ic, environmental, and social changes” Conrad’s approach to maps as ordinary wrought by colonization. Additionally, items is a contribution, and the topic of adding Lisa Brooks’s approach to maps mapping itself remains timely, especially

36 Mapping America

and mapping from the introduction to rad does not mention that Susan Rugh her book The Common Pot: The Recovery of includes a chapter on African American Native Space in the Northeast (2008) would family vacations in her cited book, again extend Conrad’s discussion of maps as leaving a generalization that whites went everyday items to consideration of ways on vacation and other Americans served maps, books, and other forms of image them. Conrad’s discussion of postcards making are the same thing, awikhigan in and other derogatory images of African Abenaki. Rather than demonizing maps, Americans would benefit from using the as my associate learned in the 1980s, term “motif” as she traces recurring im- Brooks’s way of thinking with maps also ages. This discussion also evokes Patricia adds actual lands, people, and water- Turner’s discussion of similar everyday ways to the mix of social imaginaries. items in her “Watermelons” chapter in Because of Conrad’s broad approach Rooted in America (1999) and especially is to this topic of maps and shaping a na- augmented, in terms of the travel and the tional citizenry, we think of the construc- iconography of everyday items, by con- tion of the continental United States as a sidering Psyche Williams-Forson’s astute historically and discursively constituted book Building Houses out of Chicken Legs place. Yet her adherence to an Althusseri- (2006). Thinking of the intertextual con- an interpretive frame leads also to some nections I enjoyed making with this arti- sweeping generalizations. Rail travel is cle, I now wonder how many other texts mostly considered here the activity of will come into play with Conrad’s piece the elite although in the nineteenth cen- and what other work may be sparked by tury railways like the AT&SF produced it. their maps and other extensive promo- Yet, one concern I have with the meth- tional materials, such as the Indians of the odology of this piece is its nearness to Southwest (1903) guidebook written by American studies but how it misses an former American Folklore Society presi- important element. In his 2008 president George A. Dorsey, to attract a wide dential address to the American Studies ridership of tourists and settlers. The Association, Philip Deloria discussed Native Americans in this article quickly American studies methodologies and become iconic representations on maps noted three core components: texts, con- rather than the real people that Dorsey texts, and social theory (2009). While portrays who keep their traditions and this article brings together many images adapt modern conveniences like carriag- and items that are maps or are related to es and rail travel. Similarly, the brief dis- maps, and clearly adopts a social theory cussion of Pullman Porters carries none to study the ideological implications of of the nuance, and not a citation, of Jack those items, it skimps on context in favor Santino’s Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle: of long swaths of geography and time. Stories of Black Pullman Porters (1989). The shift from railway travel to road trips This brings up other sources that could occurs quite quickly here, and soon the enrich Conrad’s unexplained final focus interstate highway system with fast food on maps and racialization which here chains appears almost fully formed. The only relates to African Americans. Con- theoretical approach emphasizes the his-

37 JoAnn Conrad Mapping America

torical specificity of these moments, but Rugh, Susan Sessions. 2008. Are We There the choice of a wide swath reduces that Yet?: The Golden Age of American Family specificity. By making these long moves Vacations. Lawrence: University Press of across time and space, Conrad inadver- Kansas. tently decontextualizes her study object Santino, Jack. 1989. Miles of Smiles, Years just when it can be linked productively of Struggle: Stories of Black Pullman Porters. to policy. At the most recent American Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Studies Association presidential address Turner, Patricia A. 1999. Watermelons. in November 2010, Ruth Gilmore Wilson In Rooted in America: Foodlore of Popular used the engaging phrase, “Policy is the Fruits and Vegetables. Edited by David Sco- new theory.” By choosing the wide swath, field Wilson and Angus Kress Gillespie. Conrad misses opportunities to study Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press: how national policy claimed and deliv- 211-223. ered lands to railroad builders, moved Williams-Forson, Psyche. 2006. Building neighborhood enclaves for the interstate Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, highway system, or put mapping into Food, and Power. Chapel Hill: University the business of railroads, oil companies, of North Carolina Press. and other national and transnationalizing corporations. As physical maps wane while electronic mapping systems wax full, Conrad publishes this piece at a fine specific moment to consider how everyday items, social imaginaries, representational practices, and government policies become expressive systems accruing traditions and constructing nations.

Works Cited Brooks, Lisa. 2008. The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deloria, Philip J. 2009. Broadway and Main: Crossroads, Ghost Roads and Paths to an American Studies Future. American Quarterly 16.1: 1-25. Dorsey, George A. 1903. Indians of the Southwest. Chicago: Passenger Depart- ment of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway. Lai, Paul and Lindsey Claire Smith. 2010. Introduction. American Quarterly 62.3: 407-436.

38 Putting Words to Work

from the political to the personal to the Putting Words to Work: absurd (Loviglio 2005).The impromptu nature of these interviews, however, be- The Politics of Labor’s lied the extent to which the interviewer Vernacular and the institution still control the socio- political perspective through which the interviewee’s words are interpreted. By Pamela Conners prompting the people to answer certain University of Wisconsin, Madison questions while employing the ability to frame those answers with commentary from the broadcasters, radio executives recognized that they could construct nar- This paper explores what happens to the narrative ratives in support of business interests tradition and agency of vernacular communities when institutions intentionally provoke and from the unscripted voices of everyday deploy those communities’ vernacular styles as a Americans. means to achieve political ends. An examination As shows like Vox Pop illustrate, insti- of how the AFL-CIO and ACORN collaborated tutions sometimes intentionally engage to create an online video series using workers’ the vernacular in pursuit of a political stories in service of the Living Wage campaign agenda. Be it the rise of audience partici- illustrates this dynamic. By placing this text in pation shows on the radio in the 1930s or its historical, cultural, and mediated contexts, the proliferation of participatory media on the analysis demonstrates how the orchestrated representation of workers’ voices subverts the the Internet, institutions’ efforts to pres- authority of the vernacular as well as its power to ent or perform speech by everyday peo- engender community. ple suggests that the vernacular has commercial and political appeal. In presenting audience participation shows, radio n 1932, the radio show Vox Pop took stations often sought to advance a faith its name from its mission to put the in democracy and capitalism through the voices of the people on the radio. Its performance of democratic access to the emphasisI on the everyday citizen took airwaves. Similarly, digital participatory many forms, including quiz shows, inter- media find value in the presentation of views, and human interest stories – all of amateur media content produced by in- which variably represented and defined dividuals and groups with no necessary the notion of “the people” in a democratic connection to a specific organization. As republic. Perhaps the most dramatic at- the online video website YouTube states: tempt to authentically capture the aver- “The community is truly in control on age citizen’s perspective on the pressing YouTube and they determine what is pop- issues of the day came in the form of sur- ular on the site”(YouTube, “Fact Sheet”). prise “person on the street” interviews. The website explicitly asks its consumers While on air, broadcast personalities to see themselves as the producers of the dropped microphones out of windows content, untainted by institutional influ- and asked people questions that ranged ence.

The media practice of valuing the to circulate the voices of workers on the vernacular as primary to shaping pub- Internet in service of the Living Wage lic culture and political perspectives has campaign demonstrates how the stra- created opportunities for marginalized tegic deployment of the vernacular can communities to effectively publicize and undermine the very tradition it attempts circulate their dissenting voices in pur- to engage. In other words, the provoked suit of change (Howard 2008). The resis- performance of workers’ voices subverts tive power of the vernacular, however, the authority of the vernacular as well as must be reconsidered when institutions its power to engender community. seek to deliberately invoke a vernacular This paper begins with a summary performance—such as “person on the of the entwined relationship between street” interviews—in order to advance a vernacular and institutional discourses particular political agenda. In this paper, and the ensuing struggle over authority, I explore the implications of this strategic power, and agency. I then review the cul- vernacular engagement for the transgres- tural salience of labor’s vernacular voices sive potential of the vernacular voice. in the United States to situate an analy- More specifically, I seek to determine sis of worker testimonials posted online what happens to the narrative tradition during the 2006 midterm elections. The and agency of communities when their AFL-CIO and ACORN’s Living Wage vernacular expressions are intentionally video series on YouTube offers a rich text provoked and deployed by institutions for illustrating the symbolic interplay as a means to achieve political ends. between a labor vernacular and a labor This dynamic is illustrated through organization in a contemporary online an examination of how institutions use context. The analysis then examines the an online setting to frame the voices of particular constraints of YouTube and the workers as they recount their life and other institutional frames through which work experiences. The emergent rela- the vernacular actors are interpreted.1 tionship between the sovereign and the Finally, I conclude with an exploration resistant vernacular presents interesting of the rhetorical nature of the workers’ challenges for the communicative tra- appeals and the way in which those ap- ditions of workers. The analysis in this peals create a pitiable image of both the paper examines how low-wage workers individuals appearing in the videos as are represented in YouTube videos as a well as the broader community the AFL- part of the Living Wage campaign and CIO and ACORN suggest they represent. discusses the implications of that representation. Unlike past moments in labor Vernacular (Re)presentations history when American culture reflected Scholars across disciplines have explored a celebration of the worker as an agent of the cultural significance and social pow- change and the foundation of production, er of the vernacular voice. Folklorists the YouTube videos point to a diminish- have aimed to celebrate and examine the ment of the workers’ voices and partici- narrative traditions of non-institutional- pation in the labor movement. I argue ized discourses—the voices and spirit of that the AFL-CIO and ACORN’s choice groups of people that solidify commu-

40 Putting Words to Work

nities and express identities. Similarly, Through vernacular discourse, indi- communication scholars have called for viduals consciously or unconsciously critical attention to the cultural and po- align themselves with culturally specific litical implications of the vernacular’s groups organized around common expe- circulation in the public sphere. The ver- riences. A shared linguistic style or a re- nacular, paradoxically, can be both liber- curring narrative pattern often serves as ated and oppressed through its confron- a marker of membership in a vernacular tation with institutionalized, and often community. Folklorist Archie Green iden- dominant, discourses. Scholars have con- tified one such community through dis- sidered how the mediation of vernacular course about work, which he character- has both enabled and challenged its cir- ized as laborlore (1993; 2001). Studies of culation and transgressive power. These laborlore point to the ways in which this studies offer important insights into the occupational vernacular builds solidar- way in which identities and communities ity among those who relate to one anoth- are shaped through vernacular culture— er through their expression at work and a culture that is inevitably intertwined about work (Korson 1960; Green 2001). with its institutional foil.2 Green’s examination of work culture il- The vernacular, much like folklore, re- lustrates how workers’ self-expressions flects the shared rhetorical and cultural ensured connections in the workplace practices of discourse communities that and beyond it. The circulation of labor- maintain consistencies and continuities lore also instills in “individuals a sense across time and space (Georges and of dignity on the job and within their Jones 1995). The vernacular exists, not in movement (Green 2001; 50).” Moreover, and of itself, but rather is recognizable workers’ stories and songs often function through its difference from institutional to help workers make sense of the rela- discursive practices. While a distinction tionship between their labor, capitalism, between vernacular and institutions pro- and society (Gillespie 1980). Thus, labor- vides a useful vocabulary for character- lore may construct social bonds among izing different spheres of cultural per- workers as well as engender particular formance, most scholars recognize their perspectives about the cultural and po- inability—particularly in a thoroughly litical structures that make the conditions mediated age—to isolate one from the of their work. influence of the other. As John Dorst ob- Even though scholars of laborlore served on the cusp of the digital age, in have often focused on particular indus- a very practical sense, folklore cannot be tries’ vernacular practices, the examina- interpreted separately from the appara- tion of a working vernacular need not tuses that enable its circulation (1990). 3 be occupationally specific. The folkloric The vernacular must be understood as nature of these expressions lies in the hybrid—its emergence stems from the extent to which they build upon shared distinctive authority it attains from being experiences that resonate with oth- noticeably alternative to the institutional ers within but also across industries. expression (Howard 2005). Whether through songs, jokes, theatre performances, traditions, or social ac-

41 Pamela Conners Putting Words to Work

tion, workers developed cultural con- not entirely hegemonic (Berger and Del nections with one another through their Negro 2004). The vernacular can co- symbolic interaction. Evolving over time opt the institutional authority, drawing and across physical and discursive spac- its power in part from the institutional es, lore draws upon its historically and framework from which it expresses its contextually constructed meaning to en- difference. With “the institutional [as] an sure some consistency in its style and/or agency for the performance of vernacu- content while simultaneously resonating lar discourse”, the vernacular can dis- with different individuals who adopt and rupt or challenge normative behaviors adapt the vernacular to fit their specific and practices to invite social transfor- cultural and social situation. In this way, mation (Howard 2008, 508). This trans- folklore—and particularly laborlore— is formative and democratizing potential consistently relatable and identifiable in- of the vernacular has been the focus of sofar as it reflects shared experience even numerous studies that suggest that the though it is essentially fluid in nature. interplay between institutions and the This dynamism ensures that the mean- vernacular can be liberating, not merely ing, interpretation, authority, and power constraining (Rheingold 2000; McKinley of vernacular expression shift depending and Jensen 2003; Howard 2005; Jenkins on the context of its emergence. Particu- 2006). In addition, mediated forms that larly in a mass-mediated age, the interac- offer a visual as well as an aural compo- tion between the vernacular and its insti- nent can enhance the vernacular’s ability tutional forms within which it circulates to inspire and motivate collective social and against which it becomes recogniz- action (White 2003). able affects how audiences perceive the The perception that everyday voices vernacular agents as well as the broader resonate with audiences in these ways community with whom they may be as- makes the invocation of the vernacular sociated. Studies have pointed to the im- an appealing strategy for political ac- possibility of examining vernacular apart tion, but the presentation of marginal- from institutionalized forms and forums ized voices does not necessarily insti- (Burns 1969; Hauser 1999; Ono and Sloop gate social change or empower the dis- 1995). empowered. In addition to determining Vernacular hybridity has prompted ways in which participatory media and scholars to investigate the power dy- vernacular expression might challenge namic between the often oppositional, oppressive situations, scholars must also but inevitably intertwined discursive attend to situations in which they might realms. Just as the media exploit “the not. The potential for the vernacular to commercial potential of folksiness,” rearticulate dominant discourses or de- vernacular actors can exploit the media construct institutional structures often (Clements 1974, 318). While institutional goes unrealized (Ono and Sloop 1995). presence might frame the interpretation Thus, celebration of the possibility that of vernacular voices in such a way that the vernacular may triumphantly resist perhaps silences or negates a folk com- institutional power should not distract munity, the power of the institution is attention from the ways in which vernac-

42 Putting Words to Work

ular culture might also be undermined or the vernacular illustrates the complexity co-opted in service of institutional aims. of the relationship between the medium The emergence and proliferation of par- and its subject, the message and its inter- ticipatory media does not in and of itself pretation, and context and meaning. ensure a democratization of mediation The following analysis of the AFL- (Spinelli 2000). For example, in his study CIO and ACORN Living Wage cam- of audience participation on the radio in paign videos examines three primary the 1930s, historian Jason Loviglio shows constraints that shape how audiences in- that the impulse to broadcast the voices terpret the workers’ voices and perceive and narratives of ordinary Americans on their identities. First, the videos must be the radio was primarily a business deci- read in light of the cultural and political sion; radio executives sought to frame milieu in which they emerge. Any nar- the discourse of the everyday person to rative consciously and unconsciously characterize the public interest in a way prompts consideration of how the words that would ultimately serve the financial and voices of the storytellers engage in a interests of business. While purporting dialogue with discourses and events that to be engaging the voice on the street precede them. Establishing the historical as a symbol of the participatory and context that informs both the creation of democratic nature of radio, broadcast- the messages and the audience’s recep- ers invoked the vernacular as a means tion of them acknowledges that lore does for framing the consumptive desires of not simply construct a new way of seeing, the American public. With ultimate con- but rather makes meaning for audiences trol over who spoke and which of their in conversation with previously existing words were broadcast, radio producers symbols, beliefs, and perceptions. Sec- could manage the representation of the ond, I examine the specific institutional average American in a way that com- framework through which audiences see ported with a market and consumptive and hear the workers’ narratives. In ad- ideology (Loviglio 2005). dition to the macro context, these stories Contemporary participatory media interact with immediate situational com- must likewise be examined to uncover ponents that shape how audiences inter- implicit and explicit power shifts. Any pret them. Third, I analyze the words of given situation that engages vernacular- the workers to show how the narratives ity raises questions about what might be themselves create an image of wage work appropriated, who reserves or acquires and the workers. Together these contex- agency, and how individual and collec- tual and textual components function to tive identity is negotiated. The contexts diminish the potential of the labor ver- of vernacular emergence contribute to nacular to challenge cultural norms and its reception by different audiences. Me- expectations. Instead, the videos invoke diation of vernacular online enacts a rep- a vernacular performance that subju- resentation of the way in which groups gates the workers’ own participation in self-identify; further, its discursive circu- the labor movement. lation contributes to how others identify those groups. Studying the mediation of

43 Pamela Conners Putting Words to Work

The Cultural Capital of Labor’s Voices 1997, 161).” Pictorial representations of Historically, workers’ voices have func- workers were often connected to union tioned to stimulate both political and membership. Union papers and buttons social recognition of labor. Depictions carried cartoons and “labor action pho- and self-expressions of workers in the tographs” that projected images of work- labor movement during the New Deal ers unifying around the CIO or other la- era affirm the extent to which a labor bor organization. Through these images, vernacular can invite agency and soli- Paul Buhle explains, artists intentionally darity among those who seek social strove to capture the “ordinariness” of change. In addition to the circulation of the Americans who fought against the vernacular expressions of laborers about oppression of their employers in order to their work in local communities, more respond to negative press about union- mediated representations of labor and ism. These vernacular discursive tradi- industry reached audiences across the tions promoted working class solidarity country through the radio, which often and produced an image of the worker as broadcast worker testimonies about their citizen. With radio available as a frequent everyday experiences. This “laboring of medium for circulation, the ubiquitous popular culture”—as historian Michael vernacular voice expressed their agency Denning (Denning, 1996) calls it—has of- in challenging oppressive structures and ten been overlooked because no particu- subjugating discourses through song, lar political party or any one institution performance, and stories. The messages captured its expansiveness and omni- of the workers were an essential force in presence. Rather, the discourse of labor union organization. Their voices consti- 4 transcended institutions, regions, and tuted the labor movement. individual identity through its repro- The social and political milieu of the duction and representation in American thirties illustrates the ways in which la- culture; books, radio shows, music, and bor culture – the source of production – theatre productions found working class was acknowledged, consumed, and even life to be a marketable commodity (Den- celebrated. The image of a once-present ning 1996). A powerful and pervasive working class solidarity may be marked work vernacular helped to articulate the in part by the vernacular appeals for col- laborer as the essential point of produc- lective action and the extent to which tion and as essentially American (Buhle that on-the-ground community was fos- 1997). tered and promoted by the institutions of 5 The culture of the late 1930s rein- organized labor. This history points to forced the political recognition and re- the ability of the vernacular to transcend ification of labor and a working class. the restrictive and potentially coercive In particular, iconic images of workers, power of mediation and institutional songs, and cultural performances served constraints and engender a strong work- as a defiant counter to the popular ing class identity that legitimized the press’s depictions of the working class as agency of wage laborers. comprised of “good-for-nothings” and Cultural and political shifts in the la- “suspicious-looking foreigners (Buhle bor movement since the 1930s, however,

44 Putting Words to Work

resituates the nature of the working class William Jefferson Clinton proclaimed in vernacular voice as it functions to chal- 1967, unions were publicly perceived as lenge normative and institutionalized one more thing “against which man must practices. The centrality of the working assert himself.” (Quoted in Lichtenstein class in public consciousness declined 2002, 168) in the post-war era. Legislative and rhe- The rhetorical trajectory of a work- torical transformations during the 1950s ing class vernacular reflected this politi- led to deterioration in the unions’ polit- cal fragmentation of labor culture and ical-economic influence. The changes in organization. During World War II, the discourse about and from the working proliferation and circulation of working class stand out clearly. For example, in class iconic imagery subsided. Nostalgic the years following World War II, under characterizations of the working class George Meany’s leadership, the Ameri- emerged primarily through mass media can Federation of Labor-Congress of In- representations, such as films, cartoons, dustrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) not comics, murals, that intimated that the only narrowed whom it served, but it also working class was a thing of the past scoffed at workers’ discursive and po- (Buhle 1997). The devaluation of labor- litical representations of themselves and lore and vernacular expression coincid- 6 their work. Meany publicly denounced ed with a rise in a post-war consumer- striking and argued against reaching out ist culture. Lizabeth Cohen identifies the to unorganized workers, people of color, post-war era as a consumer movement in and women. Moreover, he derided folk which the American people were cham- singing as foolish and useless, despite pioned as “purchaser citizens” because other labor advocates’ claims that it their very act of personal consumption helped promote solidarity (Lichtenstein was deemed a civic contribution (Co- 7 2002). In 1951, C. Wright Mills argued hen 2003, 118). Whereas laborlore and that the unions work against the best in- working class culture had previously terests of workers and only suppress the connected citizenship with both produc- aspirations of the working class. His in- tion and consumption, the second half of dictment of labor unions reflected what the twentieth century provoked a shift would come to be the prevailing public in emphasis to consumption. Patriotism image of unions, the AFL-CIO in particu- was best expressed through purchasing, lar. The AFL-CIO’s disinterest in organiz- not producing. The cohesive identity of ing the unorganized, reluctance to act in a working class culture diminished with the interests of a broader constituency of the prevalence of a consumerist ideol- workers, and its distance from the civil ogy. rights struggles of the 1960s contributed The political impact of this paradigm to its depiction as merely a job agency had consequences for the public percep- and special interest group. The increasing tion and treatment of wage workers. bureaucracy of unions and suspicions of The late 1950s saw management assert- corruption discredited them in the eyes ing more power over workers, with little of the public. As Georgetown Univer- protection provided by unions and the sity student and future U. S. president state. More and more, industries that had

45 Pamela Conners Putting Words to Work

once been restrained through labor organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) to nizing found ways to break strikes and present itself and to represent workers. bust unions (Davis 1986; Cohen 2003). Aware of the subordinated status of labor The 1960s exacerbated differences among and labor solidarity in the United States, interest groups, with a state that legisla- the AFL-CIO made strides in the 1990s to tively supported the logic of free enter- redefine their mission, policies, and ap- prise, the absence of strong unionization, proach to the labor question. In an effort and the segmented articulation of class to rebuild the public image of unionism (Edsall 1991). Thus, identifying common and increase public awareness about the interests on which to build challenges to challenges of low-income work, the AFL- economic and political structures became CIO expanded its strategy for social and more difficult. The sixties and seventies political action to include the life and witnessed the blurring of the autonomy livelihood of workers beyond the day-to- of the working class. By the 1980s, unions day negotiations on the shop floor. (Lich- were demonized in public discourse and tenstein 2002) their political engagement became a li- Self-identified in their website’s ta- ability for those issues they sought to gline as “America’s Labor Movement,” endorse. These shifts in working class the AFL-CIO has made an explicit at- consciousness, culture, and unionism il- tempt to move beyond the confines of lustrate the challenges that confront the union membership in order to help the contemporary labor movement. unorganized organize, “provide a new voice for workers,” and rebuild a broad Labor Online national labor movement (AFL-CIO The voices examined in the following 2007). The union has sought to expand its case study confront a cultural milieu reach through alliances with other social much different than the one in which a and economic justice organizations on labor vernacular thrived. While unions the national and local levels. Although and trade organizations seek to reha- officially it acts as the national center for bilitate their public image, their politi- trade unions, the AFL-CIO now partici- cal and social standing in 2006 had not pates in campaigns for labor policies that fully recovered from the fall from grace specifically affect non-unionized work- in the second half of the twentieth centu- ers. ry. Wage workers, too, have fewer rights One strategy they have employed in- in the workplace and fewer protections volves placing the images and voices at against exploitation. As the trend toward the forefront, calling on workers them- Americans measuring an individual’s selves to explain the personal impact of value to the nation primarily in terms of particular government policies. In col- an ability to consume has waxed, cham- laboration with ACORN, they developed pioning the sources of production—the and posted online a series of video tes- workers—has significantly waned. timonials as a part of the 2006 effort to It is within this cultural and politi- increase the minimum wage, also known 8 cal climate that the AFL-CIO teamed up as the Living Wage campaign. That year, with Association of Community Orga- six states had ballot referenda that pro-

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posed a roughly one-dollar increase in video series explores the implications of the states’ respective minimum wages.9 and for the workers’ vernacular as it is Entitled “7 Days @ Minimum Wage,” the engaged by organizations that work to videos purport to present “7 real people advance a progressive labor agenda. with 7 real stories of living on the mini- 10 mum wage.” Each video features either Framing Workers’ Voices a person or a couple describing the chal- In addition to the broader cultural milieu lenges of paying for their basic necessi- for these videos, each video emerges in ties despite consistent hard work. The the context of several interpretative me- short five to ten minute films appeared dia that influence their meaning and re- one day at a time on the well-known ception. The institutions that produced website YouTube whose tag, “Broadcast the videos, defined their purpose, and Yourself,” encourages the posting of in- circulated them on the Internet frame dividual and amateur video content.11 how workers’ words are heard and seen. Only a few thousand people viewed each These institutional actors—AFL-CIO, of the minimum wage testimonials. One ACORN, Roseanne Barr, and YouTube— of the videos specifically promoted in a instruct the viewers about how they special feature section of YouTube’s web should interpret the videos, how they page received just over 23,000 hits prior should recognize the workers, and how to the election, the largest hit count of they should respond. In addition, adopt- any of the seven videos. ing an amateur production style, the vid- Of concern in this analysis is not the eos subordinate the laborers’ vernacular efficacy of the videos in terms of their im- to the institutional structures that pro- 12 mediate impact on voters’ choices. The voke its articulation, craft its production, value of examining these videos lies in and explain its meaning. recognizing of how the representation of The structure of YouTube ensures that the video testimonials may shape public not everyone experiences each page in perception about wage work and workers the same way.13 New advertisements, dif- and what they suggest about how the in- ferent “related video” suggestions, and stitutions view the workers. The “7 days new viewer comments continually to @ Minimum Wage” online series creates update the video pages and change what an image of the workers and has indirect the viewers see and experience. Howev- and potentially long-term implications er, the basic elements of the pages remain for how low-income Americans are pub- consistent and these elements guide how licly recognized. These videos demon- the viewer sees and interprets what they strate an effort to circulate the vernacular hear. From the description that appears expressions of workers among a wider to the right of the video to the “Related public. How these videos are distributed videos” that provides suggestions about and the messages they promote offers what to watch next to the comments sub- insight into the way the AFL-CIO and mitted by viewers just below the video, ACORN imagines the collective identi- the viewer is told what to think about ties of low-workers and their role in the what the video means. The structure of labor movement. Examination of this YouTube’s website places the videos in

47 Pamela Conners Putting Words to Work

proximity to viewer “comments” and Nobody can live on five dollars and indicates that the “7 Days @ Minimum fifteen cents an hour. Do you want Wage” series is sponsored by the AFL- to help? Well, if you live in Arizo- CIO and ACORN. na, Colorado, Missouri, Montana, Alongside each video as it appears Nevada or Ohio, you can vote yes on YouTube, the AFL-CIO and ACORN on November 7 to raise the mini- announce to the viewer that “7 Days @ mum wage. Or visit our videoblog Minimum Wage brings you 7 real people to post your comment and find with 7 real stories of living on the mini- other ways to raise hell and the mum wage, hosted by Roseanne Barr minimum wage. and sponsored by the AFL-CIO and ACORN.” Describing themselves as The videoblog to which she refers then sponsors performs their distance from appears as a URL on the screen following the creation of the videos, attesting to the words, “Roseanne, ACORN, and the their desire only to relate the “real” sen- AFL-CIO thank you. Please come back timents expressed by the “real people” tomorrow.” The workers’ stories serve to without interference. Ironically, the effort support the outrage and the cause that to make the videos seem uncontrived the institutional actors define. While the through the pronouncement of the vid- short summaries imply that the institu- eos’ realism only further calls attention tions simply seek to support the workers to the machinations that surround the by distributing their stories, the words videos. articulated by Roseanne and in the clos- This written summary statement that ing credits affirm the degree to which the accompanies each video does not ad- workers’ stories actually support the in- vocate a particular action the audience stitutions’ message. should take or a sentiment they should Isolating and interviewing these feel. That kind of direction is reserved for workers and then posting the edited the introductory and summary remarks video recordings to YouTube raises ques- provided by the person featured in all tions about how the workers are por- the videos: Roseanne Barr. An actor with trayed and what message is conveyed working class roots known for her long- through the vidcasts’ production aes- running sitcom about a working class thetic. The videos of “7 days @ Mini- family entitled “Roseanne,” Barr appears mum Wage” perform a vernacularity as a the narrator for each video. She ex- consistent with YouTube videos made presses her outrage over the workers’ by individuals who lack professional condition and implores her audience to equipment or training. They display an feel similarly appalled at the wage work- amateurism that implies that the camera ers’ oppressive and unjust lifestyles— merely captures what the workers say assuring her audience that “as an Ameri- rather than orchestrating their appear- can, you will not be proud of what you ance. The videography suggests the use hear and see.”14 At the conclusion of the of handheld cameras that deny any pur- videos, she offers a plan of action for poseful stagecraft. The poor lighting and viewers. For example, at the conclusion unremarkable spaces in which each tes- of Jessica’s video (day 4), she states:

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timonial is filmed intimates spontaneity ers are identified simply as evidence of the workers’ expressions independent for the action advocated. The workers’ of any institutional design. The recogniz- voices function as pawns in service of able vernacularity of these vidcasts exists the institutional narrative, rather than as in how they adopt a style that reflects a voices summoning solidarity. The strate- contrast to professional and institutional gic documentation and dissemination of norms. Because the videos lack profes- these non-institutional voices in service sional technique, they implicitly ask the of a political agenda realigns the forma- viewer to recognize the speakers as in- tion and reception of the vernacular ac- nocent and sincere; they are not actors, tors’ identity, agency, and voice from an but “real people.” The simplicity and act of self-presentation to one of insti- understatement of the visual elements tutional re-presentation. The question in the videos invite audiences to accept then remains, what narrative gets related the workers’ expression as honest, forth- through this framework in which the right, and undisturbed by outside influ- workers speak? ence. Unpolished and unscripted, these videos perform anti-institutionalism, Interpreting Workers’ Voices reflected in the apparent casual framing In total, the “7 days @ Minimum Wage” and amateur development of the final series includes eight videos and eight product. The styling of the videos pleads workers. While only seven stories are for a perception that the workers speak presented, the AFL-CIO and ACORN ex- independent of institutional influence; plain that one worker’s testimony was so they performatively claim their authority compelling that it had to be presented in through the construction of vernacular- two parts “with only one cut, and that’s ity. just to preserve her privacy and keep her The vernacular posture lies within the from getting fired from her job.”15 That institutional frames that it implicitly and worker, Jessica, had the first part of her explicitly denies. The voices of the work- story included in YouTube’s featured ers become implicated in and secondary videos page and the total running time of to the official structures that surround both videos is fourteen minutes and four- it. The videos can only be interpreted teen seconds. In addition, while there are by viewers through this mediated lens. seven stories presented over seven days, Before, during, and after each worker’s a married couple—Paul and Susan— narrative, the institutions speak for and share time in their video. In sum, the on behalf of them. As Linda Alcoff notes, videos featured eight workers16: “speaking for” is inescapable, but these videos do not place the workers in conversation with the institution or the audi- Day 1: Paul & Susan, “Denver couple Paul ence (1991-1992). The resulting represen- Valdez and Susan Windham tell their sto- tation of the workers identifies them as ry of living on the minimum wage. Paul sad and helpless. Rather than being her- receives $35 for a full day’s labor in back- alded as participants in a movement for breaking construction work.” political or economic change, the work-

49 Pamela Conners Putting Words to Work

Day 2: Erin, “Erin talks about needing to As with the stock descriptions of each work increasing hours at her minimum video, these individual synopses define wage, grocery store job to make ends the primary problem the workers’ face meet.” and prepares the audience to sympathize with each worker’s plight. Day 3: Jeffrey, “Jeffrey shares his story of Although each day represents workers taking care of his newborn son with his who presumably have different occupa- minimum wage paycheck. After paying tions and do not know one another, their for rent, diapers, formula, and the elec- stories adopt common themes in their tric bill, there is little left for groceries.” explanation of what they all definitely share: subsistence “close to the current federal minimum wage.”17 The similari- Day 4: Jessica (Parts 1 & 2), “Jessica, an ties in their rhetorical appeals and expe- educated mom of four, tells her life-story riential assertions suggest that the video of struggle to get ahead and make a fu- producer asked them all the same ques- ture for her family. Jessica does every- tions. And, of course, the producer made thing she can to break out of a daily cycle choices in the editing room about what of pain inflicted by having to scrape by to include and what to leave out of the on the minimum wage.” final cut. Thus, while the workers speak without a script and describe their own Day 5: Chris, “Chris tells a shocking personal experience and perspective, the American tale of day to day existence on overarching themes of the videos reflect the edge of homelessness. Without a reg- the influence of the institutional voice. ular 9-to-5 job, Chris searches for work The worker’s stories act as vignettes for every day. If he can’t make $35 a day, he the institutionally constructed narrative. will lose his room and be forced onto the Two primary appeals cut across each streets.” worker’s story: appeals to pity and to justice. While these neither of these kinds Day 6: Amanda, “Amanda talks about of appeals is inherently problematic, the missing the opportunity to do ‘normal’ context of their invocation shapes their things with her family, like go to the reception. Particularly in light of the movies or buy birthday presents for her historical and immediate interpretive siblings, because her minimum wage frames for the videos, the pleas for pity paycheck doesn’t cover the things she and just action diminish the agency of needs.” the workers themselves. The vernacular performance provoked and framed Day 7: Mallory, “Mallory shares her sto- by institutions in the prevailing cultural ry of dreaming of a better future of edu- milieu articulates the powerlessness of cation and independence, but facing no the workers, accentuates their difference opportunities on a minimum wage pay- from the audience members, and isolates check.” them from the organizations acting on their behalf.

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The appeals to pity develop through The workers also speak to their vic- the workers’ description of their inability timization, continually confronting to overcome the miserable living condi- seemingly insurmountable challenges. tions caused by their low income. In the They emphasize the structural imbal- videos, each person testifies to the chal- ances and institutionalized forces that lenges of everyday subsistence on a low make their economic hardships impos- hourly wage. The oft-repeated expres- sible for them overcome. As Paul says sion “it’s hard” is verified by the sad sto- on day one, “You get behind in bills and ries they each tell of living paycheck to just, they start doing this and that to you. paycheck, trying to provide for their chil- Adding more money for late charges. dren, and working just to ensure a place It’s just a revolving door. It’s just hard to sleep at night. Despite their consis- to get out of that cycle.” Susan echoes tently hard work, these laborers speak to this problem: “Electricity has gone up. their own inability to escape the circum- Housing has gone up. Food, you know, stances that mark their condition because there’s a big difference in the food bill. “I just look at my paycheck and I want to Everything. You know, there’s just no cry. ‘Cuz it’s just, you know, you just feel way a person making even $10 an hour like you work so hard every day and it’s anymore can really make it.” Victims of like barely anything in return (Erin, Day an oppressive system that continues to 2).” The claims are amplified by the insis- add more challenges, the workers con- tence that nothing changes despite how ditions are inescapable: “They’re set- diligently they work. On day three, Jes- tin’ so many standards to get, you know, sica speaks to the lack of recognition and help by the government now, like with compensation for her time and commit- food and housing, it’s just so hard that if ment: “You would think that you would you’re working minimum wage, you’re get paid what you’re worth. And, I am more than likely need to be living with not. My co-workers are not. But there’s somebody where you don’t need to pay nothing else for us to do. It’s nowhere rent (Amanda, Day 6).” These disturb- else to go. Because at the next job you’re ing tales repeatedly call attention to the starting at the bottom again.” The work- pitiable conditions of the workers and ers stress their resilience against the odds: their own powerlessness. “It makes me feel disgusted sometimes, The appeals that the workers make but I chunk it up and keep on goin’, cuz as they recount their experiences invite that’s the only way I can do. I do what I not solidarity in a struggle to change the have to do to make a living for me and system, but instead plea for personal and my family (Jeffrey, Day 3).” The agency political empathy. Argumenta ad Miseri- that each worker claims in these state- cordium—or arguments that “appeal to ments is directed inward – they can act pity”— invite attention to the misery of individually to perform well on the job. the speaker. Such appeals ask the audi- Beyond their individual competence, the ence to recognize the devastating ma- workers imagine no political agency that terial circumstances that constrain the would enable them to change the oppres- choices and opportunities for the person sive conditions. Their appeals invite in- or persons making the appeal. The limita- tervention on their behalf, not in a shared tion of this kind of argumentative appeal, commitment to collective action.

