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Imagined States:  Nationalism, Utopia and Longing in Oral Cultures, Utah
State University Press, May, 2001, 


An international ensemble of folklore scholars looks at varied ways in
which national and ethnic groups have traditionally and creatively used
imagined states of existence—some idealizations, some demonizations—in
the construction of identities for themselves and for others. Drawing on
oral traditions, especially as represented in traditional ballads,
broadsides, and tale collections, the contributors consider fertile
landscapes of the mind where utopias overflow with bliss and abundance,
stereotyped national and ethnic caricatures define the lives of
“others,” nostalgia glorifies home and occupation,  and idealized and
mythological animals serve as cultural icons and guideposts to
harmonious social life.

Italian Canadian Luisa Del Giudice looks at the rich Italian variants
of the traditional gastronomic utopia called Il Paese di Cuccagna, the
Land of Cockaigne, “a mythic land of plenty where rivers run with ‘milk
and honey’ (wine, beer, coffee, or rum), food falls like manna from
heaven, work is banished, and no one ever grows old” and considers its
persistence in immigrant worldview. From New Delhi, Sadhana Naithani
examines the “preface-d space” that as India, colonial British authors
imagined and passed on to readers in formulaic prefaces to collections
of Indian folklore. Reimund Kvideland, of Norway, and Gerald Porter, an
English scholar teaching in Finland, show how nineteenth-century
Norwegian and English railway navvies (itinerant laborers) idealized
their low-status occupations in song. In a second essay, Gerald Porter
demonstrates through broadside ballad texts the role of caricatures of
the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish in constructing “Englishness.” Turks were
among the “others” Germans demonized, as Tom Cheesman, who teaches in
Wales, explains in his paper on their historical representations in
German street ballads.  Cozette Griffin-Kremer of France paints a
sweeping picture of the landscape of the mind that written and popular
traditions of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales built around bovine bodies,
the human-cow partnership, and the mysteries of domestication, thereby
providing conceptions of transcendence of the human condition. Finally,
Vaira V§±is-Freibergs, a scholar and the current president of Latvia,
explains the images of longing for idealized childhood homes that
married women, exiled by a patrilocal culture, expressed in Latvian
folksong.

Contents:

Luisa Del Giudice, Mountains of Cheese and Rivers of Wine: Paesi di Cuccagna
and 
other Gastronomic Utopias

Sadhana Naithani, Preface-d Space: Tales of the Colonial British Collectors
of Indian Follore

Reimund Kvideland, Working the Railways, Constructing Norwegian Navvy Identity

Gerald Porter, "Who Talks of My Nation? Constructing Englishness through
Negative Racial Stereotypes"

Tom Cheesman, The Turkish German Self:  Displacing German-German Conflict in
Oriental Street Ballads

Cozette Griffin-Kremer, Bovine Bodies and the Domestication of the Human Mind 

Vaira Vikis-Freibergs, 'The Poppy Blossom from my Native Land':  the Married
Woman as Exile in Latvian Folk Poetry"
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to order, call:  1-800-239-9974
$22.95 paper
approx. 270 pp., illustrated


Luisa Del Giudice, Director
I.O.H.I.
Italian Oral History Institute
P.O. Box 241553
Los Angeles, CA 90024-1553

Tel:  (310) 474-1698
Fax:  (310) 474-3188 
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
www.iohi.org