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In an essay entitled “Aladdin's Lamp” and published on the occasion of the edition of An-sky's The Jewish Artistic Heritage, Abram Markovich Efros, a leading Russian art critic, described a form of neonationalism. It was a creative combination of folk art and modernism in which the supposed authenticity of folk art lent stylistic credentials to modernist art. In the debates about the sources of Jewish art music, an opposition was similarly constructed between the near past and ancient times, between the Oriental-sounding Yiddish folk music and the less Orientally colored sacred music that, many believed, was historically traceable to Biblical times. In this new phase of Jewish art music, kuchkist preoccupation with folk music as an expression of national identity was replaced with a neonationalist orientation, in which national musical sources were abstracted.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about figurative images of Africa and visual mimesis of Africans. The chapters examine visual images as they were deployed in their contexts of apprehension and compares African iconographies and readings with European ones. The chapters analyze colonist and folk arts, including advertising, street cartooning, and photography. They demonstrate that images change depending on who is looking at them and show that how images have both underwritten and undermined the hierarchies that governed colonial Africa.

This chapter examines how Xiaocheng Folk Art Village in Yan'an was transformed into a container of tradition and the practice of paper-cutting into an intangible cultural heritage. It first considers the origin narrative of Xiaocheng Folk Art Village before discussing how China's urban intellectuals in the fields of folklore, religious studies, and anthropology have sought to re-understand the meanings of their work in the broader national and international framework. It then explains how Xiaocheng Folk Art Village emerged as a site of local, national, and international interests, with particular emphasis on the birth of creative rural subjects, reconfigured domestic relations, and a new public life in the village. It also describes the village's democratic struggles over folk art and concludes with an analysis of the politics of cultural authenticity and the invention of tradition in the broader context of intense urbanization and agrarian crisis in China. The chapter argues that heritage making in China is a process of “narrative battle” in which various actors construct differentiated meanings of history and tradition against the official party-state narrative.

This chapter assesses the role of folk performance art in nation-building efforts in postcolonial Korea. Both Korean states, in their competing assertions of legitimacy, valorized “the people” (minjung), mobilized the performing arts to define and enshrine Korean national identity, and provided institutional support for the preservation and performance of these expressive forms, both at home and abroad. Moreover, dissident groups in South Korea performed shamanic exorcisms and t'alch'um dramas to identify themselves with the masses and to pressure the government toward democratization. It is argued that, whereas Korean political and intellectual elites had traditionally despised these expressive forms, the experience of colonial scrutiny transformed them from caste-specific genres to symbols of Koreanness, worthy of state patronage. Moreover, folk performance art has become a medium for commemorating the country's colonial history and spirit of resistance.

The influence of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes saturated the artistic environment inhabited by Diego Rivera and Roberto Montenegro in Paris before World War I. In predecessors to the debates surrounding nationalism in Mexico, Diaghilev explored its intersections with folk art in the pages of his magazine Mir iskusstva. Montenegro studied with Diaghilev ally Hermen Anglada who urged his disciples to use elements from their nation’s folklore to escape the hegemony of Parisian modernism. Although Rivera disparaged the Ballet Russes’s influence on Mexican art, he painted his “Mexican trophy,” a cubist Zapatista landscape with a prominent serape, in response to an exhibit of Russian folk art that had been inspired by the success of Diaghilev’s dance company. Montenegro also cited this exhibition as one of the major influences in his decision to pursue Mexican folk art as a source of inspiration.

Mexican muralism began as a manifestation of José Vasconcelos’ belief that beautiful environments produced more effective learning. He thought of muralism as decoration and hired his artists for that purpose. That what they created was to be Mexican was a given, but how it was to be Mexican went unspecified. The stained-glass window he commissioned from Roberto Montenegro, unveiled at the outset of the nation’s centennial celebration in 1921, took the jarabe tapatío (Mexican hat dance) as its theme. The commemorative events which followed the window’s unveiling underlined the post-revolutionary government’s intent to separate itself from the French taste associated with the dictatorship it had overthrown. Although the nation’s new leaders may not have had the means to impose a national aesthetic at the time, through its centennial celebration it pronounced itself firmly in favor of folk art as a sign of the national.