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as explained by philosopher Douglas In the collective narrative created by the Walton, is that it draws attention primar- individual testimonies, the workers’ eco- ily to short-term consequences (1997). nomic fate rests solely in the hands of Rather than raising awareness about the others. Rather than inviting audiences to systemic cause and plausible solutions, act with them, they ask the audience to appeals to pity focus attention solely on act for them. the problem itself. Audience members In addition to the pleas for help, the become spectators of horror, responding workers’ appeal to a principle of fair- with sympathy, not action. As Stephen ness. They express a desire to experience Browne shows in his analysis in Theo- the opportunities presumed to be fun- dore Weld’s American Slavery, in inviting damental to the American Dream and the audience to react compassionately, ask the audience to recognize the work- the sentimental style distracts audiences ers as victims of an injustice. Most of the from considering the underlying cause workers express that it is “not fair” that and the broader social and political im- despite working hard, they cannot afford plications of the misery (1994). Appeals to adequately support themselves and to pity evoke reactions of voyeurism and their families. The speakers attest to their possibly compassion, but not acts of rev- value as workers and citizens deserving olution or reform. Argumenta ad miseri- of access to what they lack. For example, cordium invite audiences to pay attention Jessica dreams of political leaders that to the identities and personal dramas of will say, “I care about human beings. the victims which means that the videos I care that everybody should be able to function more as a characterization of the have food on their table, have affordable workers than as a call to action. healthcare, have things that they need, This is not to say that appeals to pity live on this earth and then be able to die cannot create instrumental arguments respectfully.” Susan also speaks to the for change. This possibility, however, is inhumanity of denying fair treatment to contextually contingent. Since the words all people: “Let’s respect the backbone of of the low-wage workers in the YouTube America – the people that are working videos are situated within the material hard to keep it together. We need them as and discursive frameworks of the in- much as we need that computer wizard, stitutions which already subjugate the you know? They are just as important to workers’ ethos, the appeals only enhance America.” The appeals for recognition their marginalization and difference build on a claim to an inalienable right as rather than serving as grounds for an al- American citizens to certain food, health liance with the audience. The workers ar- care, and basic needs. ticulate their desire for an increase in the The video series’ narrative argues minimum wage advancing themes that that an increase in the minimum wage emphasize their lack of agency in chang- will function to correct the injustice that ing the pitiable conditions that comprise should be intolerable in American soci- their life and work experiences. The sto- ety. Pointing to their exclusion from the ries distance the workers from the audi- modest benefits and security of better ence to whom they address their appeals. wages, Susan, on Day One, explicitly la-

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ments the loss of a middle class: “There the appeal to pity within the institutional has to be middle class in America. There frame has already focused the audience’s always has been a middle class. Our soci- attention on merely witnessing and sym- ety is based on it. Versus, you know, like pathizing with their plight. The image Russia. The rich and the poor. The poor of the subjugated and helpless worker get poorer and the rich get richer. We’re undercuts a call for collective redemp- not about that. This is America.” She as- tion in the name of American justice. The sociates security with an economic mid- workers request inclusion in the Ameri- dle class and suggests that the stagnating can Dream, which reinforces their lack minimum wage offends the American of agency and recalls their own expres- way. Similarly, others remark on the in- sions of powerlessness to participate in ability to save and purchase homes due the struggle to make a change. to their low wage work. Mallory, on Day The calls for sympathy and the ap- Seven, says, “It’s hard to live by, um, pay- peals to justice function in service of a ing my rent and food and stuff. I have to noble political goal—a living wage—but put that first, of course, but I don’t have the two appeals together act to reinforce any spending money for myself to save a pathetic image of the wage workers. for a car or college or housing.” On Day The wage increase that the workers and Three, Jeffrey claims that a minimum the organizations advocate in the 2006 wage increase will “help me or anybody, living wage campaign amounted to ap- you know, that’s rentin’, or anything like proximately one dollar. While such an that, where they could put money back increase marks progress toward reliev- maybe to better theirself (sic), where ing financial stress on low-wage working they can get a home and stuff like that.” people, the new wage would not neces- The wage laborers emphasize their de- sarily bring about the opportunities en- sire to consume, save, and get an educa- visioned by the workers in the videos tion. Inviting recognition of their plight – saving for college, moving to a new as victims of an injustice—their lack of apartment, buying a car or a home. Mal- access to recognizably American values lory, for one, says that “if I was to get a and opportunities—demonstrates an ef- raise of a dollar, or a dollar six to $6.85. It fort to bridge potential differences with would help me a lot to save money in the their audience by summoning the valued bank for those things (Mallory, Day 7).” American commitment to “justice for Articulating a belief in a vast improve- all.” ment in their dire financial life through a However, this claim that potentially one dollar increase suggests a particular aligns the worker with its unknown naïveté on the part of the workers. The audience through a recognizable and appeal to justice through a dispropor- shared value—fairness—is undermined tionate solution to the problems they de- by the fact that the appeal comes from a scribe identify them as ignorant and/or voice already framed and articulated as as mere pawns in service of a narrative of subordinate and powerless. Their appeal benevolent reform enabled by the insti- to fairness calls for the audience to act tutions and a movement driven by their for the workers to undo an injustice and work—not the laborers’.

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Implications When the relationship between ver- Examination of these vernacular perfor- nacular and institutions unfolds in ser- mances in the “7 days @ Minimum Wage” vice of political ends, the result has sig- video series illustrates how the workers’ nificant ramifications for how marginal- appeals function in an institutional and ized voices achieve recognition and form cultural framework that devalues the their identity in the public sphere. To the workers’ own role in seeking political extent that the vernacular is subject to and material change. The laborers serve provocation and manipulation, it loses its as subjects to the movement, not partici- inherent value as a dialogic and ephem- pants in it. Their pleas for recognition, eral form of communication through help, and access reinforce their marginal- which communities can be constituted. ization. Whereas vernacular performanc- As the living wage videos illustrate, the es by laborers on the radio in the 1930s vernacular voices may get co-opted into had functioned to celebrate the solidar- an institutional narrative. Framed contex- ity of the working class and promote the tually and structurally through the lens- power of unity among them, the contem- es of AFL-CIO and ACORN/YouTube, porary YouTube AFL-CIO and ACORN the workers’ vernacular isolates and dis- Minimum Wage videos instead empha- empowers the speakers, rather creating size the isolation, vulnerability, and help- connections between them and discur- lessness of the wageworkers. sively constructing their own agency in By identifying workers as they do the labor movement. The AFL-CIO and in these videos, the AFL-CIO enforces ACORN locate the strength of their voice a particular image of them that denies in the weakness of the worker. their own political agency. In particu- Although other studies show how lar, the nature of the participatory me- powerful vernacular expression can be in dia enhances the idea that the workers articulating human experience and shap- lack control over not only their circum- ing political culture, the co-optation of stances, but also their circulation; they that expression by institutions in service were not broadcasting themselves—as of specific political goals can challenge YouTube’s tagline suggests—but being the power of that discourse. The commu- broadcast. In this explicit effort to consti- nal strength of vernacular discourse rests tute a broader movement around labor not only in its freedom of expression, but and the working class, the unions rely also in its freedom of circulation. The act specifically on the discursive othering of of making vernacular voices tools of in- the workers themselves. Of course, these stitutional action imagines the vernacu- are not the only representations of wage lar as subordinate and controllable. Thus, workers circulating in the public. How- once the vernacular expression becomes ever, they demonstrate the way in which, politically purposeful, its political power even through benevolent intention, the diminishes. The institutions’ production orchestrated performance of vernacular- and distribution of the videos suggests ity might do more to reinforce the oth- that the vernacular necessarily depends ered status of oppressed groups, rather on the institutional, whereas the institu- than empower their participation in pub- tion’s attention to the vernacular is pure- lic conversation. ly voluntary.

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The presentation of workers’ voices on and their reception. Thus, particularly YouTube by the AFL-CIO and ACORN as organizations that seek to intentionally a part of the living wage campaign illus- engage a vernacular voice to advance trates how strategic and political deploy- the interests of the marginalized or opment of the vernacular reconfigures the pressed must be conscious of the ethics authority of the vernacular voice. While of that action. Two, this paper thus sug- the history of the labor movement points gests the need to further develop an eth- to the agency of vernacular expression, ics of representation with regard to ver- the YouTube videos expose the extent to nacular. A provocation or performance which power of the everyday can be with- of the vernacular functions as a marker drawn in the very moment in which it is and maker of cultural identity as much recognized. This case affirms the need to as a naturally occurring and spontane- consider how online participatory media ous emergence of the vernacular. can disable marginalized voices even as it actively creates a space meant to em- Notes power them. The isolation and control 1 The word “constraint” should not be read of the vernacular that the YouTube struc- as necessarily connoting a negative influence. ture enables and the AFL-CIO employs Rather, I use the term as suggested by Lloyd denies the community that vernacular Bitzer in his seminal article, “The Rhetorical expressions typically invite. The shared identity of workers is erased by the in- Situation.” He notes that constraints might be dividualized containment of these voic- “made up of persons, events, objects, and rela- es. Because each of the workers’ voices tions which are parts of the situation because is articulated individually, they do not they have the power to constrain decision function dialogically with one another. and action. Standard sources of constraint Rather, they are explicitly removed from include beliefs, attitudes, documents, facts, the communal context, thereby empow- traditions, images, interests, motives and the ering AFL-CIO and ACORN to define that community. The “sense of dignity” like (8).” Thus a constraint is anything that that Archie Green says a labor vernacular shapes the construction of meaning, whether can engender is lost.. it be positive, negative, or neutral. Lloyd F. The analysis of the “7 days @ Mini- Bitzer, 1968. The Rhetorical Situation. Philoso- mum Wage” campaign two primary phy and Rhetoric 1 (1): 1-14. lessons in the study of the political and 2 Lantis argues for the use of the term “ver- purposeful engagement of vernacular nacular culture” to characterize the every- expression by institutions. One, examina- day narrative and practices of discourse tion of vernacular texts must begin with communities: “Vernacular culture…focuses an awareness that the voices of everyday people can be manipulated, particularly attention on the overt—on acts and arti- since those voices do not surface inde- facts—and on its cultural meaning (213).” pendently of the media that circulates Lantis, Margaret. 1960. Vernacular Culture. them. When and how vernacular voices American Anthropologist 60:202-16. emerge inevitably shapes their meaning

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3 See also Linda Dégh who argues “that the 6 For an insightful analysis of the culture media have become a part of folklore (25)” in of the AFL, the CIO, and their subsequent American Folklore and the Mass Media. Bloom- union, see Clayton Sinyai, Schools of Democ- ington: Indiana University Press, 1994. racy: A Political History of the American Labor 4 Certainly, the working class solidarity that Movement (Ithaca: ILR Press, 2006). Sinyai thrived under the New Deal should not be demonstrates how the AFL in particular overstated or idealized. As historians such dismissed craft workers and immigrants as as Alice Kessler-Harris have shown, the sys- lacking in civic virtue and incapable of orga- tematic exclusions of workers based on race, nization. gender, and ethnicity subvert both the pur- 7 For a more sympathetic biography of ported benevolence of the New Deal era and George Mean, see Robert H. Zeiger, “George the existence of a centralized and recognized Meany: Labor’s Organization Man,” in Mel- working class (Kessler-Harris 2001). vyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, eds. La- 5 The CIO actively promoted the voices of bor Leaders in America (Urbana: University of workers on the radio. They used radio as a Chicago, 1987). means of bridging ethnic, racial, and geo- 8 The United States federal government first en- graphical divisions within the working class acted a minimum wage law as a part of the 1938 (Denning, 1996). In addition to speeches Fair Labor Standards Act. Designed to help se- from national labor leaders, radio programs cure a living wage for workers, the federal gov- featured the voices of workers themselves, ernment imagined the guaranteed minimum as a talking about their organizing experiences way to ensure and encourage the purchase power (Cohen 1990). For example, WCFL radio in of the working class. However, over the years, Chicago provides a window into how medi- increases in the minimum wage stagnated to such ated vernacular voice may not always and a degree that by the turn of the 21st century, the necessarily bow to the institutional perspec- minimum wage was roughly 70 percent of what tive in which it is intimately and inevitably it was worth in 1968 (Lichtenstein, 2002). Liv- bound. With the goal of advancing the causes ing wage activists have since responded with of workers steeped in labor struggles, this campaigns across the country that target leg- radio station even worked with the CIO to islative and ballot action in cities, counties, develop a speaker’s bureau that provided and states (Luce 2004). Public debates over laborers with studies in public speaking as the minimum wage invite characterizations of well as the economics and politics of labor, the people who must subsist on the low hourly industry, and capitalism (Godfried 1997). wage and the material inequities they experience. Workers who successfully completed these Making the argument for an increased mini- courses frequently found themselves on the mum, advocates often point to the indigni- radio recounting their experiences in labor ties of living on a low hourly wage and ar- struggles, pointing to the ways in which they ticulate the injustice of letting hard-working had resisted the power of their employers Americans suffer materially in spite of their and sought out public support of boycotts and picket lines.

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responsible commitment to their jobs. For 12 Consistent with other living wage elections, all examples of people demonstrating the chal- seven states approved increases in the minimum lenges of minimum wage through personal wage.Living wage campaigns have consistently experience, see Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel received wide public support. See Luce, Fighting and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, for a Living Wage and a Pew Research Center New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001 and 30 poll released in April 2006: Michael Dimock, Days [2005], dir. Morgan Spurlock, 288 min., “Maximum Support for Raising the Mini- Arts Alliance America, 2008, DVD. mum. Pew Research Center Publications”. 9 In 2006, the federal minimum wage was http://pewresearch.org/pubs/18/maxi- $5.15 an hour. States, counties, and cities mum-support-for-raising-the-minimum. may all adopt minimum wage rates that are 13 It should be noted that in the roughly higher or lower than the federal level. If the three and a half years since the videos were state minimum is lower than the federal rate, first posted on YouTube and the publication then the federal rate applies. Current and of this paper, YouTube has undergone a num- previous federal minimum wage rates can be ber of changes in its format and certainly its found at on the United States Department of content has grown exponentially. For the Labor website: http://www.dol.gov/ESA/ purposes of this analysis, I will focus on the minwage/chart.htm. Other state and local features that have remained consistent over rates are available at http://www. dol.gov/ that period of time. esa/minwage/america.htm. 14 Quoted from Roseanne Barr’s introduc- 10 The link for the video blog on the AFL- tion to Paul and Susan’s video on Day 1. CIO website uses the tag line “7 real people, 7 15 Quoted from Roseanne Barr’s introduc- real stories (http://www.aflcio.org/issues/ tion to part one of Jessica’s video on Day 4. jobseconomy/livingwages/index.cfm).” 16 The descriptions of each speaker is cited The quote “7 real people with 7 real stories of from the information box positioned the right living on the minimum wage” came from the of each video on the YouTube page. campaign’s website, which is no longer accessi- 17 Barr uses this phrasing in her introduction ble online (www.sevendaysatminimumwage. of all the videos. org/). See also the YouTube page dedicated to the campaign: http://www.youtube.com/ Works Cited user/7daysatminimumwage. AFL-CIO. 2009. “7 Days @ Minimum 11 The “Seven Days @ Minimum Wage” Wage.” Accessed March 29. videos are available on YouTube, www.you- http://www.aflcio. org/issues/ jobseconomy/livingwages/ tube.com and the AFL-CIO website about americaneedsaraise_7days.cfm. the minimum wage, http://www.aflcio. AFL-CIO. 2009. “7 Days @ Minimum org/issues/jobseconomy/livingwages/ Wage: Amanda (Day 6).” americaneedsaraise_7days.cfm. Accessed March 29. Accessed March 29. http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=mzJJ_LeQFqI.

57 Pamela Conners Putting Words to Work

AFL-CIO. 2009. “7 Days @ Minimum Berger, Harris M. and Giovanna P. Wage: Chris (Day 5).” Accessed Del Negro. 2004. Identity and March 29. http://www.youtube. Everyday Life: Essays in the Study com/watch?v=x1UVlnfjjcU. of Folklore, Music, and Popular AFL-CIO. 2009. “7 Days @ Minimum Culture. Middletown: Wesleyan Wage: Erin (Day 2).” Accessed University Press. March 29. http://www.youtube. Bitzer, Lloyd F. 1968. “The Rhetorical com/watch?v=Dq32NP9BiNA. Situation.” Philosophy and AFL-CIO. 2009. “7 Days @ Minimum Rhetoric 1 (1): 1-14. Wage: Jeffrey (Day 3).” Accessed Buhle, Paul. 1997. The Knights of Labor March 29. to the New World Order: Essays AFL-CIO. 2009. “7 Days @ Minimum on Labor and Culture. New York: Wage: Jessica (Day 4/ Garland Publishing, Inc. Part 1).” Accessed March Burns, Tom. 1969. “Folklore in the Mass 29. http://www.com/ Media: Television.” Folklore watch?v=Ps0JyNakyQQ. Forum 2: 90-106. AFL-CIO. 2009. “7 Days @ Minimum Clements, William M. 1974. “The Wage: Jessica (Day 4/Part Rhetoric of the Radio Ministry.” 2).” Accessed March 29. Journal of American Folklore 87: http://www.youtube.com/ 318-27. watch?v=v4zHlgWEY4U. Cohen, Lizabeth. 1990. Making a New AFL-CIO. 2009. “7 Days @ Minimum Deal. Cambridge: Cambridge Wage: Mallory (Day 7).” University Press. Accessed March 29. http:// ______. 2003. A Consumer’s Republic: www.youtube.com/ The Politics of Mass Consumption watch?v=b2oSm58ig4o. in Postwar America. New York: AFL-CIO. 2009. “7 Days @ Minimum Knopf. Wage: Paul & Susan (Day YouTube. ”YouTube – Broadcast 1).” Accessed March 29. Yourself.” 2009. Accessed on 20 http://www.youtube.com/ March http://www.youtube. watch?v=edjWDKnulxs. com/t/about. 30 Days [2005]. Directed by Morgan Davis, Mike. 1986. Prisoners of the Spurlock. 2005. New York, NY: American Dream: Politics and Arts Alliance America, 2008 Economy in the History of the US DVD. Working Class. London: Verso. AFL-CIO. 2009. “America Needs a Denby, Priscilla. 1971. “Folklore in the Raise.“ Accessed May 5. http:// Mass Media.” Folklore Forum 4: www.aflcio. org/issues/ 113-25. jobseconomy/livingwages/ Dégh, Linda. 1994. American Folklore and index.cfm. the Mass Media. Bloomington: Barr, Roseanne. 2009 “Roseanne Indiana University Press. World.” Accessed 5 May . Denning, Michael. 1996. The Cultural http://www.roseanneworld. Front: The Laboring of American com/home/.

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Culture in the Twentieth Century. Hauser, Gerard A. 1999. Vernacular London: Verso. Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics Dimock, Michael. 2009. “Maximum and Public Spheres. Columbia: Support for Raising the University of South Carolina Minimum.” Pew Research Press. Center Publications. Accessed Wage and Hour Division (WHD), May 5. http://pewresearch.org/ United States Department of pubs/18/maximum-support-for- Labor.. 2009. “History of Federal raising-the-minimum. Minimum Wage Rates Under the Dorst, John. 1990. “Tags and Burners, Fair Labor Standards Act, 1938 – Cycles and Networks: Folklore 2007.” Accessed May 5. http:// in the Telectronic Age.” Journal of www. dol.gov/ESA/minwage/ Folklore Research 27(3): 179-91. chart.htm. Edsall, Thomas Byrne with Mary D. Howard, Robert Glenn. 2005. “Toward Edsall. 1991. Chain Reaction: The a Theory of the World Wide Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes Web Vernacular: The Case for on American Politics. New York: Pet Cloning.” Journal of Folklore W. W. Norton & Company. Research 42(3): 323-360. Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2001. Nickel and ______. 2008. “The Vernacular Web of Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in Participatory Media.” Critical America, New York: Metropolitan Studies in Media Communication Books. 25(5): 490-513. Georges, Robert A. and Michael Owen Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Jones. 1995. Folkloristics: An Culture. New York: New York Introduction. Bloomington: University Press. Indiana University Press. Kessler-Harris, Alice. 2001. In Pursuit Gillespie, Angus K. 1980. Folklorist of the of Equality: Women, Men, and the Coal Fields: George Korson’s Life Quest for Economic Citizenship in and Work.. University Park: The 20th – Century America. Oxford: Pennsylvania State University Oxford University Press. Press. Korson, George. 1960. Black Rock: Mining Godfried, Nathan. 1997. WCFL, Chicago’s Folklore of the Pennsylvania Dutch. Voice of Labor, 1926-78. Urbana : Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University of Illinois Press. Press. Green, Archie. 1993. Wobblies, Pile Lantis, Margaret. 1960.“Vernacular Butts, and Other Heroes: Labor Culture.” American Anthropologist Explorations. Urbana: University 60(2): 202-16. of Illinois Press. Lichtenstein, Nelson. 2002. State of the ______. 2001. Torching the Fink Books Union. Princeton: Princeton & Other Essays on Vernacular University Press. Culture. Chapel Hill: University Loviglio, Jason. 2005. Radio’s Intimate of North Carolina Press. Public: Network Broadcasting and Mass-Mediated Democracy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Luce, Stephanie. 2004. Fighting for a Sinyai, Clayton. 2006. Schools of Living Wage. Ithaca: Cornell Democracy: A Political History of University Press. the American Labor Movement. McKinley, Michelle A. and Jensen, Lene Ithaca: ILR Press. O. 2003. “In Our Own Voices: Spinelli, Martin. 2000. “Democratic Reproductive Health Radio Rhetoric and Emergent Media: Programming in the Peruvian The Marketing of Participatory Amazon.” Critical Studies in Community on Radio and the Media Communication 20: 180-203. Internet.” International Journal of Mills, C. W. 1951. White Collar: The Cultural Studies 3(2): 268–278. American Middle Classes. New White, Shirley A. 2003. “Introduction: York: Oxford University Press. Video Power.” In Participatory Wage and Hour Division (WHD), Video: Images that Transform and United States Department of Empower. Edited by Shirley Labor. 2009. “Minimum Wage A. White. New Delhi: Sage Laws in the States - January 1, Publications: 17-30. 2009.” Accessed May 5. http:// YouTube. “YouTube Fact Sheet.” 2009. www. dol. gov/esa/minwage/ Accessed May 5. http://www. america.htm. youtube.com/t/fact_sheet. AFL-CIO. 2009 “Mission Statement” Zeiger, Robert H. 1987. “George Meany: Accessed May 5. http:// Labor’s Organization Man.” www.aflcio.org /aboutus/ In Labor Leaders in America. thisistheaflcio/mission/. Edited by Melvyn Dubofsky Ono, Kent A. and John M. Sloop. 1995. and Warren Van Tine. Urbana: “The Critique of Vernacular University of Chicago. Discourse.” Communication Monographs 62: 19-46. AFL-CIO. 2009. “Raising the Minimum Wage: Talking Points and Background.” Accessed May 5. http:// /issues/jobseconomy/ livingwages/upload/ minimumwage.handbook.pdf. Accessed on 5 May 2009. Reser, Erin M. 2005. “Strategies of Negotiation in Mainstream Media: Vernacular Discourse and Masculinity.” In The Full Monty. Popular Communication 3: 217- 237. Rheingold, Howard. [1993] 2000. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Cambridge: MIT Press.

60 Putting Words to Work Responses

their children, who were my friends. Gene Cooper Thus, when Pamela Conners writes University of Southern California of the culture of the late 1930s with its “iconic images of workers, songs, and cultural performances” that “reinforced abor lore vernacular was spoken, the political recognition and reification sung, and otherwise performed of labor and a working class” and and consumed in our home “promoted working class solidarity”, my throughoutL my childhood. We listened childhood experiences bear witness to the to the records of Woody Guthrie, Pete appropriateness of her characterization. Seeger, Paul Robeson, and Marian An- Furthermore, there is no doubt that derson. We learned and sang union songs “the discourse of labor transcended insti- at a pro-labor summer camp where each tutions, regions, and individual identity” color war team was named after a union largely through the vehicle of “books, (my team was the International Ladies radio shows, music, and theatre produc- Garment Workers, and I can still sing the tions” in which working class life was union anthem, honest!). The older kids at portrayed with dignity, and power and camp that summer performed Clifford prosperity were secured through work- Odets’ “Waiting for Lefty”, which cli- er solidarity. It is equally true, however, maxes when workers stop “waiting” and as Conners points out, that cultural and organize themselves. My parents read to political shifts since the 1930s, especially me from story books in which joining the the rise of post WWII consumerist cul- union solved the family’s financial prob- ture, have resituated and devalued the lems, making it possible to buy the oth- working class and its vernacular expres- erwise unaffordable toy in the shop win- sion (Harvey 1990; Turner 2003). dow. All of this left a deep impression on Thus, “by the 1980s, unions were de- my consciousness. monized in public discourse” and, espe- My father even ran for State Assem- cially after Ronald Reagan’s crushing of bly on the American Labor Party ticket the air traffic controllers strike, they came in our Brooklyn assembly district when to be seen as part of the problem rath- I was in second grade (1954-5). He lost, er than part of the solution, consistent but the ALP was successful enough in with Regan’s Republican vision. Also, in NYC to repeatedly send Vito Marcanto- the increasingly global economy of the nio to congress as representative of the 1980s and 1990s, the shift of production working class, speaking to and for the to cheap non-unionized labor overseas workers in labor movement vernacular. further undermined the power of orga- As my tales of the 1960s entertained nized labor in the US. Conners’ account my son a generation later, the 1930s of the imagery, positioning, and charac- always loomed large in my father’s terization of minimum wage workers consciousness, memories, and stories. in an AFL-CIO. YouTube video is, thus, Furthermore, all my parents’ friends a dramatic representation of how far we shared their values and spoke in the have come since the 1930s... on the slide phrases of labor vernacular, as did down.

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In today’s media environment, the Works Cited “workers’ stories and songs [that] function to help workers make sense of the Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of relationship between their labor, capital- Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the ism, and society” are almost completely Origins of Cultural Change. Cam- absent; thus, “[t]he resulting represen- bridge, MA: Blackwell. tation of the workers identifies them as Turner, Terence. 2003. Class Projects, sad and helpless”. Rather than being her- Social Consciousness, and the alded as the vanguard in a movement of Contradictions of Globalization. revolutionary change, the workers in the In Globalization, the State and Vio- YouTube videos are objects rather than lence. Edited by Jonathan Fried- subjects. They are merely “evidence for man. NY: Altamira Press. the action advocated”, the increase of the minimum wage. The appeals that the workers make as they recount their experiences invite not solidarity in a struggle to change the system, but instead a plea for personal and political empathy, for pity. In the collective narrative created by the individual testimonies in the videos, the workers’ economic fate rests solely in the hands of others. Rather than inviting the audience to act with them, the workers ask the audience to act for them. Whereas vernacular performances by laborers on the radio in the 1930s had functioned to celebrate the solidarity of the working class and promote the power of their unity, the contemporary YouTube minimum wage videos emphasize, instead, the isolation, vulnerability, and helplessness of the wage workers. While Conners doesn’t address the issue directly, her article forces us to ask what the way forward might be for the working class in this era of globalized capital. It is difficult to say, although it is certainly worth thinking about. What will the labor lore vernacular of the future be like? Perhaps it will be composed in the form of a text message…TTFN.

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Problematizing the Vernacular a working class vernacular, as Conners correctly argues, then there is also a Barry Brummett systematic working class vernacular of clothing, grooming, and the other The University of Texas at Austin elements of style. If we accept a sense of the vernacular amela Conners has written an as style, incorporating elements beyond excellent paper that will engender only the verbal, the importance of my much fruitful dialogue. In second main point becomes clear. It beginningP that conversation with this is hard and hardly worthwhile to response, I mean in no way to denigrate a commodify a verbal style of expression thoughtful, well-crafted study. I want to alone. One can scarcely make a dollar engage Conners’s work by problematizing off of accent and idiom. Ally accent and the idea of the vernacular. First, I will idiom with commodities and one attracts urge expansion of the vernacular beyond the interest of global capitalism, creating the spoken word. Second, I will question value in the act of mediating and mass- the extent to which there can be a true distributing signs of that vernacular. vernacular, in the usual sense, in an era of Amish pronunciation may be interesting; mass mediation and global capitalism. Amish furniture is big business. Conners regards the vernacular as When global capitalism develops a “speech by everyday people” (39). This commercial interest in the marketing of is not wrong, but I think it is narrow. I a vernacular in this wider sense, it puts suggest that we see the vernacular as a its considerable power to work defining a wide range of systematic signs consisting vernacular and informing the global audience of speech but also gesture, posture, of that definition. Corporate interests will grooming, clothing, home decoration; tell the global audience, or perhaps I in other words, the style that is a system mean market, what a vernacular is and of communication (Brummett 2008). A who it represents. They will do it in a number of scholars such as Mary Douglas way to make vernacular commodities and Baron Isherwood (1979), Marcel more marketable. The power of global Danesi (2003), and Virginia Postrel capitalism, and the tools of mediation (2003) have argued that when objects, at its command, problematizes the good, clothing, grooming, and gestures vernacular in this way: Do signs represent become signs within a style, they become or do they create commodified vernaculars? like a language in their systematicity. The question would not arise were local It seems reasonable, then, to think that communities of all sorts insulated from a vernacular could be seen as a system the power of capitalism and mediation. of these elements of style. Let me also One would visit a place and report back, note that a vernacular is often a system of through global media, on vernacular signs typical of, or bespeaking, particular practices observed there. Suppose, social groups. Elements of style not only however, in an increasingly integrated work like a language but are also often and commodified global market, media identified with social groups. If there is tell a group what their vernacular is and,

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more important, suppose those groups vernaculars in an age of global capitalism in their various communities believe and mass mediation of images, an age of it? Is the vernacular of style that we see nearly universal commodification, is an then a true vernacular or a commodified important next step in our understanding simulation produced so as to sell more beyond the foundation that Conners has Cajun stuff in New Orleans, more Navaho given us. stuff in Arizona, all of it made and mass marketed by capitalism? Works Cited Conners’s example of Roseanne Barr Brummett, Barry. A Rhetoric of Style. is, I think, more problematic than it Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois might seem. Roseanne’s vernacular is University Press. 2008. not, of course, only verbal. She has a Danesi, Marcel. My Son is an Alien: A style of grooming, clothing, gesture, and Cultural Portrait of Today’s Youth. so forth. Her television show presented Lanham, MD: Rowman & an even wider range of signs claiming to Littlefield. 2003. be working class vernacular. One can, Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood. and perhaps should, ask: How much did The World of Goods. New York, that show represent a real vernacular NY: Basic Books. 1979 one could find somewhere, and how Virginia Postrel. The Substance of Style: much did working class people take cues How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is from her show as to which vernacular of Remaking Commerce, Culture, and style (or style of vernacular) they should Consciousness. New York, NY: perform? HarperCollins. 2003. A more poignant example could be hip-hop. Does what one may see in videos and movies reflect a vernacular of style that real people in some place express, or do people take cues from the latest Chamillionaire video as to which vernacular they should perform? I do not think there is one simple answer, but I do think it is useful to complicate and problematize the idea of the vernacular precisely because of the world in which we live. Vernaculars can now be manufactured as much as discovered. These vernaculars might draw people to them in shifting and temporary communities, whereas in an earlier age a vernacular were more likely to have been the expression of a stable and longstanding community. Understanding how institutions use

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Audiences and online participatory media can disable Vernacular Rhetoric marginalized voices even as it actively creates a space meant to empower them” (43, 55). Christina M. Smith In discussing the videos, Conners Ramapo College of New Jersey details the two primary frames constructed by the AFL-CIO and cholarly interest in the creation, ACORN to shape and influence audience circulation, and contestation of interpretation of the productions. vernacular rhetoric has increased First is the frame of “appeals to pity”. Sdramatically with the growth of new Addressing examples pulled from visual media. The opportunity for previously and textual representations in which marginalized groups to disseminate their the subjects lament their precarious message has expanded because new positions in society, Conners suggests media forms offer ways to gain access, the subjects are consequently rendered albeit constrained and controlled, to the “sad and helpless.” The workers’ “… public sphere. Pamela Conners astutely voices function as pawns in service notes in her article, however that any of the institutional narrative, rather circulation of vernacular rhetoric must be than as voices summoning solidarity.” viewed in concert with the institutional (49). Second, Conners illustrates the structures that inform its production and frame of “fairness” with references enable its consumption. Conners’ article to the descriptions by the videos’ provides readers with a provocative subjects of their inability to achieve the example of the strategic deployment of American Dream. She offers the view vernacular communication in the service that institutions’ use of these frames in of institutional goals. presentations of vernacular performances Specifically, Conners argues that “articulates the powerlessness of the the institutional appropriation of workers, accentuates their difference vernacular expression on the part of from the audience members, and isolates labor organizations ultimately functions them from the organizations acting on to interrupt the potential of vernacular their behalf” (50). laborer discourse for coalition-building I would like to raise one point of among not only low-wage workers, contention with the discussion of these but the wider working public as well. two frames. Though the author does Commenting on the use of low-wage acknowledge that appeals to pity can workers as institutionally framed and create arguments for change, I argue narrated subjects in a series of seven short that more change-engendering potential YouTube videos intended to highlight the in visual depictions of suffering exists plight of minimum wage laborers, she than Conners allows. She suggests notes, “…the videos invoke a vernacular that individual experience is less performance that subjugates the transformative than embodied political workers’ own participation in the labor action. The two, however, are not mutually movement,” thus demonstrating “…how exclusive; the longstanding importance

65 Pamela Conners Putting Words to Work

of personal narratives and the sharing from the author’s current rendering, but of individual experience for mobilizing that nevertheless should be addressed action and fostering social change in studies of vernacular discourse on must be acknowledged. In discussing the Internet: the role of the audience. visual representations of occupied Conners’ analysis of the videos leaves Palestinians, Azoulay (2008) argues that little room for resistance. Rather, the an ethical relationship exists between the subjects in the videos appear as victims photographer, the person depicted, and of the institutional framing imposed by the viewer, a relationship she calls the the AFL-CIO and ACORN. Perhaps more “civil contract of photography.” Thus, importantly, the resistive role played by images of injustice possess heightened the audience remains unaddressed in the persuasive power, as case studies of the article. In fact, audiences are quite savvy Burning Monk, Kent State, and the 1963 in detecting and challenging inauthentic Birmingham photographs (all depictions vernacular discourse. From the online of individuals) illustrate (Skow and “outing” of LonelyGirl15 to the outrage of Dionisopoulos, 1997; Hariman and constituents of a censored political blog, Lucaites 2001; Johnson, 2007). Though the collective intelligence of consumer these studies focus on still photographs, audiences challenges a one-sided view of the civil contract is equally applicable to institutional power (Burgess and Green, moving images. 2010; Howard, 2008). Conners notes the In the end, the essay offers a useful case low number of views received by the study for examining the complex interplay videos and suggests that this could be between institutional entities that utilize due to the fact that they were deemed vernacular discourse to advance their by audiences as overly-institutional both causes and the vernacular communities aesthetically and rhetorically. Recent in which that discourse originates and scholarship in media and cultural studies acquires meaning. The appropriation also highlights the growing capacity of vernacular discourse by institutional of fans to not only challenge media entities raises important questions content, but also create and circulate about power, control, and censorship. their own material (Jenkins, 2006). The My work analyzing the United States existence of content in response to the Armed Forces’ use of YouTube videos labor videos could also provide insight that resemble those produced by soldiers into the consumption of the institutional suggests the fluidity of boundaries productions. between truly vernacular material and Additionally, it would be useful that which is intentionally marked as to explore the viewer commentary vernacular by powerful organizations. accompanying the videos to ascertain Considering the weight accorded such how audiences responded to the seemingly vernacular productions, the productions. Hess (2009) provides a boundaries of authenticity are important thorough analysis of how audiences to expose and challenge. challenged institutional messages by the In light of these implications, I would Office for National Drug Control Policy. like to discuss one aspect that is absent Hess ends his study with larger questions

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about the (in)ability of the YouTube Skow, Lisa M., and George N. medium to serve as a productive space Dionisopoulos. 1997. “A Struggle for vernacular discourse. Thus, a further to Contextualize Photographic analysis of viewer interpretation of the Images: American Print Media videos could reveal the ways in which and the “Burning Monk.” diverse audiences responded and might Communication Quarterly 45: 393- open up opportunities for resistance to 409. the institutional hegemony advanced by the AFL-CIO and ACORN.

Works Cited Azoulay, Ariella. 2008. The Civil Contract of Photography. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books. Burgess, Jean, and Joshua Green. 2010. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Cambridge: Polity. Hariman, Robert, and John L. Lucaites. 2001. “Dissent and Emotional Management in a Liberal- Democratic Society: The Kent State Iconic Photograph.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31: 4-31. Hess, Aaron R. 2009. “Resistance Up in Smoke: Analyzing the Limitations of Deliberation on YouTube.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 26: 411-434. Howard, Robert G. 2008. “Electronic Hybridity: The Persistent Processes of the Vernacular Web.” Journal of American Folklore 121: 192-218. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Johnson, Davi. 2007. “Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 Birmingham Campaign as Image Event.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 10: 1-25.

Food in Binary

Food in Binary: their personal thoughts and recipes Identity and Interaction in Two regularly on their blogs now have major book deals1 and jobs working for the Food German Food Blogs Network.2 While food constitutes only a small portion of the topics written about Kerstin McGaughey in the blogosphere, this still accounts for thousands of blogs on food in many Boston University different languages.

