This chapter examines encounters around mental health illness that played out within mandate Palestine’s hybrid legal system. Issues of mental competency and legal responsibility were debated across civil and religious courts, but this chapter focuses on the criminal courtroom and criminal insanity defences. Criminal insanity defences forced mandate judges, medical experts, and lay witnesses to debate what forms of behaviour and thought were evidence of mental health illness, and what should, by contrast, be considered normal, ‘rational’, and therefore punishable for a given defendant. Through a close reading of two exemplary cases, this chapter moves beyond the historiography’s focus on cultural difference to highlight how different bodies of knowledge – psychiatric, social, and folkloric – were put to work to define the ‘normal’ in relation to other axes of identity like age, class, and gender. A third case, which played out against the backdrop of the Palestinian great revolt, meanwhile reveals how understandings of the ‘normal’ could be warped by wider political circumstances, with life-or-death consequences for defendants.

This chapter reconstructs the dynamics of the initial encounter between the British and the question of mental health illness in Palestine into the 1920s. Far from recapitulating a familiar narrative about the colonial introduction of psychiatry as a moment of rupture, it instead offers a multi-layered account of the opening of the first government mental health hospital at Bethlehem, in order to highlight how the British were in fact latecomers to an ongoing history of psychiatry in Palestine. Well before the British occupation of 1917, Palestinians had recourse to a range of medical and non-medical options for the management of the mentally ill, and those existing understandings, experiences, and institutions crucially shaped how the British responded to mental health illness across these formative years. As well as tracing the establishment of a key institution, this chapter also introduces a central figure in the history of psychiatry in mandate Palestine: Dr Mikhail Shedid Malouf.

In this chapter I give an account of how I remember my childhood in the melodious echoes of songs my mother continues to sing in my mind, punctuating the crucial decades of the 1950s and 1960s, or 1330s and 1340s, to be more precise on our own calendar, in conjunction with historic events that stormed my homeland during this fateful time and then by extension much deeper and longer into history, culture, context – into religion, art, poetry, philosophy, and mysticism. I remember and I forget and I write and I wonder. I do all of these as an adult looking back. I detail how I wrote this book in the early hours of the morning, when most of the world around me was fast asleep, and as the sun rises and the room becomes bright, only the reflections of those memories linger about me. In the darkness of my room and the brightness of the laptop screen on which I wrote, I was reassured of a window that has opened into the womb into which I was conceived.

The introduction articulates the problem of the origins of Britain’s folkloric beings and traces the various ways in which scholars have tackled (or sidestepped) the problem, from John Aubrey to the present day. The introduction seeks to explain why scholars became wary of engaging with folkloric origins as a historical question, critiques previous approaches to the history of folkloric beings, and presents the book’s new approach in the context of current methodologies in the study of the history of popular religion. The introduction then outlines the structure of the book

Leo Tolstoy wrote throughout his career about Russian peasants, first at a class-inflected distance but later with admiration for their clothing, labor, and religious and moral feelings. As a Count, he automatically held a particular position vis-à-vis peasants, especially before the 1861 emancipation. His literary works and teaching tales depict peasants variously, sometimes idealizing an individual (from Platon Karataev in War and Peace to Alyosha the Pot), other times looking with distrust or frustration at peasant groups and their stubborn opposition to farming innovations. Eventually, Tolstoy famously adopted peasant garb, practiced many kinds of peasant crafts and labor, and enthusiastically communicated with peasant and sectarian thinkers, admiring their simple Christian faith. His primers for peasant children and collections of teaching tales often picked up folktales, paring their style down to the extreme simplicity that he considered typical and preferable. Toward the end of his life Tolstoy sought out the opinions and experiences of Russian peasant laborers in works of passionately engaged journalism. Major figures in Russian revolutionary movements (Lenin, Plekhanov) admired his insights, letting his authority in depicting peasant life continue into the Soviet period.

