The "other" - re: American Born Chinese

Jesse wrote a briliant take on "American Born Chinese" on the other forum. I think that as outsider we will always have only a limitted ability to see the "Other", therefore the only way that one can really make their voice heard is speaking up.

Edward Said (2005), Patricia Hills Collins (1986) and Carol Gilligan (1987) are three examples of scholars who protest the "incorrect" or mistaken way that the academia views their ethnic group or gender. I argue that there is no way to avoid a partial view of the other, even if we try to maintain the highest awareness possible and attempt to be fully attentive to the 'Other'. The only way to engage the other and to espier to more social justice is to be conscious and listen carefully to what the 'Other' is saying, and be open to the content and the format of what she sais, avoiding (as much as possible) preconceived conclusions. Eventually, it seems like the only way that someone who feels her is seen in a distorted way can change it, is to talk about her experience and bring it into the discourse, just as Said voiced his personal experience as an Arab, Gilligan interviewed women in addition to men and Collins brought her voice as a black woman into the scholarly discourse.

Hall (1997) states that Stereotyping is a common signifying practice. Stereotypes take simple memorable characteristics about a person, reduce everything about the person to those traits, exaggerate and simplify it and fix it without change or development to eternity. "Stereotyping reduces, essentialists, naturalizes and fixes 'difference' " (p. 258). Hall states that stereotyping is part of the maintenance of social and symbolic order, it is one of the mechanisms of boundary maintenance, a practice of 'closure' and exclusion. (p. 258) So that stereotyping is unavoidable. It is part of the way we naturally make sense of the world. However, it may lead to social in-justice and become a source of ethical problems. In the same time ignoring the fact the the "Other" is different may also cause social injustice.

This is clearly demonstrated in the case of Gilligan's research. Gilligan (1987), who taught and researched with Erikson and later with Kohlberg, found that the moral development standards that she was teaching did not feet her own thinking. She found that all the research was done exclusively with male subjects therefore the results did not take into account the different voice of women regarding this subject. As a result the evaluation scales developed based on this research advantaged men.

Gilligan's findings should alarm every one who is involved with research. Just like Erikson and Kohlberg, we all do our best to research issues with the most objective attitude possible. Yet, we can only perceive the issues we are studying using our pervious knowledge, thinking processes that we have learned and our system of values and beliefs. Just like Erikson and Kohlberg did not notice they are missing half of the population they are trying to study, we are bound to be blind to numerous aspects of our own research.

In this paper I will try to explore these issues using art work, with the intention of "trusting the process" and let it lead me to a smaller more focused point for discussion.

References:

1.     Alcoff, L, (1991). The problem of speaking for others. Cultural Critique.no.20 (pp. 5-32).

2.     Collins, P. H. (1986). Learning from the outsider within: The sociological significance of black feminist thought, Social Problems Vol 33, no 6 pp14-32

3.     Collins, P.H. (2000). Black feminist thought. London: Routledge.

4.     Foucault, M. (1984). The ethics of concern of the self as a practice of freedom Ethics subjectivity and truth. NY: The new press.

5.     Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

6.     Gilligan, C. (1987). Moral orientation and moral development. Justice and care, ed. Held V. (1995). Colorado: West view.

7.     Hall, W.,ed. (1997). Representation. London: The open university.

8.     Said, E. (1978) Orientalism. (Hebrew Translation), Tel Aviv: Am Oved.   

Recycling of images in films - does it enhance memory or forgetfulness?

Recycling of images in films - does it enhance memory or forgetfulness?

I would like to offer an additional angle to "the truth about film" and the "rhetorical abilities of the camera". Most of our readings dealt with the ways film makers depict reality and create images of themselves and others. I would like to suggest, that an additional concern is how these images are than used, or recycled in other films and what is the impact of such use on the meaning of the original images. Does it reinforce the memory that these images carry to does it contribute to forgetting it?

