Culture in Everyday Life

From Mystery Plays to the Robin Hood revels at May Day, Aberdeen played a full role in Scotland’s popular dramas. Donald Smith explores some older forms of live entertainment, and their present day revival. Should we still go ‘A-Maying’? What does Robin Hood have to do with the Granite City? And does climate change mean we should move theatre back outdoors? 

In 2019, Donald Smith, the then Director of Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland, gave a public talk as part of the Elphinstone Institute’s Public Lecture Series entitled 'A Blond Wig for Maid Marion': Aberdeen and Scotland's Folk Dramas.

This presentation, which was recorded at the Elphinstone Institute’s 2017 symposium dedicated to memory of Bill Nicolaisen, by Elphinstone Institute Director, Dr Thomas A McKean, looks at performed and sung ballad texts in the light of Bill Nicolaisen’s ideas of time – performance, narrative, and historical – and place, beyond the beyond. Ballads and their performance express and encapsulate, ignore and elide time and place in dynamic, sometimes illogical ways, pulling and stretching realities to maximise impact. Using North-East ballads, Dr McKean explores some of the ways singers and composers use and are affected by these concepts.

For more information about Dr McKean’s work, please visit: Dr Thomas McKean | People | The University of Aberdeen (abdn.ac.uk) 

Recording of the 2019 David Buchan Lecture presented by Amy Skillman. 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 honour 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 travelling exhibition that examines the role of folk arts as a catalyst for activism in communities throughout Pennsylvania. https://www.abdn.ac.uk/elphinstone/

A transcript for this podcast can be found online, here. 
Adam McNaughtan delivers an illustrated talk with Gordeanna McCulloch entitled ‘Words for Tunes: Robert Burns as a Lyric-Writer’ at the Cullerie Singing Weekend in 2009. It was recorded by Professor Ian Russell.

A transcript for this episode can be found online, here.

Music is a potent component of remembering. It works either as an unchosen catalyst, stirring up unbidden memories as a tune is fortuitously heard, or as a chosen vehicle serving as an intentional carrier of people’s remembered experience of significant moments or occasions in their lives, as for instance in the widespread ascription of ‘our song’ in intimate relationships. This talk will map out the major ways in which music figures in registering and referencing the past, both in autobiographical memory and in vernacular memory. It will also outline and discuss the fieldwork-based research that has provided the main body of data drawn on in the trilogy The Mnemonic Imagination, Photography, Music and Memory, and Memory and the Management of Change, co-written with Emily Keightley. The main concept in this work is the mnemonic imagination, and this too will be brought into the talk and its value explained.

Michael Pickering is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University. He has published in the areas of social and cultural history, the sociology of art and culture, and media and communication studies. His recent books include Creativity, Communication and Cultural Value, 2004 (with Keith Negus); Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour, 2005/2009 (with Sharon Lockyer); Researching Communications, 1999/2007/2018 (with David Deacon, Peter Golding and Graham Murdock); Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain, 2008/2016; Research Methods for Cultural Studies (2008); Popular Culture, a four-volume edited collection (2010); The Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as Creative Practice, 2012 (with Emily Keightley); Rhythms of Labour: Music at Work in Britain, 2013 (with Marek Korczynski and Emma Robertson); Research Methods for Memory Studies, 2013 (with Emily Keightley); Colonial Advertising and Commodity Racism, 2013 (with Wulf D. Hund and Anandi Ramamurthy), and Photography, Music and Memory (with Emily Keightley). His major research project with Emily Keightley on media and memory was funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

A transcript for this episode can be found on our website, here.

The late Leonard Primiano discusses his research on Catholic kitsch in this guest lecture given at the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen.

A transcript for this episode can be found online, here.
Intro and outro music provided by Zazim.  

This recording of the 2016 David Buchan Lecture comes from the Elphinstone Institute Archives. It was delivered by Valdimar Hafstein, Professor in the Department of Ethnology, Folklore, and Museum Studies at the University of Iceland. Since completing 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 a former president of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) and a former Chair of the Icelandic Commission for UNESCO.

His lecture, 'Copyrighting Tradition in the Internet Age: Creativity, Authorship and Folklore' explores the entanglements between creativity, authorship, digital culture, and copyright law.

The lecture's abstract reads as follows: 

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.

Since giving the Buchan Lecture in 2016, Valdimar has published two books and released a documentary film on subjects related to the lecture. Making Intangible Heritage: El Condor Pasa and Other Stories from UNESCO was published in 2018 by Indiana University Press, and Patrimonialities: Heritage vs. Property was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020, co-authored with Martin Skrydstrup. His documentary film, ""The Flight of the Condor: A Letter, a Song, and the Story of Intangible Cultural Heritage"", co-produced with filmmaker Áslaug Einarsdóttir, has been screened at numerous film festivals and conferences worldwide and is available in open access online. His next book, Copyrighting Tradition: Unknown Authors and the Voice of the Folk, is under contract with Indiana University Press."

The recording begins with a short presentation on the Elphinstone Institute's work by director, Dr Thomas McKean. This is followed by some introductory remarks by the then University of Aberdeen Principal, Professor Sir Ian Diamond.

The views expressed in these podcasts are those of the individuals concerned and do not represent the views of the University of Aberdeen.

A transcript for this episode can be found online here.

Elphinstone Institute’s Annual David Buchan Lecture 
The Elphinstone Institute is a centre for the study of Ethnology, Folklore, and Ethnomusicology with a research and public engagement remit covering the North-East and North of Scotland. Through interaction with researchers and practitioners, this podcast explores cultural phenomena in everyday life.

Today's podcast comes from the Institute archives and features a lecture entitled Recycled Stories: Health Legends, Epidemics and the Politics of Risk, delivered by Professor Diane Goldstein. Professor Goldstein is the director of the Folklore Institute and chair of the department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University. She has served as president of the American Folklore Society and the Society for Contemporary Legend Research. 
The talk explores medical epidemic legends and their significance to modern healthcare practice. 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. 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. 

Although delivered in 2016, Diane's talk is extremely pertinent today as we remain, at least in Scotland, in the grip of the covid-19 virus.

The recording begins with some remarks by former University of Aberdeen Principal Professor Sir Ian Diamond. This is followed by a short presentation by the director of the Elphinstone institute, Dr Thomas McKean, who subsequently introduces Professor Goldstein. 

Intro and outro music provided by Zazim. 
The views expressed in this podcast are those of the individuals concerned and do not represent the views of the University of Aberdeen.