Abstract This paper will focus on how two German food bloggers portray their Food blogs are increasingly gaining importance not only in the virtual sphere but offline as well. This identity through their blogs, and how paper looks at the creation of identity and process their interactions with their readers of interaction in two German food blogs. Drawing and other bloggers shape a sense of 3 on current theories of Internet and community community unique to the medium. A space this paper will interpret what is occurring in unique convergence is occurring in food this online group. While the food blogosphere was blogging: while the food blogosphere born in the realm of new media (the Internet) it was born in the realm of new media (the must by its nature rely on the offline food world, as Internet) it must by nature of its subject well as traditional media spheres such as print and rely on the offline food world, as well as television. The German food blogging community traditional media spheres such as print and acts as an example to observe how bloggers represent themselves and interact amongst each television. This mixing of media is what other in this relatively new medium. Media and Henry Jenkins calls convergence culture: food are both constantly evolving, and thus an the blending of media and users who are 4 article of this kind is restricted by the paper on willing to follow it. It is evidenced all which it is written. Therefore, this project is not over the food blogosphere: blogger Adam intended as a final conclusion on the topic, but Roberts’ erstwhile television deal with rather as an introduction to the possibility for Food Network as its host of the weekly exploration and expression. food celebrity web show “FN Dish;” and pastry-chef-turned-expat-blogger-in- Introduction Paris David Lebovitz’s several published ood blogs have become a wildly cookbooks. popular platform for individuals to While English-language blogs, like write about their recipes, restaurant Roberts’ “Amateur Gourmet” and Fmeals, opinions, and food experiences in Lebovitz’s eponymous blog, are highly a public forum. Some argue facetiously popular internationally, they are only one that everyone with a fork and an Internet portion of the food blogosphere that exists. connection has a weblog of his or her Just as Hollywood has its celebrities along own. While this is not accurate, it may with the countless actors who are in L.A. not seem too far-fetched. Every major trying to make a break, or simply to follow newspaper with a food section now has at a passion, food blogs have their own set least one food blog, if not several, on their of stars and lesser-known individuals, websites. Writers who began by posting all engaging in the media for their own Cultural Analysis 9 (2010): 69-98 © 2010 by The University of California. All rights reserved 69 Kerstin McGaughey Food in Binary

reasons. This paper will focus on a specific to be blogging about creative pursuits.9 subset of blogs, namely two blogs out of Furthermore, Munich is known for its Munich including the internationally flourishing tourism and food industries. popular blog, “Delicious:Days,” written While every region in Germany prides in English by Nichole (“Nicky”) Stich, itself on its distinctive food cultures, it is as well as the German-language blog arguable that Munich is even more aware “Cucina Casalinga” by Nathalie5, which of its cuisine, due at least in part to the is more locally/nationally focused. foreigners who come and enjoy the food. There are countless variations of food Both bloggers in question write about blogs, which makes choosing a set for shopping in several of the city’s specialty study challenging. Susan Herring has food shops and local fresh produce created a methodology for what she calls markets, as well as their favorite regional Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis6, Bavarian foods. in which she discusses how to choose a Stich and Nathalie are bloggers who corpus of online data. She suggests three cook much of their own food and post different methods, including choosing about it. This is a general trend in food random, motivated, or convenience blogging, though these two particular samples.7 In this case, a random sample blogs are also scattered with trips was not feasible, as it would have around Germany and abroad. When required the virtually impossible task traveling, and also sometimes while at of collecting every German blog on home, they will post about the foods the Internet from which to randomly they ate in restaurants. However, both choose.8 Thus, the choice was made for of these bloggers write mostly about these two blogs out of a combination their own personal cooking experiences. of motivation and convenience: both of These two blogs are examples of these blogs were chosen because they are convergence culture: the bloggers take by women writers out of Munich, which personal, family, and national food narrows down geographical and gender cultures that have been passed through variations, but also because they provide traditional methods of communication examples representative of the food and post them on the Internet, creating blogosphere at large, as well as social a community that is entirely dependent norms and trends in German society on both virtual experiences online and offline. These were also samples of physical experiences in the kitchen. convenience, as the author was already This paper will look at the online following several German blogs before community of these two German food this project was started. blogs, drawing on current theories of The similarities between these blogs Internet and community space, the raises questions about the significance of evolution of the blog and blogging two women blogging about food out of communities, and other studies of Munich. Women bloggers, while they are “virtual ethnography” to interpret how less popular than their male counterparts, these bloggers portray their identities can claim authorship of at least half of through their blogs, food, and what blogs on the Internet and are more likely kind of interactions occur as a result of

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engaging in the medium. While this work of. In August of that first year, Pyra Labs, by no means can encompass all aspects of a small dot-com company out of San this new and constantly evolving topic, Francisco, launched Blogger.11 Along it will act as a stepping stone for further with LiveJournal, a blog hosting platform analysis, providing a window onto started the same year with an open- possible themes and tropes that appear source codebase, Blogger made a big in many food-related blogs. impact. Suddenly, instead of requiring significant knowledge in web design, A Brief History of Weblogs HTML, and other coding languages used to create and maintain websites, bloggers “There are only a few things you need only needed to know how to write the to know about weblogs.” This quaint equivalent of an email. Blogger created introduction by Rebecca Blood to the templates, organized content, archived edited anthology We’ve Got Blog was posts, and hosted the weblog. Users written in 2002, three years after the simply filled out a couple fields: a title for first weblogs, or blogs, took off. This the post, and the content of their desire. book of essays on the topic was, at the And so, the blogosphere was born. time, revolutionary: one of the first collections of essays to look at blogs Blogger didn’t take off immediately, from a self-reflective angle, but also as the dot-com bust put a dent in the Pyra using the “old-fashioned” media, that of Lab’s assets. Nevertheless, the company print books. All of the essays had been survived and was popular enough that originally published on the Internet, but by 2003, WordPress, an open source blog it is fascinating to look at how they come hosting system, was launched among together in print. several other blog hosting companies. According to Technorati (today’s much What becomes evident right away more sophisticated version of the blog when reading through this collection is listing websites), there were at the end that blogs have changed dramatically of 2008 133 million blogs on the Internet in the six years since this book was posting an average of ten posts per published. Another contributor, Derek month.12 Powazek, acknowledges a change just in the three years since blogs first evolved, The blogosphere has become so large, arguing that originally, blogs were sites and is evolving at such unbelievable rates, with links to other sites: “each was a that Technorati has published an annual mixture in unique proportions of links, “State of the Blogosphere” since 2004. commentary, and personal thoughts and This large statistical study analyzes blogs essays.”10 Now, blogs are multimodal, for content and demographics, creating and include videos, Twitter feeds, and the most detailed statistics to date on photographs to expand the way content blogs. Overall, according to Technorati’s is presented to the reader. An initial core report in 2008, the majority of bloggers group of 23 blogs developed in the end are men; however, a Perseus report in of 1998/beginning of 1999, according to 2003 suggested women write around 13 some sites maintained by individuals 50% of blogs. Furthermore, looking at a who listed all the blogs they were aware selection of food blogs on the web, there

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is a certain impression, supported by Like in other topics, food bloggers general observation, that in the food blog connect via comment sections in blogs, niche, the majority are women. European post about each others’ sites, list other bloggers are the second-largest group blogs on their blogrolls, and engage after North American, and the largest in group blogging memes.20 The age group of bloggers is 25-34 years old. complex web of social interaction in the Moreover, while most bloggers do not blogosphere is compounded by millions make enough money to live off their of readers in addition to the thousands of blogs, 25% of bloggers have a household bloggers and thus makes a statement of income of over $100,000 a year and 75% its size nearly impossible. of bloggers are college graduates. This Nevertheless, the German food blog means, the average blogger is from the community is much smaller than its Northern Hemisphere, is probably white, English-speaking counterpart. In 2010, wealthy, and educated, and thus has the Topblogs.de ranked 293 food bloggers time, money, and resources to devote to who submitted their blogs for ranking. 14 regular, successful blogging . However, while all of these are in German, Despite its thorough research, it does not appear that German speakers Technorati does not have specific data on writing in English are represented here.21 food blogs. Their results indicate a typical It is difficult to come up with a definition blog covers on average three topics (such of a “German food blog,” not to mention as politics, news, and health), and they figures on how many there are. German included “cooking/food” among the language blogs are hosted by bloggers topic of “other,” which accounts for 43% of different nationalities, not only from of blogs. The most popular topic, at 54%, German-speaking countries. In addition, is “personal/lifestyle” which could very some German bloggers use English as well also include blogs that write about their main language. Still others write food15. in both languages. Furthermore, a Another way to calculate a general “food blog” can be written by anyone idea of the figures is by looking at search from someone who collects cookbooks engines and other aggregators. A few to someone who reviews restaurants, food bloggers (Elise Bauer of Simply to someone who writes about their Recipes16, Kalyn Denny of Kalyn’s baking experiences. For the purposes of Kitchen17, and Alanna Kellogg of Kitchen this paper, a German food blog will be Parade18) put together a search engine for defined as a blog with food in any form food blogs in 2006, which uses Google as its main focus written by any person software to search only food blogs for living in Germany or a German-speaking content. Foodblogsearch.com, according country (writing either in English or to the authors, searches over 3,000 food German) or anyone worldwide writing blogs, adding 1,000 in 2009 alone. The in the German language. online social community Foodbuzz.com boasts that it “aggregates, organizes, and New Media: The Internet and Social curates” over 10,000 food blogs, and is Interaction 19 also growing daily. In order to analyze these particular food

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blogs, it is necessary to understand what forms of media: books, websites, Twitter, is going on in the Internet as a larger and blogs all are different platforms with whole. The Internet allows for a unique which people can engage in a topic, and set of circumstances to play out. Not only the discussion frequently crosses over does the Internet act as a sphere for social from one to the other. interaction in and of itself, but it also With this in mind, the Internet is by relies on the offline world as reference no means fully understood as a space and definition. Jenkins’ studies of how we for community creation. Research on the interact with media, as well as Hine and Internet as a space for social interaction Herring’s analyses of Internet cultures and community formation has been done provide a framework from which to start since its conception. Linguists, especially, 22 a study of new media. Moreover, Erving have played a large role in determining Goffman’s social theories can also be how the Internet has affected language applied to the events that are occurring use and vice versa. Other disciplines, too, 23 on the Internet. have discussed the Internet, and several Henry Jenkins uses “convergence methodologies have been developed culture” to define content blending to create a framework for Internet across different media platforms and an analysis.25 audience willing to follow this flow of Herring has proposed both a information, which he argues “[…] occurs framework for Computer-Mediated within the brains of individual consumers Discourse Analysis (CMDA), as well and through their social interactions with as for Web Content Analysis (WebCA) 24 others.” Blogs are a prime example of aimed specifically at helping to analyze convergence culture, because they take blogs.26 She argues that traditional content from other websites, as well modes of analysis, in which language- as from other media such as film, print specific coding is the main focus, lacks journalism, books, etc, and post them on the comprehensiveness required in an a website for other people to comment all-inclusive study of blogs.27 She instead and react upon. Just as content can suggests an expanded paradigm, which travel from print to digital, the reverse includes the use of image, theme, feature, occurs as well with many bloggers being link, and exchange analyses in addition profiled in magazines and getting book to language (discourse) analysis. For and television deals. Content in these examples of these paradigms in blogs, instances is evolving from one media see Table 1 below. platform to another and, in the process, is Although comprehensive, Herring’s being filtered and interpreted by countless analyses are not exclusive of other ways users. This is the act of convergence to analyze how bloggers are portraying culture: content shifting from one kind themselves on the Internet and of media to another, and arguably the act interacting amongst each other. Herring of forming an online community space. builds into her framework the ability Online communities are formed around for expansion by including ellipses for drawing connections, and one can do so extra categories of analysis that signify by taking advantage of many different future developments in WebCA. She

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Table 1: Examples for Herring’s Paradigms for Web Content Analysis (WebCA). Adapted from Herring “Web Content Analysis.” argues that in any existing system, things, comments sections, posts, recipes, blog researchers have had to adapt and their photographs. 28 methodologies to fit their own needs. The metaphor of social ritual is an WebCA is no exception, and in this paper engagement in “face-work,” that is the Herring’s paradigm will be applied and process of performing socially recognized expanded to include “food analysis,” as and approved moral acts to improve the topic of food plays a defining role in one’s face (or reputation) in society.30 The the medium through how it portrays the comments section of blogs is where much unique character and community of a of the blogging rituals are negotiated – food blog. Herring’s theory will be used and they are being negotiated because as a reference in tandem with Goffman’s the medium is still relatively new, and concepts to analyze interaction and social norms are being developed daily. identity in the two blogs in question. For example, in one post on Stich’s Blogging activity can also be framed blog “Delicious:Days,” she described a using Erving Goffman’s concepts to weekend at an Italian villa, which she describe an individual’s portrayal of disclosed as having been paid for by the self in a society: the self as social ritual, proprietors. One commenter questioned strategic gamesmanship, and dramatic the ethics of this post-vacation update, performance.29 These three metaphors to which Stich promptly and directly can be studied in blogs by looking at responded that when “free-bees” are all the components Herring discusses. offered, there is no obligation on the In blogs, these components express blogger’s part to return any favor in themselves in the form of, among other posting, and if they do post it is on their

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own terms.31 Her post and response also 60 e-mails in your inbox […]. Be bold, alluded to several other bloggers joining be daring, and be willing to fail and 34 her in the weekend, which supported you will succeed.” her claim to legitimacy.32 In Goffman’s terms, this is known as “saving face”: in Roberts is suggesting that bloggers put her response, Stich affirmed her moral themselves out into the blogosphere and face in the blogging group by defending make themselves vulnerable with their herself against accusations of abusing posts, and sometimes they are validated her blog by becoming free advertising through readers’ comments, and for companies. sometimes they are not. However, each The second metaphor Goffman post is a strategically written process with describes is that of the game-like qualities the readership’s experiences in mind in of social interaction. As with games, order to draw the maximum response. “serious activities” allow members of the Finally, Goffman uses the metaphor of group to portray esteemed qualities while a dramaturgical performance to explain at the same time taking risks publicly for the portrayal of self. Branaman describes their own gain. The outcome of social this theory most succinctly: interaction is unpredictable, and can only be determined by the myriad players Performance entails individuals’ attempt to impress upon others and involved. Too much difference amongst often themselves that their character those involved and the social encounter is what they claim, that actions is incoherent, and too little difference mean what is intended, and that the makes it uninteresting. Successful definition of the situation is what is gamesmanship results in positive implicitly claimed.35 interaction and the sense of belonging in a 33 group. This metaphor translates over to The most direct way in which these food blogging through the bloggers’ and bloggers perform is through their readers’ daily interactions in comments food. As anthropologist Mary Douglas sections, where common ground is found discusses, groups and individuals form and experiences are validated through strong identities around the foods they shared vacation stories and suggestions eat. Groups form taboos, or “off-limits” on where to find ingredients and how to foods in order to define (and exclude) use them. However, the act of blogging participation in the community.36 Food itself is arguably acting with game-like blogs are no exception: bloggers perform social strategies, which Adam Roberts their identities through the recipes they addresses head-on: choose to cook, photograph, and share with their readers. “[Some of my] posts were dismal Together, Herring and Goffman’s failures but they were done in the same spirit as my biggest successes. So the theories provide a foundation from which lesson is you’ve gotta take huge risks to begin a discussion of the formulation and see what happens: sometimes of an identity and community in food you’ll cringe at the lack of response, blogs. Some critics might be skeptical other times you’ll come home and find that an online identity is in fact a valid

75 Kerstin McGaughey Food in Binary

identity that can be researched, given ignored offline. Geographic distances the anonymity and ease with which (though not language differences) are individuals can lie about themselves far less important online, allowing users online. However, Goffman would world-wide to engage in conversation. argue that claims of self are a result of In addition, users can easily find people many different representations in, and with common interests through online influences of, society, and that this creates profiles (unlike in offline settings, where a dualistic definition of self: the self- people do not tend to list their likes, as-performer and the self-as-character, dislikes, and hobbies for the world to most easily described as the person who see). These factors, in addition to the wears the mask, and the mask itself.37 myriad opportunities for engagement We only gain a sense of reality through in blogs, (including but not limited to our actions, but they are always framed blogrolls, comments, and links) invite by the way society perceives us.38 Thus, a community to evolve in a way that is online portrayals of self are arguably just unique to the medium. as valid as offline portrayals, simply in a different context of social norms and Analyzing Food Blogs: “Delicious:Days” rules. and “Cucina Casalinga” Questions of the legitimacy and As a member of the broader food blogging efficacy of Internet communities extend community myself, I acknowledge that further into the concept of virtual social my place in this community is both interaction. Ethnographer Christine Hine as a member and as a researcher. This argues that many people believe the provides several positive attributes to Internet encourages previously existing this study, including the ability to look at social interactions; that it promotes the community as an insider, but with the the continuation of a conversation knowledge and privilege of an academic. from the offline world in the virtual Hine argues that an Internet ethnography world. However, she points out that allows the researcher to observe in ways it is in fact becoming increasingly face-to-face ethnographers cannot, clear that the Internet is causing social but she points out that at the same 39 discourse. A great example of this is time this relinquishes the authority the blogosphere in which conversations that a researcher’s interaction with a occur within the Internet that would community can acquire.40 However, I not occur outside of it. Food bloggers maintain that in order to interact with who post recipes or restaurant reviews a culture one must use the culture’s might cook and eat the foods they blog means of communication. Bloggers and about even if they did not blog, but the their audiences communicate primarily virtual conversations, friendships, and online, and when offline communication the subsequent recipes they cook off of occurs, it usually enriches instead of other people’s blogs would not occur causes the online experience. Therefore, otherwise. Furthermore, the Internet in the process of analyzing the blogging sparks these conversations because of its community, one must use online ability to overcome obstacles not easily interaction as a primary source, and

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offline forms of communication – when of chopped fresh vegetables (see Fig. 1).41 available – to supplement, not to claim The site’s background color is a pastel authority. yellow, and the other theme colors for As mentioned, this paper looks at two the site are orange, red, and green (post blogs: “Delicious:Days” and “Cucina titles are orange, links are maroon, and Casalinga.” There are many blogs headers are green). The warmth of these written in German from many different colors already induce a reader to think of geographic locations. The nature of the southern climates, which Nathalie’s blog blogosphere (and the Internet itself) is focuses on through her frequent vacations that geographic area does not, on the to Italy, and her home cooking, which surface, appear to matter. However, a is heavily influenced by that country. blog analysis shows that these two blogs Nathalie does not post advertising on her do portray their own regional influences blog, but has links to blog events, blog on their blogs. Both bloggers write out monitoring sites that she is listed in, and of the same city in Germany and both Google followers. She gives her readers are employed in high-paying industries the option of following her through RSS (Stich’s day job evolves around internet feeds (“Real Simple Syndication” or web design and Nathalie is employed “Rich Site Summary”), so that they know in the banking industry). Despite these when she has updated without having to 42 similarities, their blogs have vastly check her website every day. different feels to them. Stich’s blog is stylistically very different from Nathalie’s (see Fig. 2). She has designed and built her blog herself, with her partner Oliver Seidel. The left two thirds of her banner has the title of her blog in white over a photograph that changes monthly. Figure 1: Homepage of Nathalie’s “Cucina Casalinga” blog: In February 2010, http://cucina-casalinga.blogspot.com/ the picture was of a pink flower, and the color scheme Nathalie’s blog is operated by the blog of her website had pink post titles and hosting site “Blogger.” She has customized links, and light gray headers. This color the template she uses, so that readers scheme also changes monthly with the initially see a banner that reads “Cucina photograph, and has been both purple Casalinga” in red lettering with white and green, always in pastel shades. Each bordering that is set over a photograph

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post is labeled with one or more grey and interact with others through the medium white circular icon that corresponds with of the blog. Specific components of the her ten post categories (from “recipes: blog (Herring’s images, themes, features, savory” to “discoveries”). Above the links, language use, and exchanges) title, Stich also has a welcome message: support the two research questions, which provide a contextual framework “delicious:days is our playground and for Herring’s analysis methodology. will let you take a peek into our steamy Goffman’s metaphors for social kitchen, mouthwatering recipes and participation are used to supplement this delightful nibbles included, all served analysis. on a tasty plate. Can you say yum?”

On the far left she has an icon advertising Identity: The Portrayal of Self Through one of her blog’s awards: in February Food and Internet 2009 she was listed fourth in UK’s Time’s The first research question addresses the Online “50 of the world’s best food blogs.” identity of the blog and blogger, which In the center of her banner she regularly can be analyzed using all of Herring’s updates a food news feed, and on the analysis components, as well as Goffman’s far right she rotates advertising her new metaphors for self-portrayal in a society. eponymously titled cookbook, as well as Practically, this analysis looks at elements the recently-launched beta version of her of blogging such as its features – the title recipe organizing software “RecipeShelf” of the blog, the “about” section, and the (complete with iPhone application). design of the blog, as well as its language, and images. As Hine mentions, identity is a difficult category to address on the Internet, since users create their identities online, picking and choosing, and most often filtering, from their offline identities how they want to expose themselves to the virtual world.43 Figure 2: Homepage of Nichole Stich’s “Delicious:Days” blog: This is precisely http://www.deliciousdays.com/ where Goffman’s use of the mask and the Using Herring’s WebCA paradigm mask wearer come into play – users of and Goffman’s metaphors for social the Internet are picking which mask they engagement, these blogs can be examined choose to portray to their online friends. in order to discuss how bloggers Stich The analysis of a blogger’s identity is and Nathalie portray themselves and not an attempt to decipher her offline

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identity (what Goffman would call the vegetable terrine45. The foods she writes “self-as-performer”), but rather precisely about define her experiences abroad and her creation of self as she projects it at home. For her readers, her posts and through her blog (Goffman’s “self-as- photographs show them a world many character”).44 can relate to: on a post about a trip to the When it is next to impossible to verify Amalfi Coast in Italy, one commenter 46 someone’s identity, as is usually the case responded, on the Internet, it is necessary to regard the Internet as its own culture and people’s “Oh I love Amalfi! I visited it last February for the first time and was identities on it as their authentic Internet completely fascinated by the colorful characters—even if they may differ from ceramics, lemons the size of my fist, the people’s identities offline. This does not blue ocean… and the food in exactly mean that identities should be assumed, the same restaurant [as the one you ate but more that identity formation should in]. I had pasta alla limone :)”47 be looked at as an indicator of who the author is, and (perhaps more importantly) The food Nathalie eats abroad acts as who she wants to be seen as. a statement of Nathalie’s identity, and Identity is created in almost every extends into her home kitchen as well. component of the blog. For food blogs, She cooks with high-end ingredients, perhaps the most important form of emphasizing the fresh and homemade. identity creation is the foods themselves She has labeled some of her posts with the the bloggers choose to write about. This category “Dinner for One,” in which she will be discussed in more detail, but demonstrates that although she is cooking foodways play a large role in a person’s for herself, she makes herself meals such identity in a larger group. Foodways as veal cutlet with brussels sprouts, and include the entire cultural, economic, and sausage with potato salad. Even when no political food system: what we eat, how, one is physically joining her to eat, her when, and with whom are all ways that a readers are virtually looking over her person can claim allegiance to, or distance shoulder at her food choices. This is an from, a group of people (be it a group interesting phenomenon, and represents of blogs or a nation). Identifying with a how the online identity that is shaped by particular group’s food is empowering, offline experiences in turn influences the and simultaneously limiting: it dictates offline identity as well. our exposure to various types of foods. An analysis of a blog’s features also However, blogs offer a safe exposure to displays its author’s identity. From the food to a large and diverse readership. title, which is the first glimpse a reader has Nathalie’s blog is an example of what of the blogger, to the layout, which shows Lucy Long would describe as culinary what the blogger finds important to put tourism: she allows her readers to where, the way a blog looks and reads is become armchair travelers by viewing arguably just as important as its content. her vacation photos, as well as recipes The title “Delicious:Days” invokes a venturing from the daily pasta dinner sense of a rich cache of food, but also to the festive homemade duck pate or accompanies Stich and Seidel’s stylish

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sense of design and mouth-watering visits to roadside diners around the photographs. “Cucina Casalinga” United States and Canada. references the Italian influences in Stich’s posts are similarly eclectic. Nathalie’s food, and her professed love Updates have included recipes for a of vacation south of the Alps. variation on Marcella Hazan’s arance fruit dessert,48 homemade coffee liqueur,49 and a cold remedy she named Thylehogichi after its ingredients (thyme, lemon, honey, ginger, and chili).50 These all reflect her welcome statement in her banner, that she is giving her readers a glimpse into her kitchen, but she is also sharing her eye for design. Nathalie’s design features are less multimodal than Stich’s. The focus of her blog is entirely on her posts. While she has categorized her posts, lists an archive, and links to a couple of blog events and blog monitoring sites, Nathalie does not post information such as her favorite music or books outside of her entries. In order for her to maintain the vacation feel of her blog, she saves Figure 3: Stich’s “Food News” posts from her travels for later dates, so section on “Delicious:Days” that every week or two there is a post on Pompei or Ravenna, even if she is in Munich at the time. Most interestingly, Stich’s blog presents information in she recently blogged a list of facts about a multimodal format: her food news herself, including facts about celebrity feed (see Fig. 3) at the top of her site is crushes (George Clooney) as well as her updated more regularly than her posts, preferred drinks (room temperature flat and this gives her readers a reason to water, wine and beer, tea, or drip coffee). return to her site while she prepares her At the end of the post, she mentions as an next update. Stich also includes lists on aside: the right-hand side of her website, next to her posting section, which include her “And by the way – I write here more favorite cookbooks, music, and literature or less anonymously, because I don’t (each linked to Amazon where readers want professional acquaintances who Google my name to discover my blog can purchase copies). Her tastes range right away. However, I will disclose from the strange and slightly disturbing my identity when asked.”51 singer-songwriter Devendra Banhart to “Plates and Dishes,” a book that It is not uncommon for bloggers to chronicles the author Stephan Schacher’s maintain a sense of anonymity on their

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blogs. While most bloggers do not in the kitchen and at the dinner table as worry about their blogs affecting their well. The very act of eating is performing jobs or other parts of their offline life an identity; for example, two different negatively, many simply prefer to keep associations are made in choosing to eat the two separate.52 Nevertheless, and chocolate ice cream or a mango. Both are Nathalie admits this herself, her posts are luxuries, but while the former suggests scattered with bits and pieces of personal a childish indulgence, the latter suggests information. In the comments section of a sophisticated snack. Susan Kalcik ties the above-mentioned post, she says performance to food choice by pointing out that people choose the foods they eat “In reality we read others’ blogs not because of who they are, but also because because of the recipes, but because of who they wish to be.54 A person of the ‘homestories,’ or rather the eating blood sausage defines herself in introductions to the recipes. There is a different cultures differently – in many small voyeur in each of us. ;-)”53 parts of Germany, someone eating blood sausage is identified as having a This statement complements Goffman’s developed palate and being part of the metaphor that the self that is expressed knowledgeable who can value the taste in society, or here online, is the mask and texture of what is considered there that one wears, and the self that is the to be a delicacy. However, in the United internal, or here offline, personality is the States the consumption of blood sausage performer. Readers always want to know was rejected from the German-American more about the person behind the blog, community, because other cultures whether she likes the same music or art as considered it a taboo food.55 Thus, in they do, or what she does besides cooking choosing to post about the recipes they in her spare time. The act of writing a food cook, the foods they enjoy, and the stores blog is very much a constant negotiation they shop in, food bloggers are constantly of how much the online identity reflects negotiating not only their own culture’s the offline identity. A blogger creates her foodways, but their readership’s as well. identity not only through the foods she They are engaging in a performance, chooses to write about, but the other a sculpting of an identity online that is information about herself that ends up in defined by the foods that end up on their her posts. Very few bloggers post just a websites. recipe; most add in a short introduction of why they cooked the food, or (at least) While one might think then that the edits they have made to the recipe. process of negotiating so many cultures would create a very bland blogging Identifying the virtual self is not just community of watered-down cultural about how a blogger writes and presents foods that are agreeable to the masses, herself online. In choosing to cook, this is far from the case. In her article on consume, and write about food, these food as an expression of national identity, bloggers are performing an identity Anne Murcott takes the stance that on multiple levels. Not only is identity nations are negotiated and imagined by a performed in the process of photographing group, not entities separate from a group. and writing a post, but it is performed

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Furthermore, she argues that print media blog post, in which the blogger describes is a form in which this national identity is a bit about herself, as well as what the discussed, transformed, transported, and blog is about. Of course, this may or may deciphered.56 It is logical here to argue that not be the case for every blog. Nathalie the Internet plays the same role as print links halfway down her homepage to her media. Murcott continues by asserting “Blogger” profile, which is the only part that food as a means of communication is of her blog that is in English: another way of transporting the concept Despite its brevity, the profile gives of a national identity. Thus, blogs are a the reader certain information. Nathalie platform on which national foodways has an established career that does not are expressed and discussed. Moreover, involve her culinary skills, so cooking they are a space where people can safely, is a hobby. She is not too interested in without leaving their living rooms, astrology, as it is only mentioned in her cross over their own traditional cultural profile and not the rest of the blog. She boundaries and engage with other most likely has money at her disposal, foodways. In a restaurant, people have to as she lives in Munich (one of the most consume the food they encounter (for a expensive cities to live in Germany), discussion of the aversions to consuming works in banking, and cooks with high- foods from other cultures that challenge end ingredients from shops like the one’s own, see Douglas, Murcott, and Hofbräuhaus-Kunstmühle and Käfer, 57 Parasecoli), whereas in a blog, readers two gourmet specialty food shops in can safely be exposed to new foodways downtown Munich.58 without having to challenge their own Stich’s blog “Delicious:Days” offers a personal eating culture. Blogs here play foil to Nathalie’s “about” section. Hers a role similar to a magazine or book, but is accessible on the top left corner of the potential readership is much larger her homepage and takes the reader to a than that of traditional print media. section with the same layout as the rest The medium of the blog offers many of the blog. Scrolling down there are features for creating identity aside from three paragraphs in which she introduces its design features and content. The herself and her partner, Seidel (who most direct expression of a blogger’s manages the technical aspects of the blog), identity is in the “about” section. This which are followed by black-and-white section is usually a separate page, not a pictures of the two. Below this is a series of the dozens of mentions in print media, as well as awards the blog has received. Lastly, there is a series of questions and answers about the technical aspects of the blog, such as what camera they use and how to advertise on the blog. Stich creates an initial informal feel in her “about” section by focusing on Figure 4: Blogger Profile why she started her blog and what her for Nathalie of “Cucina inspirations are. She gives readers an Casalinga” idea of her offline life with phrases such as:

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“I’m not a professional cook, my day “Delicious:Days” is an example of a job revolves around design and the blog written more like a branded column internet business as such, which is of the kind that other English-language my other passion […] Co-author and blogs such as Adam Roberts’ and technical genius behind this site is Clotilde Dusoulier’s engage in, whereas Oliver, we’ve been living together in Munich/Haidhausen since 2000 […] Nathalie’s blogging style represents one Long story short, given you like it here that is more indicative of the diary-writer on d:d [Delicious:Days], please do type. She does not post any advertising, come by every now and then to check and as such it appears that she makes on new posts - we’d love to see you no money off of her blog. As can be seen around.”59 in the next section, Nathalie is focusing her blogging on the interactive, hobby While Stich’s “about” section is much aspects of the medium. more descriptive than Nathalie’s, The differences between these two it ends on a more commercial note: blogs can also be seen upon looking more blog advertising. Stich and Seidel run closely at the images these bloggers use, Delicous:Days as a brand, and they and their subsequent posting themes. are clearly making money out of their When Nicky posts on her blog, she seems “passion,” as Stich infers on her blog. In to be focused on how it will look on her addition to her use of advertisements and blog, how it fits together with what she’s awards, Nicky has made and completed posted before, and what she’ll be posting a book deal, the process of which about next. While Nathalie pays attention 60 she blogged about, which is being to this as well, she mostly just posts what published by one of Germany’s largest she is having for dinner, or what she cookbook publishers, Gräfe und Unzer. decided to try out that afternoon. There Although it is a contested subject and are positive aspects to both of these some bloggers refuse to advertise on their approaches: while the former offers a sites, making money off of blog ads is not polished view of the modern German necessarily a bad thing; in fact, according cuisine, the latter shows what is being to Technorati, the majority of blogs do. cooked on a daily basis in the middle class European bloggers who advertise make German (or more specifically Bavarian) an average of 9,040 USD a year, but most home. 61 blogs make less than 200 USD. Stich Much of Stich’s posts are written and Seidel sell ad space on their blog for around her incredible photography. The 62 790 USD a month. Calculating two ad photos of her food set the theme for her spaces available at a time on the website writing: a post on roasted bell pepper (which is the current status), they are and chorizo risotto starts with a photo grossing about 20,000 USD a year. From a of five impeccable, colorful bell peppers financial viewpoint, “Delicious:Days” is atop a stainless steel workbench (see Fig. a very successful venture, and this does 5) and ends with a bowl of risotto that is not include revenue from their cookbook, as nice as a picture of risotto can be.63 Her nor from their new recipe software they post describes how she stumbled upon are soon to debut, that have come out of an easy method for peeling the peppers the blog.

