Usable Pasts

Utah State University DigitalCommons@USU All USU Press Publications USU Press 1997 Usable Pasts Tad Tuleja Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs Part of the Indigenous Studies Commons Recommended Citation Tuleja, T. (1997). Usable pasts: Traditions and group expressions in North America. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press. This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the USU Press at DigitalCommons@USU. It has been accepted for inclusion in All USU Press Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@USU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Usable Pasts Traditions and Group Expressions in North America Usable Pasts Traditions and Group Expressions in North America Edited by Tad Tuleja Utah State University Press Logan, Utah 1997 Copyright © 1997 Utah State University Press All rights reserved Utah State University Press Logan, Utah 84322-7800 Typography by WolfPack Cover design by Michelle Sellers Cover illustrations. Front cover above: Deborah Anders Silverman. Steven Cleves Weber Collection; photo courtesy of David Cook/ Fine American Art. George Lewis. ©The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; courtesy of the Historical Department, Archives Division; used by permission. Jim Gambaro. Front cover below: Clark Kelley Price; ©The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; courtesy of the Museum of Church History and Art; used by permission. Courtesy of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Joel Saxe. Deborah Anders Silverman. Bert and Brenda Lazar Collection; photo by Martha Lochert. George Lewis. Back cover: Minerva K. Teichert; ©The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; courtesy of the Museum of Church History and Art; used by permission. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Usable pasts : traditions and group expressions in North America / edited by Tad Tuleja. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87421-226-X (paper) ISBN 0-87421-225-1 (cloth) 1. Minorities—United States—Social life and customs. 2. Minorities—Canada—Social life and customs. 3. Ethnology— United States. 4. Ethnology—Canada. I. Tuleja, Tad, 1944- . E184.A1U83 1997 305.8’00973—dc21 96-51304 CIP With gratitude to George Carey and Brooke Thomas The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past. —William Faulkner Contents Acknowledgments . ix Introduction. Making Ourselves Up: On the Manipulation of Tradition in Small Groups Tad Tuleja . 1 Part I: Marking the “Tribal” 1. Through Navajo Eyes: Pictorial Weavings from Spider Woman’s Loom Nancy Peake . 24 2. Appropriation and Counterhegemony in South Texas: Food Slurs, Offal Meats, and Blood Mario Montaño . 50 3. Dyngus Day in Polish American Communities Deborah Anders Silverman . 68 4. “May the Work I’ve Done Speak for Me”: African American Women as Speech Community Jerrilyn McGregory . 96 5. The “Giving” of Yiddish Folksongs as a Cultural Resource Joel Saxe . 120 viii Usable Pasts Part II: Intentional Identities 6. Newell’s Paradox Redux Jay Mechling . 140 7. Historical Narrative in the Martial Arts: A Case Study Thomas A. Green . 156 8. Pioneers and Recapitulation in Mormon Popular Historical Expression Eric A. Eliason . 175 Part III: The Spirit of Place 9. “Up Here, We Never See the Sun”: Homeplace and Crime in Urban Appalachian Narratives John R. Williams . 215 10. Booze, Ritual, and the Invention of Tradition: The Phenomenon of the Newfoundland Screech-In Pat Byrne . 232 11. Shell Games in Vacationland: Homarus Americanus and the State of Maine George H. Lewis . 249 12. How Texans Remember the Alamo Sylvia Ann Grider . 274 Part IV: National Perspectives 13. “Kamell Dung”: A Challenge to Canada’s National Icon Robert M. MacGregor . 293 14. Closing the Circle: Yellow Ribbons and the Redemption of the Past Tad Tuleja . 311 About the Contributors . 332 Acknowledgments The seed of this book was sown some years back at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where a midlife critical assessment of my writing plans was turned in a fruitful direction by two fine teachers. George Carey of the English department gave me an unforgettable introduction to the dynamics of folklore, and Brooke Thomas introduced me to anthropology in a marvelous potpourri called “Biocultural Processes of Change.” Both were sources of warm encouragement, and it is as much because of their kindness as because of their example that I am pleased to be able to dedicate this volume to them. At the University of Texas at Austin, I have been fortunate enough to work in a program whose founding luminary was the don of performance folklorists, Américo Paredes. My thanks to the university for its generous fellowship support and to the folklore and anthropology faculties for their insightful and spirited