Francis Lee Utley Memorial Lecture:
Not Telling: How Folklorists Think about Narrative
Friday, October 14, 2022, 5:00 pm–6:00 pm, Tulsa South
Sponsored by the American Folklore Society and the Fellows of the American Folklore Society
Amy Shuman, President of the AFS Fellows, will present the Utley Memorial Lecture.
My aunt was a hidden child in France during the Holocaust, but we didn’t talk about it. I only learned her story when a member of the family found her Shoah Foundation interview on YouTube. That was in 2012; by then she was part of a group of hidden children, and someone had persuaded her to tell her story. Since then, she has become a frequent teller at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, and she and I have had many conversations about telling and not telling her story. My presentation references many of the important discussions about narrating atrocity including the reluctance to talk about trauma and the obligation to bear witness to it and acknowledge one’s place in one’s own history. Acknowledging, but moving beyond those conversations, I explore narration that lets others into intimate, high intensity emotional states.
Don Yoder Lecture in Folk Belief and Religious Folklife:
How to Have Theory in a Pandemic: Precarity, Autoethnography, and Belief Scholarship during COVID
Friday, October 14, 2022, 7:30 pm–8:30 pm, Tulsa South
Sponsored by the AFS Folk Belief and Religious Folklife Section
Andrea Kitta (East Carolina University) will give the Yoder Memorial Lecture
Influenced by recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, elections, and the opioid epidemic, I will link my experiences with my ongoing fieldwork in ways we often don’t discuss, primarily because of the cultural restraints in academia that, despite emphasis on reflexivity, still do not allow us to be fully honest about our own subjectivity. As a belief scholar, I am troubled by this lack of acknowledgment of our own beliefs and the ways we manage those beliefs when they run counter to the beliefs of our fieldwork participants. In an age when people’s beliefs can kill us, what is the role of a belief scholar and folklorist? How do we even pretend to maintain objectivity after surviving a pandemic? In How to Have Theory in an Epidemic, Paula Treichler (1999) considers the complexity of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the multiple meanings and consequences that disease represents. COVID-19 and Long COVID are more than serious diseases; they’re also a complex system of meanings, and those meanings have value, even when lives are at stake. But how do we make meaning when we are also suffering? How do we promote David Hufford’s assertion that people are smarter than we give them credit for while we watch people make decisions that harm us and others? How do we frame ourselves as the outsider who creates “a narrative that begins with unfamiliarity and naiveté so that it can end with knowledge” (Shuman 2011, 148) when we are all intimate insiders when it comes to COVID-19? Using fieldwork conducted during the pandemic on COVID-19 and Long COVID, as well as classic texts on ethnography and reflexivity, I will move towards creating theory and methodology for our brave new world.