Tobias Abrect (2012) states the use of iconic images of the holocaust in popular cinema is actually contributing to forgetting the original traumatic event. According to him, the holocaust became part of our universal collective memory. The images that became the symbol of a- historical total evil, are used not only for the memory of the holocaust but also for understanding other war horrors. "They became the visual foundation for our imaging of any horror that follows". This "migration" of images to other contexts, the use of the visual representation of the holocaust to cinematic and television images of other wars occurs internationally.

The films that were filmed by the allied forces while entering the concentration camps were recycled as iconic images for genocide. According to Abrect these images were used for films about the holocaust like Shindler's Lists (Spielberg, 1993), Memory of the camp (McAlister 1945) and more. However it was also used in films like Platoon (Stone 1986) about the Vietnam war. Abrect claims that Stone is using images from the holocaust (such as bulldozers shoving corpses to the graves). According to Abreact Stone creates a visual connection between the burial of the Vietnamese farmers and the Jewish victims of the holocaust to emphasize his notion that the Vietnam war was un justified. This "migration of images" stigmatizes historical events that are compared to the holocaust.

Furthermore, images from the holocaust appear in science fiction and fantasy movies as well: X- men (Singer, 2001). "V for Vendetta" (2006) and Shutter Island (Skorze 2010). Abrect states that the use of these images makes the narrative of the holocaust into a universal paradigm of moral.

References:

Abrecht, T. (2012). Iconic images of the holocaust in popular cinema. Yad Vashem (Heberw). Retrieved 15/8/2012 from http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/he/education/newsletter/24/main_article.asp

The Truth about Film (Elizabeth Aiossa)

Valerie Smith's chapter, "The Documentary Impulse in Contemporary African-American Film," discusses the disparity in cultural and racial representations as seen in black fictional films and documentaries. Namely, Smith notes how the fictional films created by and depicting African-American community life rely on verisimilitude, the appearance of truth and factuality, when the documentaries, a nonfictional genre by convention, reveal instead the slipperiness of reality.  As hooks argues in her response to the absurd fears and institutional interventions surrounding the theatrical release of Boyz N the Hood, fictional films depicting urban black life, regardless of their attempted verisimilitude, potray sanitized and watered-down versions of our unjust and prejudicial world. It is for this fact, I suppose, that African-American documentarians were inspired to question and challenge rhetoric, generic conventions, and media representation. Independent filmmaking, for its lack of financial sponsorship strings, had the freedom to do so.  

 

While I agree with Chris that media and its markets have changed dramatically in the twenty years since Smith's chapter was published, I think Billips and Hatch's documentary style and design can still teach today's filmmakers how to construct and contribute alternative voices and depictions of themselves and their unique communities. As Smith details, Billips and Hatch et al. "trouble the boundary between fact and fiction" (60) when they "interweave dramatic re-enactments, pantomime, and fantasy sequences with archival footage and interviews o question ideologies […] and the adequacy of realist techniques of representation" (61). This lesson can return to inform fictional dramas as well, seeing that TV and film realties not bent solely on ratings and gross profit stand to learn from it, too.

 

I teach Introduction to Screenwriting at a community college in northern Illinois. Although our campus is only 40 minutes outside of Chicago, too many students assume that the news and TV and film representations of our local urban life adequately inform and represent this diverse and rich and too-segregated city and its citizens. I see how important it is to ask these emerging writers to challenge and change the media they script, whether for TV or film, fiction or documentary, in socially aware and conscientious ways. After all, a zombie film (as most of my students want to write, for some reason) is never just about zombies...

 

We, the creators of new media (art, essay, film, whathaveyou) need to stop replicating and perpetuating stereotypes and prejudice, censorship and the status quo. Now is the time, seeing as that the production and dissemination of our art is now democratized and in our hands.

 

I will share this chapter with my incoming class, and hope, at the very least, that each one of these writers contemplates the power they wield.     

