Western Folklore

Vol. 76 No. 4 – Fall, 2017

Articles

Pig Tales: Assumptions, Beliefs, and Perceptions Regarding Pork Bans Real and Rumored
Michael Owen Jones
 
ABSTRACT: This essay focuses first on a short-lived pork ban by the federal Bureau of Prisons and then it examines rumors of recent pork bans in public institutions in the U.S. and Western Europe. The goal is to discover, through detailed analysis of comments and the application of foodways theories, many of the persistent but often hidden assumptions, beliefs, and sentiments regarding the consumption of pork. A recurrent theme is the multivalent symbolism of this food. In addition, social tensions, feelings of values under attack, culinary nationalism, and cultural protectionism are clearly manifested in public comments. The essay contributes to the literature on prison provisioning, rumor and belief, and nationalistic movements involving food and foodways. KEYWORDS: Prisons, Foodways, Pork, Folklore, Rumors, Folk Beliefs, Religion.

“Someone's Been Sleeping in My Bed”: Home Invasion Stories
Russell Frank
 
ABSTRACT: In most places, home invasions are serious crimes. In a college town neighborhood shared by students and permanent residents, a home invasion may entail nothing more nefarious than a drunken student blundering into the wrong house. This article examines several personal experience narratives told by residents who experienced home invasions and considers the multiple ways in which the stories help tellers and listeners feel better about the experience and about life in their lively neighborhood. KEYWORDS: personal experience narratives, crime victim narratives

“Paiutes and Shoshone Would Be Killed For This”: Whiteness, Rewilding, and the Malheur Occupation
Bruno Seraphin
 
ABSTRACT: The “High Desert Wildtending Network” is a grassroots movement of mostly white and non-Native nomadic “rewilders” in the northwest United States who appropriate Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge, gathering and replanting wild foods in a seasonal round. Evaluating Wildtending’s potentialities for settler-Indigenous solidarity, this article discusses the network’s rhetorical shifts within the context of the 2016 armed occupation at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and the movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock. KEYWORDS: settler colonialism; race; cultural appropriation; human-environment relations; social movements

Reviews

Galit Hasan-Rokem & Ithamar Gruenwald, Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews: Ancient Jewish Folk Literature Reconsidered
Reviewed by Renee Perelmutter

Pravina Shukla, Costume: Performing Identities through Dress
Reviewed by Emmie Pappa Eddy

Yanagita Kunio, Legends of Tono 100th Anniversary Edition [and]
Yanagita Kunio and Sasaki Kizen, Folk Legends from Tono: Japan's Spirits, Deities, and Phantastic Creatures
Reviewed by Jeremy Robinson

Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, Gillian Lathey, and Monika Wo`zniak, Cinderella Across Cultures: New Directions and Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Reviewed by Margot Blankier

Dennis Waskul with Michele Waskul, Ghostly Encounters: The Hauntings of Everyday Life
Reviewed by Heather Joseph-Witham

Jeffrey Veidlinger, Going to the People: Jews and the Ethnographic Impulse
Reviewed by Josh Parshall

Michael Dylan Foster and Jeffrey A. Tolbert, The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World
Reviewed by Sharon R. Sherman

Sara M. Patterson, Middle of Nowhere: Religion, Art, and Pop Culture at Salvation Mountain
Reviewed by Peter Tokofsky