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as on giving her readers a glimpse into her kitchen, and how she relates to the food she eats. The frequency of posting plays a role here too: Nathalie posts almost daily, whereas Stich posts only a few times a month. While Stich’s photographs are beautiful, it is hard to know what exactly she’s eating for dinner. For Nathalie, it is quite simple to figure out: she eats her posts. This is not to say that Nicky does not do the same, but it is hard to imagine she is making pink ravioli desserts64 and black grissini65 every night. Nathalie posts about her weeknight fish66 dinners, but also about her potato puree topped with caviar and lime Figure 5: Nichole Stich “Roasted bell pepper risotto sauce dish for guests.67 dating chorizo cubes” Delicious:Days From this brief analysis, and how to cook her recipe, with step- one can conclude that by-step pictures along the way. While Nathalie performs herself through her her posts do not have a thematic trend blog by giving her readers a sense of necessarily – her risotto is followed by her offline self — in this case not her squid-ink-dyed grissini – it seems that internal (unmasked) self, but her offline the colors of her blog and her posts are performed self. One could thus argue that just as important as the content. This there is the internal self, the performed makes for a very stylish, polished blog; self, and the digital self. This tiered her attention to detail in content and reflection of identity is seen also in Stich’s design is paramount. blog; however, she focuses much more Nathalie, on “Cucina Casalinga,” also on the digital self as a unique identity, has many photos on her blog. However, rather than the digital self as a reflection they are not done in a home photo studio, of the performed or internal self. This they are shot as she goes about preparing is not to say “Delicious:Days” does not her evening dinner. She intersperses reflect Stich’s offline personality, but she posts on her dinners with posts about her shapes and crafts it to reflect perhaps an favorite wines, vacations, as well as other idealized, designed self online. kitchen and food-related comments. This difference in how bloggers Nathalie focuses not on style as much navigate the performance of self,

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especially in reference to recipe choices three in French, and one in English. and advertising, does not seem to “Delicious:Days” is not included in her create too much tension in the general blogroll (neither is “Cucina Casalinga” blogosphere. Each blogger tends to listed on Stich’s blog). Overall, it can be understand that her blog identity is deduced from Nathalie’s blog that her unique, and that there are countless ways priority in creating connections with to blog. Both blogs use different features people is to interact with people who are of the medium to shape their virtual interested in similar topics as she is. Most identity for the reader, and give glimpses of the blogs she links to use blog hosts of their offline identities as well. like Blogger, TypePad, or WordPress and thus have similar aesthetics to her own Interaction: Meaningful Community- blog. Many of the bloggers she links to Building Online also comment on her posts and vice versa (as will be discussed later on). The second research question is how these two bloggers interact with other Many bloggers maintain that the best bloggers and readers. Herring’s six way to get on their blogroll is to put components again can be used in this them on your own. However, this does case, most specifically looking at links, not hold up on more popular blogs like exchanges, and language use. Specifically, “Delicious:Days.” While this might be interaction can be measured by looking considered a snub in most situations, at blogrolls, comments, and blogging when a blog attains a certain level of memes. Because of the complexity of popularity, it is considered common blogging, and the inability to know sense for the blogger not to post all blogs exactly who reads the blog and therefore that are linked to her because otherwise who is in the blogging community, it is the blogroll would take up the whole hard to pin down interaction. However, blog. Stich lists twenty food blogs on her by looking at blogrolls, how and under website and, in a separate list, twenty what circumstances bloggers link to each blogs on other topics. She directly other, and the kinds of blog memes they addresses how blogs are listed on her site participate in, it is possible to come up in the FAQ section of her “about” page: with general conclusions. “Neither threats work nor tons of To begin with, one easy way to know chocolate, wait, chocolate may actually what interests a blogger is by looking at work. In other words, delicious:days is her blogroll. The blogroll is a list of blogs my playground and the links displayed that the blogger finds interesting and in the blog roll are in fact part of my posts somewhere on her site. In addition regular reading routine. As it changes, 68 to being able to hop and jump from blog so will the links.” to blog all afternoon, it is a great way to study the intricate web of interaction. For Stich, her blogroll is organic, and Nathalie lists seventy-seven food blogs reflects her tastes and interests, not a on her site. Separately, she lists seven desire to connect with other bloggers. blogs on other topics. Of the food blogs “Delicious:Days” is writing for an listed there are six written in Italian, audience, and expressing her own

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identity through her interactions with vice versa). This shows solidarity on others. the part of both people involved (reader The comment sections for both of and blogger), in addition to a set of roles these blogs are quite active, but in and norms. When Nathalie comments in different ways. Over ten consecutive her own comment section, she usually 70 posts, 32 people posted comments (some responds to all who have commented multiple times) on “Cucina Casalinga.” and has the final say on the topic. Nathalie’s posts received an average of Nathalie’s discussion of the element 5.5 comments, almost a third of those of voyeurism involved in reading and who commented posted more than writing blogs is an example of the group’s once, and 20% of commenting readers self-awareness: an open discussion and (6 people) posted four or more times. agreement of why participants in the In comparison, 162 individuals left group blog and read blogs. comments on ten consecutive posts on In Stich’s blog, participation can be “Delicious:Days”. Each post received measured by the number of comments on average 19.6 comments, with 16% posted, but the shared history is more returning commenters, and only 0.02% (3 often one in which a commenter who has readers) posting four or more times. While been a long-time reader will post for the initially one would conclude that because first time. Stich’s posts, not the individual Stich receives, on average, almost four interactions with or amongst her readers, times as many comments as Nathalie, that become the shared historical foundation. her community is more significant, but Conflicts occur, such as the reader who this is not necessarily true. Here again, questioned the ethics of Stich’s weekend Herring provides a useful framework paid getaway, but overall solidarity from which to approach looking at is displayed through comments like these comments in terms of community: “kaltmamsell’s” in response to Stich’s she argues that an online community cold-remedy: “Please consider it a iron includes measurable participation, proof [sic] of the trust I have in you that a shared history, solidarity, criticism I will actually try this. Appetizing is not and conflict, a group’s self-awareness, exactly what it sounds. But if you say and a set of roles and hierarchy.69 Both so. Erm – thanks.”71 Through these same comment sections of “Cucina Casalinga” interactions, roles and hierarchies are and “Delicious:Days” exhibit all of established: Stich not only is an authority these behaviors, but they build into two figure as the blogger, but her readers’ different kinds of online communities. comments displaying trust, or thanking Nathalie’s commenters share a tangible her for a new recipe, solidify her status history through reading and commenting as a knowledgeable and helpful person. on her blog, but also because Nathalie Just as Nathalie has the final say in her does the same on her readers’ blogs. blog, so does Stich when she responds to Those who comment most frequently comments (she does not respond to each on Nathalie’s blogs are bloggers who comment, but does answer questions). Nathalie reads regularly herself, and Not only do Nathalie and Stich’s who she links to on her blogroll (and interactions fall into Herring’s definition

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of communal behavior, but they also fit My Blog Burning?” (IMBB for short). into Goffman’s concepts for the portrayal It first started with Alberto of the blog of the self. Rituals are established in Il Forno, and a post of his in which he the blogosphere and followed: spoken explained how interesting it would be to and unspoken rules such as “respond harness the power of creativity among to all comments within reason,” “blog food bloggers into a regularly,” “cite your sources.” Identities are performed and confirmed on these “[…] day where, just for the fun [sic], blogs through comments as well. In bloggers take up a certain theme and fact, an example is one in which the two come up with a recipe (original or not) for it. It would be really interesting bloggers in question are interacting: to see what people from different Nathalie posted a comment on Stich’s backgrounds come up with and a great blog regarding finding a rare fruit chance to get new ideas.”74 mentioned in Stich’s post in a local Munich specialty food store, Käfer. This This seems like a normal segue today, high-end store stocks expensive, hard- but in the 2004 food blog world it was to-find, high-quality meats, produce, quite revolutionary: an Italian’s soup and grocery items. To shop there is to recipe was posted side-by-side with a perform the part of a member of the more German’s and they could be tried out and affluent, food-conscious sector of society. compared simultaneously. Not only was Stich returned Nathalie’s comment by this a new form of expression, but it was confirming that she, too, had found the 72 popular precisely because it exploited ingredient at Käfer. what already made blogging popular: it In addition to blogrolls and comments was yet another way to use the medium sections, blog events play an important and to give voice to an individual, and to unique role in interaction on food blogs. hear other individuals’ voices in return. Blog memes, in a chain mail format such Bloggers jumped at the chance, and as surveys, questionnaires, or quizzes, the inaugural event included thirteen exist in blogs with other themes as well participants blogging about soup. By the as other Internet media such as email. In time IMBB was phased out, the last event some cases these blog events are called on cooking with tea had over ninety 73 “blog carnivals;” however, blog memes participants. Another event that still in food blogs are usually referred to as continues today is Sugar High Friday, “blog events.” Blog events are something which began later in 2004 but is one of that initially derived (in the food blog the longest-running food blog events on world, that is ) out of some early events the web. Some bloggers who typically that bloggers put together as a way of blog in other languages (including playing around with this new form of “Cucina Casalinga” among other community. Events are theme posts, German bloggers) have participated organized by one blogger, to which other in these events by blogging in English, bloggers submit their own posts around while others write their additions in their the theme. In the food blogosphere, the own languages. However, blog events first blog event on record was called “Is by no means have to be held in English,

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and German food bloggers have created increasing their own involvement in and countless fascinating blog events. Today, exposure to the community. Whether or IMBB has turned into a website of its not a blogger wants to use the blog as a own,75 run by other food bloggers than medium for profit, almost all bloggers the original Alberto, and tracks blog want to be seen and read regularly. memes all over the Internet. To become involved with blogging Notably, of the two blogs being events is one way of being a part of the analyzed here, only “Cucina Casalinga” conversation. Furthermore, blog events regularly participates in these events. represent a way in which bloggers “Delicious:Days” does not, with the participate in Goffman’s theory that exception of Sugar High Friday, one of individuals perform an identity in social which she has hosted on her own blog. settings. Which blog event, how often, Hosts and creators of blog events will and on what topic bloggers participate in often make banners that participants are all ways in which bloggers choose to can post on their websites like ads76, perform certain roles and rituals in this not only to notify their readers of their virtual social setting. participation, but also to spread the One very interesting blog event that word about the event so other bloggers occurred four times is “Deutsche schicken can submit their own posts. At one point sich gegenseitig Fresspackete” (freely in spring 2009, “Cucina Casalinga” translated by Rosa from the English: advertised the following: “Dein Kochbuch German Blogging By Post),79 which came das unbekannte Wesen” (DKduW), out of a European-wide event called “Fremdkochen,” and “räuchern Euro Blogging By Post.80 This event gestattet.” The first is a monthly event in steps out of the virtual realm and into which bloggers post about a recipe out of the bloggers’ physical kitchens: bloggers one of their cookbooks (the title references sign up for the meme, the host creates an the fact that bloggers tend to have many elaborate scheme “Secret Santa” style, neglected cookbooks); the second is in its and bloggers have a certain amount of second month and is an event in which time to put together and send packages bloggers cook a recipe from another (preferably reflecting their gastronomic blog that conforms to the month’s theme region of Germany) by regular postal and cook it, which culminates in the service to their assigned blogger. In host creating a PDF cookbook of all the return, they receive a package from a recipes;77 and the third is a reaction to a different blogger, which they photograph law passed in Germany to ban smoking and blog about, posting their reactions in restaurants and is a meme on smoking and, in some cases, recipes in which they different foods.78 cooked with received ingredients. All of these blog events serve to This kind of interaction is Jenkins’ encourage the virtual community, “convergence culture” at its core: precisely as bloggers intended them to. using virtual and offline modes of Not only do participants get to see what communication to create a community others are cooking, but it is a sure-fire of bloggers that transcends one singular way to get hits to their blogs, thereby medium. While in some ways, this offline

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communication can be seen as establishing manner of a knowledgeable acquaintance, the blogging community (it is “finally” not as much someone who is writing for becoming something “real”), it is in fact peers. A traditional reference for this just another way of taking advantage of would be someone who is a newspaper all the forms of communication available columnist: Stich is a person readers can today. Subsequently bloggers have used identify with, but also someone who has other media such as Twitter,81 mobile perfected the lifestyle and community phone cameras,82 Facebook,83 and so forth she represents on her blog. to communicate in multiple ways with Nathalie’s “Cucina Casalinga” is an each other and the reading audience. example of the diary-writer blog. She Whatever the medium used to posts daily about her meals, wines, and communicate, the food blogosphere travels, and, as a consequence, Nathalie is vast and intricate, and interaction shares much of her offline self. Her focus within it deserves a much closer look. online is to connect with peers who have Even within the much smaller German similar interests and hobbies as she does, food blogosphere, it is the many ways in and she seeks out Internet conversations which members can interact that makes with others. Her participation in blog the community viable, not to mention events, and her back-and-forth comments vibrant. with other bloggers suggest that she is involving herself fully in all of the Conclusion communicative aspects food blogging has to offer. Although the history of food blogs is very short, they have evolved into a Both of these bloggers work hard valid medium from which to study how to shape their identities and their an individual creates an identity and involvement with their readers. It cannot interacts with others through their food be argued that one expression is superior and the Internet. “Delicious:Days” and to the other, nor should it be. These are “Cucina Casalinga” are two different simply two different ways in which to examples of how food bloggers shape their engage with the same medium. These identities within a virtual community. two blogs in themselves provide a rich Using Herring’s Web Content Analysis treasure chest to study how people can framework, as well as Goffman’s social shape and share their identities online theories on the performance of self, one in different ways through writing, can see that these bloggers are shaping photography, and design. their identities and involving themselves in communities online in ways that they otherwise could not have done offline. In “Delicious:Days”, Stich represents a digital self that she has shaped from her offline self to portray an idealized world with her partner in her Munich/ Haidhausen apartment. Stich’s posts and her responses to comments are in the

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Notes 6 Computer-Mediated-Communication 1 Clotilde Dusoulier, “Chocolate & Zucchini: (CMC) is a term used for all interaction Daily Adventures in a Parisian Kitchen,” that uses computers, especially through the Chocolate & Zucchini, 6 November 2006, Internet. Crystal categorizes genres of the (October 13, 2009). Clotilde 7 Herring 1994: 350. Dusoulier, “Clotilde’s Edible Adventures 8 This would have bode questions of which in Paris,” Chocolate & Zucchini, 22 April blogs to include in this data set: Would 2008 (October 13, Switzerland? Would a blog written in 2009). English by a German-speaking expatriate 2 Adam Roberts, “The Big Reveal: Introducing in Southeast Asia be considered a “German the FN Dish,” Amateur Gourmet, 18 February blog”? Furthermore, once these definitions 2008. difficult if not impossible to determine that all (October 13, 2009). of the existing blogs were found, and how to 3 It is assumed here that these bloggers are provide meaningful context for analysis. The engaging in an online community. However Internet is far too large to ensure certainty of it should be acknowledged that “online gathering a complete data set of this kind. community” is a term that is questioned in 9 See Sarah Pederson and Caroline Macafee’s literature. For a thorough discussion of the 2007“Gender Differences in British Blogging,” term and the issues surrounding definitions Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication of online communities, see Herring 2004, 12: 1472-1492. Crystal 2006, and Gruber 2008. 10 Rebecca Blood’s 2002 “Weblogs: A History 4 Another example of convergence culture and Perspective,” in We’ve Got Blog: How would be smartphones, which use Internet- Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture, edited by and computer-based technologies to allow John Rodzvilla (Cambridge, MA: Perseus their users not only to use the devices as Pub.) 8. phones, but also planners, social networking 11 Ibid. devices, and sources of information among 12 “State of the Blogosphere 2008,” Technorati, countless other features. 22 September 2008, < http://technorati. 5 Nathalie blogs without a last name, and com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/> as such she will be referred to only with her (October 13, 2009). first name. 13 Pedersen and Macafee, 1493. Pedersen and Macafee notes that Technorati ranks blogs

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by popularity, and popularity is measured 31 This is not only a topic that is played in how many incoming links a blog has. out amongst those participating in the Furthermore, studies have shown that men’s blogosphere, but is one that the FTC has blogs tend to be linked to more, and discussed weighed in on as well. It recommends all more frequently in mainstream media than blogs to have a disclosure policy regarding women’s. This can account for the different free gifts and other uses for blogs as statistics. potential marketing tools. For a complete 14 “State of the Blogosphere 2008,” Technorati, discussion of these policies, see http://blog. 22 September 2008, < http://technorati. disclosurepolicy.org/. com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/> 32 Nicole Stich, Delicious:Days, “Days of Bliss (October 13, 2009). – Don Alfonso 1890,” 15 Ibid. (13 October 2009). alfonso-1890/> (27 February 2010). 17 Kalyn Denny Kalyn’s Kitchen, (13 October 34 Adam Roberts, “How to Make Your Food 2009). Blog Popular,” Amateur Gourmet, 8 October 18 Alanna Kellogg Kitchen Parade, (13 October 2009). 2007/10/how_to_make_you.html> (27 19 “About Us,” Foodbuzz.com, (13 October 35 Branaman 1997: lxiv. 2009). 36 Douglas 1984 20 Blogging memes are like chain mail for 37 Branaman 1997: xlviii. the blogosphere, and their role in food blogs 38 Branaman 1997: lxxv. will be discussed further on in this paper. 39 Hine 2000: 7. 21 “Essen und Trinken,” Topblogs.de, < 40 Hine 2000: 48. http://www.topblogs.de/category/essen- 41 This banner recently changed from a und-trinken/> (27 February 2010). background photograph of fresh chilies. It 22 See Jenkins 2006: 3 and Herring, 1994. was the first banner change since she created 23 See Branaman 1997: xliii. the blog. 24 Henry Jenkins, 2006: 3. 42 For a description of RSS feeds and how 25 See Herring 1994, Crystal 2006, and they are used in the Internet, see What Is Gruber, 2008. RSS? (27 26 See Herring 1994 and 2010. February 2010). 27 See Herring 1994 43 Hine 2000: 8. 28 Herring 1994: 11. 44 Branaman 1997: xlviii. Furthermore, 29 Branaman 1997: xliii. henceforth bloggers will be referred to with 30 Branaman 1997: lxvii-lxviii. female pronouns, as both bloggers in this study are women.

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45 See Long, 2003. 58 Nathalie, “Hofbräuhaus Kunstmühle 46 Translations are the author’s unless und Viktualienmarkt,” Cucina Casalinga, 2 otherwise noted. September 2008, (13 October 2009). blogspot.com/2010/02/i-amalfi.html> (27 59 Stich, Nicole, “About,” Delicious Days, February 2010). 48 Nicole Stich, “A Tipsy Winter Dessert 13 October 2009. – Arance All’Aperol” Delicious:Days, 60 Nicole Stich, “Archive for ‘my cookbook,’” dessert-arance-allaperol/> (27 February (13 October, 2009). 2010). 61 Technorati, 2008. 49 Nicole Stich, “Cooking with the Guys: 62 That they are selling ad space in US dollars Part Two – Homemade Coffee Liqueur” suggests that their target readership is in the Delicious:Days, < http://www.deliciousdays. United States, not Germany. com/archives/2009/11/26/cooking-with- 63 Nicole Stich, “Roasted Bell Pepper Risotto the-guys-part-two-homemade-coffee- Dating Chorizo Cubes,” Delicious Days, 23 liqueur/> (27 February 2010). December 2008, (13 deliciousdays.com/archives/2010/02/09/ October 2009). thylehogichi-or-how-to-fight-a-nasty-cold/> 64 Nicole Stich, “Pink Pasta – IMBB No. 2,” (27 February 2010). Delicious Days, 27 January 2006, (13 October 2009). blogspot.com/2010/01/peppinellas- 65 Nicole Stich, “Paint It Black – Grissini,” wahnsinnsliste.html> (27 February 2010). Delicious Days, 8 January 2009, (13 October 2009). Cucina Casalinga, < http://cucina-casalinga. 66 Nathalie, “Riesen-Forelle aus dem Ofen,” blogspot.com/2010/01/peppinellas- Cucina Casalinga, 7 August 2008, (27 February 2010). cucina-casalinga.blogspot.com/2008/08/ 54 Kalcik, 1984:50. mein-erster-post-seit-einiger-zeit-habe. 55 Ibid. 40. html> (13 October 2009). 56 Murcott, 1996: 63. 67 Nathalie, “Kartoffeltörtchen mit Kaviar in 57 Douglas 1984; Murcott, 64; and Parasecoli Limettensauce,” Cucina Casalinga, 1 March 2008: 127. 2010, < http://cucina-casalinga.blogspot.

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com/2010/03/kartoffeltortchen-mit-kaviar- is there any explicit revenue made in the in.html > (1 March 2010). blogging meme in general. 68 Stich, Nicole, “About,” Delicious Days, 77 The name “Fremdkochen” is a play on words referring to the verb “fremdgehen,” 13 October 2009. which means to be unfaithful. 69 Herring 1994: 356. 78 Here again this is a play on words: formerly, 70 Interestingly, this is a norm that is restaurant smoking sections would have expressed in one of Stich’s own posts titled signs saying “Rauchen Gestattet,” meaning “Foodblogging do’s and don’ts,” in which she “smoking allowed.” “Räuchern Gestatted” lays out guidelines similar to Adam Roberts’ literally translates to the same phrase, but ones on how to write a successful blog. “Räuchern” means to smoke and/or cure 71 kaltmamsell, in “Thylehogichi – or how foods. to fight a nasty cold,” Delicious:Days, 9 79 Rosa, “GBBP – DssgFP 1,” Neuhausener February, 2010< http://www.deliciousdays. Nudelsuppe, 28 March 2006, (27 php?itemid=230> (13 October 2009). February, 2010) 80 Andrew Barrow, “Euro Blogging By Post 72 Nathalie and Nichole Stich, in “And then 1 – The Round-Up,” Spittoon, 4 August 2005, she asked me if I wanted to try some…” (13 October 2009). deliciousdays.com/archives/2009/03/17/ 81 Pim Té, “Chez Pim”, Twitter, (13 October 2009). some/> (27 February 2010). 82 Clotilde Dusoulier, Clotilde’s Moblog, 73 Samuel Van Der Wall, “RPG Blog Carnival, (13 October 2009). Roleplaying Pro, 1 May, 2009, (12 March 2010). on_facebook.html> (13 October 2009). 74 Alberto, “Proposal for a Blog Cooking Day,” Il Forno, 26 January 2004, (13 October 2009). 75 Andrew Barrow and Ronald, Is My Blog Alberto. Proposal for a Blog Cooking Burning?, (13 October, 2009.) forno/2004/01/proposal_for_a_. 76 However, unlike ads, there is no explicit html> (13 October 2009). revenue made with these banner ads, nor

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Barrow, Andrew and Ronald. Is My Mediated Discourse Analysis: Blog Burning? (13 Online Behavior. In Designing for October, 2009). Virtual Communities in the Service Bauer, Elise. Simply Recipes. (13 Barab, Rob Kling, and James H. October 2009). Gray. Cambridge: Cambridge Branaman, Ann. 1997. Goffman’s Social University Press. Theory. In The Goffman Reader. _____ 2010. Web Content Analysis: Edited by Charles Lemert and Expanding the Paradigm. In Ann Branaman. Malden, MA International Handbook of Internet Blackwell Publishing. Research edited by Jeremey Crystal, David. 2006. Language and the Hunsinger, Lisbeth Klastrup, Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge and Matthew Allen. Springer, University Press. forthcoming 2010, Preprint in Denny, Kalyn. Kalyn’s Kitchen. edu/~herring/webca.2008.pdf> (13 October 2009). (20 February 2010). Douglas, Mary. 1984. Pollution. In Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Food in the Social Order. Edited Where Old and New Media Collide. by Mary Douglas. Russel Sage New York: New York University Foundation. Press. _____ Chocolate and Zucchini. (13 October 2009). Performance of Identity. In Dusoulier, Clotilde. Clotilde’s Moblog. Ethnic and Regional Foodways in (13 October of Group Identity. Edited by 2009). Linda Keller Brown and Kay Foodbuzz. About Us. Foodbuzz.com. Mussell. Knoxville: University of (13 October 2009). Kellogg, Alanna. Kitchen Parade. (13 October Communication in the New 2009). Media. In Qualitative Discourse Long, Lucy M. 2003. Culinary Tourism: Analysis in the Social Sciences. A Folkloristic Perspective on Edited by Ruth Wodak and Eating and Otherness. In Culinary Michal Krzyzanowski. New York: Tourism. Edited by Lucy M. Long. Palgrave Macmillan. University of Kentucky Press. Hine, Christine. 2000. Virtual Ethnography. Murcott, Anne. 1996. Food as an London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Expression of National Identity. SAGE. In The Future of the Nation State: Herring, Susan C. 2004. Computer- Essays on Cultural Pluralism and

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Political Integration/. Edited by category/essen-und-trinken/> Sverker Gustavsson and Leif (27 February 2010). Lewin. London, UK: Routledge: Van Der Wall, Samuel. RPG Blog 63. Carnival, May 2009: The Nathalie. Cucina Casalinga. < http:// Future Of Roleplaying. cucina-casalinga.blogspot.com/> Roleplaying Pro. 1 May, 2009. (27 February 2010). (12 March 2010). Pederson, Sarah and Caroline Macafee. What Is RSS? (27 February 2010) Blogging. Journal of Computer- Mediated Communication 12 (2007): 1472-1492. Roberts, Adam. The Amateur Gourmet. (13 October 2009). Rodzvilla, John (ed.). 2002. We’ve Got Blog : How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Pub.. Rosa. GBBP – DssgFP 1. Neuhausener Nudelsuppe. 28 March 2006. (13 October 2009). Stich, Nichole. Delicious:Days. (27 February 2010). Té, Pim. Chez Pim. Twitter. (13 October 2009). Technorati. State of the Blogosphere 2008. Technorati. 22 September 2008. < http://technorati. com/blogging/state-of-the- blogosphere/> (13 October 2009). Topblogs. Essen und Trinken. Topblogs. de. < http://www.topblogs.de/

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First, blogs in general allow for Lucy M. Long representations of self that appear to be Bowling Green State University freed from the usual constraints of race, class, gender, or other external forces. The blogger can be whoever they want logs are a new form of expression to be, focusing their identity on their that to those not versed in them relationship to food and their ability to may seem to be a perplexing use of write about it in an engaging way. They one’sB time—sort of like writing in a diary can disguise their personal attributes and and leaving it open, hoping someone will craft an imagined persona. In a sense, this read it. To those involved with blogging, is not unique to blogs—we all do this to a this form opens new ways of interacting certain extent in social spaces in which we with the world, of representing the self, are new or in public. McGaughey draws and constructing community. Food, from Goffman’s “front and back stages” perhaps because of the universality of concept here, applying them to virtual eating, is a particularly popular topic of space. One feature that is distinctive to blogs, some of which have turned into the new media is that, while the “stage” books, writing careers, and even films offers physical distance between bloggers (for example, the award winning, Julie and readers, it oftentimes offers ways for and Julia). readers to discover more about those McGaughey, in this essay, explores bloggers. Various search engines can be the world of food blogs, explaining used to fill out their identity, finding their how they do more than simply relate location, their occupational or educational experiences about food. She argues that background, and more personal social they bring together physical and virtual networking sites. Ironically, too, as a realities into a convergence culture blogger develops more of their own that is unique both to and within the voice, their on-line personality becomes blogosphere. Her discussion centers more multi-dimensional, with off-line on two facets of blogging: the ways activities and identities referenced. An in which a personal identify can be intimacy can then develop on-line that constructed and expressed through blogs seems to cut through the usual mediators and the interactions surrounding blogs of appearance, personality style, or social as constituting communities. She also skill leading to feelings of experiencing asserts that food blogs are unique as a the authentic self more in on-line than blog genre in that they both draw from face-to-face interactions. This feeling of and “overflow” into real life as well as authenticity can be powerful enough other cultural forms, such as cookbooks, to draw individuals back to the virtual films, and published memoirs. Her reality found in the blogosphere. observations are insightful and useful. I McGaughey recognizes that there are add to them here some perspectives from different approaches to blogs. One of the folkloristics on representation of self and points of her paper is that two bloggers notions of community that may further she analyzes as case studies demonstrate help us understand the popularity of this very different expectations for how phenomenon.

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readers will respond to and use their a “native genre” used by bloggers writings. One is more informational; themselves or is it an academic construct the other is more personable and invites imposed upon this group of people interaction. Not all bloggers are seeking by the writer? Why not use sociologist a virtual intimacy, but may be seeking George Simmel’s phrase “affinity group” creative outlets, or, even possible markets that describes groups that form around a for their writing or ideas. The power of single common interest and then develop blogs, though, is that they allow us to into dense social relationships? speak for ourselves, not through someone In the popular imagination, the else’s translation of our voice. word “community” tends to be a Another way of looking at blogging vague concept referencing “warm that I suggest is an adaption of Barbara and fuzzy” relationships. It can be a Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s notion of “objects concrete, physical entity—a bounded, of memory.” Like arranging souvenirs defined geographic area, such as a into a collage, photos in an album, or neighborhood--but community implies knickknacks on a shelf, blogging offers a welcoming atmosphere, a friendly a way to select from our experiences to neighborliness that goes beyond simply construct a logical narrative of our lives, co-existence to caring for one another to make sense of our personal histories; and a sense of mutual responsibility. we are here now because of things that Ideally, community provides the feeling happened in the past. They help us that one has a place in life and matters recognize the significance of past events, to others, that one can expect acceptance people, places, or even objects that and understanding when interacting may have at the time seemed mundane with other members of that community. or trivial. They also help us hold on Using “community” to refer to groups of to feelings experienced at particular individuals, who read the same blog and times in our pasts, letting us remember respond to it, might seem to be stretching things that were special. Although this the concept, but I hear people talk about may sound like an overstatement, such their online communities as places where objects of memory offer a way to affirm they feel they can relax with friends. The the fact that we exist and that our lives fact that the virtual community is totally might hold some meaning. This gives voluntary and can also be turned off and deep psychological reasons for why we on according to the individual’s own hold onto seemingly useless or worthless needs and interests makes it even more items. Blogs are similar. We can look back appealing than the “real” world in which over them to see what we were feeling in the individual may have much less the past, to find ways that we have grown, control. They can be part of it according to see how networks have developed. to their own level of interest. The second major theme McGaughey This voluntariness raises questions addresses is the idea of a community about the accuracy of the term as a developing around blogging. We scholarly concept. Folklorists Paul Jordan- should perhaps ask here why the word Smith and Laurel Horton, in an analysis “community” is being used—is this of music and dance groups, observed

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that the participants themselves self- Works Cited identified as part of a “community” when Jordan-Smith, Paul and Laurel Horton. they felt a strong emotional connection 2001. Material Expressions of between their own identity and the other Communality Among Dance participants (2001:103). The authors Groups. Western Folklore 60: 203- also borrow from Etienne Wenger to 26. describe these groups as then becoming Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1989. “communities of practice” (1998) with Objects of Memory: Material “a stable network of interpersonal Culture as Life Review. In Folk relationships and a common body of Groups and Folklore Genres: A semantically important resources for Reader. Edited by Elliot Oring. interpreting meaning” (2001: 105). The Logan, UT: Utah State University last idea expressed may be particularly Press. relevant to McCaughey’s descriptions of Wenger, Etienne. 1998. Communities of food blogs. Perhaps, readers are drawn Practice: Learning, Meaning, and to them because they feel they share a Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge way of looking at the world—food is University Press. important enough to write about, read about, and even argue about. The fact that online discussions intersect with and overflow into “real life” by individuals cooking and tasting foods included in the blog is even more affirmation of a common lens for evaluating the world outside the virtual one. McGaughey’s article sheds much needed light on a phenomenon that is increasingly becoming a significant part of people’s personal and social lives. She also demonstrates ways in which food blogs offer opportunities for new ways of interacting around food, ways that will perhaps become increasingly important as the world continues to become fractured yet connected through globalization.

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the links between UFO- and fairy-lore, observing that informants’ descriptions of UFO-Abduction Narratives aliens bear a remarkable resemblance to and the Technology of traditional accounts of anthropomorphic Tradition1 supernaturals, not least in the propensity of both groups to abduct human beings (Bullard 1989; Rojcewicz 1991). Kimberly Ball A major factor distinguishing the two University of California, Irvine groups is the aliens’ use of highly advanced technology, which is, from a human standpoint, futuristic. Accordingly, Abstract several scholars have interpreted the This article examines UFO-abduction narratives UFO-abduction narrative as a reaction to posted to online discussion fora, and argues technological change, in one form or an- that these narratives reflect millennial anxieties other (Dean 1998, 126-52; Luckhurst 1998, over an anticipated hyper-technological future 38-40; Bullard 2000, 156-7; Barbeito 2005, figured as “alien.” In particular, UFO-abduction 206-10; Dewan 2006, 197; Kelley-Romano narratives reflect concerns over developments in those technologies used to transmit information 2006, 394; Brown 2007, 70-82, 85-99). I over space and time, i.e., technologies of tradition. would like to contribute to this conversa- These narratives thus thematize the circumstances tion by proposing that these narratives are of their own transmission, and developments in the especially concerned with developments transmission of traditional lore more generally. in those technologies used to transmit information over space and time—what I am terming “technologies of tradition.” I he first to point out a connection introduce this term to refer to any device between UFO phenomena and the for conveying knowledge or culture from supernaturalT phenomena of tradition one context into another, and to serve as was astronomer Jacques Vallee, who, in a reminder that technology is intrinsic 1969, suggested that the similarity among to tradition, even if it is only that most accounts of UFOs, demons, angels, fundamental technology of tradition: fairies, and ghosts provides evidence language. Casting the matter in this way against the extraterrestrial hypothesis discourages the tendency to see technol- of UFO origins (Vallee 1969). Folklorists ogy as opposed to tradition, and allows have since heeded Linda Dégh’s call to the anxieties engendered by recent devel- study reports of encounters with UFOs opments in new media to be contextual- and those who pilot them as legends, ized within a long history of anxiety over hence as part of a tradition of anomalous- changes to the ways in which elements of experience narratives describing human the past are brought into the future. The dealings with unusual beings of various latest major development in the technol- kinds (Dégh 1977). In particular, Thomas ogy of tradition is the advent of the In- Bullard and Peter Rojcewicz have ternet, which represents the culmination contributed to an understanding of of advancements in two spheres: digital Cultural Analysis 9 (2010): 99-128 © 2010 by The University of California. All rights reserved 99 Kimberly Ball UFO-Abduction Narratives

information technology and mass media. rative is a particularly apt subject for Through an analysis of various motifs, I such a study, and a legend of particular will argue that UFO-abduction narratives interest at this time, in that it confronts express anxieties over the rapid changes one of the central concerns of our age: in these two spheres during the period in humanity’s transformation through its which these stories have been told, from engagement with technology. the mid-twentieth century to the present. In particular, I argue that these narratives Technology vs. Humanity thematize the circumstances of their own Reports of anomalous objects in the skies transmission, which occurs today in large 2 go back at least as far as the description part via the Internet. of Ezekiel’s visions in the Old Testament, Though referencing studies published and the extraterrestrial hypothesis was by abduction investigators, this article adduced as early as the nineteenth cen- focuses on the UFO-abduction narra- tury, when mysterious “airships” were tive as it exists online, where numerous sighted over various locations in the sites host discussion fora in which par- United States and presumed in the popu- ticipants report their own and comment 3 lar press to contain emissaries from other on one another’s abduction experiences. planets (Ezekiel 1, 4-28 NRSV; Sanarov I have amassed a database of a little over 1981, 163; Denzler 2001, 5-6). The begin- 200 abduction narratives from English- ning of the UFO era is, however, usually language discussion fora, each of which dated to 1947, when “flying saucers” were is embedded in or, indeed, constituted by first described by pilot Kenneth Arnold, a discussion with multiple participants. who saw a group of disc-shaped objects Online-forum participants contribute above the Cascade Mountain range in the their narratives spontaneously in an in- state of Washington; later that year sto- formal setting, responding to questions ries surfaced about a crashed alien sau- and comments from other participants cer in Roswell, New Mexico (Arnold and who stand on a more or less equal foot- Palmer 1952; Coates 2001, vii). First-hand ing with themselves. Instead of playing accounts of contact with the occupants of an active role, the researcher may choose, these craft began to appear in the 1950s as I have done, to stand outside this pro- and initially described benevolent beings cess. As Jan Fernback and Trevor Blank who proffered gentle advice to willing have individually observed, the online human interlocutors (Leslie and Adam- discussion forum is therefore an ideal site ski 1953; Angelluci 1955)—but reports to study legend, a genre that unfolds in of a more sinister kind soon started to conversation, often as a debate regarding emerge. The best known UFO-abduction matters of contested ontological status report of this era, and the first to exhibit which informants might feel abashed to a pattern that has since become familiar, discuss in the presence of the academic was made in 1961 by Betty and Barney researcher (Fernback 2003; Blank 2007). Hill, who, under hypnotic regression, Despite these inherent advantages, there told psychiatrist Benjamin Simon of be- has thus far been little study of legends ing taken off a New Hampshire road by on the Internet. The UFO-abduction nar- aliens who used mind control to force the

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couple into their craft and subject them was not until the introduction of the mi- to medical examination (Fuller 1966).4 crochip in 1975 that the home computer Several similar accounts gained wide became a possibility. In 1984, just 20% of publicity in the 1970s, and in the 1980s Americans used a computer, and most of and 90s UFO-abduction narratives be- this usage was confined to the workplace, came almost commonplace, as investi- but by 2007 this number had increased gators obtained stories from hundreds to 80%, with 76% of Americans owning of individuals who underwent hypnosis personal computers (U.S. Census Bureau to recall periods of “missing time” they 1988; Pew Research Center 2007). Even suspected might indicate alien interfer- more intimate than technology in the ence with their memories.5 Today, UFO- home, the use of technology in the body abduction narratives flourish online. also increased dramatically during this The UFO-abduction narrative is, then, period. The first electric pacemaker was a phenomenon of the late twentieth and implanted in a heart patient in 1958. To- early twenty-first centuries. What dis- day, roughly 250,000 cardiac pacemakers tinguishes this era from previous eras are surgically implanted each year, and is the proliferation of increasingly so- the use of other medical implants, such phisticated technology and its growing as neurological stimulators and cochlear presence in the daily lives of ordinary devices, is growing (Haddad, Houben, people. When the modern UFO era be- and Serdijn 2006, 38). Perhaps the most gan in 1947, many of the household elec- startling developments have occurred in tronic devices in use today had already the realm of assisted reproductive tech- been developed, but ownership of these nology, or ART. Since the birth of the first devices was not widespread, even in “test-tube baby” in 1978, an issue of great relatively wealthy countries. Advances controversy at the time, in-vitro fertiliza- in mass production in the 1950s and 60s tion has become a relatively routine prac- together with increased prosperity in the tice, especially in Europe and the United wake of World War II greatly expanded States, with some 200,000 ART babies the presence and number of such items born worldwide in 2004 (Horsey 2006). in the average homes of industrialized Our current idea of the future is, nations. Electronic television sets, for ex- logically, one in which technological ample, became available for purchase by advancement has continued apace, and the general public in the 1930s, but the technology has become embedded even proportion of U.S. households owning more thoroughly in every aspect of our televisions in 1950 was just 10%, increas- everyday existence. The aliens in UFO- ing rapidly to 94% by 1965 (Steinberg abduction narratives, with their high- 1980). By 2005, ownership had increased tech devices that allow them to intrude only slightly, to 98%, but the average into the most intimate realms of human number of televisions per household had life (the interior of the home, the interior grown to 2.6 (U.S. Census Bureau 2008). of the body, the “recesses of the mind”) Other technologies have taken longer to aptly represent this vision of a hyper- infiltrate the home. The 1940s saw the be- technological future. UFO-abduction-fo- ginnings of computer technology, but it rum participants regularly comment on

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the advanced state of alien technology, hate. What we have for emotions they which they attempt to contextualize by have for intelligence. That’s the com- estimating how far in the future human promise. (Larson 2007) beings might be expected to reach similar levels of technical expertise. AmentiHall, Larson expresses a dichotomy that is for example, characterizes aliens as pos- common to both the human/alien and sessing “technology and mental faculties human/machine distinctions in the far exceeding our own from hundreds to popular imagination. We anthropo- thousands of years,” while LooseLips- morphize machines in terms of “intelli- SinkShips puts a finer point on it, stating gence,” imagining that there could be a that the aliens use “technology that is consciousness at work in the computer roughly 2,500 years more advanced than or the robot, but we are less able to imag- where we are in the year 2007” (Amen- ine a machine consciousness capable of tiHall 2009; LooseLipsSinkShips 2007). emotion, which is felt to be more deep- Bart5050 goes further still: ly human than reason. Lack of emotion links the alien and the machine. In the If a species reached the industrial age discourse surrounding UFO-abduction, say four billion years ago, manipulat- this similarity prompts speculation as to ing the physical laws might be simple. the aliens’ true “nature.” We manipulate the physical laws of In an online discussion of the seem- the universe every time we turn on a PC. Scale that up a few billion years. ing affectlessness of the “Gray” aliens (Bart5050 2009, Post 9)6 who usually figure in abduction narratives, Advancer states that “the Grayling The aliens in these narratives wield a fu- must be seen as a robot controlled by a turistic array of high-tech devices, and it cowardly being, for this is what they are is their highly advanced technology that - nothing more than flesh with no free allows them to come to this world in the mind” (Advancer 2009). Roberto21 de- first place, but their connections with scribes his alien abductors as “small be- technology go further than this. Aliens ings who behaved, as always, in a totally also tend to exhibit the traits of technolo- robotic, mechanical way” (Roberto21 gy. A common motif in both UFO-abduc- 2009, Post 32). Bart5050 conjectures that tion narratives and popular representa- they are beings “specifically engineered tions of aliens—from the pod people of to make long journeys and gather mate- Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Star Trek’s rial,” while Angel opines that the Grays Spock—is that aliens lack emotion. This may be “clones,” because “they all look lack is usually regarded as connected the same” (Bart5050 2009, Post 3; Angel with alien intelligence. As abductee and 2006). In line with this idea and noting discussion-forum participant Mark Lar- Bridget Brown’s characterization of the son puts it: Grays as “an army of uniformity,” scholar Patricia Barbeito suggests that this same- [The aliens are] just a group of people ness “identifies [the aliens] as symbols without emotions. They lack emotion of the effects of mass freproduction,” a and are curious about our emotions: symbolism that is reinforced in “hybrid- happy, sad, uneasy, frightened, love,