Rhetorical Abilities of the Camera: Valerie Smith and James Allen

[by Christopher Smith]

The rhetorical capacity of the camera has changed both the way social protest is captured by onlookers, but has also helped to establish a means by which statements of political, social, or economic activism may help determine its efficacy—a new criteria was established during the twentieth century, of what "looks good" for the television and still cameras. From red carpet celebrity appearances to network television anchors to filmmakers and politicians, one's own appearance and voice transmitted across electronic means has become a new and fluid form of rhetoric. When Nixon sweated and stammered his way through televised, live, and unedited Presidential debates in 1960—and went on to lose the race to Kennedy—he hired a young and aspiring production assistant to help him "look good" on television, to present himself as newly calm and clear, stern and thoughtful. Within a decade, Nixon had an effective public image, the sum of the rhetoric crafted by a careful team (Joe McGinnis' The Selling of the President 1968 is a fantastic description of this transformative process)—and the young production assistant, Roger Ailes, would go on to create and head Fox News, on behalf of the Murdoch empire. How does the action of "looking good" take place today, in films, news, and on the wild and wicked web?

Context for Valerie Smith's work regarding films that appeal to specific racial groups is useful in understanding the lineage and evolution of our collective on-camera rhetoric. Since the time of her writing, some of her presumptions regarding the efficacy of documentary film may be challenged by the popularity of artists like Michael Moore, and the continued and heightened high regard for the works of Spike Lee. While "documentarians [still seem] unlikely to achieve the popularity of directors of fiction films" (p. 62), Smith's (1992) assumptions about the commercial viability of "nonfiction films" (p. 61) may have been unseated by a recent trend in nonfiction television, film and culture: reality television, now clearly established as a genre of popular entertainment, seeks the presentation—however awkwardly rendered—of individuals' narratives, without the façade sought by the rhetorical cameras of the twentieth century. Do reality television programs, from Hoarders to Hardcore Pawn, represent the "intimate, if not contiguous, relation to an externally verifiable reality" (p. 60) Smith identifies in the movies of the early 1990s? If Andy Warhol was correct, that we may all be delivered our requisite fifteen minutes of fame within the corporate portals of reality television, are producers interested in making individuals and their narratives 'look good?' What is the "intimate [and] externally verifiable reality" that can help define this emerging realm of nonfiction narrative?   

If Smith's characterization of the import and reception of black feature films in 1992 was critical to the development of rhetoric and representation in film, James Allen's website Without Sanctuary serves as contrast: without the expectations of a manufactured plot, a rising action, and a benevolent resolution sandwiched between segments of corporate commercials, Allen's work in compiling images, and their presentation on a web page, helps establish a genre technologically unavailable at the time of Smith's writing. Self-described 'picker' James Allen, narrating the short film declared that, "in America, everything is for sale, even a national shame" (2005). He describes how his collecting and presenting photographic postcards of lynchings across the United States during the early 1900s has "engendered" in him a fear of "the majority," and how a specific "image layered a pall of grief over my fears." Those who peruse his site are witness to scenes of horrific and public death; the viewer endures "the endless replay of anguish," as Allen ruminates and speculates about the motivations of those depicted as watching the hangings and swaying bodies. Is such a website—a work of visual rhetoric, devised specifically to represent moments when citizens have looked far from 'good' but perhaps at their most reprehensible and repugnant—effective, as an act of protest, of representation long after the grave facts? Does the visual representation of individuals or groups looking 'less-than-good' at moments in history constitute an act of protest?

