Option 1 For class discussion on Monday, April 9
The two articles for today deal with death and memory. These cultural problems connect to the body in terms of how to treat and dispose of or position the dead body, how to conceive of the dead body when the live, changing body rigidifies. Death raises critical questions regarding nature of the physical body in relation to non-tangible entities, tangible objects, and society. Memory becomes an issue -- how to remember and how to forge, what to remember and what to forget -- how to deal with not just pain, but also with contradictions to beliefs about perdurability and permanence. We often think of our memories of the dead in terms of individual memories; the articles raise questions about social, shared, institutionalized memories, and how they may be models for personal ones -- or may not.
Forms of folklore provide ways that social ideas are manifested, inculcated, examined, explored, or developed. Perhaps the forms of folklore do not express given ideas but enable a group to work out problems instead. Rituals, customs, myths, symbols, and folk beliefs provide vehicles that may, then, express or constitute, work out, in a kind of performative way, embodied confrontations with death, memory, and social meaning.
Considering these two articles, and the ones for Fri. April 6, also dealing with death, please write a couple of pages making your own observations about some key differences and similarities between two societies, as they handle death. How do they seem to conceptualize and "solve" the problem of death and the body? You could consider how a folk form serves as an expressive means to demonstrate or to embody beliefs or ideas or as a experimental, performative, or processual means to work out a problem Or some of both? Or you may find another framework more apt for your comparison of how two societies use folklore and the body to deal with the problem of death.
You may certainly also voice, in your little essay, critiques of the writers' methods, assumptions, goals, etc.! Yet I want to use our time on Monday to examine, without as much centering on critique of the writings, some cultural differences and patterns in how particular cultures handle death in and through the body, and how they handle the body in and through death.
Option #2, Mon. April 16
For the three studies of menstruation in society, please be ready to help the class consider either:
1. How menstrual beliefs, in these societies, reflect patriarchal and dominant male voices, but how women may use these beliefs, customs, and symbols to create spaces and means for assertion, agency, threat, or other forms of resistance, power, or expression. How can these essays be made relevant for this course?
Or
2. How the different articles pose very different questions about gender, power, and menstruation (and childbirth or reproduction, or fertility). What methods, theories, standpoints, goals can make an article that deals with gender and power feminist, and what can make an article not feminist? Help the class discuss what intellectual, social, or disciplinary goals these writers seem to have. How can these essays be made relevant for this course?
Option #3, Wed. April 18
Both Rosan Jordan and Janice Boddy look at kinds of bodily possession, penetration, or invasion that particularly affects women in two very different societies. These folklore genres highlight, in both cases, issues related to women's reproduction and issues of female reproductive power in these particular societies.
Many other articles this semester have shown social customs, beliefs, taboos, forms of magic that originate in or center around men's anxieties regarding women as the reproducers of society, of clan members, of lineage members, of progeny, or of children -- however the next generation is valued or primarily conceived of. Most of these social constructs, from a male dominant traditions and voices, treat women's menstrual blood, their pregnant or afterbirth bodies, the afterbirth itself, and other body parts associated with conception and birth as pollutants, or taboo or dangerous substances.
These two articles look at women's own cultural productions and voices; they show how women may deal with major cultural ideas about their reproductive powers or bodies through stories, customs, rituals, or beliefs. In some cases, their practices empower themselves or express their own anxieties and subordination.. Discuss how these articles provide any new ideas about folklore and the body, as they treat possession or invasion of the body. How recurrent themes still present? Does taking the women's point of view seem to make a difference in these studies?
Option #4, Fri. April 20
Here we move into very new territory, dealing with the anatomical
body in terms of sexual and gender difference. If you choose this
option, write about some key issues and cultural expressions the
articles theorize. Use your position paper to guide the class in
considering the complex relationships Americans draw between anatomy,
gender, sexuality, and identity. How are those conceptions and values
evidenced in or explored through body surgeries. symbol systems,
stories, customs, literary treatments, or other expressive or
cultural representations of genitals and identity?