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ization” narratives, which confront hu- tion-forum contributor HighlanderCon- man beings with their own “technical spiritor describes the experience thus: reproducibility” (Brown 1997, 5; Barbeito 2005, 206-7). [I] was with a friend, camping in my back garden. Bright lights above our The engineering of humanity is the heads. All I remember was he went central theme in the “hybridization” nuts, screaming about aliens, while I narrative, as Stephanie Kelley-Romano just suddenly couldn’t move and fell terms those abduction stories in which into a sort of deep sleep, totally numb aliens act to save their own species from with no thoughts while awake at the extinction through a human-alien inter- same time. Aware of things, if you breeding project (Kelley-Romano 2006, know what I mean. I just remember 394-7).7 During many abductions the being stood over for a long time by reproductive systems of both sexes are very tall thin people, and then waking examined at length, and ova and some- up with my mate crying in the corner of the tent. (HighlanderConspiritor times embryos are removed from female 2005) abductees while sperm is collected from males (Bullard 1989, 156; Rojcewicz 1991, The aliens’ ability to reproduce and ma- 493). Some narratives go further, describ- nipulate human beings in mechanical ing how fetuses resulting from the aliens’ ways suggests the technologization of breeding program are implanted in and humanity, a suggestion reinforced by the then harvested from female abductees terminology used to describe what aliens before being placed in a high-tech facil- do to abductees in several narratives ity abduction investigator David Jacobs posted online. Dark Knight, for example, terms the “incubatorium” (Jacobs 1992, reports that aliens are “overwriting” her 153). The scale of the incubatorium’s thoughts and performing a “data down- “mass reproduction” is emphasized in load” into her mind, while Phil describes the online narrative of Rz Blade, who re- a procedure in which a Gray “programs” ports having seen aboard a UFO “shelves an abductee by staring into his eyes and shelves full of babies in jars—thou- 9 (Dark Knight 2008; Phil 2009). Aliens sands and thousands of them” (Rz Blade 8 are, moreover, said to implant humans 2007). Aliens are like devices or copies with tiny devices, which are supposed to of a prototype rather than individual or- locate, monitor, and/or control abduct- ganic beings, and they treat their human ees (Hopkins 1987, 59). In one forum it is abductees correspondingly as things to speculated that an abductee might have be mechanically reproduced and manip- a “micro-stargate installed by aliens” in ulated. her uterus as part of the hybridization Another dramatic example of this is program (OmegaLogos 2009). The al- when aliens simply “switch off” people terations made to abductee Cliff Dess are whom they do not wish to abduct but more thorough: who are present during an abduction, rendering them unconscious or at least I had my left eye removed from the immobile for a time (Hopkins 1987, 34- socket and things threaded through 5, 97, 110-11; Jacobs 1992, 55, 71). Abduc- the optic nerve. Things were pushed

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down the back of my throat and a fine Cliff Dess relates that during his child- needle which was pushed up through hood his mother was periodically re- the table that I was lying on was in- placed with a “clone” who acted “roboti- serted into the back of my neck […] I cally” while his true mother was used have some of the most sophisticated by the aliens in their breeding program technology integrated into my body that is state of the art [...] I believe the (Dess 2007). In Dess’s narrative, it turns procedures that were performed on me out that humans are being replaced on were an advanced way of monitoring a much larger scale, for Dess sees alien/ us. They are able to see what I see, hear human hybrids, whom he identifies in what I hear and speak, so I am a pris- part through their “robotic” actions, in- oner inside my own existence. I do not termingling with the human population believe that I am the only one with this wherever he goes, and one such hybrid technology integrated within. I believe communicates telepathically with Dess’s this is being done rampantly through- wife, telling her that “humans are be- out society to certain individuals who coming outnumbered” (Ibid.). Indeed, at may be a threat to their agenda. (Dess 2007) one point Dess laments the decline of humanity into mindless consumerism and emotional coldness—which is part of the Many abductees feel that they have been alien plot—with the statement that “we electrically charged as a result of such are becoming the hybrids of the future” implants or other alien procedures, and (Ibid.). On another forum, Red expresses that this charge causes the equipment a similar idea: around them to sometimes malfunc- tion (WorldShadow 2007; Dreamforaday We are all stressed out, but what is 2009; Koval321 2009; Roberto21 2009: driving so many people over the edge? Post 1.). In a related phenomenon, ab- I have been called paranoid and delu- ductees report hearing electrical sounds sional, and sometimes it hurts. But I before, during, and after their abduc- stand by my theory that we here on tions, and one abductee sporadically Planet Earth are being invaded. They sees “wavelengths” or “grid lines…like are using advanced technology to on a computer,” after the aliens have warp our minds, and to turn us against “altered” him (Smersh 2008; Cravemor one another. (Red 2007) 2009; Mamasong 2009; NCDreamer38 2009; Proustwouldlikesumtea 2009). Such In UFO-abduction narratives, it is tech- technologization may ultimately render nology’s increasing capacity to affect and human beings as affectless as aliens, for alter humanity on many levels that the Dark Knight claims: “I also have not felt aliens, as the machine-like representa- my emotions since the attacks started in tives of a high-tech future, portend. I 1998” (Dark Knight 2008). propose that these narratives are especially concerned with the effects of de- The de-humanization of humanity velopments in those technologies used through alien technology is a theme that to transmit information over space and is regularly discussed in UFO-abduc- time—what I am terming technologies of tion fora. In a story reminiscent of fairy tradition. After all, what aliens seek dur- changeling legends (ML 5085), abductee ing abduction is, largely, information.

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Aliens and Information Technology 243-4; Jacobs 1992, 223). Many, like ab- Aliens gather various kinds of informa- ductee John_Doe, remember the eyes as tion during abductions. They study hu- an especially frightening aspect of the man anatomy at length and collect phys- abduction experience: ical samples, especially of reproductive materials providing genetic information. It had eyes that were big and almond shaped […] there were no pupils. Its Aliens are also interested in the knowl- eyes were black and void, showing edge humans possess, but rather than no signs of feeling [...] I still get night- ask abductees questions, aliens often mares of this entity looking at me resort to a technique Jacobs refers to as (John_Doe 2009A) “information transfer” (Jacobs 1992: 197). Sometimes this is accomplished through Noting the eyes’ seeming hardness and special equipment, as in the case of Ro- reflectivity, some abductees have likened berto21, who describes the following ex- them to an artificial covering of some perience aboard a UFO: kind, such as glass or plastic (Hopkins 1981: 189-90): I was also able to see my whole life projected into images, extremely fast. I To me, it looked like they were wear- had the feeling that everything inside ing a very hard, shiny helmet around my brain, past memories, sensations, their heads –so I wasn’t really seeing experiences, was also being watched the real head, and it looked like they and recorded by some kind of a device had coverings on their eyes. They linked to me through the chair I was had the classical large, black, almond sitting on. (Roberto21 2009: Post 1) shaped eyes – but to me they looked like coverings. (Alexis_Amy 2009) Here, information is conveyed not through oral, written, or even telepathic In short, alien eyes resemble blank communication, but as a kind of down- screens.10 The interface between human load, as from one machine to another. In- and alien during information gathering formation may also be transferred wire- is therefore akin to the screens that serve lessly, as it were, through a procedure as interface between humans and vari- Jacobs terms “mindscan,” during which ous devices used to transmit and receive an alien stares deeply into an abductee’s information: the television, the comput- eyes, leaving abductees with the feeling er, the mobile phone. Abductees often re- that “data” has been “extracted from port seeing a bluish glow during abduc- their minds” (Jacobs 1992: 97). Adding to tion, which mimics the glow from such the technological quality of this process a screen in a darkened room (Generical- is the mindscan interface, i.e., the aliens’ lyMajestic 2009; Roberto21 2009, Post 1; eyes. Ibeleave 2009; Spacemushrooms 2009; The eyes are perhaps the most com- John_Doe 2009A). And just as one usu- mented-upon feature of alien anatomy. ally confronts a blank screen before be- Most abductees describe alien eyes as ginning an experience with information enormous and uniformly black, taking technology, the aliens’ eyes often serve as up most of the alien’s face (Bullard 1987, a gateway into the abduction experience

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(Jacobs 1992: 96). The experience of ab- constituting a revolutionary develop- ductee Mark Larson is typical: ment in the technology of tradition. The beginnings of digital information technol- I was about eleven years old when I ogy can be traced to machines built in the woke up to a strangely, dimly lit room 1940s, the decade when the modern UFO with three Grays over my bed, two phenomenon began. The development on one side, the third “leader” on the of Internet technology, which profound- right-hand side. My older brother was about ten feet from me in his bed sleep- ly increases the scope and power of the ing. I gasped to holler out and tried to database, starts with the United States’ flex myself from my bed. I was para- establishment of ARPA (the Advanced 12 lyzed from the neck down and noth- Research Projects Agency) in 1958 as ing came out of my mouth, no noise. part of the Cold War quest to supersede My vocal cords were completely shut Soviet technology, motivated in part by off. The three Grays were just bend- the USSR’s Sputnik launches. The devel- ing their heads staring at me, like they opment of cyberspace is thus linked at could read my mind, their eyes wide the outset to the conquest of outer space. and big. (Larson 2007) 11 It is the speed of computer technology and its capacity to process through great In addition to gathering information, expanses of information in brief periods aliens also use their eyes to implant vi- of time that make possible the digital sions, feelings, and thoughts into their database; correspondingly it is the abil- human subjects, constituting a data-trans- ity of Internet technology to transmit fer in the other direction (Jacobs 1992: 99- information rapidly through space that 106, 143-50, 197). This is what happened radically increases access to the digital during the abduction of Funky-Zoo: database. These features of the database are mirrored in the great speed at which Then I suddenly woke up and I saw this short being, about 70 to 80 centi- UFOs are reported to travel and the vast meters, in front of my bed looking into distances they are said to cover, indicat- my eyes. At first I was terrified, thinking a power for transmitting information ing, what is this thing going to do to unparalleled in previous technologies of me? But then, while looking in its eyes, tradition. But there can be a horrific as- these calming thoughts came into my pect to the inhuman scale of such power, head. I remember thinking, “he is a and UFO-abduction narratives are, for good guy; he’s here to help you; he the most part, horror stories. won’t hurt you; you’re safe now.” I remember looking in its eyes was very To be abducted is to be overwhelmed relaxing. (Funky-Zoo 2009) by technology. Aliens almost never use bodily force to capture human beings, The alien eye is the interface for a two- but rather rely on special devices beyond way exchange of information, much like human ken to render humans helpless. A the screens that serve as interface between beam of light is sometimes used to trans- humans and the digital database. The dig- port abductees to the aliens’ ship, or a ital database is the defining technological mysterious technology is used to para- breakthrough of the “Information Age,” lyze humans so that the aliens may do

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their work unimpeded, as in the case of King of Egypt once warned that the tech- AmentiHall: nology of writing would make people forgetful insofar as they would become The next occurrence was a battle of dependent on “external marks that are battles. It changed my life and my alien to themselves” (graphēs exōthen perception of everything. I, as a soul, hup’ allotriōn tupōn), rather than relying was fighting for my life, for control of on their own powers of memory (Plato my body. This being horribly violated 13 my entire body and was attempting 274e). Walter Ong has pointed out that to control me. I was in my body but concerns over computer technology mir- POWERLESS. The technology it used ror the concerns over writing expressed was beyond my comprehension. There in the Phaedrus, in that both technolo- was a loud frequency “scratching” or gies are seen to “provide an external re- “crash sound” in my brain. (Amenti- source for what ought to be [an] internal Hall 2009) resource,” and in both cases “give-and- take between real persons” is replaced During capture, and during information with something “unreal” and “unnatu- gathering, many abductees report feeling ral” (Ong [1982], 78-9). The alienness of similarly “overwhelmed” by the hypnot- the UFO and its pilots stands for the per- ic power of the aliens’ screen-like eyes, ceived unnaturalness of the latest tech- which they are “powerless” to resist (Ja- nologies of tradition, and their power cobs 1992: 98-9). The information abduct- to alienate by to some extent replacing ees receive from aliens can also be over- face-to-face oral interaction as a means whelming, as in the experience of Dark for transmitting information. In this re- Knight, during her “data download”: spect, UFO-abduction narratives serve as commentaries on the circumstances I was inundated with swirling 3D of their own transmission, for these nar- shapes and numerous background ratives are transmitted mainly through sounds, very confusing, very disori- enting […] the movement, swirling mass media. shapes and noise, I couldn’t concen- trate. Everything to overload your UFOs and Mass Media senses so you just shut down. (Dark Torunn Selberg has observed that in a Knight 2008) number of narratives relating UFO sightings in 1991 near Bergen, Norway, refer- In the often nightmarish terms of the ences to the mass media provided the UFO-abduction narrative, humanity is specific orientation in space and time opposed to the alien technologies that characteristic of the legend genre (Sel- threaten to overwhelm it, just as the lat- berg 1993, 114). Selberg cites several in- est technologies of tradition are so often stances where the narrator sets the scene seen as threatening to overwhelm and al- with reference to a particular television ter basic elements of our humanity, and or radio program to which he or she was our connection to the past. This percep- paying attention just before sighting the tion goes back at least as far as Plato’s UFO, as in the following: Phaedrus, in which Socrates tells how the

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And when I was sitting here and was On the one hand, the fact that people about to start following the program use references to mass media to verify “Window on the World”…And I was and to locate the events of UFO narra- sitting here and watching the start of tives spatially and temporally reflects that program. Then I saw, out of the the amount of time people spend engag- corner of my eye, a cluster of white blinking lights… (Selberg 1993, 110)14 ing with these media, especially at night when most UFO phenomena occur. On the other hand, as is especially evident Sometimes, as in the case of online-disin the last two examples, the proximity cussion-forum contributor All-Natural, of mass media experiences to UFO expe- mass media transmissions alert abduct- riences in narrative reflects the ways in ees to the fact that they have had a “miss- which this lore is transmitted. Selberg re- ing time” experience: ports that in the case of the Bergen UFO I was watching the History Channel, sightings the mass media served to trans- a two-hour biography of the life of mit people’s experience stories and, by Nero. After a few minutes of watching so doing, provided the reference points it I got bored because I’d already seen for many more people to interpret their that the day before. So I went outside anomalous experiences as UFO sightings in their backyard to enjoy the view of (Selberg 1993, 114). With respect to UFO- the city […] I sat on one of the lawn abduction narratives, Thomas Bullard chairs for about 30 minutes […] Then notes that “dispersal of this folklore by suddenly the wind stopped and I had electronic and printed means has become an annoying ringing noise in my head. Also I had a headache. I just felt weird. so important that oral transmission plays It’s kind of like the feeling you get only a minor role” (Bullard 1989, 166). In- when you realize you’re on the floor deed, most abductees first become aware after you fainted […] When I looked at that they have been abducted after en- the TV the biography of Nero already countering an abduction account in the passed! It’s impossible after sitting for mass media and then beginning to ques- 20-30 minutes a two-hour biography tion “missing time” in their own expe- ended. (All-Natural 2008A) rience; once they are convinced of their own abduction, abductees then typically Another kind of mass-media referencing become avid consumers and producers is found in the UFO-abduction narrative of abduction narratives in the mass me- of online-discussion-forum contributor dia, increasingly on the Internet (Brown Kayla, who, in another move character- 2007, 178-9, 182). The UFO phenomenon istic of the legend genre, reassures her is thus part of a relatively new develop- readers of her story’s veracity with the ment in the transmission of folk narrative, following analogy: “I will tell you right one that only becomes possible in the lat- now that the experience and the ‘aliens’ ter twentieth century, whereby the mass were as realistic as I’m seeing the com- media become the primary conduit for puter screen right now” (Kayla 2001). In some narratives which would have pre- a similar vein, Gabblebee describes her viously been spread mainly through the alien abductors as being “as pale as the oral tradition. There are ways in which textbox I’m typing in” (Gabblebee 2009). UFO narratives thematize this development.

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C.G. Jung described accounts of UFOs They were visible to everyone ev- as constituting a “visionary rumour,” erywhere in the world. There was no that is, “a story that is told all over the panic, no fear, no incidents, no warn- world, but differs from an ordinary ru- ings. Just pure awe and excitement. (Dreamforaday 2009) mour in that it is expressed in the form of visions, or perhaps owed its existence to them in the first place and is now kept The sense of “unusual connection” alive by them” (Jung 1959: 19). With this Dreamforaday feels sharing this experi- definition, it would seem that any wide- ence with the crowd in the field deepens spread traditional narrative relating a into “pure awe and excitement” at the type of anomalous experience that en- prospect of sharing it with “everyone ev- tails a visual component could likewise erywhere in the world.” It is unclear from be termed a “visionary rumour”—but the narrative whether the UFOs are vis- Jung’s emphasis on the visual aspect of ible to everyone in their skies or on their UFO phenomena (an aspect which is also television screens, suggesting an equiva- brought out in the term “sighting” com- lence between the two modes of view- monly used to refer to UFO encounters) ing. The UFO in flight, visible by many is peculiarly fitting, for UFO narratives people and from many perspectives at may be regarded as “visionary” in ways once, symbolizes the accessibility of in- that other anomalous experience stories formation, and the “unusual connection” are not. Whereas the anthropomorphic between people that can result, when the supernatural beings of tradition tend to mode of transmission is through mass dwell in the hidden nooks and crannies media. of the world (in the woods, underwa- The history of mass media arguably ter, beneath the mound, inside the crag), begins with the printing press, but the UFOs are on display in the sky, at least range of media transmission does not potentially visible to many people at reach a truly massive scale until the twen- once.15 Jung emphasized the “collective” tieth century with the broadcasting of nature of UFO visions, which frequently radio and television, and, most recently, involve waves of sightings (Jung 1959: the advent of the World Wide Web. Since 19-20). This collectivity features promi- the Web went online in 1991, the Internet nently in the UFO-dream narrative post- has become a major mode of transmis- ed online by Dreamforaday: sion for UFO and UFO-abduction narratives. Numerous websites, chatrooms, I walked over to a large field with a and discussion fora are devoted to UFO crowd of people standing and looking phenomena, and this is part of a larger up at the sky […] I looked up and saw trend in the transmission of traditional a bunch of star-like shiny dots […] I re- narrative. The mass readability of infor- member feeling a surge of excitement mation posted to the Web, styled “elec- and unusual connection hard to put tronic skywriting” by cognitive scientist into words. I kept looking up at the shiny metallic objects gently hovering Stevan Harnad (Harnad 1991), is akin to in the sky […] I ran home to see what the mass viewability of the UFO as object the TV networks say. And indeed, ev- in the sky. The proliferation and simulta- ery channel was covering the event. neous existence of UFO and UFO-abduc-

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tion stories on the Web, each providing a tion. Also, the written word is mostly unique perspective on the phenomenon, delivered in a form geared toward indi- often through the firsthand narration of vidual reading, while the spoken word is an individual experience, is akin to the at least potentially audible to many peo- multiple perspectives possible simulta- ple at once, especially if it is broadcast neously of the aerial UFO. But although through the mass media of radio or tele- Internet technology lends itself to such vision. Thus for Ong, “listening to spo- visual analogies, and although the trans- ken words forms hearers into a group, a mission of folk narrative via the Internet true audience,” whereas “reading writ- is still largely accomplished through the ten or printed texts turns individuals in medium of writing, Internet technology on themselves” (Ibid., 134). may be understood as sharing in some Writing in 1982, Ong did not address of the characteristics more normally as- computer-mediated-communication sociated with orality/aurality, and these technologies (CMC)—such as email, tex- characteristics may be part of what makes ting, and online chatrooms—in his dis- this medium so appealing as a mode of cussion of the differences between oral- transmission for legend. ity and literacy, but others have pointed out the ways in which these technologies Secondary Orality: share in some of the characteristics of Community vs. Alienation orality that Ong identifies, despite their being written modes of communication Walter Ong coined the term “secondary (Harnad 1991; Langham 1994; Fernback orality” in 1982 to refer to that orality 2003). The speed of CMC approaches “sustained by telephone, radio, televi- that of oral conversation, creating a sense sion, and other electronic devices that of co-presence in time, while the interface depend for their existence and function- of the screen, with messages co-present ing on writing and print”(Ong [1982], in visual space suggests a shared place. 11). Secondary orality is like the orality The potential for fostering the sense of of face-to-face communication not only participation in a temporally and spain its use of the spoken word, Ong main- tially co-present group that character- tains, but also in “its participatory mys- izes face-to-face orality is thus arguably tique, its fostering of a communal sense, greater with CMC than with the forms its concentration on the present moment, of secondary orality that Ong described and even its use of formulas” (Ibid., 134). in 1982, with the possible exception of Each of these characteristics distinguish- telephony. In the age of YouTube, DVRs, es orality, secondary or otherwise, from and podcasting, as well as the personal written modes of communication, ac- viewing/listening device, radio and tele- cording to Ong, as writing presupposes vision audience members may not be the separation of message-sender from listening to a particular program at the message-receiver in both time and space, same time or place as anyone else. Radio making it less present- and less presence- and television, moreover, mostly provide oriented than spoken communication, one-way transmissions in contrast to the which is rooted in the temporal and spa- multi-user communication technology tial togetherness of face-to-face interac-

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of CMC, which better approximates the age person’s range of experience. This is give and take of face-to-face oral conver- why, after abduction, All-Natural turns sation. Orality and CMC are also to some to the Internet: extent comparable in terms of their greater accessibility compared to such forms I have no idea what happened. The of transmission as literary publishing or next day I was kind of depressed television broadcasting, to which con- thinking how my goals in life are so stupid and pointless. I stayed indoors tributing access is severely restricted. In for a few days looking up all over the these ways CMC brings us back together Internet to find people who I can talk again from the relative isolation of ear- and relate to. Nobody I interact with lier modes of writing and earlier forms in my daily life seems to have any an- of mass media. The acts of mass-media swers. (All-Natural 2008B ) transmission by which UFO-abduction narratives are spread, especially via the The Internet is regarded by abductees Internet where technology reproduces as an improvement upon earlier forms some of the qualities of face-to-face com- of mass media in this regard, because it munication, likewise reunite abductees makes possible interactions among peo- with their fellow human beings, over- ple who, though separated by geogra- coming to an extent the potential for phy and other circumstances, are united these technologies to alienate us from by abduction. Another way in which the one another. The “secondary” sense of Internet constitutes an improvement on togetherness fostered through these tech- previous technologies of tradition is indi- nologies thus constitutes a way in which cated in an online post by Howoulduno: humanity resists being overwhelmed by technology. Technology has changed so much in Many abductees seem to regard the the last few years that a truer picture of Internet in this light, as a way to over- the number of encounters is emerging via the INTERNET […] My first expe- come isolation. Abductees often report rience was in 1969, then I read all the feeling cut off from their fellow human UFO books that I could on the matter. beings insofar as they cannot talk about I found USA authors very unreliable their experiences with non-abductees in their reporting, whereas the IN- without the fear of ridicule, as in the case TERNET has many witnesses to these of John_Doe: UFOs from their own experiences […] All the books that I read didn’t fit with Now it’s like I want to talk to friends my encounter, but the INTERNET has about it, but then again I don’t want to shown me that many people have had be labeled as that crazy guy. So here I similar experiences. (Howoulduno am searching for answers on an Inter- 2009) net forum. (John_Doe 2009B) By creating a vast database of personal Even if non-abductees are willing to of- accounts, the Internet provides a better fer a sympathetic and non-judgmental idea of abduction’s extent, allowing ab- ear, they cannot be relied upon to give ductees to feel themselves part of a wide- advice in matters so far beyond the aver- spread phenomenon rather than isolated

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in the singularity of their experiences. lation that makes one liable to encounter Also, the Internet grants a “truer picture” an anomalous being. In UFO-abduction of the nature of abduction, directly from narratives, however, isolation is often abductees rather than filtered through the achieved not through norm violation but writings of abduction investigators. If, as through a kind of norm adherence, when in the case of Howoulduno, this picture an abductee follows the cultural norm of better comports with an abductee’s own retreating into solitude to utilize technol- experience than the picture given else- ogy. In many UFO-abduction narratives, where, the sense of singularity is reduced abduction happens when people are in- even further. Abductees use Internet terfacing with electronic media, or im- technology to connect with one another mediately thereafter:16 and thus overcome feelings of isolation, but is this techno-togetherness really suf- I was staring at the TV screen when all ficient to counteract the alienating effects of a sudden I looked at the doorway of the technology through which it is ac- and an un-worldly-looking figure was there. (MagicWords55 2009) complished? It is important not to paint too bright a picture, for UFO-abduction narratives thematize the circumstances I went to my room to play video games of their own transmission, and these nar- to take my mind off of things, and fell ratives tend to be dark tales. The role of asleep in my bed with controller in isolation in UFO-abduction narratives hand. LOL! Anyway, I woke up again indicates that there is no simple reso- to see a blue-purple face that was in lution to the problem of technological the shape of what a Gray face would alienation. look like. (Lionbear 2009) The transmission of UFO-abduction narratives through mass media tends to After about an hour of messing around happen when one is physically alone or as on the computer, I decided it was time if alone, increasingly when one is in front to go to sleep. I shut my computer of the computer screen interfacing with down […] then I looked up. I was com- the online digital database. Likewise, pletely thrown off guard. I was staring abduction tends to happen when people at a being. (John-Doe 2009) are alone or as if alone (in group situations, everyone else is “switched off”), It may be that people do feel a certain confronted by the screen-like eyes of the guilt or uneasiness engaging in what alien abductor. Of course, anomalous-ex- could be construed as anti-social behav- perience stories in general tend to begin ior when they isolate themselves physi- with the isolation of the protagonist. The cally to interface with technology, and person traveling alone at night through these feelings may play a role in actual- the forest is far more likely to meet up izing what is usually a negative abduc- with the anthropomorphic supernaturals tion experience that in some ways mim- than is the person who remains among ics the experience of engaging with tech- her fellow humans, indicating that isola- nology. Like the use of electronic media, tion may signal or constitute a norm vio- abduction is typically an act of physical

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isolation during which abductees are by abduction, but their union leaves transported away from their fellow hu- something to be desired. The passive man beings and into the alien realm. and isolated state the aliens inflict on Even when people are abducted togeth- their human victims mimics the state of er, like Betty and Barney Hill, the aliens sleep, which is fitting given that so many separate them aboard the UFO, placing abductees are taken from their beds, but them in individual rooms to undergo in- it also evokes engagement with elec- dividual procedures and returning them tronic media, during which one tends separately to the original point of abduc- to be physically (and sometimes mention (Fuller 1966). Sometimes abductees tally) passive, and, increasingly, alone. report seeing other unknown abductees In Roberto21’s narrative, the isolation aboard the craft, but separation usually that the aliens are able to inflict is what obtains among them, as in the narrative saves them, for their human captives of Roberto21: outnumber them and would easily over- power them if only they could act in uni- I woke up and instead of being in my son. This happens in the home as well bedroom, I found myself inside a clear as aboard the ship, for abductees com- glass cylinder […] I remember desper- monly cry out during abduction to other ately trying to get out of the container people sleeping nearby, who strangely but I could not move a muscle except for my eyelids. Finally, and all at once fail to awaken. In these scenarios, ab- by sheer force of will, I was able to re- ductees feel that if they could only com- gain movement of my limbs. I jumped municate they would not be abducted. out of the glass container faster than a This motif is echoed on another level of spring […] To my horror, I saw a row UFO-abduction discourse, in the opinion of glass containers […] In each of these expressed by many participants in online clear glass cylinders there was either discussion fora that if enough abductees a man or a woman, lying nude under will share their stories, abductions can be this dense glowing greenish solution. brought to an end. I panicked and, yelling and screaming like a madman, I began to run to- The desire to gather as much informa- wards a window of light I saw at the tion as possible about the phenomenon of end of a corridor. It was not easy to get abduction in one place, so that ultimately to the light. This place was huge […] an answer can be found as to what is re- I passed many other containers, all ally going on and abduction can be end- identical to the one I have been in. […] ed, is expressed again and again on these Just a few steps before I reached the fora. In a forum on UFOSeek.com, a par- lighted area, still screaming at the top ticipant named Jeff refers to his attempts of my voice, two humanoids came to to compile a comprehensive record of his me from the opposite direction. One of them touched me on the shoulder and own in a “big book”: I passed out immediately. (Roberto21 The big book is actually everything I 2009: Post 1) have experienced personally over the past 37 years. I wrote it because I was Like the participants in an online discus- forgetting too many important an- sion forum, these abductees are united swers, and when I come across people

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like you and the rest on this forum, it The Case of Raptor_Evolved allows me to open up and give you The complex interplay among themes of everything I’ve experienced in hope isolation, community, and technology is that this information would be of great evident in the narrative of abductee Rap- value to everyone here. (Jeff 2009) tor_Evolved. Raptor identifies himself as “Mexican-American,” and states that he The idea behind the book is appreciated, was “born and raised in Chicago” (Rap- but the technology of the book is consid- tor_Evolved 2006: Post 1). His earliest ab- ered outmoded by another participant, duction experience happens when he is a Miro, who replies: child visiting relatives in Mexico: Hey Jeff, try to imagine the BIG BOOK I believe I was about ten in the sum- is here and it is live and it is called mer of 1992. It was either a Saturday the UFOSeek forum. To be helpful we or a Sunday, but twice every month have to come together in one place and the entire village has a get-together in work side by side. We should not pull the front of the patio of the old Catho- the information away in pieces. All the lic church were we have pozole. You info needs to stay here to help anyone know, a great kind of get-together of who will freely enter our forum [...] I sorts where all the adult people dance, just think that this kind of research can laugh, and drink to all hours of the never be finished by one person. (Miro morning, while the kids run around 2009A and 2009B) chasing each other. At around 12 AM I remember looking for my dad and Community is seen here not as an end in telling him I was tired, I wanted to go itself, but as a means to understanding to sleep. I thought my dad ignored me. and ultimately overcoming abduction. He came back a couple seconds later The technology of the Internet is regard- and told me my uncle would take me ed as instrumental in providing an arena to their house to go to rest. My uncle where this community can coalesce. In- also took one of the other villager’s sofar as this community is established kids to drop off at their house which online, however, it partakes of the tech- is further down from the road. (Rap- nology that, like abduction, induces iso- tor_Evolved 2006: Post 1) lation, resulting in a circular movement with an uncertain outcome. This tension The celebration Raptor describes at the between isolation and community, with beginning of his narrative—set as it is in both states linked to technology, runs a “village,” in front of “the old Catholic through UFO-abduction narratives and church,” where the entire community, indicates these stories’ significance as young and old, gathers to share the tra- meditations on the complex problems of ditional pre-Columbian stew known as communication in the Information Age. “pozole”—evokes an earlier era more This tension, and its implications for our characterized by face-to-face communitas relationship with the latest technologies than the Information Age. The sense of of tradition, will be explored in the re- community that is established so effec- mainder of this essay through the analy- tively here is contrasted sharply by the sis of one individual’s abduction saga. isolation of the following scene:

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So my uncle’s house is at the end of the book. I still had my shoes on. I woke village. He has a mezcal field which is up to the sound of a pickup truck in the the plant that is used to make tequila. driveway. I got up and realized that I He dropped me off at his house and had none of the items I mentioned be- went about his business. I remember fore me, nor did I have my shoes or resting on the couch reading a book socks on. The door was open to the before I went to sleep. It was a book bedroom. The cats were nowhere to on the history of the Pemex Corp (re- be found. As I walked down the hall- ally boring) when one of the cats start- way I looked to the right and on the ed getting really annoyed. It puffed counter were my items, perfectly lined up and ran at one of the doors and next to each other. I found my socks, started hissing through the glass. I put shoes, book, and my watch right next my book down, went to see what all to each other perfectly placed next to the fuss was about and saw nothing. each other! (Ibid.) I immediately felt strange. I could not describe it back then but I know now The television serves to simulate human it was as if someone was watching companionship, but it is sometimes just me outside. When you look outside when people turn to this medium to through the glass doors you see the mezcal field. Out of curiosity I opened overcome feelings of loneliness that ab- the door and nothing was there. It did duction occurs, bringing them together seem perhaps strange that the mezcal not with their fellow human beings, but was waving in the air back and forth with an uncanny alien presence (Crazy- even though there was no wind. I was flanger 2007; Jtobias69 2009; Lionbear very scared at that moment so I raced 2009; Magicwords55 2009). Media schol- back inside and locked all the doors ar Jeffrey Sconce has observed that from and secured all the windows and their inception electronic media have turned all the lights on in the house. inspired a sense of mysterious presence (Ibid.) or “liveness” that belies their mechanical reality (Sconce 2000). Radio and televi- The eerie solitude of the uncle’s house, at sion in particular, in that they broadcast the edge of the village and bounded by a disembodied voices and images without field, frightens Raptor, oddly, by induc- substance, give the impression that they ing the sense of his not being alone. His serve as “gateways to electronic other- isolation from other human beings ex- worlds” (Ibid., 4). In Raptor’s story, his poses Raptor to the sense of a mysterious sense of mysterious presence in his un- presence. He seeks solace in a technology cle’s house is followed by an experience that is often used to combat feelings of with television, which is in turn followed loneliness, the television: by what he interprets as an abduction. Al- though Raptor does not seem to purpose- I then went into my uncle’s bedroom and turned the TV on with the lights fully forsake the old-fashioned human on. I found all three cats scared under- togetherness of the village feast in favor neath the bed. I locked the door to the of the simulated togetherness of TV, this bedroom. I sat on the bed watching the is the substitution in which he engages. TV. In my left hand I had a black plas- The sense of simulated togetherness the tic watch. In my right hand I had the TV provides not only falls short of the to-

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getherness achieved through real face-to- their stories these abductees lose control face interaction; it brings Raptor together of their cars, which may slow to a halt with an alien presence. or speed off in a different direction, be- The next experience Raptor narrates hap- fore being forcibly removed from them pens when he is in his twenties and liv- by aliens. ing in the United States. This time, it is The automobile is a technology whose when he is trying to move in the opposite power is palpable in its use. Unlike the direction, from simulated to face-to-face radio, the television, or the computer, companionship, that abduction occurs: the power of which is more intellectu- ally understood than physically felt, the I was playing some Killzone online car grants its user a visceral feeling of the on the PS2 when Isaiah called me at harnessing of technological power. To around 11:45 PM and asked me to lose control over this device is immedi- pick him up because he was bored. I ately and physically dangerous, whereas decided I was going to pick him up. So after about fifteen minutes or so I other technologies present subtler dan- suited up and headed outside through gers if one’s control of them is curtailed. my basement apartment. I took a right The out-of-control car presents an es- up the cement stairs then a left down pecially profound and frightening ex- the sidewalk towards the garage. perience, therefore, which may serve to Halfway there I remember looking at represent other kinds of dangerous im- the compost heap and deciding that I potence with respect to technology. The wasn’t going to pick Isaiah up. I turned car may also represent isolation, despite around and backtracked to the base- its potential for bringing people together. ment. As I approached the staircase I Although cars may be used to transport reached to turn the light on which was now on my right. Then I woke up in people across the distances that separate my car in the garage with all the lights them, cars isolate their users during trav- turned off. A split second later I was el, keeping people in their own individu- overcome by the same presence I felt al containers rather than participating in while I was younger, that someone the communal experience of, say, public was watching me. (Raptor_Evolved transportation. As a mode of transporta- 2006: Post 10) tion, the car may further be understood to represent the isolation of liminality, Again, Raptor is engaging in the simu- the space one occupies that is no place, lated companionship of electronic me- when one is betwixt and between one’s dia, and, again, he experiences a myste- point of departure and one’s destination. rious presence. The automotive motif, This liminality echoes the placeless space evident in his previous abduction story of electronic otherworlds, like that of the as the means by which he is transported online game Raptor plays prior to this into isolation, makes another appear- abduction experience. ance. Like the Hill couple whose highly At the beginning of his narrative, publicized 1961 abduction was among Raptor intends to use the car to achieve the first to be reported, many abductees face-to-face interaction with his friend. are abducted while driving their cars. In It is unclear whether the decision not to