This chapter analyzes Sita's Ramayana, a graphic novel published in 2011 by the Indian publisher Tara Books in partnership with Groundwood Books in the United States and Canada. Illustrated by Moyna Chitrakar, a female folk artist from West Bengal, and written by Samhita Arni, a young, cosmopolitan female Indian author, Sita's Ramayana has been marketed as a feminist retelling of the epic. It has been primarily targeted at a young adult readership and has been critically acclaimed as well as commercially successful both in India and abroad. The chapter shows how the graphic novel version of the popular Indian epic Ramayana is strikingly different visually from the other myriad picture books and comic book adaptations of the tale, because of its use of the centuries-old patua folk art form.

This chapter examines the evolution of Japanese prints from 1868 to 2008. It begins with a discussion of the history of the Japanese graphic print industry during the period 1868–1912, with particular emphasis on the influence of photography and the use of woodblock prints to record historical events. It then considers innovators within the old woodblock traditions up to 1912, along with new directions that would raise both the status and aesthetic aims of graphic art in 1900–1941. It also explores the transformations of ukiyo-e during the period 1890–1941; the folk art movement and its influence on prints; Japanese prints during the war years; the success of the Sōsaku Hanga variety during the Occupation (1945–1952); changes in the print industry after the Occupation; and the developing relationship between painting and printmaking. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the impact of the death in 1989 of the emperor Shōwa on the field of prints.

This chapter examines and explores an event called the Festival of Nations, which showcases a myriad of folk demonstrations that range from African American doll making to Iranian rug weaving. The festival is a rich pool of ideas and insights into issues of immigration and ethnicity, and provides a chance to engage with scholarly critiques of multiculturalism in the context of a festival. Also present in this festival are performances that can be interpreted through postcolonial feminist critiques, focusing mainly on the ways that women have often been constructed through ideas of family and home, within Indian nationalist discourses. This chapter thus seeks to revisit and reexamine the site of this festival to reflect upon the question of how the School for Indian Languages and Cultures (SILC), through the enactment of women’s folk art, emerged as a women’s performative space that facilitated acknowledgement.

Using ethnography based on young folk artists from Mithila, Bihar, this chapter explores the question – ‘What does it mean to inherit a tradition?’ Are these young artists merely passive carriers of traditional templates and if not then how do anthropologists conceptualise novelty within the traditional arts? Inspired by Veena Das’s work on children and her discussion of Wittgenstein on what it means to follow a rule, this chapter adds to her work on voice and culture.

This chapter introduces the variety of drums used in Japan and begins a discussion of the “taiko boom” by demonstrating how it has helped bring taiko drums and taiko drum makers closer to the mainstream of Japanese cultural life. Japanese drums are typically differentiated based on their size, shape, and material composition. They are also sounded in distinct ways (by hands, sticks, or mallets) and are employed differently in the three main genres of Japanese performance: music of the imperial court (gagaku), music accompanying the classical stage performing arts (koten geinō), and music used in religious ritual or the folk performing arts (minzoku geinō). Prior to the emergence of ensemble taiko drumming, taiko drums were used most extensively within the folk performing arts. This historical context contributed significantly to the development of taiko in the postwar period.

This chapter analyzes in detail how three of Ondezoka's most emulated pieces were created. Ondezoka's repertoire can be considered quite original; moreover, the group is quite influential among taiko ensembles throughout the world. The analysis of these three pieces demonstrates how Ondekoza put into motion regional culture in the process of preparing a repertoire to take around the world. In some cases, inheritors of the folk performing arts were able to visit Ondekoza in Sado to instruct the group in their local performing art. Like those in the many amateur taiko ensembles that would follow Ondekoza, though, in most cases group members traveled to the region in which the performing art originated. Travel of individuals to and from Sado Island was thus instrumental in generating Ondekoza's repertoire and establishing its presence on the island.