Websites may have helped reinforce Allen's notion that "in America, everything is for sale"; a published collection of his images remains available, though their representation online may have undermined his profits. Allen's website includes an active and public forum, in which comments on the lynching photographs from educators, students, and web users at large have sought to make meaning of and increase understanding of what Allen described in his short film as "the cold steel trigger in the human heart"—what drove these crowds to these terrible moments. Discussions found on the forum provided unique and fluid contextualization for the collection. One participant, username ansar1013, posted on August 11, 2011, under the "Where Was God?" thread on the Without Sanctuary website: "I am here to establish a system of justice in this world and replace this current system of injustice. These lynchings that were done can only be blamed on the cowards and punks in the crowd that lacked the testicular fortitude to fight for right. People know what is right from wrong. We just lack the balls to do something about it. So instead of getting bogged down into some GOD talk we should discuss strategies and tactics to completely destroy this current system of injustice" (ansar1013, 2011). Theological arguments, pedagogical applications, and individuals' constructive criticism all aid in making sense of Allen's photographic documentary; perhaps the site remains proof that we, as a culture and population, are still seeking full context for the rhetorical abilities of the camera. The creative genre that accommodates the compilation and distribution of images (of others, taken by others) may still be evolving. Perhaps we are still trying to understand what it means to 'look good' on film, and in the digital age. The choices in 'looking good' that are ours and in the present-tense are not the same as the choices made by those in the past: be them crowds gathered around trees for nefarious and horrific reasons during the first decade of the last century, or the populations represented by filmmakers twenty years ago.

Allen, J. (2005). Without Sanctuary [film]. Retrieved from http://withoutsanctuary.org

Ansar1013. (11 Aug. 2011). "Where Was God?" [forum post]. Retrieved from http://withoutsanctuary.org/main.html

Smith, V. "The Documentary Impulse in Contemporary African American Film." In Black Popular Culture: A Project by Michele Wallace, ed. Gina Dent. Seattle: Bay Press, 1992.

Thunderheart - We Women Warriors

Thunderheart - We Women Warriors by Raul Manzano

 

"Old Cowboys New Indians," an article by T.V. Reed is based on three films of the American Indian Movement as depicted by American's film authority, Hollywood. For this assignment, I will focus on the film Thunderheart which I viewed. I will also address the film We Women Warriors which was recently shown in New York City. A documentary based on Indigenous people in Colombia, S.A.
The plot of the film "Thunderheart" is the investigation of a murder case where an Indian has been accused of the crime. The FBI is in charge of the case for which agent Val Kilmer, whose background is half Indian, is sent to work along guru investigator Sam Shepard. Kilmer finds himself in a cross-road between the White world and Indian culture as he is confronted by members of the Indian community; his facial features revealed his Indian ethnicity he could not hide behind his RayBan shades. As he tries to stay firm to his White upbringing and conduct a professional investigation, he begins to realize there is more to the crime. Along the way, he meets spiritual leader or grandfather, as he is called, who instill in him the power of self reflection, sharing traditional values, customs, and beliefs in the laws of nature. He also tells him there is a reason why he has been called to this investigation. Soon Kilmer begins to put clues together to find out that the investigation is a set-up to accuse an Indian of a crime he did not do. The land the tribe inhabits is uranium rich which is being exploited by a mining company, in the process the river waters have been contaminated by the mineral extraction process. The Indian who was killed discovered why his people have been dying but he is silenced by a sniper. The plot thickens as Kilmer finds out that his boss is involved in the cover-up with direct ties to the government, which makes Kilmer a disposable person. As he uncovered more information, he is pursued by hunters and the police in a car chase coming to a dead-end in a deserted mountain area but he is saved by the force of the Indian tribe that has come together to his aid. At that point, Kilmer realized his own identity and the power of the spiritual world.  While the film focused on a crime solving investigation, the true story is about the treatment and displacement of the Indians that for over five hundred years have been driven to no-man's-land and when they finally settled, they are poisoned by American capitalism.

