Previous Lectures

2023 DAVID BUCHAN LECTURE

When Humans, Animals, and Plants Talk to Each Other

Professor Sadhana Naithani

Thursday, 16 November 2023

6.30pm, Sir Duncan Rice Library, 7th Floor, Meeting Room 1

Can folklore provide a way of creating a healthier planet? We live in a world of deep environmental and ecological crises. As we struggle to understand how to heal the damaged earth, we realise that we know its residents, geographic landscapes, and wide oceans more through stories than experience. The age-old tales, proverbs, and songs encapsulated as folklore have not only entertained humanity, but have provided a way of relating with nature. This lecture shows how folklore deals with nature, animals, and natural phenomena. Folklore’s imaginative resolutions to contemporary crises are surprisingly in tandem with science and demonstrate why folklore is an integral subject of interdisciplinary study.

Sadhana Naithani is professor of literature and folklore at the Centre of German Studies, and Coordinator of Folklore Unit at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. She is the current president of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research and a Fellow of the American Folklore Society. She has been awarded Fellowships by the German Academic Exchange Service, the British Council and in 2022-23, she was a Fulbright Visiting Professor in University of California, Berkley. Her research interests cover European and Indian folklore and her work on colonialism and folklore is considered pioneering. She is the author of In Quest of Indian Folktales (2006), The Story Time of the British Empire (2010), Folklore Theory in Postwar Germany (2014), and Folklore in Baltic History. Resistance and Resurgence (2019). More recently, she has made three ethnographic films on contemporary German villages and folktales, and been a consultant on several documentary films on Indian folklore. She writes fiction too, and her novella, titled Elephantine, published in UK in 2016 is the story of a female elephant caught in the monumental history of British India. Sadhana Naithani is seriously concerned with the situation of wild animals across the world, some of who are threatened with mass extinction. This is what guides her current research and the subject of her forthcoming book are the colonial British writings on Indian wild life.

2022 DAVID BUCHAN LECTURE

Remembering and Reclaiming Folk

Danielle Brown

Thursday, 17 November 2022

7.00pm, Sir Duncan Rice Library, 7th Floor, Meeting Room 1

Remembering and reclaiming folk traditions can be a powerful tool of empowerment for everyday people, especially those who are marginalized. Drawing examples from storytelling traditions of the African diaspora, and particularly the Caribbean, the lecture will demonstrate the value of folk traditions for navigating everyday life, positing that now more than ever people across the globe need tools to traverse our hypermodern and increasingly disconnected world. 

Danielle Brown, Ph.D. is an artist, scholar, entrepreneur, and founder of My People Tell Stories, an organization that offers an array of services—including music workshops and performances, travel tours, and writing services—for educators, creatives, and culture enthusiasts. Brown earned a doctorate in Music from New York University with a concentration in ethnomusicology and specialization in the music of Latin America and the Caribbean. Brown is the founder and CEO of of and a former Assistant Professor of Music History and Cultures at Syracuse University, and has lectured at various colleges and universities. She has worked with elementary, middle, and high school students, and is certified in the Kodály method. In addition, Brown is an active vocalist, cuatro player, and composer. She is the author of the music-centered ethnographic memoir, East of Flatbush, North of Love: An Ethnography of Home, and the East of Flatbush, North of Love: Teacher Guidebook.

2021 DAVID BUCHAN LECTURE

Responding to Tragedy: A Folklorist Collects the Pandemic – Talk and Conversation

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 

Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator, POLIN Museum Core Exhibition in Warsaw, and University Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University

Thursday, 18 February 2021

7.00pm, On-line via Zoom

The last year has seen a wonderful variety of creative responses to the pandemic, from masks, memes, and signs to memorials and tributes. Prof. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett will talk about how people give form to their values in everyday life, what these objects reveal, and what they mean in people’s lives. Grassroots creativity and resilience are evident everywhere in response to traumatic events, whether 9/11 almost two decades ago, or the COVID-19 pandemic today. These responses show tradition in action, adapting as it always does to new challenges. Folklorists are first responders on the cultural front, collecting the present and exploring dimensions of significance.