This chapter examines folk storytelling performances staged in and by various government work units or state-owned enterprises for public relations purposes, with particular emphasis on how the production of folk cultural tradition became intertwined with danwei business promotion in Yan'an. Using the case of northern Shaanxi storytelling, the chapter considers how the practice of folk tradition is linked to work-unit messages and, sometimes, national ideology promotion. It discusses the ways in which folk cultural production today concerns complicated political, commercial, and social relations with work units. It shows how the production of folk tradition is increasingly adapted to danwei public relations events and campaigns, while, at the same time, danwei events also become the spaces wherein traditional folk art forms find new developments, audiences, and visibility in the age of urbanization and marketization.

Inspired by Das’s essay on the paintings of Akhbar Padamsee, this chapter explores the use of the mirror motif as a framing device by folk artists in Bengal. Das uses the paired terms bimb-pratibimb or the ‘image and its reflection’ from Indian poetics give voice to the image – to allow it to communicate with itself as it were. In the conventional understanding of the ‘frame’ it serves as a limit, creating a spatial field within which the image can be displayed and then effaces itself. The mirror as a framing device within the picture seems to do the opposite. It multiplies the perspectives from which the image is viewed thereby drawing attention to the frame itself.

This chapter begins with a nineteenth-century attempt by the Archdiocese of Santa Fe to obtain the privately owned Santuario. It then turns to the 1929 sale, which was orchestrated by Anglo artists and intellectuals in the newly formed Spanish Colonial Arts Society. The ostensible goal of buying the church was to preserve it for the Hispano population as well as its priceless Hispanic folk art, but the Spanish Colonial Arts Society immediately turned the deed over to the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, then under the leadership of Archbishop Daeger. The chapter provides an analysis of the racially charged decisions that were made concerning the ownership and fate of the Santuario. Key figures in the Spanish Colonial Arts Society who are discussed in the chapter include Mary Austin and John Gaw Meem.

We present a broad overview, describing, in general terms, what we mean by “shaman painting” and how we will be approaching them as objects that have been appreciated as art and as objects that are considered sacred inside shaman practice. The three authors describe how they came to be interested in shaman paintings from their different backgrounds and perspectives. Involved in the shaman world as a near initiate and then as a scholar, Jongsung Yang began to collect the paintings and paraphernalia that would otherwise be destroyed. Yul Soo Yoon gained an appreciation of shaman paintings as part of his growing awareness of the beauty and significance of Korean folk art. Laurel Kendall became interested in shaman paintings when her fieldwork suggested that they were regarded as more than just paintings.

Peruvians are among the many immigrant groups in Miami, and include upper- and middle-class as well as lower-class and rural-derived people. For the Peruvian community, music is not only a fundamental symbol of identity, but also an antidote and a response to crisis, and sometimes a business. This chapter investigates Peruvian music and its function in the community. It discusses the Historical Museum of Southern Florida’s South American Traditions Project, launched in the summer of 2001 to document the traditions of selected South American communities “making history” in present-day Miami-Dade: Colombians, Peruvians, and Venezuelans. The chapter looks at South America’s political and cultural boundaries, Miami’s dialectical musical relationship with Peru, the reconstruction of Peru in Miami, Peruvians’ regional identities and social organization, and venues for the performance of Peruvian music. It concludes by considering initiatives to promote Peruvian folk arts in Miami.

This chapter focuses on children’s folklore as ephemeral art. Children’s schoolyard lore teaches African American children and their friends, rhyme, rhythm, a form of public speaking, formalized game rules, cultural expectations, kinesic aptitude, and self-assurance. Schoolyard folkloric play lasts a short time, from around four to twelve years of age, but its influence can be profound. By age twelve schoolyard verbal play gets pushed off into some quiet corner of the mind, but the effects linger, as children move on to adolescent and mature pursuits equipped with facility in language, poise, a knowledge of game rules, and an awareness of cultural expectations. This book began with integration in 1967 in New Orleans, a process stressful for all, but particularly for African American children. It ends revealing that African American children managed to cling to their own mode of speech and their own play for over forty years. Play and verbal interactions still have the function of enabling children to be schoolyard artists.