 

On the other hand, the film We Women Warriors is an important documentary on the lives of indigenous women that stood up against violence and the lack of government protection. Caught up in the cross-fired between guerrillas and military forces (and paramilitares), they struggle to survive in a war that is not theirs. Using non-violent protest, they achieved milestone recognition but the fight is not over as long as the drug trafficking trade and guerrilla-government conflicts continues. Their lives are at risk. It is interesting to know how technology has aided them in their cause by using laptops and cell phones. Those women, with their limited education, showed the power of determination to change and build a constructive environment, more importantly, to preserve their indigenous population and culture. Their protest became a national debate thereby obtaining political rights to govern themselves. After all these years, finally the Indigenous population of Colombia have their voices heard. A statement on the producers website about Indigenous human rights reads: "When the UN Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples was passed in 2007, the United States, Canada and Colombia were the only countries that abstained from endorsing it. Two years later, Colombia's Constitutional Court ruled that the Colombian government must do more to protect the country's 102 aboriginal nations, 32 of which are in danger of extinction because of the armed conflict. These events contributed to Colombian government's endorsement of the U.N. Declaration Rights of Indigenous Peoples in May 2009. Canada and the U.S. just recently endorsed this critical human rights charter in 2010."

 

Both films show the treatment and discrimination Indigenous people have suffered since the White man landed in the Américas. Thunderheart portraits Native American Indians living in deplorable conditions and their struggles to survive under White man laws, while We Women Warriors depicts harsh living conditions caused by another White man's exploitation: drug trade.

 

Works Cited:
Thunderheart. Dir. Michael Apted. Perf. by Val Kilmer, Sam Shepard, Graham Greene. 1992.

 

Todos los Pueblos Productions. We Women Warriors. Web. 18 Aug. 2012. <http://wewomenwarriors.com/directors-statement.html>.

 

We Women Warriors. Dir. Nicole Karsin. Perf. by Doris, Ludis and Flor Ilva Trochez. (2002-2009) 2011.

Tolken, in "The anguish of snails: Native American Folklore in the West offers an interesting account of the development of Native American dance as a reflection of the changes in the Native American Society.

The part of her analysis that caught my attention even more was when she suggests a new kind of inquiry. She suggest: "—for our inquiry and insight—let’s ask not, “Why are they dancing?” or “What are they dancing about?” but rather, “What are they dancing?” That is to say, what is embodied in a particular dance while people are performing it? What do the accumulated patterns “say” to us?"

" Just as visual art allows us to create concrete objects to articulate complex cultural values, just as stories and songs allow the expression of cultural ideas in the patterns of oral performance, so dance allows us to dramatize, to act out, to embody a set of

ideas or values which otherwise would remain unarticulated" (80).

As an illustration for this idea (with some refrence to last week's discussion)
 I would like to share with you this image:

Moriya, 120/90 cm

                                             

E. Richard Hart’s Anguish of Snails: Native American Folklore in the West (by Elizabeth Aiossa)

E. Richard Hart's Anguish of Snails: Native American Folklore in the West asserts that "we may use the 'clues' provided by Native American tales, songs, dances, architecture, and other arts—provisionally, of course—as if they were snail shells, as objects that have meaning beyond their physical existence but nonetheless are readable through their details of style and substance" ("Cultural Patterns" 9). These texts are worthy of study, but not merely via the Western style of analysis and evaluation. Rather, these are living artifacts of an embodied, performed culture. Instead of projecting and prescribing our own meaning and beliefs systems upon these cultural constructions, we must "read out of the shell as text" (10); that is, explore the patterns of culture and performance arising from said text. For example, "we can as definitely describe the organization of Native American culture as circular. Circles abound in Native architecture, narrative, ritual, art, dance, and gesture […] to symbolize Native concepts of inclusion, balance, symmetry, and relationships" (11-12).

 

We recently read N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain for Dr. Armitage's Memoir and Identity course. In an attempt to demonstrate Hart's method for grappling with Native folk art, I'd like to share my discussion of this seminal text with you.  