“The Tree” examines lynching souvenirs in the context of the emerging tourist economies of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century southern United States. The chapter focuses on mementos taken from lynching trees as well as the overlaps between this practice and other forms of landscape documentation and tourism. Through this study, the chapter also charts the overlaps between different object categories, particularly souvenirs and relics, as the image of the South became an increasingly commericalized and consumable one. This study of lynching souvenirs thus makes an argument for the inextricability of southern identity from its foundations in racial violence.

Views of Africa in the Black press evolved dramatically in the ninety years covered by this volume. The first generation of Afro-Latin American journalists had grown up with African parents and grandparents and were often sympathetic to their social and cultural practices. By the turn of the century doctrines of scientific racism, with their visions of Africans and their descendants as the bearers of genetic and cultural inferiority, led to much more negative views of Latin America's African heritage, even within the Black press. Emerging critiques of scientific racism in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s produced a rehabilitation of that heritage, though some doubts persisted. Ethiopia’s tenacious resistance against Italian invasions in the 1890s and 1930s, the region’s role in World War II, and decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s further raised Africa’s profile and image in the Black papers.

This chapter expands on what we generally conceptualize when we think of Irish narratives’ attention to the natural world. Folklore, Bairbre Ní Fhloinn writes, “speaks with the authority of the group and with the sanction of accumulated tradition”; it has at its disposal “a ready-made vocabulary.” In many ways, folklore suggests a radically different form of epistemological and aesthetic practice when compared to the Gaelic annals. It is worth noting here that indigenous epistemologies and vernaculars are not only important for historical reasons but also, as the field of Traditional Ecological/Environmental Knowledge (TEK) testifies, paramount for contemporary sustainability measures. Ní Fhloinn demonstrates Irish folklore’s place in a global tradition that is inspired by oral narratives and local histories and committed to environmental activism.

This chapter focuses on the writing of Sterling Brown and Zora Neale Hurston, specifically their representations of the folk and folk culture in the 1930s. In addition, it charts the development of their work from the 1920s into the 1940s and World War II. Both writers critiqued the practices and discourses of contemporary ethnography and their assertion of the disappearance of the folk and their culture in the face of modernization, a perspective largely adopted by the politics of the New Deal and the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP). Both writers confirmed the continued relevance and adaptability of Black culture and its place within both the African Diaspora and the national project of the United States so that their work for the FWP produced a counternarrative to its perspective. This chapter argues that a focus on the work of Brown – himself a self-identified leftist – and Hurston demonstrates that the writing of this period does not break down along strictly oppositional lines but is expansive, dialogic, and malleable.

The concluding chapter provides a critical reflection on the historical study of sex, gender, and sexuality in Japan, highlighting scholarly strongholds, addressing blind spots, and identifying questions yet to be raised. It notes, for instance, that existing sexuality studies question the once implicit, normative, and exclusive gender binary and heterosexuality. It spins forth Jennifer Robertson’s observation that, historically, in Japan and elsewhere, sexual practices have not presumed a specific sexual orientation or identity – although today some queer activists and homophobic critics tend to fuse the two.

This chapter considers Defoe’s profound interest in the language and mores of popular culture. It illustrates the way that the Tour uses the speech and activity of the people to show how each region contributes to the diverse culture of the nation, as a means to evoking the variety of Britain. The “talk and activity” of the people, as G.A. Starr puts it in an important article, help to flesh out this evocation of Britain. Defoe had a special penchant for proverbs, which he used in the title of several works, and which are scattered through the text of his major books in both fiction and non-fiction. Proverbial usages reflect not just habits of mind among the population at large, but also the outlook of those who live in particular corners of the kingdom. The treatment owes much to his keen ear for speech patterns, evident in the dialogues found elsewhere in his oeuvre. Moreover, in a number of places within the Tour, Defoe cites local customs, often related to tales and legends, that he generally treats with obvious scepticism. Apart from all else, he was a pioneer in the literary use of folklore.