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pick up his friend immediately precedes to work in his red van and asked me the abduction experience or is part of what I was doing there. I had no an- it, perhaps as an alien-induced course swer so he shook his head and ignored of action, for the vision of the compost me and went to work. heap bears no logical connection to the “decision” although the two events are I told Marco what happened after I juxtaposed in the narrative. In any case, left his house. He was a little shaken. a failure to connect ends in abduction, (Raptor_Evolved 2006B) and Raptor awakens in the liminal space of his car, which is not used as a means Raptor loses control over his car, but this to achieve connection, as previously in- time, instead of preventing him from see- tended, but merely as a place to be alone. ing a friend, loss of control prevents him This automotive motif recurs in a subse- from reaching home. It becomes evident quent abduction, the narrative of which here that Raptor lives with his family, begins with Raptor’s decision to leave a so home represents another opportuni- friend’s house and drive home: ty for human connection, but Raptor is prevented for a time from making that I was at my friend Marco’s House on a connection and is again trapped in the Wednesday sometime in March. After some talk about some ideas for a com- liminal space of his car. When he finally ic story I decided to head out to my does reach home, rather than waking up house at around 3:00 A.M. I was kind Raptor “just comes into being”—it is as if of hungry so I stopped by Burger King he were “switched on” right at that mo- and ordered three Whoppers with ment. The aliens thus impose a confusing cheese. I headed back to my house. experience on Raptor which is difficult to articulate because it is more mechanical than human. Because he is unable to As I turned on the left corner of the al- communicate this experience to his fa- ley to park my car in the garage I got to ther, and thus provide a suitable response maybe the fifth garage before my garage. And my car stopped completely. to his father’s inquiry, Raptor’s father I started it again and nothing. I was “ignores” him, recalling Raptor’s first then again overcome by the same sen- abduction experience when he thought sation I had before of being watched. his father “ignored” him at the commu- My vision turned white and I woke up nity gathering in Mexico. Here as there, in my backyard on the bench next to an opportunity to connect with another the tree at around 5 A.M. Strange thing human being is missed. After this experi- is I didn’t wake up. I just came into be- ence, however, Raptor does connect with ing. his friend Marco, telling someone for the first time about his strange experiences. You know when you wake up you feel As a result of his abduction experiences groggy. I didn’t. It felt like someone Raptor decides to spend more time with threw me onto the bench or some- Marco and thereby avoid being alone. thing when I came to. My dad had just Eventually, alas, Raptor must leave Mar- opened the back door and was headed co’s company and is again abducted, but

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this time his car carries him all the way of me. I could tell that there were three home: figures off in the mist. I could tell they were humanoids but right away I I arrived at home, parked my Honda knew they weren’t human. Civic in the garage and went inside my house without incident. My pad is in the basement. Turned on the TV, The one on the left moved slightly en- couldn’t find anything interesting circling me to my left. Then the one on except infomercials, so I went to my the right moved to my extreme right. bed to sleep […] I don’t know if I was To describe their movement I would dreaming or not. I’ll explain. I found have to say that they seemed to float. myself outside of my car. I have a Then both the ones on my right and green Civic. I was outside of the driv- my left stopped and looked at the one er’s-side door. And I didn’t have a per- in the middle, as if gesturing [to] him ception of where I was. To describe it I to proceed. He moved forward in my would have to say emptiness, because direction. Little by little as he moved there was nothing but me and my car through the mist I could make out in a black emptiness. (Raptor_Evolved more details. I wasn’t afraid at first but 2007) I found myself unable to move and I couldn’t move, I could only think. The As was the case with his first abduction, fact that I couldn’t move gave a kind of inner panic and I found myself afraid Raptor is watching television immediate- and scared. ly before his abduction experience. The black void in which Raptor finds himself corresponds to the placelessness of elec- Their eyes, their eyes are the most tronic media, and the isolation that typi- frightening things I have ever seen. fies the experience of those using them. They penetrate you as if looking Raptor finds himself in the void, but he through your very soul. Their skin is is not exactly alone—his car is there with rough like a mixture of elephant skin him, suggesting the “companionship” and a reptile’s. The one in the middle of technology, and the loneliness of that stopped about a meter away from me and held out his hand close in front of companionship. In contrast to his previ- his chest. He was staring at me and ous experiences, this time Raptor does cocked his head to the right a little. I not find himself in his car, but outside it. could tell he was talking to me. The car, it turns out, has carried him to a destination of sorts, which is an encounter with aliens: He asked me why I was afraid. I didn’t respond. I tried to think of someplace I looked up at eye level and a mist to put my mind in. I thought of a fire- formed all around me. It formed all place and concentrated on thinking around leaving only I would say a foot about it. I tried to glaze my eyes over or so of clearance between me and the to avoid staring into his. He repeated mist. I turned to my car. I thought I the same thought to me and that I heard a noise. At that instant I felt the should not act the way I was behaving. presence I had before of being watched. I kept thinking about the fireplace and I rolled my head back around in front didn’t say anything. I could tell they

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were trying to get me to go with them. sion he watched immediately before this I tried to think of anything, math prob- abduction experience. The aliens want lems, something to keep my brain ac- to take Raptor with them into the misty tive. void, but by keeping his mind “active” Raptor is able to resist abduction and the The one in front of me I could tell was enforced passivity and isolation it entails. very disturbed by my behavior. I could The forces of technology cannot take us tell by the expressions in his face. He out of this world through their powers rolled his hand back, removing it from to divert our attention to an “electronic my front; his expression changed. He otherworld” if we won’t pay attention looked slowly to his left and his right, to that realm. At the end of this abduc- and backed away from me a bit. He tion experience, Raptor finds himself cocked his head slightly to the right isolated, once more, in his car. Raptor’s and said to me why I did not want abduction saga began at the community to go. I replied and said that I didn’t celebration in Mexico and ends here, in want to go with them, I was not interested. He stared at me more intently. I the car which is as liminal a “location” could tell the other two were moving as the alien blackness. There is no final away from me back to the mist. I com- return to community within Raptor’s municated to him and said no, I was narrative; rather, the return to commu- not going to go. I could tell he stopped nity occurs outside the narrative, in the because I was able to move. His face forum wherein the narrative unfolds. became expressionless and he slowly In the analysis above, I have “iso- faded back into the mist. lated” Raptor’s narrative from its original context, where it is embedded in an I found myself in my garage with car open-ended discussion with many par- gate still opened, car door still opened, ticipants. In the forum where Raptor tells and the car itself was on. (Ibid.) his tale, many posters praise Raptor’s story for being “realistic,” “authentic,” In this scenario, Raptor cannot move—he and “believable,” while others mock his can only think. He is no longer a physi- gullibility for believing that certain ex- cal presence but only a mental presence, periences constitute evidence of abduc- like the alien presence of the electronic tion. Several participants share their own otherworld, or like the presence Raptor UFO-sighting and UFO-abduction expe- possesses in the online discussion forum riences in response to Raptor’s, and one where he tells his narrative. The aliens poster offers various theories as to the communicate to Raptor without speak- reasons for abduction. This exchange of ing, as is their wont. Their power, as Rap- praise and criticism, experience and ex- tor acknowledges, is in their eyes. Rap- planation, is characteristic of the online tor describes the screen-like eyes of the discussion forum, which overcomes to aliens as “the most frightening things I some extent the isolation of the Informa- have ever seen,” and feels he must avoid tion Age by bringing people together to staring into them lest he fall under their engage in the traditional interaction of control, evoking the power of the televi- legend telling. But the question remains, is it enough?

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Conclusion Notes Although nothing new, fear of technology has intensified as the pace and scope 1 This essay is based on a chapter from of technological development have in- my dissertation (Ball 2009). A version was creased, especially since the mid-twenti- presented at the 2009 conference of the eth century, leading to the sense that we American Folklore Society in Boise, Idaho. are in a time of profound transition, when 2 I therefore agree with Jodi Dean in seeing tradition comes to seem especially prob- a special connection between UFO-abduction narratives and Internet technology, though lematic. It is feared that what has been our reasons differ. For Dean, the “multiple brought forward out of the past and into layerings and linkages” made by abductees the present will be lost in a future where and abduction investigators to account advancements in technology will over- for seemingly unconnected occurrences as whelm humanity, changing it into some- abduction phenomena mirror the links made thing unrecognizable as human, into possible through Internet technology (Dean something alien. This essay has examined 1998: 131). how certain motifs in UFO-abduction 3 A few examples: abduct.com, abovetopse- narratives present the disturbing pros- cret.com, alien-abduction.com, aliencases. pect of an unnatural humanity manipu- conforums.com, alien-ufos.com, book-of- lated, altered, and isolated by alien tech- thoth.com, curezone.com, irishufology.net, iwasabducted.com, theblackvault.com, ufo- nologies in a hyper-technological future. casebook.com, ufos-alien.com, ufoseek.com, The latest technologies of tradition give unexplained-mysteries.com. human beings unprecedented powers to 4 The Hills’ story was made into a book in transmit and receive information, but to 1966 and a TV movie in 1975 (Fuller 1966; the extent that they replace face-to-face Colla 1975). interaction these technologies are feared 5 The most famous UFO abductions of to be alienating, and the sense of connec- the 1970s were the “Pascagoula incident” tion they do provide through “secondary involving Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker orality” or “online community” is feared in 1973, the Travis Walton case in 1975, and to be insufficient to sustain humanity as the Betty Andreasson case, experienced in we currently understand it. The UFO- 1967 but not reported until 1975 (Walton 1978; abduction narrative and the websites Fowler 1979; Hickson and Mendez 1983). The where it takes shape provide a forum for best-known UFO-abduction investigators are exploring these fears, as well as the hope Budd Hopkins, David M. Jacobs, and John E. 17 Mack (Hopkins 1981, 1987, 1996; Jacobs 1992, that they may not be realized. 1998; Mack 1994, 1999). 6 Here and throughout, I have standardized spelling, and have made some minor changes in punctuation and grammar to increase the readability of online posts. 7 The theory that the aliens’ purpose for visiting our planet is an alien/human hybrid breeding program undertaken to save the alien race from extinction is associated especially with the work of UFO-abduction

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investigator Budd Hopkins, who recorded 17 I would like to thank everyone who has many narratives of this type from his graciously read or listened to a prior version informants (see especially Hopkins 1987). of this essay, and especially those who have 8 Barbeito, Kelley-Romano, and Brown generously offered their comments and advice each interpret “hybridization” narratives as regarding its revision at various stages, in expressing anxieties over developments in particular: Carol Burke, Scott Forbes, J. Hillis reproductive technologies (Barbeito 2005, Miller, Joseph Falaky Nagy, Laura O’Connor, 206-10; Kelley-Romano 2006, 394; Brown and Timothy R. Tangherlini. 2007, 70-82, 85-99). 9 Here and throughout, I refer to discussion- forum participants according to the gender they profess online. 10 Patricia Barbeito likens the alien eye to a Works Cited movie screen (Barbeito 2005, 209). 11 David Hufford has pointed out how the Discussion Forum Posts paralysis commonly described by UFO abductees is similar to aspects of the “Old Abudctee. 2009. Help! Post 1. August Hag Experience” (Hufford 1982, 233-4). 18, 2009. Alien-UFOs.com. 12 ARPA’s name was changed to DARPA http://www.alien-ufos.com/ (Defense Advanced Research Projects personal-ufo-alien-experiences- Agency) in 1971, then back to ARPA in 1993, alien-dreams/20969-help.html. and back to DARPA again in 1996. (November 9, 2009). 13 The English is from Barbara Johnson’s translation of Jacques Derrida’s La Advancer. 2009. Alien Abduction Dissémination (Derrida 1981, 104-5). The or Crazy Talk? Post 18. italics are mine. October 31, 2009. AlienHub. 14 “…Og da sitt’ eg her og skal begynne å com. http://www.alienhub. følgja programmet ‘Vindu mot verden’… com/alien-abductions-close- Også sitte eg her og ser på starten på dette encounters/4147-alien- programmet. So ser eg ifrå øyekroken, ein abduction-crazy-talk-2.html. klase med kvita blinkande lys…” (April 1, 2010). 15 Bengt af Klintberg makes the point that Alexis_Amy. 2009. Alien Abductions. whereas in earlier times the realms where one Post 27. May 31, 2009. Alien- could encounter “the other folk”—the forests UFOs.com. http://www.alien- and seas, or inside the mountains—were ufos.com/personal-ufo-alien- mysterious places, they are less mysterious experiences-alien-dreams/20123- today, so that the “others” have become aliens, alien-abductions-3.html. for “space is now the only unknown territory that remains for our fantasy” (Klintberg 1986, (November 24, 2009). 259). All-Natural. 2008A. I Think I’ve Been 16 In addition to the examples given, see Abducted... May 11, 2008. the following: Raptor_Evolved 2006: Post 1; AboveTopSecret.com. http:// HiddenUFO 2008; GenericallyMajestic 2009; www.abovetopsecret.com/ Abudctee 2009; Raziell 2009; Crazyflanger forum/thread354652/pg1. 2009; Jtobias69 2009. (February 4, 2010).

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All-Natural. 2008B. I Think I’ve Been Dark Knight. 2008. Neg Greys and Abducted... May 14, 2008. Psychic Attack. Post 1. January AboveTopSecret.com. http:// 2, 2008. UfoSeek.com. http:// www.abovetopsecret.com/ www.UFOSeek.com/forum/ forum/thread354652/pg2. viewtopic.php?f=20&t=1336&sid (February 4, 2010). =b3c5d2b4cb7253e05e6f7348978b AmentiHall. 2009. Visitations. Post 12. bb3c. (February 18, 2010). May 9, 2009. Alien-UFOs.com. Dess, Cliff. 2007. Cliff Dess’s Story. http://www.alien-ufos.com/ Post 1. August 17, 2007. personal-ufo-alien-experiences- HyperspaceCafé.com. http:// alien-dreams/20067-visitations. www. hyperspacecafe.com/ html. (December 1, 2009). forum55/2807.html. (March 3, Angel. 2006. Why Would I Have Been 2010). Abducted. Post 21. March 20, Dreamforaday. 2009. Can Anyone Relate 2006. Alien-UFOs.com. http:// to My Experiences? Post 42. www.alien-ufos.com/personal- May 1, 2009. Alien-UFOs.com. ufo-alien-experiences-alien- http://www.alien-ufos.com/ dreams/10256-why-would-i- personal-ufo-alien-experiences- have-been-abducted-3.html. alien-dreams/19670-can-anyone- (November 15, 2009). relate-my-experiences-5.html. Bart5050. 2009. Possible Abduction (December 1, 2009). Attempt. Posts 3 and 9. April Funky-Zoo. 2009. Blue Old Alien Thing. 10, 2009. Alien-UFOs.com. Post 1. August 1, 2009. Alien- http://www.alien-ufos.com/ UFOs.com. http://www.alien- personal-ufo-alien-experiences- ufos.com/personal-ufo-alien- alien-dreams/19782-possible- experiences-alien-dreams/20818- abduction-attempt.html. blue-old-alien-thing.html. (February 25, 2010). (November 10, 2009). Cravemor. 2009. Possible Abduction Gabblebee. 2009. My Alien Experience. Attempt. Post 26. April Post 1. October 9, 2009. Alien- 24, 2009. Alien-UFOs.com UFOs.com. http://www.alien- http://www.alien-ufos.com/ ufos.com/personal-ufo-alien- personal-ufo-alien-experiences- experiences-alien-dreams/21545- alien-dreams/19782-possible- my-alien-experience.html. abduction-attempt-3.html. (November 5, 2009). (February 25, 2010). GenericallyMajestic. 2009. Where Do Crazyflanger. 2007. I’ve Been Contacted. I Begin? Post 1. October 19, Post 12. August 22, 2007. 2009. Alien-UFOs.com. http:// AlienHub.com. http://www. www.alien-ufos.com/personal- alienhub.com/alien-abductions- ufo-alien-experiences-alien- close-encounters/852-ive-been- dreams/21546-where-do-i-begin. contacted-2.html. (December 28, html. (November 5, 2009). 2009).

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HiddenUFO. 2008. Yellow Light Shines dreams/19782-possible- through Window at Night. Post abduction-attempt.html. 1. August 4, 2008. Alien-UFOs. (February 25, 2010). com. http://www.alien-ufos. John_Doe. 2009B. Possible Abduction com/personal-ufo-alien- Attempt. Post 6. April 10, 2009. experiences-alien-dreams/17960- Alien-UFOs.com http://www. yellow-light-shines-through- alien-ufos.com/personal- window-night.html. (December ufo-alien-experiences-alien- 1, 2009). dreams/19782-possible- HighlanderConspiritor. 2005. I Was abduction-attempt.html. “Abducted” on 21.06.1985. Post (February 25, 2010). 5. November 21, 2005. AlienHub. Jtobias69. 2009. Something Went Down com. http://www.alienhub. Last Night. Post 1. October com/alien-abductions-close- 30, 2009. Alien-UFOs.com. encounters/31-i-abducted-21-06- http://www.alien-ufos.com/ 1985-a.html. (January 14, 2010). personal-ufo-alien-experiences- Howoulduno. 2009. I Was Abducted and alien-dreams/21648-something- Taken Onboard the Ship. Post went-down-last-night.html. 63. September 17, 2009. http:// (November 2, 2009). www.alien-ufos.com/personal- Kayla. 2001. Re: Alien Abduction ufo-alien-experiences-alien- Experiences. November 27, dreams/15131-i-abducted-taken- 2001. BISLEEP Discussion Forum: onboard-ship-7.html. (November Basic Sleep Research. http:// 6, 2009). www.sleephomepages.org/ Ibeleave. 2009. Alien Abduction. Post 11. discussions/basic/messages/ June 6, 2009. Alien-UFOs.com. msgs 11515.html. (February 23, http://www.alien-ufos.com/ 2009). personal-ufo-alien-experiences- Koval321. 2009. Re: Signs of Alien alien-dreams/20253-alien- Abduction and Classification abduction-2.html. (November 5, of Experience. July 26, 2009. 2009). UFOSeek.com. http://www. Jeff. 2009. Re: Signs of Alien Abduction ufoseek.com/forum/viewtopic. and Classification of Experience. php?f=20&t=2291&start=110. July 14, 2009. UFOSeek. (February 11, 2010). com. http://www.ufoseek. Larson, Mark. 2007. I Was Abducted and com/forum/viewtopic. Taken Onboard the Ship. Post 3. php?f=20&t=2291&start=100. August 3, 2007. Alien-UFOs.com. (February 11, 2010). http://www.alien-ufos.com/ John_Doe. 2009A. Possible Abduction personal-ufo-alien-experiences- Attempt. Post 1. April 9, 2009. alien-dreams/15131-i-abducted- Alien-UFOs.com http://www. taken-onboard-ship.html. alien-ufos.com/personal- (November 6, 2009). ufo-alien-experiences-alien-

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Lionbear 2009. Through the Wall? Post NCDreamer38. 2009. So Real, My Dream 1. October 9, 2009. Alien-UFOs. Last Night! Post 1. October com. http://www.alien-ufos. 26, 2009. Alien-UFOs.com. com/personal-ufo-alien- http://www.alien-ufos.com/ experiences-alien-dreams/21450- personal-ufo-alien-experiences- through-wall.html. (April 1, alien-dreams/21610-so-real- 2010). my-dream-last-night.html. LooseLipsSinkShips. 2007. Real (November 5, 2009). Abduction Experience. Post 2. OmegaLogos. 2009. Alien Fetous July 23, 2007. AboveTopSecret. Abduction. October 31, 2009. com. http://www. AboveTopSecret.com. http:// abovetopsecret.com/forum/ www.abovetopsecret.com/ thread293104/pg1. (January 28, forum/thread515422/pg1. 2010). (January 28, 2010). Magicwords55. 2009. If It Happended Phil. 2009. Cosmic Energy Abduction Once Will It Again? Post 1. May I Have No Idea. Post 4. April 5, 2009. Alien-UFOs.com. http:// 14, 2009. IwasAbducted.com. www.alien-ufos.com/personal- http://www.iwasabducted. ufo-alien-experiences-alien- com/discussion/forums/ dreams/20023-if-happended- viewtopic-cosmic-energy- once-will-again.html. (December abduction-i-have-no-idea.html. 1, 2009). (January 26, 2010). Mamasong. 2009. Encounter and Proustwouldlikesumtea. 2009. Illness. Post 1. November 3, Abduction Encounters in 2009. Alien-UFOs.com. http:// Suburban Areas. Post 3. October www.alien-ufos.com/personal- 22, 2009. Alien-UFOs.com. ufo-alien-experiences-alien- http://www.alien-ufos.com/ dreams/21699-encounter-illness. personal-ufo-alien-experiences- html. (November 5, 2009). alien-dreams/21572-abduction- encounters-suburban-areas.html. Miro. 2009A. Re: Signs of Alien (November 5, 2009). Abduction and Classification Raptor_Evolved. 2006. Abduction? Post of Experience. July 14, 2009. 1. December 2, 2006. Post 10. UFOSeek.com. http://www. December 6, 2006. AlienHub. ufoseek.com/forum/viewtopic. com. http://www.alienhub. php?f=20&t=2291&start=90. com/alien-abductions-close- (February 11, 2010). encounters/453-abduction.html. Miro. 2009B. Re: Signs of Alien (January 7, 2010). Abduction and Classification _____. 2006B. Abduction? Post 20. of Experience. July 14, 2009. December 15, 2006. AlienHub. UFOSeek.com. http://www. com. http://www.alienhub. ufoseek.com/forum/viewtopic. com/alien-abductions-close- php?f=20&t=2291&start=100. encounters/453-abduction-2. (February 11, 2010). html. (January 7, 2010).

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_____. 2007. Abduction? Post 29. January 20, 2009. UFOCasebook. January 19, 2007. AlienHub. com. http://ufocasebook. com. http://www.alienhub. conforums.com/index. com/alien-abductions-close- cgi?board=alienabduction &num encounters/453-abduction-3. =1208736984&action=display&st html. (January 7, 2010). art=15. (March 10, 2010). Raziell. 2009. Yellow Light Shines Spacemushrooms. 2009. Alien through Window at Night. Post Abduction. Post 21. June 13, 7. April 7, 2009. Alien-UFOs.com. 2009. Alien-UFOs.com. http:// http://www.alien-ufos.com/ www.alien-ufos.com/personal- personal-ufo-alien-experiences- ufo-alien-experiences-alien- alien-dreams/17960-yellow- dreams/20253-alien-abduction-3. light-shines-through-window- html. (November 5, 2009). night.html. (December 1, 2009). WorldShadow. 2007. My 1988 Abduction Red. 2007. New Here. Post 21. Experience with Detailed December 7, 2007. AlienHub. Images. Post 1. November 30, com. http://www.alienhub. 2007. AboveTopSecret.com. com/alien-abductions-close- http://www.abovetopsecret. encounters/1062-new-here-3. com/forum/thread318428/pg1. html. (January 9, 2010). (January 28, 2010). Roberto21. 2009. Alien Abduction. May 27, 2009. Posts 1 and 32. References Alien-UFOS.com. http:// Angelluci, Orfeo M. 1955. The Secret www.alien-ufos.com/personal- of the Saucers: How UFOs Work. ufo-alien-experiences-alien- Amherst, WI: Amherst Press. dreams/20253-alien-abduction. Arnold, Kenneth, and Ray Palmer. html. (November 5, 2009). 1952. The Coming of the Saucers: Rz Blade. 2007. Abductee Tells A Documentary Report on Sky All. Post 1. October 7, 2007. Objects that Have Mystified the IWasAbducted.com. htttp:// World. Boise, Idaho: Privately www. iwasabducted.com. published. (January 21, 2010). Barbeito, Patricia Felisa. 2005. “He’s Smersh. 2008. Abduction Experience Making Me Feel Things in by Anonymous. Post 1. April My Body That I Don’t Feel”: 20, 2008. UFOCasebook. The Body as Battleground in com. http://ufocasebook. Accounts of Alien Abduction. conforums.com/index. Journal of American Culture 28: cgi?board=alienabduction &num 201-215. =1208736984&action=display&st Blank, Trevor J. 2007. Examining the art=15. (March 10, 2010). Transmission of Urban Legends: _____.2009. Abduction Experience Making the Case for Folklore by Anonymous. Reply 18. Fieldwork on the Internet. Folklore Forum 37.1: 15-26.

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Brown, Bridget. 1997. Alien Fashion: Dégh, Linda. 1977. UFO’s and How Inside the Alien Jumpsuit. Folklorists Should Look at Them. Verbivore 3: 4-7. Fabula 18: 242-8. _____.2007. They Know Us Better than Denzler, Brenda. 2001. The Lure of We Know Ourselves: The History the Edge: Scientific Passions, and Politics of Alien Abduction. Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit New York: New York University of UFOs. Berkeley: University of Press. California Press. Bullard, Thomas E. 1987. UFO Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Dissemination. Abductions: The Measure of a Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: Mystery. 2 vols. Bloomington, IN: University of Chicago Press. The Fund for UFO Research. Fernback, Jan. 2003. Legends on the Net: _____.1989. UFO Abduction Reports: An Examination of Computer- The Supernatural Kidnap Mediated Communication as Narrative in Technological a Locus of Oral Culture. New Guise. Journal of American Folklore Media and Society 5.1: 29-45. 102: 147-70. Fowler, Raymond E. 1979. The _____.2000. UFOs: Lost in the Myths. In Andreasson Affair. Englewood UFOs and Abductions: Challenging Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. the Borders of Knowledge, ed. Fuller, John G. 1966. The Interrupted David M. Jacobs, 141-91. Journey: Two Lost Hours “Aboard Lawrence: University Press of a Flying Saucer.” New York: Dial Kansas. Press. Christiansen, Reidar Th. 1958. The Haddad, Sandro A.P., Richard P.M. Migratory Legends: A Proposed Houben, and Wouter A. List of Types with a Systematic Serdijn. 2006. The Evolution of Catalogue of the Norwegian Pacemakers. IEEE Engineering Variants. FFC 175. Helsinki: in Medicine and Biology Magazine Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia. 25.3: 38-48. Coates, Tim, ed. 2001. UFOs in America, Harnad, Stevan. 1991. Post-Gutenberg 1947: FBI Files Related to the Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution Sighting of Unidentified Flying in the Means of Production Objects During 1947. London: of Knowledge. Public-Access The Stationery Office. Computer Systems Review 2.1: 39- Colla, Richard A., Dir. 1975. The UFO 53. Incident. Universal Studios. 120 Hickson, Charles, and William Mendez. minutes. 1983. UFO Contact At Pascagoula. Dean, Jodi. 1998. Aliens in America: Tucson, AZ: W.C. Stevens. Conspiracy Cultures from Hopkins, Budd. 1981. Missing Time: Outerspace to Cyberspace. Ithaca, A Documented Study of UFO NY: Cornell University Press. Abductions. New York: Richard Marek Publishers.

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_____.1987. Intruders: The Incredible Leiner, Barry M., et al. 2003. A Brief Visitations at Copley Woods. New History of the Internet. http:// York: Random House. www.isoc.org/internet/history/ _____.1996. Witnessed: The True Story brief.shtml. (February 4, 2009). of the Brooklyn Bridge UFO Leslie, Desmond, and George Adamski. Abductions. New York: Simon 1953. Flying Saucers Have Landed. and Schuster. London: Werner Laurie. Horsey, Kirsty. 2006. Three Million IVF Luckhurst, Roger. 1998. The Science- Babies Born Worldwide. IVF. Fictionalization of Trauma: net. http://www.ivf.net/ivf/ Remarks on Narratives of Alien three_million_ivf_babies_born_ Abduction. Science-Fiction Studies worldwide-o2105.html. (June 28, 25: 29-52. 2006). Mack, John E. 1994. Abduction: Human Hufford, David. 1982. The Terror that Encounters with Aliens. New Comes in the Night: An Experience- York: Scribner’s. Centered Study of Supernatural _____. 1999. Passport to the Cosmos: Assault Traditions. Philadelphia: Human Transformation and Alien University of Pennsylvania Encounters. New York: Crown Press. Publishers. Jacobs, David. 1992. Secret Life: Firsthand Ong, Walter. [1982] 2002. Orality and Documented Accounts of UFO Literacy: The Technologizing of the Abductions. New York: Simon Word. London: Routledge. and Schuster. Pew Research Center. 2007. World _____. 1998. The Threat – The Secret Publics Welcome Global Trade Agenda: What the Aliens Really – But Not Immigration. The Want…and How They Plan to Pew Global Attitudes Project. Get It. New York: Simon and Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Schuster. Center. Jung, C.G. 1959. Flying Saucers: A Modern Rojcewicz, Peter M. 1991. Between Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. One Eye Blink and the Next: Trans. R.F.C. Hull. New York: Fairies, UFOs, and Problems of The New American Library. Knowledge. In The Good People: Kelley-Romano, Stephanie. 2006. New Fairylore Essays. Edited Mythmaking in Alien Abduction by Peter Narváez. New York: Narratives. Communication Garland Publishing, Inc.: 479- Quarterly 54: 383-406. 514. Klintberg, Bengt af. 1986. Råttan i pizzan: Sanarov, Valerii I. 1981. On the Nature Folksägner i vår tid. Stockholm: and Origin of Flying Saucers Norstedts. and Little Green Men. Current Langham, Don. 1994. The Commonplace Anthropology 22: 163-7. MOO: Orality and Literacy Sconce, Jeffrey. 2000. Haunted Media: in Virtual Reality. Computer- Electronic Presence from Telegraphy Mediated Communication to Television. Durham, NC: Duke Magazine 1.3: 7. University Press.

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Selberg, Torunn. 1993. UFO 339 på vei fra Oslo? Rykter og nyheter om UFO’er i en norsk bygd. Tradisjon 23: 107-19. Steinberg, Stephen Cobbett. 1980. T.V. Facts. New York: Facts on File. U.S. Census Bureau. 1988. Who Uses Computers? Census Statistical Brief. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau. _____.2008. Utilization of Selected Media: 1980 to 2005. Table 1099. Statistical Abstract of the United States. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau. Vallee, Jacques. 1969. Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers. Chicago: Henry Regnery Co. Walton, Travis. 1978. The Walton Experience. New York: Berkley Publishing Corp.

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Events and Debates

Sensationalist Scholarship: or years now I have refrained from A Putative “New” History of writing about Ruth Bottigheimer’s speculative notions concerned with Fairy Tales Fthe so-called “new history” of the fairy tale because I believed a strong wind of Jack Zipes sensible, well-grounded, judicious schol- University of Minnesota arship would blow them away. But I was wrong. I underestimated Bottigheimer’s ambition. Somehow she has managed to make herself into a cause célèbre and In early modern Europe, then, what was to draw the attention of well-meaning a mixed-media environment characterized scholars, who mistakenly think they by talking and manuscripts became even might be able to have a dialogue with her. more mixed by the addition of mass print. Yet it seems that she mainly wants to ride Again, we need to stress that mass print her own hobby horse with blinders and did not replace talking or manuscripts. to astonish academia with her notions of Major media generally accumulate; they what constitutes cultural evolution. Her do not supplant one another. We also “novel ideas” are part of the sensational- should emphasize that mass print did not ist vogues that haunt all cultures. Dressed at any point or in any place become the predominant mode of communications. For in flashy colors, they can easily become several centuries after the introduction of attractive commodities. Sensationalism mass print, literacy rates remained low. sells well, even sensationalist claims of People who can’t read—and that was publicity-seeking academics. Here a lit- the majority of the European population tle history about Bottigheimer’s “rise to until the late nineteenth century—do not fame” and details about her mission to read manuscripts or printed texts. They define the fairy tale in absolute terms is talk. Orality, though not primary orality, necessary before I deal with her most re- survived well into the modern era even cent book, Fairy Tales: A New History. where print and literacy spread fastest and penetrated most deeply. And even among people who were literate, talking The Incident and manuscripts hardly disappeared On July 30, 2005, Bottigheimer, evidently once printing and printed matter became anxious to publicize her theses in Fairy widely available. For many—and perhaps Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy even most—purposes it remained easier Tale (2002) and to cause a sensation, drew to talk to someone than to write a note to them, and easier to write a note to them the ire of many of the folklorists attending than to print one. (Poe 2011, 115) the Fourteenth Congress of the Interna- tional Society for Folk Narrative Theory in Tartu, Estonia, by delivering a paper, “Fairy Tale Origins, Fairy Tale Dissemina- tion, and Folk Narrative Theory,” which dismissed the oral tradition as providing the source of literary fairy tales and Cultural Analysis 9 (2010): 129-155 © 2010 by The University of California. All rights reserved 129 Eventes and Debates Events and Debates

proclaimed Giovan Francesco Straparola Straparola tended to tone down the lexi- as the original inventor of the fairy-tale cal expressionism of Morlini), the dialect genre. Until Bottigheimer had promoted expression and the Latin cast, together Straparola to the position of “god” of with the phonetic variants and frequent fairy tales, very few scholars had paid hyper-corrections, reveal the strong lin- much attention to Straparola, whose col- guistic accomplishment of the author lection of stories, Le piacevoli notti (The in the direction of the models of the no- Pleasant Nights, 1550-1553), published vella tradition and are the tell-tale of a in two volumes, contain about fourteen more general narrative project directed eclectic fairy tales and fifty-nine stories at bringing about a literary consecration with riddles.2 A “bestseller” in its time, of the fairy tale of the oral tradition.” 4 its allure can be attributed to several fac- Now, if an expert in Italian linguistics tors, which I have pointed out in Fairy and Renaissance culture can indicate Tales and the Art of Subversion: “His use that Straparola was the mouthpiece of of erotic and obscene riddles, his mastery an Italian literary and oral tradition and of polite Italian used by narrators in the wanted to consecrate the oral fairy tale, it frame narrative, his introduction of plain is certainly questionable to crown Strap- earthly language into the stories, the crit- arola as some sort of fairy godfather of ical view of the power struggles in Italian a new genre. It might be best to dismiss society and lack of moralistic preaching, Bottigheimer’s pretensions with a shrug his introduction of fourteen unusual fairy of the shoulder and explore the remark- tales into the collection, and his interest able oral/literary aspects of Straparola’s in magic, unpredictable events, duplicity, tales to understand how and why he rep- and the supernatural. Similar to Boccac- licated oral and literary tales in innova- cio, Straparola exhibited an irreverence tive ways. for authorities, and the frame narrative Yet, instead of ignoring and/or criti- reveals a political tension and somewhat cally reviewing Bottigheimer’s theses, ironic if not pessimistic outlook on the Dan Ben Amos, one of the foremost and possibilities of living a harmonious hap- most reasonable folklorists in the world, 3 py ever after life.” decided to give her book, Fairy Godfather, It must be said, however, that Strapa- a fair hearing and to organize a round- rola was not a great stylist; he plagiarized table titled “The European Fairy Tale many Latin tales, translating them into Tradition: Between Orality and Literacy” the vernacular Italian, and imitated con- for the 2006 fall meeting of the American temporary writers. The foremost Strapa- Folklore Society in Milwaukee, Wiscon- rola scholar in Italy, Donato Pirovano, sin. Ben-Amos invited two highly quali- who edited the definitive contemporary fied scholars, renowned medievalist Jan edition of Le piacevoli notti, has written Ziolkowski and noted European anthro- some very interesting remarks about pologist Francisco Vaz da Silva, to com- Straparola’s patchwork linguistics. “In ment on Bottigheimer’s book, which this general average tone, where there Ben-Amos also criticized at the round- are no centrifugal impulses and extremes table. Bottigheimer was allowed time to (it has already been pointed out how respond to their papers, but the session

130 Events and Debates

was a fiasco because she refused to take Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past their criticisms seriously and vaguely of Wonderful Lies (2007), chastises Bot- defended her ideas with unfounded ra- tigheimer for ignoring numerous Latin tionalizations. All the papers of the AFS texts that have their origins in an oral session were revised and expanded into tradition and were fairy tales before tales articles published in the Journal of Ameri- were given labels. According to him, Bot- can Folklore in the summer of 2010.5 The tigheimer has simply ignored striking major points of contention were Bot- evidence that the Greeks and Romans tigheimer’s claims that Straparola was and other European, Asian, and African the founder of the fairy-tale narrative, people were telling tales during the pre- described as a “rise tale,” which reflected Christian era and early antiquity that laid the rise of the mercantile and bourgeois the foundation for a literary genre which classes; that Straparola’s tales set a model gradually flowered in Paris, not in Italy, for other writers, especially the French; during the 1690s when the socio-cultural that it was through print literature that conditions were riper in Paris than in It- tales were disseminated and reached the aly for designating certain tale types as peasantry, who had not been intelligent belonging to the genre of the fairy tale. enough to create their own wonder tales; The narrative sequence of Bottigheim- and that Straparola lived and worked in er’s “rise tales,” which she attributes to Venice and catered to a wide circle of ar- Straparola, can easily be read differently tisans who were literate. Though nothing and expanded to comprehend many oth- is known about Straparola, where he was er tale types and narrative patterns. But born, where he lived, or what his profes- by limiting just fourteen of Straparola’s sion was, Bottigheimer wrote an imagi- tales to a tight girdle-like definition, what nary biography that was also questioned Ziolkowski calls a “perverse agenda,”7 by the participants at the roundtable. she does Straparola an injustice because she ignores the wide range of different The Book that Set the Folklorists on kinds of oral wonder tales that he drew Fire upon to write his tales. Aside from his own significant work, Ziolkowski cites As Ziolkowski, Vaz da Silva, and Ben- other studies, such as Formes médiévales Amos thoroughly and politely demon- du conte merveilleux (1989) edited by strate in their lengthy essays, Bottigheim- Jacques Berlioz, Claude Bremond, and er’s Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and Catherine Velay-Vallantin and Märchen the Fairy Tale, is one of the most narrow und die mittelalterliche Tradition (1995) positivist studies of folklore and fairy by Maren Clausen-Stolzenberg, which tales that has ever been produced. Zi- provide indisputable evidence that oral olkowski begins his essay by stating, tales existed and at times informed nu- “the book will not become a landmark in merous literary romances, lais, poems, folkloristics in general, and only time will and exempla. Yet, as Ziolkowski notes, tell if it has a lasting impact even within “Tradition of the oral sort turns out to be fairy-tale studies.”6 Ziolkowski, who has a phenomenon Bottigheimer presents as published an exhaustive pioneer and being hopelessly elusive before the intro- comprehensive study, Fairy Tales from