So much of Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain is about loss: the loss of Kiowa culture, history, identity. The loss of Tai-me, grandfather Mammedaty, the buffalo. Despite these grave losses, or because of them, the writing breathes life into the stories and rituals of this disappearing culture. In this sense, Momaday blurs the constructed "Western" lines between personal and private, self and society, between myth and reality, and between story and history. In doing so, this book challenges the oft rigid notions of what memoir is supposed to be, ought to do. As Hart suggests, "[f]or those tribes that are still flourishing, for those whose cultures have been partly demolished, and even those whose worlds were devastated, the expressions of folklore provide us with the best and most articulate records of perspectives that we cannot do without precisely because they embody the relatively unmediated cultural voices of the peoples who have shaped the realities of life in the Western Hemisphere" (16).

 The circular design concept of Rainy Mountain acts as scaffolding for the journey through all of these levels and layers of cultural identity. Like the Worm Ouroboros forever returns to eat its own tail, this memoir is bookended by poems each touching upon the timelessness of nature and the eternity of the spirit. These metaphorical conceits extend throughout the narrative; as Momaday explains in the Prologue: "It is a whole journey, intricate with motion and meaning; and it is made with the whole of memory, that experience of the mind which is legendary as well as historical, personal as well as cultural. And the journey is an evocation of three things in particular: a landscape that is incomparable, a time that is gone forever, and the human spirit which endures" (4). Momaday also admits that Rainy Mountain is evidence of how the human mind processes and recreates traditions and stories and cultures.   

 

It is clear that Momaday's purpose here is not to navel-gaze and voice self, but to facilitate a chorus of the Kiowa people, throughout the ages, through the rise and fall of a precious and subaltern culture. It should come as no surprise, really, that Rainy Mountain was published in 1969, when factions of the voiceless and powerless were emerging with force and fighting for the preservation and commemoration of their contributions to history and to our shared future. As such, this text can clearly be understood as protest art, as capable of shaping and influencing knowledge construction and meaning making.

Perhaps what we can take away from Hart's chapters is the important lesson of how not to approach the study and analysis of the artifacts of other cultures. Rather than asking "'What do you think this really means?'" we should instead inquire "'What's being acted out, or dramatized, or made concrete here?'" (10).

 

I wonder how this shift in inquiry reshapes your understanding of a particular text or artifact, or if it ultimately leads you to draw the same conclusions.

 

Works Cited

Hart, E. Richard. "Cultural Patterns in Native American Folklore: An Introduction." Anguish of Snails: Native American Folklore in the West. Utah State University Press. 9-35.  

Momaday, N. Scott. The Way to Rainy Mountain. University of New Mexico Press, 1969. Print.

Elizabeth M. Aiossa, M.F.A.
English Instructor
Communication Arts Department
College of Lake County 
19351 West Washington Street
Grayslake, IL 60030-1198

Folk Arts, Low or Hight Art?

Response to Betsy Peterson on Folk and Traditional Arts and Social Change
Raul Manzano

 

Folk Arts, Low or High Art?

 

In her article “Folk and Traditional Arts and Social Change” Betsy Peterson brings to the surface popular culture expressed through folk arts, a discipline that is undermined and undervalued by the art establishment and relegated or categorized as a low art form. Like other art forms in the seventies and eighties craft work and photography did not have status of a fine art discipline. Only through avocation, protest, and demand, these artistic expressions were elevated to high art status. Photography has existed for more than a hundred years before the art establishment accepted it. Likewise, craft art was not considered an art form. The Feminism movement of the seventies led by artists like Judy Chicago, Miriam Shapiro and Lippard utilized what was considered women’s work i.e. crochet, embroidery, china painting, pottery and porcelain to create their art. These craft practices were considered functional works and not works of art or one-of-a-kind objects. Women also utilized their bodies as a way to express themselves, claiming that female emotions and feelings are different than men. “In asserting the relevance of the personal in art, feminists contributed considerably to the death of modernism and to the birth of postmodernism” (Sandler 115) raising their voice, establishing dialog and more importantly gaining recognition. Similarly, “[f]olk and traditional arts can also create a space for dialogue that enables full and authentic engagement with others” (Peterson 1). In this regard, Peterson refers to the communal space as places where people gather to express concerns about their community and other related issues including local entertainment in the form of popular dance and or community traditions known as folk arts. It is here at these gathering places that Peterson asserts the importance and value of popular culture for social change, where people bring grassroots issues that relate to their own community. Unfortunately, says Peterson (paraphrasing here) “community arts and folk arts do not engage in critical dialog” (8) to be taken seriously. While efforts have been made to bring awareness and public support for folk arts and other social issues, there is more ground still to be gained.  Nevertheless, Peterson is hopeful that change will come, “the folk arts remind us that is the little things, the cultural particulars, the specificity of adaptive response, that can enable a fully realized sense of cultural citizenship” (14). Just like “in 1972 Chicago, Schapiro , twenty-one women students from the program […] embarked on an ambitious communal effort called Womanhouse….[it] became the repository of the daydreams women have as they wash, bake, cook, sew, clean and iron their lives away” (Sandler 118). Folk arts will have its day too and the recognition it deserves.

