Notes
451 Notes 1. Defining Tradition 1. The Coalition for Traditional Values website emblazons its motto: “Empowering People of Faith Through Knowledge” (www.traditionalvalues .org; accessed September 12, 2010). Toward Tradition was active on the Web before 2006 and described its devotion to “faith-based American principles of constitutional and limited government; the rule of law; representative democracy; free markets; a strong military; and a moral public culture.” The organization’s founder, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, maintains a website at http:// www.rabbidaniellapin.com. The Citizens for Traditional Values website uses the motto “A Positive Voice for Your Values,” and under its list of guiding principles posted on the “Faith and Family” site is “preserving the influence of faith and family as the great foundation of American freedom embodied in our Judeo-Christian heritage.” 2. “Honesty: Zach’s Tall Tale (Adventures from The Book of Virtues, No. 1)” was the opening of an animated prime-time series scheduled to debut over Labor Day weekend in 1997 on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS). Aladdin Paperbacks published an illustrated print version based on Bennett’s story by Shelagh Canning in 1996. 2. Explaining Tradition 1. The procedure can also be rendered as circular to emphasize that the testing of the hypothesis leads to its revision, which in turn promotes building on the previous findings. Judy Kirscht and Mark Schlenz, in their textbook Engaging Inquiry, for example, illustrate the “scientific method” beginning with “observe” and proceeding circularly to “hypothesize,” “experiment,” and “revise hypothesis,” before returning to “observe” at the top of the circle (2002, 13). 2. Many historians of American cultural anthropology have attributed the rising importance of interpretation since the 1960s to the influence of the subjectivist ethnography of Ward Goodenough and David Schneider, in addition to Clifford Geertz (see D’Andrade 1999; Winthrop 1991,146–49). As Ladislav Holy (1987) points out, the move to interpretation was guided by a post-structural focus on cultural specificities in place of a search for crosscultural uniformities. Daniel Linger (2005) labels the preference for interpretation as the discursive “Geertzian tradition,” which stands in contrast to the positivist “Durkheimian tradition.” Robert Winthrop, in an entry on “Interpretation ” in his Dictionary of Concepts in Cultural Anthropology, argues that 452 Notes to Pages 86–214 Geertzian interpretation displaced the historicism of Boasian anthropology. Citing Geertz, Winthrop writes, “From the interpretive perspective, in contrast , culture is not a ‘power’ determining behavior, but a context of meanings within which human action is made intelligible” (1991, 148). Paralleling the structural concerns I have raised, the resulting fate of generalization in anthropological research has also been debated. See, for example, the arguments over the proposition that “social anthropology is a generalizing science or it is nothing ” in Key Debates in Anthropology (Ingold 1996, 15–54) and the controversy over the American Anthropological Association’s removal of the word science from its self-description in a long-range planning document (Glenn 2010). 3. Recalling the paradigm shift in folkloristics during the 1970s, Roger Abrahams notes, “Goldstein’s A Guide for Fieldworkers provided the center for gravity for the next generation. Fieldwork was now installed as the sine qua non of folklore as it had been in cultural anthropology and other ethnographic disciplines” (1993a, 385). 5. Adapting Tradition 1. The disease was not recognized in its epidemic form until 1887, when outbreaks were reported in Sweden. Since then, outbreaks of polio have been reported around the globe, including severe epidemics in Asia and central Europe . The disease was finally controlled by the introduction of the Salk vaccine in 1954. 2. American children are not unique in this preoccupation with games in which touch has a noxious effect. Iona and Peter Opie, in Children’s Games in Street and Playground (1969, 75–78), describe various afflictions that European children playfully pass on by touching one another. In 1954, at the height of the polio epidemic, British children played a form of tag in which “the dreaded Lurgi” was the feared disease, and they would write “P.A.L.” on their arms to protect themselves against it. The Opies write about other related chasing games: “In Liss children transmit something, which only they can understand, when they make the ‘aggie touch’; and the touch may even be passed on by the deceit of shaking hands. In Wolstanton children play a game called ‘Germ.’ . . . In Lastonbury they play ‘Minge.’ In Swansea girls obtain a morbid thrill playing ‘The Plague’: in Cranford, Middlesex...
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