Pitch wrote:
>What I've been turning over is this: What should academics appropriately >expect vis a vis resources when non-academics put those resources to >uses that serve in non-academic contexts?
Academics should expect ... exactly nothing! Part of my fascination with the interplay between academic knowledge production and its uses in the public sphere is the fact that once a text (academic or otherwise) is published, the author loses complete control over what happens to it: how it's interpeted, poached, appropriated or used, and by whom. It's ironic, for example, that the film "Oss Oss, Wee Oss," produced by American folklorist Alan Lomax and UK folklorist Peter Kennedy in 1953, inspired Pagans in Berkeley, California to create their own May Day custom with an oss based on Lomax's Frazerian interpretation of the custom as a pagan fertility rite. Lomax, who was a purist and considered revivals and revitalizations to be "fakelore," would have been horrified had he known. We don't, however, get to decide how our work is used once we put it out there.
BB,
Sabina
Sabina Magliocco
Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology
California State University
18111 Nordhoff St.
Northridge, CA 91330-8244
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