News & Events
PERCS Co-Sponsors NC Folklore Society Annual Meeting
April 4th in Elon's Holt Chapel
On April 4, 2009, PERCS will co-sponsor the North Carolina Folklore Society Annual meeting, the first time that the meeting will be held at Elon. The theme of the conference is “We are all Students of Folklore” and will feature some of Elon’s own students. Michael Sadler, Kirsten Rhodes and Clementine Wall will present their findings from a semester in the field in Cowee, North Carolina as part of the pilot PERCS Project (see announcement below and the “Projects” page for more information).
The Annual Meeting will also feature a keynote address from folklorist Tom McGowan and storyteller Orville Hicks and presentations from students from UNC Chapel Hill, Western Carolina University and Duke’s the Center for Documentary Studies. Registration is free. For more information, please go the NCFS website: www.ncfolkloresociety.org/
PERCS Cowee Team Presents at Southern Anthropological Society
PERCS students and professors had a strong showing at the Southern Anthropology Society Meetings in Wilmington, NC on Saturday, March 14th, 2009 as they presented their ethnographic research of the Cowee Valley in western North Carolina. PERCS faculty member Lisa Peloquin chaired the panel, titled “Prospectors to Collaborators: Rethinking Ethnography, Undergraduate Research and the South.” Elon students Michael Sadler, Clementine Wall and Kirsten Rhodes reflected on the challenges of collaboration in and out of the field, exploring the complexities of establishing rapport, portraying people in documentary photography, and negotiating power dynamics among an undergraduate research team. Elon professors offered brief remarks to frame the panel. Dr. Peloquin situated the presentations within the context of theory, practice and discourse, anthropology professor Tom Mould discussed institutional collaborations, and School of Education professor Bird Stasz introduced the field project and the community of Cowee.
The work conducted by Sadler, Wall and Rhodes represents the achievements of the first multi-year, interdisciplinary, collaborative research project supported by PERCS: Elon’s Program for Ethnographic Research and Community Studies. The project, led by Bird Stasz, explores the cultural heritage of Cowee North Carolina located in the heart of the Little Tennessee River Valley. For the past seven months, students and faculty have worked with quilters, documented the stories of elders, participated in the preservation of a community general store, and practiced ethnophotograhy.
"Project PERCS" Launches Ethnographic Study of the Little Tennessee River Valley
This year, PERCS launched "Project PERCS": a sustainable program supporting teams of students, faculty and community leaders in multi-year, interdisciplinary, ethnogrpahic projects. This new research program will promote greater collaboration between the university and local communities, produce substantive research, and enhance student learning. As part of this larger project, PERCS ius offering a 2-hour gateway course titled "Appalachian Ethnography" to introduce students to the field project. For more information on Project PERCS, click here. For more information on the gateway course, click here.
Recent Events
Thursday, April 24, 2008
George Gmelch "The Changing Culture of American Baseball"
Yeager Recital Hall, 7:30 p.m.
George Gmelch is the Roger Thayer Stone Professor of Anthropology at Union College and Professor of Anthropology at the University of San Francisco. He is the author of ten books and numerous articles on Irish Travellers, salmon fisher folk, migrants, tourism, and baseball. He has conducted ethnographic research in Ireland, England, Alaska, Newfoundland, Barbados, and the US and led students on anthropology terms abroad in Ireland, Tasmania and Barbados. His books include Behind the Smile: The Working Lives of Caribbean Tourism; Inside Pitch: Life in Professional Baseball; The Parish Behind God's Back: The Changing Culture of Rural Barbados (with Sharon Gmelch) Double Passage and Baseball Without Borders. Gmelch has recently used ethnographic research methods to study professional baseball players and will talk about how professional baseball in America has changed, reflecting cultural trends in the larger society.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
George Gmelch “The Ethnography of Tourism”
Moseley 215, 12:45-1:45 p.m.
Before his evening talk, George Gmelch will meet with Elon students to discuss the ethnography of tourism.Drawing upon decades of research on tourism in the Caribbean, some of which is captured in his 2003 book Behind the Smile: The Working Lives of Caribbean Tourism, Gmelch will engage students in an open discussion about the complex intersections of tourism and local cultures. Gmelch will also explore the complex cultural politics and learning pedagogies of study abroad and international field schools.
 Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Video Screenng of Middletown Redux
McEwen 011, 8:30 pm
In preparation for Luke Eric Lassiter's talk on Thursday night, PERCS will screen Middletown Redux, a twenty-six-minute documentary that captures the process of collaboration between Muncie’s black community and Ball State University students and faculty. In their own words, students, faculty and community members comment on the project's evolution and the relationships formed between the campus and community. This informative and compelling film illustrates the process of creating a rich ethnography out of fieldwork and the rewards of collaborating with local communities.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Luke Eric Lassiter, “The Other Side of Middletown: Building Bridges Between Universities and Local Communities through Collaborative Ethnography”
Yeager Auditorium, 7:30 p.m.
