Finding Your Island: To Return or Not to Return
Based upon multiple field visits to the same site in northwest Mindanao in the southern Philippines, the issue addressed here is how ethnographic data may differ, pro and con, as the researcher ages and changes over time. Issues of validity, reliability and even potential creativity of insights are touched upon as variables in long-term research to the same locale.
Auto-Ethnography: Paradigms, Problems, and Prospects
of the Indian Health Service Task Force on Alcoholism 11. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. 1973 Alcoholism: A High-priority Health Problem. Report of the Indian Health Service Task Force on Alcoholism. Section 111. DHEW Publication No. (HSM) 73-12002. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. 1976a The Forward Plan for FY 1978-1982, Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration, with Appendix (pp. 85-94). Entitled Decision Paper on the Proposal to Transfer American Indian Projects Funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to the Indian Health Service. Washington, D.C.: Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration, 2nd printing, rev. ed., October. Mimeographed. 1976b Forward Plan FY 19781982, Indian Health Service, with Appendix B, Joint NIAAA-IHS Letter to Indian Alcoholism Projects, from Emery A. Johnson and Ernest P. Noble, May 10. Washington, D.C.: Public Health Service, Health Services Administration, October. Mimeographed. 1976c An Overview of Seven NIAAA Alcoholism Treatment Programs for Fiscal Year 1976. Program Analysis and Evaluation Branch, NIAAA. Mimeographed. 1977a Summary of Meeting of Consultants from National Indian Organizations with Indian Health Service Personnel, IHS Headquarters, Rockville, MD, June 15-16, 1977; with Appendix, Draft Alcoholism Transfer Plan, June 15, 1977, by Donald A. Swetter, IHS Alcoholism Programs. 1977b Proposed Alcoholism Transfer Plan-NIAAAI I HS. Washington, D.C.: Public Health Service, Health Services Administration, July 21. Mimeographed. 1977c Progress Report. The Indian Health Care Improvement Act-P.L. 94-437, presented at the Annual Meeting of the National Congress of American Indians, Dallas, Texas, September 15. Westermeyer, J. 1976 Clinical Guidelines for the Cross-Cultural Treatment of Chemical Dependency. American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse 3(2):315-22.
Of Corpse: Death and Humor in Folklore and Popular Culture
Of Corpse: Death and Humor in Folklore and Popular Culture. Edited by Peter Narvaez. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2003. Pp. vii + 358, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95 paper) Peter Narvaez predicates his anthology on what he calls "the deathhumor paradox," which he believes is "on the rise" because communication technologies have altered contemporary views of space and society. He has divided the collection into four sections based on folkloric genres and the culture of popular entertainment. The mix is broad, varying from disaster jokes to pranks at wakes to death imagery at festivals to rock groups and "vernacular cinema." As he notes, this collection "joins a growing number of folklore studies that focus on private and public traditions of death," but with the specific slant toward humorous practices at times and sites of death and bereavement. One weakness exhibited by several articles is a cursory treatment of the historical dimension. Narvaez could have shored up his position about the death-humor paradox being on the rise by noting that in ages past, the humorous treatment of death grew alongside the threat of death (as in plague years). Christie Davies' assertion that there were no disaster jokes before television is poorly argued: lack of evidence never proves the nonexistence of a phenomenon, and jokes about disasters can sink without a trace because, unlike ballads, they tend not to preserve sufficient description of instigating events that turned out later to be of ephemeral importance. As I read through the collection, a persistent voice seemed to call to me from my not-so-distant past. The voice had the identifiable timbre of Robert A. Georges, and asked a question that Bob persistently posed whenever his graduate students began to talk about a folktale in terms of text: "What is 'the story?'" The question was a reminder that the printed text is not a living story; or, as I once put it to him, the text is the corpse of the story-that static part left behind when the living quality has departed. He agreed. I think Bob Georges' question persisted because of an irony I found in Narvaez's title. It seemed to me that far too many articles took for granted that "the story" (or practice) could legitimately be separated from the living events in which it and its variants occurred: so that the words "of corpse" referred to the folkloristic approach used in analyzing and interpreting the customs and practices here presented. I felt moreover that though the common factor was certainly folkloric behavior, the behavioristic approaches espoused by Georges, Ben-Amos, Jones, Classic, Oring, and other folklorists were being overlooked or abandoned in favor of clever functional interpretations involving the use of heavy-hitting terms like "counter-hegemonic," terms that would certainly have bewildered those whose practices were being analyzed. …