Listeners can contribute pictures of their own pandemic objects, some of which Prof. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett will discuss in the second half.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator, POLIN Museum Core Exhibition in Warsaw, and University Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University. Her publications include Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage; Image before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864–1939 (with Lucjan Dobroszycki); They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust (with Mayer Kirshenblatt); The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times (with Jonathan Karp), and Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory (with Jeffrey Shandler).

She was honoured for lifetime achievement by the Foundation for Jewish Culture, is a recipient of the Yosl Mlotek Prize for Yiddish and Yiddish Culture, received honorary doctorates from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and University of Haifa.  In 2015, she received the Marshall Sklare Award for her contribution to the social scientific study of Jewry. She serves on Advisory Boards for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Council of American Jewish Museums, Jewish Museum Vienna, Jewish Museum Berlin, and the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, and is an advisor for museum and exhibition projects in Lithuania, Albania, Belarus, and Israel. She served as President of the American Folklore Society from 1991 to 1992 and was decorated with the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland for her contribution to POLIN Museum. Most recently, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and awarded the Dan David Prize.

2019 DAVID BUCHAN LECTURE

Building Community Self-Esteem: Advocating for Culture

Amy Skillman

Academic Director of the M. A. in Cultural Sustainability at Goucher College

Thursday, 21 November 2019

Craig Suite, The Sir Duncan Rice Library

University of Aberdeen

Why is our heritage so important? How does culture support our communities?

Join us on a folklorist’s journey from scholar to activist to facilitator of change, and back again. Through narratives of migration, motherhood, courage, and food, Skillman uses the transformative power of story to create agency and resilience among refugee and immigrant women in the USA. These stories and more illustrate our responsibility as cultural advocates to help build and foster community self-esteem and well-being.

Amy Skillman is Academic Director of the M.A. in Cultural Sustainability at Goucher College. Skillman works at the intersection of culture and tension, where paying attention to culture can serve to mediate social change. She advises artists and community-based organizations on the implementation of programs that honor and conserve cultural traditions, guides them to potential resources, and develops programs to help build their capacity to sustain these initiatives. Her work has included an oral history/leadership empowerment initiative with immigrant and refugee women in Central Pennsylvania, a Grammy-nominated recording of Old Time fiddlers in Missouri, and a yearlong arts residency with alternative education high school students rooted in the ethnography of their lives. Skillman recently curated a major traveling exhibition that examines the role of folk arts as a catalyst for activism in communities throughout Pennsylvania.

Memorial Interventions: Negotiating Paths through Complicated Pasts

Regina Bendix

Professor and Chair of European Ethnology, University of Göttingen, Germany

Thursday, 29 November 2018
King's College Conference Centre
University of Aberdeen

followed by a reception featuring North-east Produce

Creating suitable monuments to historical figures and events has turned into an ever more complicated endeavour. We live in a time where statues are toppled as they stand for ideologies and deeds no longer shared. Conversely, some sites memorialised for the atrocities committed within them are visited to honor the perpetrators rather than the victims. Drawing attention to components of local as much as world history has grown to be a complex field, with many different kinds of actors competing with innovative ideas.

This lecture examines a range of small memorial interventions ranging from occupational culture to Holocaust markers. Rather than working with large figures on pedestals, they are designed to subtly disrupt everyday perception. What are the motives behind such initiatives? Who pays for them? What kinds of materials are they made of and how do they seek to imprint their message onto present and future generations? Drawing from case materials in the USA and Germany, similar questions present themselves: Who is entitled to decide what should be publicly remembered and in what form? How effective are small memorial interventions in stirring public discussion of the past? And how does intentional memorial activity compare to actual evidence of historical events in everyday life?

Regina Bendix is Professor and Chair of European Ethnology at the University of Göttingen, Germany. Starting in the mid-1990s, her research interests and fieldwork focused on cultural tourism (primarily in Austria) embedded within the larger historical project of popular ethnography in the late 19th-century Austro-Hungarian Empire. Since moving to Germany, she has devoted significant ethnographic attention to the workings of the academic framework in Germany. Her research emphases continue to focus on narrative, tourism, heritage and culture, the ethnography of the senses, the history of cultural fields of research, and the culture of academia.