collegiality. With regard to this project in particular, I am grateful to Steven Feld for commenting on the introduction and for guiding me through the “authenticity” debates, to Douglas Foley for his helpful reading of my yellow ribbons essay, and to Roger Renwick for a stimulating introduction to folklore theories. Frances Terry, bless her, has held the fort together. Versions of three of the following chapters were previously published. George Lewis’s chapter appeared under the title “The Maine x Usable Pasts Lobster as Regional Icon: Competing Images over Time and Social Class,” in Food and Foodways 3 (1989): 303–16. Part of Jerrilyn McGregory’s work was published as “‘May the Work I’ve Done Speak for Me’: The Migration Text of the Lucky Ten Social Club” in SAGE 9 (1991): 10–13. A version of my chapter on yellow ribbons appeared under the same title in Journal of American Culture 17 (1994): 23–30. We thank the journals’ editors for permission to print revised versions of these articles here. This volume has profited much from the kindness of strangers— those anonymous reviewers whose gentle (and not so gentle) prod- dings have helped us to sharpen its focus and clarify its intent. I thank them, whoever they may be, for trimming our sails. In addi- tion, I am grateful to four identified readers. Judy McCulloh gave helpful comments on the manuscript in an earlier incarnation; Pat Mullen’s mastery of the scholarly literature helped us considerably in polishing several of the essays; Barre Toelken’s generous reading clar- ified the advantages of our eclectic approach; and John Alley’s input as executive editor of Utah State University Press has served us as a paragon of editorial professionalism. My appreciation, too, to the press’s director, Michael Spooner, who was kind enough to invite our submission in the first place. For years of personal and professional support, I am especially grateful to Angus Gillespie and Jay Mechling. As editors, they were rash enough to include my first scholarly paper in their anthology on American wildlife; as colleagues and friends, they remain two of the reasons that I still look forward to scholarly conferences. To Andrée, as always my lift and my keel, te embrazo on our twentieth and my thirtieth. Introduction Making Ourselves Up: On the Manipulation of Tradition in Small Groups Tad Tuleja In a justly influential book published in 1983, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger coined the phrase “invention of tradition” to describe the appearance within modern states of novel, symbolic, generally normative behaviors that served to “establish continuity with a suitable historical past.” Such invented traditions, they claimed, responded to rapid social repatterning by fixing some areas of social life as comfortingly “invariant.” Thus “customary traditional practices” were revived, and new ones devised, to provide a refuge from the dizzying pace of modern life.1 Because Hobsbawm and Ranger were interested in how British colonialism managed transactions of symbolic capital, they depicted tradition invention as primarily a “top down” or nationalizing phenomenon, an elite practice designed to bring homogeneity and continuity to imperial disparateness. “Traditions are commonly relied upon,” Michael Kammen has observed, “by those who possess the power to achieve an illusion of social consensus, [invoking] the legit- imacy of an artificially constructed past in order to buttress presentist assumptions and the authority of a regime.”2 Hence the political and social conservativeness of new traditions—amply demonstrated by 1 2 Usable Pasts their proliferation in uneasily democratizing 19th-century Europe and in the United States in the equally unsettling period of the New Immigration. Because this nationalizing pattern had simultaneously to accommodate and to conceal diversity, morevoer, invented traditions were typically “vague as to the nature of the values, rights, and obligations of the group membership,” even while specific practices endorsing cohesion—such “symbolically charged signs of club membership” as saluting the flag and rising for the national anthem— became compulsory in both Europe and America.3 In North America, such traditions were being invented genera- tions before the expansive age of Victoria and Cecil Rhodes. As Henry Steele Commager pointed out a quarter of a century ago, the search for a “usable past” was ubiquitous in the period of Manifest Destiny, as Americans foraged diligently to supply a “suitable” history to a country that was told repeatedly—and not only by Europeans—that it lacked one. “Nothing in the history of American nationalism,” Commager wrote, “is more impressive than the speed and lavishness with which Americans provided themselves

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