131 Eventes and Debates Events and Debates

duction of phonographic recording in the how she not only created a fictitious bi- 1870s. A slogan, probably around fifty ography which depicts the unknown years old and quaint in ways that would Italian author as a fairy-tale hero invent- have disconcerted its original exponents, ing fairy tales, but she also invented her advocates that we ‘Question Authority,’ own history of storytelling that excludes but Bottigheimer follows a simpler (and 95% of the European population from possibly simplistic) principle of ‘Ques- creating and disseminating tales in an tion Orality.’ In her view, not only is it oral tradition. It should be noted here pointless to conjecture about oral tradi- that Pirovano has written: “The biogra- tional literature before unambiguous re- phy of Giovan Francesco Straparola still cords of it survive, but in addition it is remains an unfathomable mystery. The wrongheaded to suppose that oral tale- almost absolute absence—at least in the telling ever made a creative contribution present state of research—of documents to the fairy-tale tradition as she defines it that concern him is aggravated by the in the subtitle of her book.”8 In general, impossibility of extracting definite facts Ziolkowski does not argue for privileg- about his life from his works. There are ing the oral over literature. Rather, he ar- only vague hints that give access to con- gues against positivist approaches such jectural hypotheses in which various as that used by Bottigheimer, who relies scholars of the past centuries have ex- on strict dichotomies, absolutes, and erted themselves, certainly in a noble but twisted speculative history. Moreover, he fruitless way. Frequently they managed pleads the case for the discreet investiga- to reconstruct Straparola’s life, but these tion of folklore and medieval texts: “We reconstructions were rarely persuasive if have an obligation to approach each and not groundless.”10 every story with an open eye to possible Vaz da Silva not only shows clearly orality lurking behind literature as well as that Bottigheimer’s biography of Strap- to possible literature behind orality. Old arola is groundless and misleading, he dichotomies have broken down over the also points out the contradictions in her past decades in the understanding of me- thesis wherein she claims that his tales dieval literature: it has been recognized appealed to an urban and artisan reader- that Latin texts from the Middle Ages ship, but ultimately nourished Europe’s could have features indebted to oral- hungry folk imagination even though ity, popular culture, and secular tastes, they were filled with reference to up- while the literary products of medieval per social classes in the sixteenth and vernaculars could be literate, learned, seventeenth centuries. He then asks: “If 9 and Christian.” there is a congruence between plot suc- While Ziolkowski focuses on Bot- cess and the preoccupations of the audi- tigheimer’s rejection of oral wonder tales ence, then why would tales crafted for that stem from antiquity, the middle ages, the specific situation of an urban Vene- and Eastern traditions, Francisco Vaz tian readership become the characteristic da Silva questions the accuracy and au- lore of illiterate rustics across Europe and thenticity of Bottigheimer’s biographical beyond? And why would tales offering depiction of Straparola and then shows imaginary escape from all-too-real pov-

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erty register success among the upper More than the clear references to classes? Clearly, the principle of refer- orality within Straparola’s two-volume ence to social reality, which Bottigheimer collection concern Ben-Amos. Like Zi- uses to explain why a rise plot should olkowski, he provides strong evidence have been successful in sixteenth-centu- that there were numerous oral tales in ry Venice, fails to explain the reception of ancient Egypt and Asia that became well urban rags-to-riches plots among illiter- known in Europe long before Straparo- ate rustics as well as among aristocrats. la put pen to paper. Europeans, despite In other words, the principle that is used the rise of Christianity and witch hunts, to account for the invention of the genre continued to spread tales that involved fails to account for its diffusion.”11 In ad- pagan beliefs and rituals. As Ben-Amos dition to showing how contradictory remarks, “Tales about supernatural mir- many of Bottigheimer’s assertions are, acles, holy men, fairies, and animals that Vaz da Silva offers numerous examples enriched mortals were told in legends of how folk and literary tales meshed. and fairy tales both before and after the Moreover, he proves conclusively that fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the the French writers of the 1690s were not time when Richard Whittington lived primarily influenced by Straparola, as and then became the subject of a legend Bottigheimer claims, but that there were about a cat-less land, and both before and numerous French oral tales and literary after the sixteenth century when Strapa- romances that circulated and influenced rola incorporated into his anthology a writers such as d’Aulnoy, Lhéritier, and version of ‘Puss in Boots.’”13 Perrault. One of Bottigheimer’s major argu- Vaz da Silva’s critique of Bottigheim- ments throughout her essays and books er’s fabrications is further reinforced by is that absence of documentation of fairy Ben-Amos’s essay in which he demon- tales (as she defines them) is clear evi- strates that Straparola’s plagiarizing and dence of absence of fairy tales in the lives patchwork style followed the fashion of of the peasantry until Straparola and oth- his age and also the tradition of oral sto- ers began writing and publishing their rytelling: “In borrowing tales and pass- tales. However, as Ziolkowski, Vaz da ing them on to new audiences, Straparola Silva, and Ben-Amos reveal, there is more acted as an oral storyteller in the garb of a than sufficient documentation about sto- writer. Using the relatively new media of rytelling and texts that indicates a long print, he continued a behavior common tradition of oral wonder tales that incor- and appropriate to oral culture. Within porated fairy-tale motifs, topoi, charac- this new era, his work became a reser- ters, and patterns. In pre-modern Europe voir of tales culled from diverse sources, before and after Christianity took hold, a reservoir that, as John Colin Dunlop people both learned and non-literate long ago pointed out, was very popular believed strongly in witches, fairies, life in France. Le piacevoli notti thus became a after death, walking ghosts, vampires, source for literary fairy-tale writers who devils, miraculous intervention, and so did not have direct access to oral tradi- on. During the European witch hunts tion.”12 from approximately 1480-1700, that took

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many different forms; the very testi- these things relied on a body of knowl- monies of suspected witches, declared edge to help them evaluate the facts of witches, witnesses, and prosecutors read the world, and just like us, they inherited like bizarre fairy-tales and certainly were this knowledge from the culture in which part of the stuff that storytellers used to they were born.”14 entertain or inform their audiences. The Belief in fairies, witches, devils, and evening gatherings, in which all kinds of ogres became dangerous in European so- tales were told but never recorded, must cieties that punished people for heretical have been filled with tales replete with expression and behavior, and the peas- fairies, witches, mermaids, dwarfs, ogres, antry, always suspicious of their learned dragons, devils, angels, saints, magical superiors, were not about to tell them objects, potions, herbs, kings, queens, tales that were part of their intimate cul- peasants, flying and talking horses, talk- ture. Certainly women were most reluc- ing cats, dogs, and foxes, and so on. tant to tell their tales to male interlocutors These tales were never recorded because of the educated class. As Ben-Amos suc- the very few learned people who could cinctly argues: “The slim documentary write had no interest in collecting them evidence of fairies in the belief systems and writing them down, and if they did, of medieval European societies is not a they stylized them for a different audi- testimony for their absence, and ignor- ence. Besides, these tales were told in ing their documented presence creates a dialect, and there were no orthographic blind spot in the practice of literary em- standards that facilitated the recording of piricism. After all, ephemeral beliefs and tales told by peasants, laborers, and arti- communication occur regardless of their sans. Almost every person in pre-modern documentation. The meager references Europe breathed the stuff of wonder tales to fairies in contemporaneous writings and other types of tales that contained a are a function of the nature of medieval mixture of pagan beliefs and early Chris- documents and of the attitude toward tian religious stories. In his thought-pro- fairies rather than a testimony to their voking book, Strange Histories, Darren true prevalence in belief systems. With Oldridge remarks; “In the period cov- no church and no cult to support them, ered by this book—from the late Middle the fairies were relegated to the cultural Ages to the beginnings of modern science periphery. Consequently, the evidence of at the end of the seventeenth century— their significance can be inferred most the prevailing system of belief permitted readily from the testimony about their many ideas that now seem unfamiliar vanishing: comments about their dis- or ridiculous. Can the dead walk? Most appearance attest to their earlier pres- people in medieval Europe believed they ence. In the words of Chaucer’s “Wife of could, and orthodox Christians assumed Bath”: this would happen en masse at the time of the Last Judgment. Can witches fly? In the Old days of King Arthur, today Even the most trenchant opponents of Still praised by Britons in a special the persecution of witchcraft in sixteenth way, This land was filled with fairies all century-Europe believed this was possi- 15 ble. Just like us, the people who accepted about.

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Yet belief in fairies has never vanished tale that do not enrich our understand- and fairy tales as part of oral and liter- ing of why writers composed their fairy ary culture can be considered a minor tales and how they created them. There subversive genre that infiltrates major is not a shred of sophisticated theoreti- dominant culture whenever it can. When cal thinking in what she purports to be a J. M. Barrie had Peter Pan cry out to the “new” history of fairy tales. largely adult audience of his 1904 play in In chapter one, “Why a New History of London and ask them whether they all Fairy Tales?”, Bottigheimer sets the tone believed in fairies, the answer was a re- of her book by declaring: “It has been sounding YES! Whenever and wherever said so often that the folk invented and the play is produced in the twenty-first disseminated fairy tales that this assump- century, the answer remains the same. tion has become an unquestioned propo- sition. It may therefore surprise readers Bottigheimer’s Rebuttal that folk invention and transmission of There is no need to summarize Bot- fairy tales has no basis in verifiable fact. tigheimer’s evasive reply to her critics Literary analysis undermines it, literary published in The Journal of American Folk- history rejects it, social history repudi- lore because she has developed her “radi- ates it, and publishing history (whether cal” ideas in Fairy Tales: A New History, of manuscripts or of books) contradicts 16 to which I shall now turn. This book is it.” Bottigheimer enjoys using declara- slim in size and thought. Bottigheimer tions rather than thoughtful explanations essentially rehashes her nomination of to develop her theses and arguments and Straparola as the inventor of literary very rarely cites sources other than her- fairy tales and adds Giambattista Basile self as an authority. For instance, she does as co-inventor. She sets herself up as the not tell us who it is who has said so often main authority of defining fairy tales. that the folk invented and disseminated She re-writes the history of the fairy tale fairy tales. There are no references. Is she by focusing on book commerce and con- talking about oral folk tales or literary tends that only the publication of books fairy tales? Who are the historians who enables us to understand how writers have claimed that only the folk invented created their fairy tales and how the tales fairy tales? Where are her citations? She were transmitted. She treats common does not mention that in the last forty or people with great disdain and makes no fifty years, folklorists, literary critics, his- effort to understand how language and torians, and scholars of folklore and fairy communication have evolved and how tales from many different countries have tales were disseminated orally before been more interested in the intersections printing machines were invented. She between the oral and literary traditions focuses only on the publication records than in attempts to privilege one over of three countries, Italy, France, and Ger- the other. It is Bottigheimer who wants many, and excludes the rest of the world to establish a paper tiger, the dichotomy from her analysis, as though only Europe of oral and literary traditions and the gave birth to fairy tales. She concocts ge- privileging of oral tales. What does she neric categories to stereotype the fairy mean by the abstract conglomerations of

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literary analysis, literary history, social begin with a dirt poor girl or boy who history, and publishing history that re- suffers the effects of grinding poverty fute oral transmission of tales? Are these and whose story continues with tests, groups of people, institutions, or meth- tasks, and trials until magic brings about ods that she will use to prove that only a marriage to royalty and a happy acces- she knows who the true inventors of the sion to great wealth.”19 These descrip- fairy tale are? tive definitions are so vague, flat, and Indeed, this is what this chapter sim- simplistic that they could fit thousands plistically sets out to do. Bottigheimer if not hundreds of thousands of narra- begins with one of the most ignorant and tive types and schemes. Moreover, Bot- false definitions of folk tales that I have tigheimer does not consider many other ever read: “Folk tales differ from fairy theories developed by Vladimir Propp, tales in their structure, their cast of char- Claude Lévi-Strauss, Claude Brémond, 20 acters, their plot trajectories, and their Louis Marin, or Steven Swann Jones, age. Brief, and with linear plots, folk tales just to name a few, who have endeavored reflect the world and the belief systems to explicate the patterns in folk and fairy of their audiences. . . . Folk tales are easy tales in great detail. She does, however, to follow and easy to remember, in part discuss why tales about fairyland are dif- because they deal with familiar aspects ferent from fairy tales and declares that of the human condition like the propen- “the distinguishing characteristics of tales sity to build castles in the air.”17 In fact, about fairyland—two parallel universes folk tales, especially oral wonder tales, and sometimes unhappy endings—make are much more diverse than Bottigheim- their differences from fairy tales obvious. er suggests. They have so many remark- Despite these fundamental differences able similarities with literary fairy tales in location and outcome, tales about and other genres such as myths, legends, fairyland are often, and confusingly, anecdotes, etc. that it is very difficult to lumped together with human-centered 21 define a typical “authentic” fairy tale. and real-world-based fairy tales.” Yet, Nevertheless, the omniscient Bottigheim- Bottigheimer does not attempt to under- er provides us with strict demarcations stand the social history of fairies that can that, for once and for all, will enable us be traced to Greek and Roman antiquity 22 to know what a fairy tale really is. Actu- and the worship of certain goddesses. ally, according to Bottigheimer, there are Nor does she consider that fairies (and two types of fairy tales, both invented related creatures such as nixies, sirens, by Straparola: restoration fairy tales and mermaids, and sylphs) were part of the rise fairy tales. “Restoration fairy tales real human word and belief systems of are firmly based in the world of human humans. What concerns her most is to beings,”18 Bottigheimer states, and I have establish her own categorical definition no idea what she means. She outlines a of two types of literary fairy tales and to plot in which a member of the nobility demonstrate that the “unfettered coun- (king or queen) is banished or driven try folk” could never have told tales that from his realm and regains it through en- engendered what Straparola and Basile during tests and trials. “Rise fairy tales supposedly engendered—the genre of the fairy tale.

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In her next chapter, “Two Accounts of passed their childhood among Hesse- the Grimms’ Tales: The Folk as Creator, Cassel’s privileged and had spent their the Book as Source,” she again rehashes early manhood in libraries and archives, what folklorists and literary critics have and, when ill health forced it, in spas. been discussing and have known for the Unworldly, inexperienced, and like the past forty years. There’s nothing new tales they recorded, generally innocent in this chapter except a vitriolic attack of sexual knowledge, they were person- on the poor Brothers Grimm, or should ally naive about the peasantry’s earthly I say, Wilhelm, for he was the brother world. Thus it is not surprising that they most responsible for editing the Grimms’ projected the simplicity with which they Children’s and Household Tales, from 1819 were personally familiar onto the tales onward. Bottigheimer makes a great deal they were collecting, and beyond them, out of the fact that many of the Grimms’ to the folk they believed in.”23 informants were from the middle class or Bottigheimer assumes that she knows could read and that the Brothers some- more about the German people than the what idealized the German folk, a view Grimms did, and this puts her in the au- that was carried on and maintained by thoritative position to judge them and German folklorists in the twentieth cen- their relationship to the people. Perhaps tury and scholars from other countries. she should read the letters that the Broth- However, this does not discount the fact ers exchanged between themselves and that most if not all of the Grimms’ tales the recent biography by Stefan Martus have oral sources and most can be traced to obtain a better understanding of the to other countries and other collections Grimms.24 The Brothers were not the to- of folklorists in other countries. Whether tal bookworms and naive dreamers that the Grimms’ conception of the folk was she makes them out to be. They were not right or wrong, they were responsible for interested in mixing with and catering to the significant collecting of oral tales in the upper classes and always had contact Europe throughout the nineteenth centu- with people both from the lower and up- ry, and Bottigheimer does not give them per classes. It is true that they were very credit for their endeavors to encourage diligent students, but they also were learned people to pay more attention to down-to-earth and knew that they had non-literate people and their beliefs, ritu- to work hard to support their family af- als, and customs. Instead, she makes such ter their father’s early death. Only one demeaning remarks as: “The Grimms brother, Wilhelm, went to a health spa themselves were poor judges of the folk in Halle, not a luxurious spa attended by that they claimed to be the pure creators both Brothers as Bottigheimer suggests. of and the uncontaminated dissemina- Jacob travelled to Vienna and then to Paris tors of oral narrative. In the years of their and saw the ravages of war and its effect collecting for the first volume of the First on the common people and wrote about Edition, Wilhelm and Jacob must have them. The Brothers knew more about sex been remarkably ignorant about Germa- and bawdy jokes than Bottigheimer pre- ny’s folk. Despite the personal poverty of tends, and the tales—among them many their adolescent years in Cassel, they had tales about soldiers—they collected do

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in part reflect the “earthly world” about the book. We have no knowledge what- which Bottigheimer seems to know very soever about Perrault’s practice of writ- little. ing. We do not know whether he copied Throughout her book Bottigheimer or worked with Basile’s and Lhéritier’s works with assumptions, declarations, texts. It is most unlikely that he could de- and questionable evidence as if only cipher Basile’s unusual Neapolitan dia- she knew the truth about history. She is, lect and Baroque stories. It is more like- however, a most unreliable historian. In ly that Perrault may have known some chapter three, “The Late Seventeenth- oral tale related to the cycle of “the good and Eighteenth-Century Layers,” she and bad girls” that circulated not only in wants to prove that the talented French France but also in Germany, the Slavonic writers of the 1690s all knew Straparola’s countries, and Italy. This is not to say that and Basile’s works and could not have we must privilege the oral over print, but been influenced by a French oral tradi- as various French scholars have endeav- tion that, according to Bottigheimer, did ored to explain, we should be aware of not even exist. Yet, many of the women oral influences in printed tales that can writers, d’Aulnoy, Lhéritier, De La Force, be traced linguistically, philologically, Murat, and even Charles Perrault, make stylistically, and historically to all kinds reference to nannies and servants who of oral tales. told them tales. Some of the best schol- The oral components in Straparo- ars in France have documented the influ- la’s and Basile’s tales are striking, but ence of French folklore and orality in the in chapter four, “The Two Inventors of writing of the tales.25 Often the women Fairy Tale Tradition; Giambattista Basile writers performed their tales orally in sa- (1634-1636) and Giovan Francesco Strap- lons. With the exception of Murat, none arola (1551, 1553),” Bottigheimer uses of the writers ever mentioned Straparola her narrow definitions of the fairy tale as in their letters or memoirs. As for Basile, restoration and rise tale to eliminate any none of the French writers could read possibility that either Basile or Strapa- Italian much less the Neapolitan dialect rola might have based their tales on in which Basile wrote his tales. Yet, Bot- oral sources or tried to imitate oral per- tigheimer once again declares: “I’ve ex- formances that might have influenced amined Lhéritier’s and Perrault’s tales their writing.27 Once again, Bottigheimer of the good and bad sisters and their makes all sorts of allusions to Straparo- respective magical rewards and curses. la’s and Basile’s lives that make it seem I’ve compared them with each other and as if their tales were formed either by with the two Basile tales that preceded their own imaginations or through read- them. And I’ve concluded that Perrault ing books. It is important, however, to may well have had his niece’s tales as stress again that we know absolutely well as Basile’s two tales in front of him nothing about Straparola, and that he when he composed ‘The Fairies.’”26 might not have even lived in Venice or Once again Bottigheimer lets her imag- addressed his tales to the urban artisans ination carry her away to invent scenes so who supposedly devoured his books. We that she can justify the magic powers of could even, like Bottigheimer, create a

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Straparola who listened to tales by gifted printed texts carrying fairy tales from Venetians and who might have known one place to another. The ubiquitous and tales from The Arabian Nights, because of mysterious folk and nursemaids remain, the trade with Turks, Arabs, and Persians but as consumers of fairy tales rather in Venice. The truth is that we must rely than as producers.”28 Given the fact that on slight textual evidence in the case of anywhere from 70% to 90% of the popu- Straparola and on historical records and lation in Europe was non-literate, that texts in the case of Basile, two very dif- Latin dominated the books published in ferent writers. Since I have already dealt the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with Straparola earlier in this essay, I will that books were often purchased by col- add here only that the author himself re- lectors, placed in libraries, and not read, veals his debt to the oral storytelling tra- that there are few records of people read- dition in the book, frame narrative, and ing print fairy tales, that people from all some of the tales. Straparola admits that classes read aloud in an oral tradition, that the tales are not his; his narrative is based books were expensive, that most people on a gathering of people from the upper spoke and communicated in some kind classes who tell tales that they have heard of dialect, we must ask what the common before, a couple of them in dialect. All of people were doing to amuse themselves them bear witness to an oral influence, in the medieval and Renaissance periods. including the telling of riddles. In the We must ask why the learned people ig- case of Basile, who chose to invent ten nored the writing down of the tales of bizarre peasant women to tell the tales in the common people. We know, however, his collection The Tale of Tales (Lo Cunto that once learned people actually began de li cunti), it is clear from the dialect, to investigate in the nineteenth century the hybrid plots, and his known perfor- what tales common people were telling, mances at courts that he was thoroughly they found hundreds if not thousands conversant with a lower-class tradition that were not influenced by books; many of storytelling. Naples, the south of Italy, were oral wonder tales. Bottigheimer for- and Sicily were treasure chests of oral gets to add that books circulated mainly storytelling, and Basile, who travelled among the aristocracy and upper middle throughout Italy and was not from the classes, and many of the French and Ger- aristocracy, was clearly familiar with oral man writers of the eighteenth and nine- tales and literary works. His brilliance— teenth centuries wrote extraordinary lit- the use of folk dialect to mock Baroque erary fairy tales that show no connection mannerist conventions—seems to have to so-called restoration and rise tales. As avoided Bottigheimer’s gaze. to her derogatory remarks about com- In her final chapter, “A New History,” mon people, whom she turns into passive she begins with another one of her infa- consumers unable to create their own mous declarations that are based on noth- wonder or magic tales, they are lamenta- ing but disdain for common people and ble. Perhaps if she studied how peasants oral traditions: “If we look forward from and laborers developed certain rituals, Straparola toward the fairy tale future, how tales and songs were performed in we see a publishing phenomenon with their homes and at work, how they con-

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fessed their beliefs about elves, fairies, In a superb talk, “Authorizing Fairy- and witches in fabricated stories to their Tale History? Disciplinary Debates and persecutors, how town criers might have the Politics of Inequality,” held by Cris- circulated tales, and so on, she might tina Bacchilega at the recent 2010 meet- have granted them some brains and cre- ing of the American Folklore Society, she ativity. Bottigheimer, however, goes even comments: “When Bottigheimer writes, further than denying the majority of Eu- ‘Rise fairy tales are a product of that ropean people any power of original sto- quintessential engine of modernity, the rytelling; she means to diminish the tales printing press,’ this seemingly matter-of- of all other peoples in the world with fact statement, which is more a declara- her “new” history when she writes: “In tion than a historical truth, participates a large sense the international spread of in a larger and powerful discourse that fairy tales can be explained within a his- has represented modernity as strictly tory of a predominantly Italian creation, literate as well as simply European, and French editing, and German re-editing has configured the difference between that took place in a context of commercial oral and print traditions into a strategy of mechanisms within book distribution control and domination. Why does this networks.”29 This statement—unless you matter? Whether the fairy-tale genre is subscribe to Bottigheimer’s prescriptive considered exclusively within European definition of a fairy tale—explains noth- and literary history, or as a genre whose ing and is an outright lie. Fairy tales, even ties to expressive cultures and compara- the kind Bottigheimer celebrates, were tive literatures are inflected by global dy- told, copied, and disseminated by word namics, has significant implications for of mouth and manuscript in many other ascribing a place for lay and subaltern parts of the world long before Straparola knowledges in history.”30 was born. Her “new” history of the fairy If Bottigheimer had been serious tale is nothing but an embarrassment to about writing a new, more balanced in- literary analysis, literary history, social terdisciplinary history of the fairy tale, history, and publishing history. she might have begun with a discussion about the evolution of human commu- Ideological Simplifications and Impli- nication throughout the world and how cations humans exchanged information and de- What is perhaps most disturbing about veloped narratives based on daily expe- Bottigheimer’s Fairy Tales: A New History rience, work, rituals, and beliefs. Though is her seemingly objective use of terms there is no exact date as to when human and methods to conceal a perverse ideo- language and cognition developed, most logical agenda. Perhaps she is unaware historians agree that it was at least 100,000 of her own ideological prejudices and the to 200,000 years ago, long before alpha- negative effects they might have for stu- bets, script, and printing presses. That is, dents and scholars of folklore and fairy all people on the earth lived and commu- tales, but they clearly color her views nicated by gestures and word of mouth and reveal the defects and contradictions thousands of years before such a thing as of her faux history. a fairy tale as we know it today came into

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being. Yet, tales of various kinds were in- ing such as local enhancement, emula- vented and cultivated, and as Michael tion learning, ontogenetic ritualization, Tomasello points out in The Cultural Ori- or any form of individual learning. The gins of Human Cognition: “Natural lan- argument is that cumulative cultural guages also contain cognitive resources evolution depends on two processes, infor construing whole events or situations novation and imitation (possibly supple- in terms of one another, that is, for cre- mented by instruction), that must take ating the various kinds of analogies and place in a dialectical process over time metaphors that are so important in adult such that one step in the process enables cognition—such as seeing the atom as a the next.”32 solar system, love as a journey, or anger As metaphorical tales were told and as heat. Also, children’s growing skills of circulated thousands of years before linguistic communication enable them to print, they served social functions, were participate in complex discourse interac- retained through memory, and were tions in which the explicitly symbolized passed on from generation to genera- perspectives of interactions clash and so tion. When oral wonder tales originated, must be negotiated and resolved. These it is difficult to say, but there are traces, kinds of interactions may lead children to signs, patterns, and plots in early ancient begin to construct something like a theory manuscripts that reveal how all people of mind of their communicative partners, came to know the world through meta- and, in some special cases of pedagogical phor, ritual, custom, and transformation. discourse, to internalize adult instruc- Tales were not named or categorized actions and so begin to self-regulate and to cording to genre, but it is clear that most reflect on their own thinking—perhaps of the fairy-tale motifs, topoi, characters, leading to some types of metacognition plots, and conventions existed in oral and representational redescription. The traditions (and some continue to do so) internalization of discourse interactions long before learned people learned how containing multiple, conflicting perspec- to write and categorize narratives. tives may even be identified with -cer An interesting case in point is The tain types of uniquely human, dialogical Thousand and One Nights (Alf Laila wa 31 thinking processes.” Laila) which is purposely omitted from The primary learning processes of lan- discussion in Bottigheimer’s essays and guage and cultural communication were books. The tales in this collection were and are based on imitation, instruction, originally Persian and stemmed from and communication. What is important oral storytelling traditions of the eighth for the study of fairy tales and any oth- and ninth centuries. As Paul McMichael er narrative form is a comprehension of Nurse points out in Eastern Dreams: How its evolutionary tendencies. Tomasello the Arabian Nights Came to the World, writes: “Cumulative cultural evolution “Travel and trade mean exchanges not depends on imitative learning, and per- only of goods but also of ideas and in- haps active instruction on the part of formation. Although their exact prov- adults and cannot be brought about by enance is unknown, based on such inter- means of ‘weaker’ forms of social learn- nal evidence as cultural references and

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terminology it is believed that many of various storytellers, scribes, and scholars the stories in the Nights originated with began to record the tales from this collec- Indian, Arab, Persian, Greek, Roman and tion and others and to shape them either possibly Chinese travelers, merchants, independently or within the framework and soldiers plying travel routes from of the Sheherezade/Shahriyâr narra- the Balkans to the China Sea. Rest stops tive frame. The tellers and authors of the were spent around campfires or in the tales were anonymous and their styles occasional caravanserai—walled hostels and language differed greatly; the only catering to travelers—dotting the roads. common distinguishing feature was the At these times, it was customary to swap fact that they were written in a colloquial stories to while away the restful hours language called Middle Arabic that had before setting out again. The more popu- its own peculiar grammar and syntax. lar tales were thus transferred from place By the fifteenth century, three distinct to place while being continually modi- layers could be detected in the collection fied according to regional customs and of those tales that formed the nucleus of circumstances, much as a joke will as- what became known as The Thousand and sume local colour and familiar allusions One Nights: (1) Persian tales that had some for better comprehension.”33 Indian elements and had been adapted The development of the Nights tales into Arabic by the tenth century; (2) tales from the Oriental oral and literary tradi- recorded in Baghdad between the tenth tions of the Middle Ages into a classical and twelfth centuries; (3) stories written work for Western readers is a fascinat- down in Egypt between the eleventh and ing one. The tales in the collection can fourteenth centuries. be traced to three ancient oral cultures Nurse emphasizes the important role — Indian, Persian, and Arab —and they played by the rawi, professional storytell- probably circulated in the vernacular ers or reciting storytellers, in the dissem- hundreds of years before they were writ- ination of the tales that were addressed ten down some time between the ninth mainly to people of the lower classes, and fourteenth centuries. The apparent disdained by the educated classes. The model for the literary versions of the rawi still exercise their profession in Mo- tales was a Persian book entitled Hezâr af- rocco today. Nurse also notes that many sân (A Thousand Stories), translated into of the tales come from written compila- Arabic in the ninth century as Alf laylah tions and literary antecedents and were wa-laylah (A Thousand and One Nights), constantly being changed when told for it provided the framework story of a and written down. In the process they caliph who kills his wife because she be- became truly international, and Nurse trays him. Then, for the next three years, notes, “it is known that stories from the he takes a new wife every day and slays Nights were circulating in ‘westernized’ her each night after taking her maiden- versions in Europe many centuries be- head to avenge himself on women. He is fore their printed appearance, cropping finally diverted from this cruel custom by up in oral form in Germany, France, Italy a vizier’s daughter, assisted by her slave- and Spain, although it is unclear wheth- girl. During the next seven centuries, er manuscript versions of sundry Nights

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tales were in circulation. All the same, it among teachers, reading in one’s native is likely some Nights stories were pres- language did not play a part in the tra- ent in Europe from around the twelfth ditional curriculum.”35 Girls were rarely century, arriving through Arabized Sicily taught to read. Many people could only or Moorish Spain to be absorbed into the write their names and yet were consid- European folklore tradition.”34 ered literate. Among the hundreds of tales that In Literacy in Early Modern Europe: Cul- were recorded by scribes were stories ture and Education 1500-1800, R. A. Hous- that followed Bottigheimer’s plots of ton points out, “The imperfect nature of rise and restoration tales such as “The early modern sources generally makes it Fisherman and the Genie,” “The Tale necessary to categorise people as literate of the Three Apples,” “Aladdin and the or illiterate. However these are at best Magic Lamp,” and “The Ebony Horse.” seen not as discrete categories, but as In addition, there were fairy tales of ini- steps in a hierarchy of skills. At the same tiation and marriage rituals, tales with time, seeing and listening could bridge fairies, flying horses, and wizards, and the gap between literate and illiterate. tales dealing with incest, child abuse What is more, literacy can be used for dif- and abandonment, rape, slavery, exploi- ferent purposes: to serve some practical tation, deceit, miraculous intervention, or functional end such as economic need and so on. Were these tales told in Venice among tradesmen, in which case reading during Straparola’s time? We don’t know and writing would be advantageous; or for certain, but we do know something to fulfill a religious need, where reading that Bottigheimer never discusses: Ven- alone is all that is commonly required.”36 ice was the most important trade center Literacy was also used by the church with the Byzantine Empire and the Mus- and by governments constituted by the lim world, and it is quite possible that upper classes to subject the lower classes not only goods but tales were exchanged to authoritative regulations, social codes, in this port city that was also known for laws, and manners. Very few books the performing arts and the publishing in the sixteenth century were secular of books. Though there was a higher rate and fiction. Even when they were read, of literacy in Venice than in most Italian they were frequently read aloud and in cities, more than 70% of the people in groups. For the most part and in most of the city could not read adequately, and Europe, orality of different kinds was the even those who could read did not nec- dominant mode of cultural communica- essarily understand what they read. As tion in all social classes. Cultural condi- Brian Richardson points out in Printing, tions and languages were very diverse Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy, throughout Europe, and the stories and “What is striking from a modern point social practices of the lower classes were of view is that children could learn to not considered worthy of attention. They read without necessarily understand- were very rarely recorded just as Bot- ing fully what they read: because of the tigheimer never bothers to explore oral force of tradition and the lack of prestige mediation in all the classes and the pos- of the vernacular as a written language sible connections between the classes in

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regard to storytelling. If she had done 9 Ziolkowski, 395. this and had understood the complex na- 10 Straparola, Le piacevoli notti, li. ture of history, we might have a different 11 Vaz da Silva, 404. picture of Straparola and Basile. We cer- 12 Ben-Amos, 430. tainly would have a different view of the 13 Ben-Amos, 434. Le piacevoli notti and Lo Cunto de li cunti 14 Darren Oldridge. 2005. Strange Histories: and the significant roles they played in The Trial of the Pig, the Walking Dead, and mediating oral and literary stories that Other Matters of Fact from the Medieval and helped foster the genre of the literary Renaissance Worlds. London: Routledge, 4. fairy tale. As it stands, Bottigheimer’s 15 Ben-Amos, 435. “new” history of the fairy tale can only 16 Ruth Bottigheimer 2009 Fairy Tales: A New be considered self-serving sensationalist History.Albany: State University of New “scholarship.” York, 1. 17 Bottigheimer, 4. Notes 18 Bottigheimer, 10. 19 Bottigheimer, 11-12. 1 Marshall Poe. 2011. A History of 20 See Vladimir Propp 1968. Morphology of Communications: Media and Society from the the Folktale. Edited by Louis Wagner and Evolution of Speech to the Internet. Cambridge: Alan Dundes. 2nd rev. ed. Austin: University Cambridge University Press: 115. of Texas Press; Claude Lévi-Strauss. 1963. Structural Anthropology trans. Claire Jacobson 2 See Giovan Francesco Straparola. 2000. Le and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: piacevoli notti. Edited by Donato Pirovano. Doubleday; Claude Brémond. 1997. L’Analyse Rome: Salerno: xlvii structurale du récit. Paris: Seuil; Louis Marin. 3 Jack Zipes. 2006. Fairy Tales and the Art of 1989. Food for Thought. Baltimore: John Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and Hopkins University Press; Steven Swann the Process of Civilization, 2nd ed. New York: Jones, 1995. The Fairy Tale: The Magic Mirror of Routledge: 14. Imagination. New York: Twayne. 4 Straparola, Le piacelvoli notti: xlvii 21 Bottigheimer, 16-17. 5 See Jan Ziolkowski. 2010. Straparola and 22 See Lauence Harf-Lancner. 1984. Les Fées au the Fairy Tale: Between Literary and Oral Moyen Âge: Morgane et Mélusine. La naissance Traditions. Journal of American Folklore des fées. Paris: Honoré Champion. 123:377-397; Francisco Vaz da Silva. 2010. 23 Bottigheimer, 45. The Invention of Fairy Tales,” Journal of American Folklore 123: 398-425; Dan Ben- 24 See Steffen Martus. 2009. Die Brüder Grimm: Amos. 2010. Straparola: The Revolution Eine Biographie. Berlin: Rowohlt. That Was Not, Journal of American Folklore 25 See Robert, Raymonde Robert 2002. Le conte 123: 426-446; Ruth Bottigheimer. 2010. Fairy de fées littéraire en France de la fin du XVII à la Godfather, Fairy-Tale History, and Fairy-Tale fin du XVIII siècle. Supplement bibliographique Scholarship: A Response to Dan Ben-Amos, 19800-2000 établi par Nadine Jasmin avec la Jan M. Ziolkowski, and Francisco Vaz da collaboration de Claire Debru. Paris: Champion; Silva. Journal of American Folklore 123. Anne Defrance and Jean-François Perrin, eds. 6 Ziolkowski, 377. 2007. Le conte en ses paroles. La figuration de l’oralité dans le conte merveilleux du Classicisme 7 Ziolkowski, 380. aux Lumieres. Paris: Éditions Desjonquères. 8 Ziolkowski, 385. 26 Bottigheimer, 73.

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27 For two important essays concerned with the oral components of Italian fairy tales, see Cristina Lavinio, “La fiaba tra oralità e scrittura: aspetti linguistici and stilistici” and Giovanna Cerina, “La fiaba tra oralità e scrittura: aspetti semiotici,” 1982, in Oralità e Scrittura nel Sistema Letterario, ed. Giovanna Cerina, Cristina Lavinio, and Luisa Mulas. Rome: Bulzoni: 91-114 and 115-132. See also Luciano Morbiato, ed. 2006. La Fiaba e altri Frammenti di Narrazione popolare. Florence: Olschki. 28 Bottigheimer, 103. 29 Bottigheimer, 107. 30 Cristina Bacchilega, “Authorizing Fairy- Tale History? Disciplinary Debates and the Politics of Inequality,” manuscript of talk held on October 16, 2010 at the American Folklore Association Meeting in Nashville, Tennessee. Donald Haase, who responded to Bacchilega’s paper, also made some very perceptive remarks about Bottigheimer’s rhetoric of assertion at this session. See also Cristina Bacchilega’s 2010 review of Ruth Bottigheimer’s Fairy Tales: a New History in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 35: 468-71. 31 Michael Tomasello. 2008. The Origins of Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 9-10. 32 Ibid., 39. 33 Paul McMichael Nurse. 2010. Eastern Dreams: How the Arabian Nights Came to the World. Toronto: Viking Canada: 23. 34 Ibid., 46. 35 Brian Richardson. 1999. Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 108. 36 R. A. Houston. 2002. Literacy in Early Modern Europe: Culture and Education 1500- 1800 London: Longman: 4.