The David Buchan Lecture was launched in 2015 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Elphinstone Institute. The lecture is in memory of the influential ballad and contemporary legend scholar who was also the Institute's first appointed director.

This annual event places Ethnology and Folklore firmly in the university calendar and appeals to a wide audience across the university as well as to the general public.

Folk Narrative as Terror Therapy in Scotland, Appalachia, and the Wake of Disasters Worldwide

Carl Lindahl

Fulbright Distinguished Scholar, Fellow of the American Folklore Society
Professor, University of Houston

Thursday, 16 November 2017 at 6:30pm
King's College Conference Centre
University of Aberdeen

followed by a reception featuring North-east Produce

In oral traditions worldwide, tales tend to come out at night, and they do the work of darkness. Narrators from Scotland and Appalachia use the darkness from which their tales emerge as a ground for unseen, but colorful words. These words in turn inspire listeners to fashion vivid, visual worlds which they can see only with their eyes closed. Terror may be the sharpest spur to the formation of these images—and wise narrators manipulate the fear factor to shape unforgettable lessons for their most receptive listeners. Sharing terror creates a bond that transcends fear to accomplish healing. A similar therapy is at work in the stories of disaster survivors, which are reshaped over time to convert memories of loss into scripts for salvation, and for that reason, such narratives need to be told in certain ways and under certain conditions enabling survivors the most power possible to heal themselves.

Professor Carl Lindahl (University of Houston) is a Fellow of the American Folklore Society, a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar, a Folklore Fellow of the Finnish Academy of Sciences, and an internationally recognized authority in folk narrative, medieval folklore, folktales and legends, festivals and celebrations, folklore fieldwork, traditional healing strategies, and ways in which folk cultures seek and exercise covert power. Among the folk cultures he has explored are French Americans (Cajun, Creole, and Caribbean) and the regional cultures of Texas, Appalachia, and the Ozarks

Lindahl’s Swapping Stories: Folktales from Louisiana (1997) was named the Louisiana Humanities Book of the Year by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. He has received the Alcée Fortier Award from the American Folklore society, and has won a University of Houston Teaching Excellence Award. Among his books are Cajun Mardi Gras Masks (1997), American Folktales from the Collections of the Library of Congress (2004), and Second Line Rescue: Improvised Responses to Katrina and Rita (2013).

He currently serves on the editorial boards of Fabula: Journal of Folktale Studies (Göttingen, Germany) and Folk Life (Belfast, Northern Ireland) as well as the advisory board of the Folklife and Traditional Arts program of Houston Arts Alliance.

In 2005 he founded Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston [SKRH], the world's first project in which disaster survivors have taken the lead in documenting fellow survivors' experience of disaster. He continues to co-direct SKRH, which has received worldwide recognition for its role in aiding survivors overcome the traumatic effects of hurricanes. In 2014 he convened a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Conference bringing together ethnographers, disaster survivors, and public health specialists from seven countries to strategize ways in which to help survivors draw upon their traditional knowledge to become more active agents in their own recovery. The conference culminated with the formation of the International Commission for Survivor-Centered Disaster Recovery, of which he is the founding organizer. Also in 2014 he began working with Haitians to create Sivivan pou Sivivan (Survivor to Survivor), a pilot program based on the model of SKRH, in which Haitian earthquake survivors interview one another. Lindahl is working to make Sivivan pou Sivivan a self-sustaining, entirely Haitian-run and Haitian-staffed program.

The David Buchan Lecture was launched in 2015 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Elphinstone Institute. The lecture is in memory of the influential ballad and contemporary legend scholar who was also the Institute's first appointed director.

This annual event places Ethnology and Folklore firmly in the university calendar and appeals to a wide audience across the university as well as to the general public.

