Summary Of Gumbo This: The State Of A Dish

2117 Words9 Pages
In a number of Western discourse conventions, narratives have beginnings, middles, and ends. More narrowly, we know that the least that can be said about a narrative is that one thing follows another, and the causality is often implied or inferred. And it does not hurt that we folklorists are fond of etiologies, both in terms of the object of our study or in how we came to study folklore. To embark upon my own etiology would be tell a form of homesick narrative in which our protagonist travels from south Louisiana to central New York for graduate study and suffers a form of climactic-cultural shock wherein he discovers that snow actually occurs — and can occur from October until May — and that not everyone eats rice and seafood as the mainstays…show more content…
My current project, Gumbo This: The State of a Dish, focuses on the history and geography of gumbo in Louisiana in an attempt to demonstrate that the rise of recent heritage movements that have stressed either the Cajun or African ancestry of various folk forms in Louisiana ignore the much more interesting history of people sharing ideas and stories across race and class lines. I have organized the book to focus the reader’s attention on various dimensions of history and geography through the ethnographic lens of people living their…show more content…
I understand that one of my tasks as a folklorist is to add to the archeological-historical record, to get into history people, events, and objects that may not otherwise make it into such accounts. By getting Lou Trahan’s development of a new Mardi Gras mask-making tradition into history, I am also hoping to transform, albeit slowly, the nature of history. As my teacher, and later friend, Henry Glassie is fond of pointing out: getting funky old buildings or cool new inventions like self-crawling crawfish boats into history, be it conventional history or art history, with the addition of an adjective like “folk” isn’t our goal. Remaking (art) history such that it includes those objects and the people who made them by definition

More about Summary Of Gumbo This: The State Of A Dish

Open Document