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Contesting the Spectacle: be appreciated if we consider the kinds Global Lives as Counterpublic of media background among which it exists and thus effectively defies. in the Context of Celebrity Bono, Madonna, Angelina Jolie, 1 Activism George Clooney, Oprah Winfrey, and other megastars have chosen to lend Rebecca Elliott some of their limelight to African dis- University of California-Berkeley ease, poverty, and conflict, which become their causes célèbres. Bono takes meetings with world leaders to discuss debt relief. he Global Lives Forum convened Jolie promotes economist Jeffrey Sachs’ on February 27, 2010, to provide a Millennium Villages Project in Kenya. space for critical discussion of the Winfrey had a school for girls built in missionT and products of the Global Lives Johannesburg. This explosion of interest Project. The Forum brought together the in Africa among American celebrities is Project’s staff of producers and filmmak- perhaps best confirmed in a 2006 article ers with scholars, students, and members in the Style Section of the New York Times of the public to engage in conversation which remarked on Madonna’s use of im- about the potentials and limitations of ages of AIDS-stricken Malawian children the Project, what it had accomplished, as the backdrop during her concerts, and and what work was left to be done. concluded: “That Madonna should sud- Left implicit but yet perhaps the mo- denly be casting an ice-blue eye toward tivating force behind the entire day’s Africa should hardly be surprising. After discussions was the question of what all, she has always known how to spot makes the Global Lives Project worth a trend. And much as it may strain the doing. Why do we experience a need for limits of good taste to say it, Africa—rife something like the Global Lives Project; with disease, famine, poverty, and civil to what are we reacting? In the various war—is suddenly ‘hot’” (Williams 2006). panels and discussions, the participants A net result of this swell of this high- at the Forum described dissatisfaction profile activism, however, is that celeb- with the products of commercial media: rities have now become a predominant radically simplified sound bites increas- and ubiquitous source of information ingly packaged and filtered by appealing about Africa. In a 2007 report, media personalities. What we know is what is watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy spectacular and this seems insufficient in Reporting (FAIR) assessed the current for understanding the world and our state of Africa-related television network places in it. news coverage and concluded that Afri- The current supremacy of the spec- can countries and issues are increasingly tacle and its dangers is illustrated force- seen “through the prism of celebrity.” A fully by the contemporary phenomenon full quarter of Africa-related stories on of celebrity activism on behalf of Africa. the NBC Nightly News over 2005-2007 The value of the Global Lives Project as a had a celebrity angle, most commonly source of information about the world can focusing on Bono, with whom anchor

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Brian Williams traveled to sub-Saharan 2006). In most instances of celebrity ac- Africa in the spring of 2006. Across the tivism, Africans are present as subjects major networks, FAIR found that Africa- but absent as voices, and the “truth” or related stories were largely about either “common sense” about who they are and celebrity involvement at the G8 summit what they need goes untested by their in Scotland, Bono’s activism in general, own diverse experiences. the movie Blood Diamond (about Sierra Yet while Africans are silent in ce- Leone’s civil war, starring Leonardo Di- lebrity activism, they are far from invis- Caprio), Madonna’s adoption of a Mala- ible. Celebrities make strategic use of in- wian boy, or George Clooney’s activism tensely emotional images of suffering— in Darfur (Hollar 2007). children with distended bellies, skeletal Celebrities exert immense influence in AIDS patients, weary and overburdened the public sphere. They attract attention women, and so forth. Many of these im- not only from television news, but from ages feature the celebrity activists them- every popular medium. The FAIR re- selves, looking distraught. These images port captures how celebrities can and do tend to recycle inaccurate and degrad- define which issues are the issues when ing stereotypes. “Africans,” understood they talk about “Africa.” They can and monolithically, are portrayed as passive do set agenda that empower some ac- and helpless, as perpetually beleaguered tors and disempower others. They offer and in need, or as victims of misery solutions and celebrate heroes. Because largely of their own making. While the celebrities are regarded as trendsetters, celebrity is recognizable, usually the Af- they create, reinforce, and promulgate ricans remain unidentified—as consum- our popular “truth” about Africans: who ers of these images, we typically do not they are, what their problems are, how know their names, where they are from, those problems can be solved, and who or anything else about them. In this way, can and should come to their aid. the images also act as a communicative Celebrities create this truth largely medium that silences African voices. The without the voices of actual Africans. For celebrities—and the relatively affluent instance, many African activists com- audiences for whom they proxy—are po- plained that 2005’s Live 8, the worldwide sitioned in these images as the rescuers day of concerts to “raise awareness” in of the masses of anonymous Africans. advance of the G8 summit, featured Afri- The marginalization of African voices cans in video montages about HIV/AIDS, in discourses about them seems intuitive- but not as speakers or activists (Monbiot ly rather unfair. Since celebrities, how- 2005). The 2007 “Africa Issue” of Vanity ever, are ultimately so good at generat- Fair, edited by Bono, featured only one ing interest in and support for causes in African author (Beckerman 2007). Marie Africa, we are compelled to ask why we Claire magazine lionizes female celebri- should be so worried about such margin- ties who go to Africa and diarize about alization. Indeed, celebrities have a great the resilient hope of desperate female capacity to effect the changes they seek: victims of poverty, hunger, disease, sex- their wealth and public profile enable ual exploitation, and conflict (Stoever them to donate money and raise more;

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they get the ear of politicians and poli- political questions that get sidelined to cymakers; they inspire others to service. charitable impulses. The difficulty with Celebrity visibility can be a huge asset to simple inclusion is that the current struc- organizations and causes that might oth- tures of our various, transnational pub- erwise go unnoticed. Americans arguably lic spheres, in which these problematic “care” more about Africa now because discourses circulate, are strongly biased celebrities have made it so glamorous against the meaningful participation of (Alleyne 2005; Marshall 1997; Meyer and subordinated groups. The FAIR report Gamson 1995; Street 2004; Traub 2008). highlights as much: the cameras follow The reason to be critically thought- the celebrities. Rather than focus on “get- ful about celebrity activism is that it in- ting them in” to a rather hegemonic set forms how various publics think about of discourses, then, it is perhaps more these issues, and hence how and to what strategic to subvert these discourses, to extent they lean on their own govern- widen the discursive space and amplify ments and international organizations to the counterdiscourses already forming in intervene. Put simply, and in the words African and global counterpublics. of the Global Lives Project, “what we Counterpublics, as defined by critical see informs how we act.” A discourse theorist Nancy Fraser (1992, 2007), pro- that orients people towards charity for vide discursive arenas for the formula- silent, passive victims does not lead to tion of identity and discussion of com- the informed or sustainable redress of mon concerns. These forums include some of the most difficult political and magazines and newspapers, films, popu- economic challenges. Celebrity activism lar music, avant-garde scholarly or artis- might alert an otherwise apathetic public tic institutions, academic journals and, to the existence of suffering far away. But increasingly, online communities and by portraying Africans as “unfortunate their products. Participants, engaging as inferiors,” rather than as “outraged and peers, articulate their desires, needs, and insulted equals,” celebrities obscure (if wants, outside of the supervision of the not deny) the perspectives and the agen- dominant groups in more mainstream cy of actual Africans (Spelman 1997, 60). public spheres. Through the processes of In the words of South African sociologist debate internal to them, counterpublics Zine Magubane (2007): “there is no room create counterdiscourses and counterna- in this worldview for the possibility that rratives, which can then be used to lodge Africans themselves might be the ones to a collective, coherent, and sustained dis- create the political and economic condi- cursive attack on what is commonly as- tions such that intense poverty might not serted and understood as “true.” This be the sine qua non of African life” (391). structural change creates a space and a The seemingly obvious solution to the means for subordinated groups to exer- marginalization of actual Africans in cise voice, to challenge assumptions, and these discourses about them is to “get to contest the status quo. them in”—find a way to include Af- The Global Lives Project acts as a type rican voices. Once there, those voices of counterpublic insofar as it defies the can contest stereotypes and reassert logics of commercial media. It produces

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films that stay close and true to the expe- is focused only on those voices and ex- riences of the subjects themselves, such periences. The construction and commu- that the materiality of their lives can be nication of knowledge about ourselves expressed faithfully, without regard for and others are always political acts; the the right “angle” or emotionally compel- videos provide the data with which ling “hook.” The videos do not position viewers can assess just how general the an interlocutor between the subject and “truths” they take for granted are. The the viewer; no one is named the authori- Global Lives Forum provided an oppor- tative interpreter of the subject’s experi- tunity for those involved and interested ence. There is no Bono or Jolie to describe in the Project to affirm a certain political how whole categories of people experi- commitment—not to paternalistically ence their circumstances. The videos are “shine a light” on the “darkest” corners particular to an extreme: about specific of the globe, but rather to actively seek individuals, over the course of one day out and amplifies the diverse voices that of their lives. They thereby resist the have been talking about their experienc- tendency to generalize across complex es all along but have been drowned out diversity, while allowing the possibility by much more powerful and spectacular that viewers might notice similarities to public figures. their own lives and forge meaningful connections. Notes In Fraser’s rendering, however, counterpublics are strategically oriented. They In these two event reviews, authors Rebecca are political in their objectives, deliberate Elliot and Stina Marie Hasse Jørgensen have adapted their presentations from a forum in their contestation. The Global Lives organized by Cultural Analysis and the Global videos do not make claims or formulate Lives Project at the Doreen B. Townsend concerns, needs, and wants in the way Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley in that Fraser imagines. But what use can February 2010. The forum, “Representing/ then be made of them? Do they represent Experiencing Everyday Life in the Global an arena in which the claims of celebrity Media: Commentary on the Global Lives activists, and other popular “experts”, Project”, asked a group of scholars and can be meaningfully contested? If the new media artists to reflect on the Global videos are used as such, are they being Lives Project itself (http://globallives.org), co-opted in a way that transgresses the as well as on the value of new media for the understanding of everyday experience Global Lives Project’s purposeful neglect globally. The editors are grateful to Elliot of narrative? and Hasse Jørgensen for their willingness These questions came up multiple to distill their longer works into our shorter times over the course of the day’s presen- review format. [Eds.] tations and discussions. Ultimately, they remain open ones. What makes Global Lives strategic and potentially emanci- patory is that it offers a source of information about marginalized people that

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Works Cited Monbiot, George. 2005. And still he stays silent: By hailing the failure Alleyne, Mark D. 2005. The United of this summer’s G8 summit as a Nations’ Celebrity Diplomacy. success, Bob Geldof has betrayed SAIS Review 25.1: 175-185. the poor of Africa. The Guardian Beckerman, Gal. 2007. The Obscured (London), September 6. Continent. Columbia Journalism Spelman, Elizabeth V. 1997. Fruits of Review (online), http://www. Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_ Suffering. Boston: Beacon Press. obscure_continent.php, accessed Stoever, Jennifer Lynn. 2006. ‘Haute January 21, 2008. Culture’ for Mail Order Fraser, Nancy. 1992. Rethinking the Missionaries: Representing Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Third World Woman in the the Critique of Actually Existing American Fashion Magazine. Democracy. In Habermas and the Social Identities 12: 591-627. Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: Street, John. 2004. Celebrity Politicians: MIT Press: 109-142. Popular Culture and Political Fraser, Nancy. 2007. Transnationalizing Representation. The British the Public Sphere. Theory, Culture Journal of Politics and International & Society 24: 7-30. Relations 6: 435-452. Hollar, Julie. 2007. Bono, I Presume?: Traub, James. 2008. The Celebrity Covering Africa Through Solution. The New York Times Celebrities. Extra! http://www. Magazine (New York), March 9. fair.org/index.php?page=3119, Williams, Alex. 2006. Into Africa. The accessed 30 May 2010. New York Times, August 13. Magubane, Zine. 2007. Oprah in South Africa: The Politics of Coevalness and the Creation of a Black Public Sphere. Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 8.4: 373-393. Marshall, P. David. 1997. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Meyer, David S. and Joshua Gamson. 1995. The Challenge of Cultural Elites: Celebrities and Social Movements. Sociological Inquiry 65.2: 181-206.

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The Global Lives Project: Users can watch many different stories of everyday life, and can collect and up- Making New Media Matter in load their own documentation of the ev- a Global World eryday life experiences of people in their locale1. Thereby, GLP participants can Stina Marie Hasse Jørgensen add to the creation of a new online col- University of Copenhagen lective memory, made with other people through the digital interaction of sharing and distributing information. As a critical computing project, the Global Lives The Participatory Culture of Project hopes to bring a critical aware- Prosuming ness of how culture is categorized and omputing has infiltrated the ev- transformed by engaging users in a col- eryday life of people all over the laborative new media project. world. It is no longer merely a In the field of new media, the concept toolC for communication and interaction, of participation is a notion of process- but also something-to-think-with, a me- oriented production that is constantly dium that can give us new dimensions in changing, interacting, and mutating. the way we experience and engage with Technology has enabled new ways of the world. accessing, manipulating, and remixing The digital media theorist D. Fox Har- already-accumulated media into new rell describes how digital media, or forms of expression. In general, new phantasmal media, affects our way of think- media allows a continuous stream of ing and acting. He defines three different virtual collaboration; users can build on ways of computing: social, cultural, and the works of others to share, edit, and/or critical computing. Harrell defines the sample as both a mode of production and aims of critical computing as to: a way of perceiving and engaging in the world. One could say that the process of …challenge and provoke users’ ide- editing has become a form of art, a mode alized cognitive models through en- of interaction, and a way of experiencing abling active participation imbued the world. In the book Postproduction the with culture and critical awareness. (Harrell 2009, 4) art critic Nicolas Bourriaud describes this new cultural form:

Critical computing evokes in the user It is no longer a matter of elaborating new ways of thinking and interacting a form on the basis of a raw material with a globalized world. The Global but working with objects that are al- Lives Project is a compelling example of ready in circulation on the cultural this usage of computing technology. The market, which is to say, objects already GLP archive, which contains visual doc- informed by other objects. (Bourriaud umentation of the lives of different peo- 2002, 22) ple from around the world on a digital platform on the Internet, enables users By searching, selecting, and swapping to actively engage with global cultures. from one video documentary to another,

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as most of us do in digital archives, we bination of the words “producer” and can not only consume the GLP’s stories “consumer”. Thus, Manovich defines of everyday life around the world, but prosuming as a process in which the roles we can also become remixers, making of producer and consumer merge. The our own stories of life in a global world. Global Lives Project, I would argue, is a By sampling or editing the Global Lives social platform that enables this culture stories we can create new versions and of prosumerism. The retelling and repro- new narratives from the existing stories. duction of the narratives captured by the Thus, following Bourriaud, we might Global Lives Project is part of a new cul- see the Global Lives Project as part of a ture of participation enabled by the struc- culture of activity, enabling the reinter- ture of the digital archive, which creates preation of the digital archive through a place for interaction with the global- user-participation. ized world. As the mission statement of In this new form of culture, which one the Global Lives Project explains: might call a culture of use or a culture of activity, the artwork functions as the Our mission is to collaboratively build a video library of human life experi- temporary terminal of a network of inter- ence that reshapes how we as both connected elements, like a narrative that producers and viewers conceive of extends and reinterprets preceding nar- cultures, nations and people outside ratives. (Bourriaud 2002, 19) of our own communities. (The Global In this way, our process of selection, Lives Project. 2010b) swapping, and viewing Global Lives stories, creates a way to build our own The stated purpose of the Global Lives personal narratives by building upon Project is to provide its users with new the stories of others. These personal nar- insights into the similarities and differ- ratives are a new form of adaptations, ences among diverse cultures and ways showing our path or activity of selecting of living in the world; thus, the Global and watching these videos online. The Lives project can be seen as giving every- recorded and expressed narratives can day people a voice and a place to com- be seen as a kind of strategic consump- municate, based on an ideal of participation, a tactic to navigate the system. The tory democracy. As the above statement philosopher Michel De Certeau explains shows, the aim of the Global Lives Proj- this in the book, The Practice of Everyday ect is to change the way people experi- Life: ence and think about the world. It trades on the fact that we are different enough A tactic insinuates itself into the oth- that transcultural interactions are inter- er’s place, fragmentarily, without tak- esting, but similar enough that we can ing it over in its entirety, without being meet in a common interactive space. As able to keep it at a distance. (De Cer- the call for papers for the Global Lives teau 1984, 7) Forum argues:

This can also be thought of as a culture of By freely distributing a stream of pixels prosumerism. Art scholar Lev Manovich from unexpected and underexperienced created the term “prosumer” as a com-

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human realities to screens around the the technology used in our interactions planet, the hope of this global band of with the world. Through this embodi- filmmakers is to rebuild a more holistic ment, technology gets under our skin. and humanist ethos for the upcoming In other words, over time the use of tech- generations of globally connected life. nology can be transformed into a being of (The Global Lives Project, 2010a) technology. Either one as a subject inter- actively engages with the world by the The Global Lives Project seeks to create use of technology, i.e. by using glasses room for free and open exchange of cul- in order to interact with the surround- ture through dialogue and collaboration ing environment, or one can engage with that can enable people to critically en- technology as a subject that perceives gage with the world. the world through hermeneutical relations. The hermeneutical relation is the way we The Culture of Technological interpret or read the world through tech- Experience nology and can best be compared to the One could argue that the Global Lives relation between a trompe l’oeil painting Project is not only a project that enables and its viewer. First the trompe l’oeil tech- the prosuming culture of participation nique deceives the eye of the viewer to but also a technological experiment that believe that the painting is real, and then investigates how we perceive and repre- it reveals its identity as a painting to the sent the world. The Global Lives Project viewer. This makes the viewer aware of addresses the tension between the way the difference between the corporeal re- we see a person in another country and ality and the representation of the paint- the experience of being a person in another ing. The revelation of the deceptive qual- country. Emerging technology offers us ity of the painting – its difference – is done new modes of bodily perception, without in order to make the viewer reflect on any movement through physical space. the painting as something in itself and In the Global Lives archive, we can not not just mere representation. Further, only see how people live their everyday it prompts us to reflect on the world in lives, but we can toggle between these which the painting and the viewer are lives, moving from Kazakhstan to San both present. In the case of the Global Francisco in a split second. Lives Project, it is the computing tech- New media technology, however, is nology that makes the transformation something we experience through, so it is and creates the difference. Ihde explains easy to forget that we are witnessing rep- the technological transformation: resentations. We must pause to consider how these representations take place, be- Technologies transform our experience of the world and our perceptions cause technology not only mediates the and interpretations of our world, and corporal world, it creates and changes we in turn become transformed in this our thinking. (Ihde 2003) process. Transformations are non-neu- In Technoscience and Postphenomenolo- tral. (Ihde 2009, 44) gy, Don Ihde describes how we are bodily engaged with technology. We embody

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The corporeal experience of culture man experience in a global world. This is is based on smell, taste, sound, sight, partly due to the rise of the participatory touch, and bodily perceptions. These culture of prosuming, whose prominent sensations cannot be communicated en- features are the development of technol- tirely through technology. The bodily ex- ogy as a mediator of experience and the perience of culture is different from the recognition of the crucial difference be- experience of cultures mediated through tween the corporeal world and the vir- technology. tual world. However, all of these would That is the whole point. The space not have made the Global Lives Project presented by the Global Lives Project is so successful without its ideal and real- impossible to experience in the corpo- ization of free culture. The project would real world alone. It is exactly because simply not have existed without the moti- of the technological nature of the work vation and belief in free sharing, collabo- that it enables us to perceive the impos- ration, contribution, and communication. sible as possible: to create a participatory Yet, while the Global Lives can be said culture of prosuming. The space created to realize this ideal of free culture, with in the new media work does not repre- their successful and constantly expand- sent an actual physical space; rather, it ing digital archive of documentation on refers to it in its presentation of itself. In global lives, it is the technology of new other words, the experience of a new me- media that makes the ideal of free culture dia work is brought about by the differ- possible to pursue. Because the technol- ence between the corporeal reality of the ogy enables us to do things that are im- space and the technologically-developed possible to do in the corporeal world, the metamorphosis of the space. The Global digital archive of the Global Lives Project Lives Project could not exist without the becomes both a tool for people to use and technology. This is why the experience of interact with, but also a way of being. the technology and the possibilities of se- There is a long way to go before the cor- lecting, sampling, and remixing personal poreal world can become as open and en- narratives are an essential part of the gaging as the GLP archive; however, the project. One could say that it is a matter Global Lives Project is creating a digital of enabling the technology to amplify the path that shows us other possible worlds inaudible by exhibiting the technological and cultures and enables us to use tech- attributes within the new media work. nology as something-to-think-with.

Making New Media Matter in a Global World. When critical computing projects use Notes the new media technology as a medium See more on how to participate on: www. that is something-to-think-with, it can globallives.org open up questions that could not otherwise have been asked. The Global Lives Project opens our eyes to questions about what culture is and how it can inform hu-

154 Events and Debates

Works Cited Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2002. Postproduction – Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. New York: Has & Sternberg. De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. http://www. ubu.com/papers/de_certeau. html Accessed on January 4, 2011. Free Culture Forum Charter. 2009, http://fcforum.net. Accessed on May 5, 2010. The Global Lives Project. 2010a. Call for Papers: Representing/ Experiencing Everyday Life in the Global Media: Commentary on the Global Lives Project. http://socrates.berkeley. edu/~caforum/glpconference. html Accessed on January 4, 2011. The Global Lives Project. 2010b. Mission Statement and 2010 Artist’s Statement: http://globallives. org/about. Accessed on May 5, 2010. Harrell, D. Fox. 2009. Toward a Theory of Phantasmal Media: An Imaginative Cognition and Computation-based Approach to Digital Media. www.ctheory. net/articles.aspx?id=610 Accessed on December 20, 2010 Ihde, Don. 2009. Postphenomenology and Technoscience: The Peking University Lectures. Albany: State University of New York Press, 25-44. Manovich, Lev. 2002. The Language of New Media. http:// andreknoerig.de/portfolio/03/ bin/.../manovich- langofnewmedia.pdf Accessed on April 5, 2010.

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Reviews

Cinderella in America: A Book of Folk and cess by which European märchen were Fairy Tales. Compiled and edited by adapted as an integral part of an Ameri- William Bernard McCarthy. Jackson: can repertoire. An introduction prefaces University Press of Mississippi, 2007. each section, providing cultural and his- xiv + 514 pp., appendix, bibliography, 4 torical background on the group. It also indexes, 18 photographs. describes the material available and provides a narrative of the collection process inderella in America: A Book of Folk for each region. and Fairy Tales is a highly readable The explanatory notes at the end of and unique addition to the project each tale are informative and often ap- ofC documenting the development of Eu- pealing in their own right. Details in- ropean märchen as transplanted to Ameri- cluded are that of tale-type classification, can soil. While Cinderella in America rep- transcription and translation informa- resents the widest range of American folk tion, and description of story elements, tales available in one volume, William in addition to anecdotal descriptions of Bernard McCarthy limits his scope solely collector and performer. McCarthy also to tales of European origin, choosing to uses the endnotes as an opportunity to exclude American tales with origins in point out unusual features of the tale Asia, the Middle East, Africa, or Native that mark it as distinctly “American” in American cultures. However, he includes its retelling. The endnotes often reference European tales retold in African American other works with slightly different tran- and Native American communities. He scriptions of similar tales, in addition to further restricts this collection to include offering parallels to other tales within the only wonder tales/märchen rather than volume itself. This results in a degree of the joke narratives and tall tales popular comprehensiveness; while obviously un- among American narrators. These limita- able to include more than a sampling of tions are necessarily somewhat arbitrary, the rich variety of tales that are available, but they also inform the specific polemi- the endnotes provide a sense of the ho- cal function of this volume: to prove that, listic panorama of American tale telling far from withering in the New World, the and collecting. These background notes European wonder tale has had a vibrant legitimize the collection as a production and persistent life of its own in the United for the serious scholar, while moving this States. information out of the main body of the The collection is separated into five text allows McCarthy to retain the inter- parts organized by both historical period est of a more casual reader. and ethnic group, then sub-divided into Despite the interesting and informa- seventeen chapters on specific regions. tive editorial notes, the tales themselves A sixth part and eighteenth chapter of- are what make this volume worth read- fer a case study of not simply a tale, but ing. Drawing from archives, regional col- the taleteller herself, including personal lections, unpublished notes of fellow folk- background and photos of her in perfor- lorists, and his personal work, McCarthy mance as a final illustration of the pro- presents a range of tales that represents Cultural Analysis 9 (2010): R1-R7 © 2010 by The University of California. All rights reserved R1 Reviews Reviews

a wide swath of the Euro-American tale Everyday Life in Central Asia: Past and Pres- telling experience. Thus many of the tale ent. Edited by Jeff Sahadeo and Russell texts are either unique to this volume or Zanca. Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univer- found only rarely in other publications. sity Press, 2007. Pp. ix + 401, introduc- McCarthy has taken care to ensure as tion, selected bibliography, index. much accuracy in the reproduction of the original voice of the performer as pos- ne cannot read much of the schol- sible (while eschewing “eye-spelling” or arly literature on modern Central dialect exaggeration) by returning to the Asia (the countries of Turkmeni- original recording or transcription when Ostan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, available and personally re-transcribing and Kyrgyzstan) without encountering the material. This results in an easily scholars’ perennial laments about the rel- readable yet powerful presentation of ative lack of substantive, non-politicized these expressive tales in their rich variety analyses of life in the post-Soviet era. In- of contexts and idioms. deed, rarely do academic treatments of The engaging style in which both tales the region come down from the macro and background are presented suggests level to consider how Central Asians live that McCarthy writes with a popular au- their everyday lives. Jeff Sahadeo and dience in mind. However, he also offers Russell Zanca’s edited volume admira- an unobtrusive but thorough academic bly fills this lacuna in present scholarship background for his work through the and will likely become a standard text for editorial notes described above, an ex- Humanities courses on the region. tensive list of references and credits, and The book is comprised of contribu- multiple indexes including tale types, tions from a mixture of well-known and motifs, collectors, and storytellers. As newer voices in the field of Central Asian one of the few scholarly collections of studies, spanning the disciplines of an- American märchen, Cinderella in America thropology, political science, sociology, would serve as a convenient and reliable history, and religious studies. After an initial reference point for those interested introduction and a short opening essay in pursuing research on Euro-American that historically positions the two major folk tales. ethno-linguistic groups of the region, the McCarthy sets out prove that, con- editors divide the remaining chapters trary to conventional assumptions, the among categories such as “communi- Old World tradition of tale telling did ties,” “gender,” “performance and en- indeed travel with European immigrants counters,” “nation, state, and society in to the United States, becoming as much a the everyday,” and “religion.” part of American social fabric as the peo- Scott Levi’s concise but conceptually ple who retold them. This large and var- broad introductory essay rightly prob- ied collection of evocative wonder tales lematizes essentialist scholarship which serves not only as a valuable resource has often perpetuated the idea of the bi- and a pleasant read, but as an array of furcated nature of Central Asian ethnic- highly persuasive evidence for this argu- ity. In a crude distinction, some scholars ment. continue to maintain that a static histori- Jessica Erberich University of Southern California

R2 Reviews

cal dichotomy exists between the nomad- the early ranks of Soviet cadres in Cen- ic and settled population of the region, tral Asia negotiated Soviet and pre-So- one which manifests itself even in pres- viet ideals, creating novel wedding and ent conflict as exemplified by the violent marriage traditions that were held up as events in Kyrgyzstan during 2010. In models for the new Uzbek-Soviet wom- contrast, while recognizing the historical an. Elizabeth Constantine argues that importance of this division, Levi paints a during the Soviet period gender roles more complex picture of symbiosis, ad- were significantly transformed as wom- aptation, and syncretism. en internalized Soviet notions of gender. Under the heading of “communities,” Complimenting Constantine’s case that the second section of the volume is per- the ideas of gender changed during the haps the most temporally and geographi- Soviet period, Greta Uehling illustrates cally diverse of the entire book. Indeed, it how they remain in flux after the disso- is only here that the book’s contributors lution of the Soviet Union. stray outside the bounds of the post-So- The editors classify the chapters con- viet Central Asian republics. Contribu- cerning facets of cultural life such as tions include Adrienne Edgar’s chapter foodways, festival, and music under the on nomadic life among the Turkmens in heading “performance and encounters.” the pre-Soviet period, Robert Canfield’s It is here that Central Asian “tradition” analysis of a wedding narrative high- comes to the fore in an examination of lighting the uncertainties of rural life the everyday practices associated with and the “hidden transcripts” of Central globalized Kazakh music performance, Asian subalterns in the context of a vil- a chapter on how the Uzbek predilection lage conflict in Afghanistan, and Morgan for fatty foods reflects and indexes con- Liu’s discussion of contrasting visions of ceptions of Uzbek identity and present post-Soviet modernity in both the Uzbek economic reality, a cogent examination neighborhoods and the Soviet-construct- of the dialectic between private and pub- ed environs of the Kyrgyz city of Osh. lic meanings associated with Uzbek holi- In part three of the volume, under the days and celebrations, several reflexive heading of “gender,” Douglas Northrop ethnographic vignettes on the meanings questions the pre-war efficacy of the So- of Kazakh hospitality practices, and a viet hujum or attack on female veiling in piece discussing the nature of post-Soviet Uzbekistan and argues that the ultimate gender relations in rural Uzbekistan and legacy of such Soviet campaigns during Kazakhstan that highlights the adaptive the 1920s and 1930s was to mark female nature of the everyday and the social dis- dress as emblematic of political and na- ruptiveness of the Soviet period. tional identity. During the 1930s, most To this point, the majority of the vol- Uzbek women embraced the de-veiling ume focuses on the quotidian as a lens campaigns only when expedient and with which to view Central Asia’s post- when beyond the purview of Soviet au- Soviet reality, but institutions also play thorities largely remained behind their a part in the construction of the Central horsehair chachvon. Marianne Kamp also Asian “everyday” . Perhaps one of the details how the women who comprised most invasive ways that Central Asians

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have experienced the imposition of state centered work in the region by arguing structures (and strictures) was in the ar- that Central Asians are not inextricably bitrary mapping of the republics’ borders tied to a static “tradition” which survived and the difficulties these presented for intact after decades of Soviet control, travel in places like the historically-in- nor are they are inherently susceptible terdependent Ferghana valley. Similarly, to “fundamentalist” ideologies. Rather, many Central Asians continue to suffer Central Asian modernity is multifarious, the ill effects of the collapse of the Soviet shifting, and ever ready to adapt to po- economic system. In that vein, Kelly Mc- litical, economic, and social circumstanc- Mann shows how nostalgia for the comes. As folklorists have long known, the mand economy remains strong even as “everyday” is, as shown in this volume, many Central Asians now enjoy liberties a site of ongoing negotiation and active denied under the Soviet regime. The ef- social construction. In light of its acces- ficiency of the education system in many sible prose and ground-level analysis of Central Asian states also lags behind that life in the republics of Central Asia, en- of the USSR. In another essay Shoshana gaged general readers and undergradu- Keller illustrates how Uzbeks work to ate students will find this work a helpful negotiate the endemic corruption miring introduction to the region. down Uzbek schools. Generally, whenever scholarly lit- Benjamin Gatling erature has considered religious life in The Ohio State University Central Asia, the discussion is framed in terms of broader struggles against “political” Islam. As the editors note, their purpose is to interrogate such simplistic renderings of the alleged renewal of religious fervor in Central Asia. Sec- ondly, the contributions all, to some extent, weigh in on the success or failure of Soviet militant atheism and its rhetorical foil, “underground” Islam. To those ends, the contributors discuss issues such as the relationship of local congre- gations to state directives in Uzbekistan, shrine visitation practices and the nature of Islamic authority, varied conceptions of proper Islamic behavior, and the challenges faced by Christian minorities in the religious landscape of post-Soviet Central Asia. The various chapters in this volume all work to deconstruct the dominant and almost hegemonic force of policy-

R4 Reviews

Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fan- of preoedipal masochistic fantasy. For tasy, and Social Class. By John Kucich. instance, “fantasies of total control over Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton Uni- others” might take the form of “magical versity Press, 2007. Pp. reinterpretation of events”, or bestowing upon oneself the power to “lie, cheat, n this study of colonial fiction, John or use guile” with impunity, while Kucich moves away from psycho- exaggerated suffering that props up the analytic theories of masochism an- parental figure is aligned with “fantasies choredI in oedipal drama. Generally that maintain the omnipotence of speaking, such theories feature either others” (23-24). Schlepping through this a male masochist who valiantly flouts painstaking (but far from tedious) catalog the oedipal rulebook or one of a less is essential. The trouble with late-Victorian noble variety who takes the part of the masochistic fantasy, Kucich explains, is charlatan and, by some sleight of hand, that it “exploits a disarticulated middle- converts his suffering into moral clout. class social consciousness” and gives it Recent relational psychoanalysis, how- new form; it is not a fixed expression of ever, supplies what Kucich is convinced social relations so much as equipment is a more useful grammar of preoedipal designed to generate social discourse masochism: masochism that is chiefly of (84). Consequently, masochistic fantasy a narcissistic rather than sexual character as a literary device is available to the and thus linked to fantasies of omnipo- champions of British Imperialism, among tence. Kucich’s appeal to relational psy- them Kipling and Conrad, as well as its choanalysis as a principal but not exclu- critics, such as Robert Louis Stevenson sive or intractable interpretive method and Olive Schreiner. In identifying the bears fruit. Moreover, his findings are shifting configurations of masochistic a welcome alternative to the now-con- fantasy in the work of each of these ventional discovery that writers such authors and by sifting through race and as Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad gender ideologies to distinguish the were casualties of ambivalence, authors class values embedded in these fantasies, whose approbation of imperial tactics is Kucich offers new and sometimes at least as demonstrable as their frustra- startlingly fresh evaluations of their tion with it. Rather than hedging his bets, work. the literary critic might discover a meth- The “logic of masochistic fantasy” is od to colonial fiction’s mixed messages slippery stuff, and Kucich proceeds with in structures of preoedipal masochism. caution. Chapter 1, “Melancholy Magic: In Imperial Masochism, Kucich contends Robert Louis Stevenson’s Evangelical that these structures provided a “psycho- Anti-Imperialism” is an impressive, social language” that fashioned imperial thorough piece of criticism, and the and class subjectivities both abroad and highlight of the book. In this chapter, domestically (2). Kucich traces Stevenson’s literary In the introduction to his book, masochism to an increasingly fragmented Kucich scrupulously delineates non- evangelical psychological ideology that identical but often overlapping varieties symbolized the decline of the middle

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class. Whereas Stevenson’s early Scottish masochism in its most familiar form, novels mobilize masochistic splitting from the irresolute browbeating typical to capture irreconcilable bohemian and of Kipling’s “magical groups”, from early bourgeois impulses, Kucich explains works like Stulky & Co. to that jewel and that, in his late nineteenth-century South sometime bête noire of colonial fiction, Sea tales of imperial entrepreneurialism Kim. Kucich’s claim that Kipling repeat- Stevenson finally invents middle-class edly employs “a narcissistically omnipo- characters whose patterns of “masochistic tent bullying group that recognizes itself self-invention appear to constitute a both as the legitimately despotic center of grammar of moral legitimacy”, and social order and as its permanently alien- censure “interlopers” of the upper and ated victim” is not entirely novel (156). lower classes (72). Even here, though, Kucich has some- In the next chapter, however, Kucich’s thing new to offer. He proposes that, insistence that Olive Schreiner “sub- given our fixation on representations of merged oedipal within preoedipal mas- imperialism and race in Kipling’s texts, ochism” leaves the reader in much murk- we have yet to sufficiently acknowledge ier territory (92). His intricate readings of the “remarkably unilateral class politics” the interplay between “Freudian” and the author asserted, primarily through relational paradigms in the South Afri- a discourse of professional expertise, can author’s work are difficult to follow, which, when infused with self-denying though Kucich intriguingly speculates and even messianic evangelical values, that the evolving play of oedipal and generated a vigorous middle-class ideol- preoedipal masochisms in her writing ogy (138). enabled Schreiner to move beyond the Kucich has his hands full, juggling chauvinisms of early texts like The Story race and gender matters while of an African Farm and toward solidarity maintaining sharp focus on class issues, with Boer and African women by the ear- and he is, at least for the moment, ly twentieth century (134). By compari- swimming against a current crude vogue son, Kucich’s last two chapters on proof literary psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, imperialist discourses in the novels of Ki- he compels us to acknowledge that pling and Conrad are relatively straight- masochistic fantasies play a role “at forward. In Chapter 3, “Sadomasochism the intersections of imperial and class and the Magical Group: Kipling’s Mid- discourse”, and that they have “social dle-Class Imperialism”, Kucich argues and political instrumentality” (27, 30). that Kipling skillfully merged evangeli- Kucich argues the parameters posed calism and professionalism to formulate by relational masochism make one “an a middle-class ideology, while Chapter 4 enemy of simplicity”, and encourage the contends that Conrad integrated chival- critic to “resist interpretive pluralism” ric and professional discourses to harmo- (250). This seems true of Imperial nize “gentrified imperial detachment” Masochism, and yet his constructive use with “middle-class ethics” (29). of psychoanalytic theory would not seem Chapter 3 is Kucich’s most lucid chap- quite so constructive were it not bolstered ter, possibly because he discovers sado- by meticulous close readings of British

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colonial fiction and a deft historicism. By the same token, his laborious but rewarding study of colonial fiction is equally valuable as an experiment about how one might formulate a psychoanalytic literary criticism capacious enough to accommodate historical nuance. This is an intelligent book, and well worth our attention.

Michelle Robinson University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

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