Copyrighting Tradition in the Internet Age: Creativity, Authorship and Folklore

Valdimar Tr. Hafstein

President of the Société Internationale d’Ethnologie et de Folklore (SIEF)

Senior Lecturer of Folklore and Ethnology, University of Iceland

Introduced by Principal Sir Ian Diamond

Thursday 10 November 2016 at 6:30pm
King's College Conference Centre
University of Aberdeen

followed by a reception featuring North-east Produce

ABSTRACT
Should we copyright culture? How can one compose a one-hundred-year-old traditional lullaby? Who owns Cinderella? And what would the Brothers Grimm say?

What is the historical provenance of such Catch-22s? While we may not resolve them in this talk, the lessons we learn from picking them apart can inform our thinking about creativity and agency in contemporary culture.

In 1844, Hans Christian Andersen accused the Brothers Grimm of stealing his tale ‘The Princess and the Pea’. That Andersen elsewhere attributes this tale to oral tradition (he heard it as a child) seems not to preclude it from becoming something that others could steal from him. Bizarre?

Actually, it's not such an unusual story and the United Nations even has a special committee negotiating a new international convention that addresses such appropriations of traditional culture and traditional knowledge, in music, in medicine, and in visual and verbal art.

Beginning with the paradoxical case of a traditional lullaby that acquired a composer late in its life and ‘fell into’ copyright, this talk grapples with representations of creative agency – such as authorship and tradition – that are endowed with the force of law through the copyright regime.

My motivation is to understand the dichotomies that shape understandings of creativity so that we will be better placed to undermine them, to liberate our imagination from their powerful hold, and to imagine creativity in alternative terms.

In a digital age, such acts of liberation and imagination are badly needed; creativity is still enclosed in categories from another era and bogged down by the weight of nineteenth-century romantic ideals about the author.

Valdimar Tr. Hafstein is a Professor in the Department of Ethnology, Folklore, and Museum Studies at the University of Iceland. He completed his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2004. He has published a number of articles and edited volumes on folklore, intangible heritage, international heritage politics, cultural property, and copyright in traditional knowledge. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Portuguese, Croatian, and Danish. Valdimar is president of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) and a former chair of the Icelandic Commission for UNESCO.

The David Buchan Lecture was launched in 2015 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Elphinstone Institute. The lecture is in memory of the influential ballad and contemporary legend scholar who was also the Institute's first appointed director. This annual event places Ethnology and Folklore firmly in the university calendar and appeals to a wide audience across the university as well as to the general public.

The inaugural

DAVID BUCHAN LECTURE

Recycled Stories: Health Legends, Epidemics and the Politics of Risk

Professor Diane E. Goldstein

Introduced by Principal Sir Ian Diamond

Thursday 19 November 2015 at 6:30pm

King's College Conference Centre

followed by a reception featuring North-East Produce

The David Buchan Lecture is the culmination of a year of special events to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Elphinstone Institute. The launch of this lecture is in memory of the influential ballad and contemporary legend scholar who was also the Institute's first appointed director. This annual event will place Ethnology and Folklore firmly in the university calendar and appeal to a wide audience across the university as well as to the general public.

The inaugural David Buchan Lecture will be given by distinguished folklorist, Professor Diane Goldstein, director of the Folklore Institute and chair of the department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University, the leading institution in the field. Goldstein, who specialises in medical folklore and belief, will offer a talk on medical epidemic legends and their significance to modern healthcare practice. Goldstein has served as president of the American Folklore Society and the Society for Contemporary Legend Research. We are greatly honoured that she will be joining us for the launching of the series.

Abstract

As part of community discourse about the nature of disease, legends provide powerful information about cultural understandings of disease and illness. Though fascinating, intriguing, and often frightening, health legends do more than merely entertain. They warn and inform, articulate notions of risk, provide political commentary on public health actions, and offer insight into the relationship between cultural and health truths. When taken seriously, with respect for the narratives and their tellers, health legends enable understandings of perceptions of risk, reveal local views of public health efforts, and highlight areas of health care and education that need to be improved. Health narratives, however, do not simply articulate perceptions of disease realities; they also create those realities. Told within scientific and official sectors as well as lay communities, legends play a significant role in medical, legal, and educational responses to disease and its management. This talk will explore similarities between legends concerning several epidemics and will demonstrate the importance of that information for public health.