A rich body of recent scholarship has commented on the depth of Ellison’s engagements with major developments in sociology and psychology, including direct engagements with the work of Robert Park, John Dollard, Gunnar Myrdal, and the Lafargue Clinic in Harlem. Ellison showed a sustained interest and concern with the new prominence of sociology and psychology in mid-century policy decisions in the U.S. Accordingly, his fiction and chapters consistently engaged with these disciplines’ claims to knowledge of African American culture as compared with other ways of knowing, such as naturalist fiction, Marxist analysis, music, and folklore.

This chapter begins with discussions of two early accounts of the sorrow songs, by the African American activist Charlotte Forten and the radical abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson. These early accounts drew on both Romantic approaches to folk song and ballad and scientific or naturalist taxonomies to construct African American song-making as both historical and ahistorical. Folklorists were excited to encounter in these songs an example of a genuine ‘folk’ culture in the United States that exemplified evolutionary theories of poetic development. The chapter discusses the ‘primitive’ ballad and the ‘evolved’ lyric, and moves on to a study of the interactions between Howard Odum, a sociologist of the New South, and the Southern Agrarians, a group of scholars based at Vanderbilt University, many of whom later became part of the movement known as New Criticism. It argues that African American song is the repressed other of the New Critical idea of the lyric, and that many of those ideas are rooted in racist ideology about a pastoral, paternalistic South. It concludes with a close reading of a song whose roots can be traced to sixteenth-century England, adapted to the conditions of American chattel slavery.

This chapter explains the book's main argument, establishing why Scott needs to be re-assessed and read as an environmental writer. An identification of the types of environment explored in the ensuing chapters is accompanied by a summary of ecocritical theories that shape the arguments. The concept of land ethics is considered at the outset, to show how Scott anticipated that twentieth-century term introduced by American environmentalist Aldo Leopold. The chapter revises more usual readings of Scott’s work to show how he challenged rather than conformed to conventional picturesque understandings of landscape and rural environments. Explorations of the relationships between cities and rural Scotland show how Scott addressed the division between town and country, including his involvement with the energy (oil and coal gas) industry. Examples are taken from Scott's collected ballads, original poetry, fiction and personal writing as well as from his lifelong activity in land management and environmental stewardship.

Aristotle’s biological treatises are full of explicit commitments to empiricism, expressing both his own views about how one should conduct biological investigations while using observation and sharp critiques of his predecessors for failing to see the facts. This chapter examines some of the most prominent features of Aristotle’s commitments to empirical methods as they can be observed to be at work at the most basic level of his science of biology, that is, at the level of establishing the facts about the parts, activities, lives, and characters of animals as collected in his History of Animals (HA). Specifically, the chapter discusses Aristotle’s methods for establishing and evaluating facts as well as the sometimes all too important role played by folklore, fables, and hearsay in Aristotle’s collection of zoological facts.

The Anthropophagic movement, of 1928-1929, was the most systematic and concerted effort within Brazilian modernism to address the concept of primitivism. Yet, contrary to much that has been written about it and in contrast with other modernist ventures, it largely skirted issues of blackness and Afro-Brazilian identity. The scholarly literature has tended to reduce the movement to Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Manifesto Antropófago’, and has therefore failed to comprehend its broader scope. The chapter focuses on Antropofagia’s relationship to race and primitivism and discusses the distinction the anthropophagists made between the savage, as a Freudian trope, and the primitive, as an ethnological one. The differing positions of 1920s modernists towards Afro-Brazilian religions and samba are revealing of subtle ideological distinctions. The intersection of class and race became a central concern for communist observers like French poet Benjamin Péret. For writer Mário de Andrade, on the other hand, the quest for autochthonous cultural forms led to a focus on folklore that romanticized ideals of national and racialist identities. The high modernist paradigm, as it eventually took shape after the late 1930s, tended to ignore the needs of subaltern populations or else appropriate them and erase them in favour of a nationalist project.