Ethnomimesis

by Cantwell, Robert

• ISBN13: 9780807844243
• ISBN10: 0807844241
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1993-12-01
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

Wide-ranging and provocative, this book will fascinate all those intrigued by how we create and perpetuate our representations of folklife and culture. Ethnomimesisis Robert Cantwell's word for the process by which we take cultural influences, traditions, and practices to ourselves and then manifest them to others. Ethnomimesis is an element of ordinary social communication, but springing out of it, too, is that extraordinary summoning up that produces our literature, our art, and our music. In the broadest sense, ethnomimesis is the representation of culture. Using such diverse cultural artifacts as King Learand an eighteenth-century English manor garden to deepen our understanding of ethnomimesis, Cantwell then explores at length the representation of culture in our national museum, the Smithsonian, focusing especially on the Festival of American Folklife. Like many other such exhibitions, the Festival enacts presentations of culture across the boundaries of rank and class, race and ethnicity, gender and the life cycle. Like the concept of 'folklife' itself, Cantwell argues, the Festival stands where ethnomimesis finds its creative source, at the cultural frontier between self and other. That boundary, and the energy that accumulates there, runs through the many, varied 'exhibits' of this book.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction: On Ethnomimesis	p. 1
Poor Tom: Folklore and Power in King Lear	p. 9
The Ogre in the Tale: Enclosures, Gardens, and the Festival Market	p. 32
Of King's Treasuries: The National Museum	p. 49
Cafe Tunis: The Sites of Culture	p. 85
Duncan's Hat: A Festival Notebook	p. 124
The Ink Spots: Folklife and Stereotype	p. 150
Queen of the Spelling Bee	p. 185
Falling in Love: Ideology, Memory, Festivity	p. 213
The Empire of Ice Cream: A Poetics of Recognition	p. 249
Conclusion: Sign Language	p. 301
Notes	p. 307
References	p. 313
Index	p. 319
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