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BOOK REVIEWS
FOLKLORE / FOLKLIFE / FOLKMUSIC /
Gregory R. Darwin – Review of Sharon J. Arbuthnot, Síle Ní Mhurchú, and Geraldine Parsons, The Gaelic Finn Tradition II
Sharon J. Arbuthnot, Síle Ní Mhurchú, and Geraldine Parsons. The Gaelic Finn Tradition II. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2022. 256 pages. ISBN: 1846827957.
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/jfrr/article/view/36130/39099
The volume under review is presented as a sequel to The Gaelic Finn Tradition, published in 2012, and edited by Sharon J. Arbuthnot and Geraldine Parsons, two of the editors of this volume. Like the previous installment, this volume is an edited collection of essays, all of which focus on various approaches to and aspects of the Fenian tradition (Classical Gaelic Fiannaigheacht): a broad and heterogenous body of literary texts and oral traditions known throughout the Gaelic-speaking world from the early Middle Ages up until the present day. As is noted in the introduction, the “nucleus” of this volume was the Second International Finn Cycle Conference, hosted by the University of Glasgow in 2014; of the fourteen essays presented here, all but two represent research which was presented in some form at that conference.
The book’s essays are divided into three sections. The essays of the first section focus on medieval and early modern literary texts of the acallam “colloquy” tradition. Gregory Toner’s “Dating the Acallam” discusses previous approaches to establishing a date of composition for the lengthy prosimetrum Acallam na Senórach, and suggests that the application of machine-learning techniques (chronometrics) to the dating of texts may yield some insights. Employing an algorithm that he and Xiwu Han have developed, Toner presents the results of various analyses of the text. Because of the standardized nature of the literary language in the period ca. 1200-1600, while the algorithm is capable of assigning texts to that period, it struggles to provide more accurate dates; at the moment, therefore, chronometrics must be used alongside rather than in place of conventional approaches to textual dating.
Paul C. Eells – Review of Tara Browner, ed., Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North America
Tara Browner, ed. Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North America. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2022. 184 pages. ISBN: 0252022211.
Reviewed by:
Paul C. Eells
pe****@*******iu.edu
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/jfrr/article/view/36131/39100
American Indian music is often the most difficult aspect of Native North American culture for non-Indians to meaningfully understand or appreciate. Oddly enough, American Indian musical performance is also one of the most publicly accessible aspects of Indian cultures for the general population, and one of the areas with the longest time-depth of study by professional ethnomusicologists and anthropologists. Tara Browner’s edited volume on American Indian music, originally published in 2009 and issued as a paperback in 2022, provides context and analysis that sheds light on key areas where music intersects prominently with Indian cultures: dance, identity, mythology, poetics, and spiritual power.
The essays in Browner’s collection are a wide sampling of Native North America in geography and across the ethnographic record. The essays cover tribes as culturally far-flung as the Apache from the Inuit, and the Coast Salish from the Passamaquoddy. Some essays are built on contemporary research, whereas others are a complex analysis of ethnohistorical material. In each approach to their varied topics, it is clear that the contributors have painstakingly worked to collaborate with representatives of the tribal groups being studied. Browner herself is insistent in her introduction that this current work should support the interest of Native communities instead of taking Native communities as objects of study. Most essays in the volume balance a cultural and historical approach to music that will be of interest to Native peoples and the general public, with a highly technical musical analysis of songs and texts that will be of interest mostly to trained musicologists.