 

Works Cited:
Peterson, Betsy. “Folk and Traditional Arts and Social Change.” A working Guide to the Landscape of Arts for Change. http://animatingdemocracy.org/webfm_send/39.

 

Sandler, Irving. Art of the Postmodern Era: From the late 1960s to the Early 1990s. Colorado: Westview Press. 1998. Print.

Chris Smith on Betsy Peterson's "A Working Guide to the Landscape of Arts for Change"

Betsy Peterson's "A Working Guide to the Landscape of Arts for Change" is provided online by "Animating Democracy: A Program of Americans for the Arts," an organization whose mission statement may be as salient as any of Peterson's theorizing: "Animating Democracy inspires, informs, promotes, and connects arts and culture as potent contributors to community, civic, and social change" (2012). With funding from a variety of sources including the National Endowment for the Arts, this organization—a critical component of Peterson's work—may reflect a new and increasing value for the arts, as a means of nurturing individual and collective creative expression.

Following a discussion of our shared language for differing levels of understanding, skill, and experience we hold within our creative pursuits, Peterson admits "such terminology debates will always be with us" (p. 3), but still seeks to better define the difference between the supposed 'amateur' and 'professional.' What are the "folk arts," anyway—the arts that grow out of the lives of the untrained, yet still seeking to express themselves? Once upon a time, a truck driver stopped in a recording studio in Memphis, and recorded a love song for his mother—not because he was aspiring to change the world. "Some [artists, musicians, etc] do not necessarily label their work as "social change," even though concepts of social and cultural capital are at the core of folk arts and traditional culture" (p. 4). Elvis, I believe, never wanted to be King.

Peterson wants to further hone the theoretical context and case for the administration of public arts programs, and champions ethnographic methods for doing so: these range from advanced 'hanging out' (while bearing "sharpened skills of listening, interviewing, and observation" (p. 8)), to the full, systematic, and organic embrace of people's stories ("personal narratives, oral history, cultural traditions, and ritual often provide the raw material or basis for other related artistic projects and products"). Peterson cites the Surviving Katrina and Rita Project in Houston, a project funded as a behavioral/mental health program through the United Way, led children and adults to explain their narratives in frank and concrete ways. The capacity for what Peterson calls "capacity building" may, in other circles, be named "the construction of social capital," is illustrated by the examples she cites. One of my favorites is The Arts Bus, a central Vermont 501c3 non-profit organization whose mission is to provide creative experiences with both the visual and performing arts, for children in central Vermont.

Arts Bus, The. (2012). About the Arts Bus. Retrieved from http://artsbus.org/about-the-arts-bus.html

Animating Democracy (2012). Goals. Retrieved from http://animatingdemocracy.org/about/goals

Peterson, B. (2012). "A Working Guide to the Landscape of Arts for Change." Animating Democracy. Retrieved from http://animatingdemocracy.org/webfm_send/39