Luke Eric Lassiter is Professor of Humanities and Anthropology and Director of the Graduate Humanities Program at Marshall University Graduate College in South Charleston, West Virginia. Author of several books, Lassiter’s research covers such topics as ethnography, language and song, race and ethnicity, performance, social memory, and religion. In 2005, he received the prestigious Margaret Mead Award for his book The Other Side of Middletown: Exploring Muncie's African American Community, a work that brought faculty, students and community members together to produce a collaborative ethnography of Muncie’s black community. Lassiter has co-authored two books with Elon History professor Clyde Ellis, both of which have been praised for their collaborative spirit. Lassiter will speak about collaborative ethnography, an approach to qualitative research that emphasizes how scholars and local communities can research and write together to advance multicultural understanding and social change.
Past Events
Monday, April 16, 2007
Brown Bag Lunch Series
Sociology/Anthropology House, 11:15 p.m.
The fourth PERCS brown bag lunch discussion will take place Monday, April 16th from 11:15 p.m. to 12:15 p.m. in the Sociology and Anthropology Seminar Room. Lisa Marie Peloquin, assistant professor of sociology, will present her emergent qualitative research on healing in Indonesia. In the summer of 2006, she traveled for one month within the islands of Java and Bali. During this period of preliminary field research, she gained entrée into various traditional healing practices as well as developed rapport with practitioners. In the summer of 2007, she will return to these locations as participant observer and ethnographer.
The overall goal of the project is to document and understand the complex matrix of social and animal hierarchies within the world’s most populous Muslim country. In contrast to the hegemonic representation of Islam as synonymous with Arab culture, Peloquin’s project will contribute to a body of social scientific literature that explicitly investigates the interaction of religion with cultural, economic, and social factors. Her study of traditional healing practices in Indonesia will explore the impact of Islam and Western biomedicine on local cultures. In this sense, the comparison of Java and Bali is strategic in that each island manifests a distinct trajectory of religious identities and strategies of economic development. Peloquin is collecting visual (photographic), audio (digital sound recordings) and oral (interviews and ethnographic field-notes) data on Javanese and Balinese women in the healing arts. Her analyses will strive to remain attuned to the role of women and the social construction of gender within these social realities.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Brown Bag Lunch Series
Sociology/Anthropology House, 11:15 p.m.
The third PERCS brown bag lunch discussion will take place Wednesday, February 28th from 11:15 p.m. to 12:15 p.m. in the Sociology and Anthropology Seminar Room. Alexa Darby, assistant professor of psychology, will present her past and current research on teachers' emotions in educational reform entitled "Discovering teachers' emotions: uncovering areas of satisfaction and dissatisfaction in a comprehensive school reform initiative". Drawing on an analysis of interviews and archival materials from teachers in a high-poverty elementary school, I highlight the critical incidents that evoked emotions for teachers. The findings cluster in two areas: (a) teachers’ emotions fluctuated from positive to negative relative to their perceived increase or decrease in power within the school and classroom, and (b) teachers experienced emotions of fear and excitement in the reconstruction of their professional identity in response to the demands of comprehensive school reform. Darby will engage in a discussion with those present about future projects in this area and possible avenues for using a variety of ethnographic data collection approaches.
Thursday, November 2, 2006
Brown Bag Lunch Series
Sociology/Anthropology House, 12:30 p.m.
The second of the PERCS brown bag lunch series will take place Thursday, November 2nd from 12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. in the Sociology and Anthropology Seminar Room. Tom Mould, assistant professor of anthropology and folklore, will discuss his on-going research on prophetic narratives among Latter-day Saints. For the past 6 months, Mould has conducted ethnographic field research with the LDS community in Alamance County to document their extensive narrative traditions, with particular focus on predictive and prophetic narratives. Preliminary analysis suggests that subtle shifts in attribution and narrative voice have dramatic impact on how a narrative is categorized, interpreted, and used within the community. These shifts serve as watersheds in narrative performance that further reveal LDS views on issues of human agency, interpersonal communication, and hierarchies within the church community. Mould will engage in discussion with those present about his data and possible avenues for further analysis.
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Brown Bag Lunch Series
Sociology/Anthropology House, 12:30 p.m.
Kimberly Jones, assistant professor of anthropology, will present her research on gender and work in a Brazilian hospital. During six weeks in the summer of 2005, a bi-national team of eight researchers conducted an ethnographic study of women workers in a public university hospital in the interior of Brazil. The team’s methodology included participant observation, focus groups and individual interviews, as well as a visual ethnography of the lives of five workers. Based on preliminary results, the team developed recommendations for improving work conditions in the hospital. An edited volume of articles by members of the team is to be published by the State University of Montes Claros Press in 2007, for which Jones will be writing the introductory chapter. During her discussion, Jones will show the film from the study and facilitate feedback on how best to tell the story of the women workers in the introduction of the book, as well as in an English version of the film.
Monday, October 2, 2006
Medical Anthropology in the Age of Paul Farmer
Whitley Auditorium, 7:00 p.m.
A panel of five medical anthropologists will discuss their scholarship and the work of Paul Farmer. Panelists will be Joan Paluzzi (UNC- Greensboro), who worked for three years for Paul Farmer’s organization, Partners for Health in Boston, Patricia Whelehan (SUNY-Potsdam), whose scholarship focuses on human sexuality and HIV+/AIDS, Kaja Finkler (UNC- Chapel Hill), who has investigated narratives of women in pain in Mexico and biotechnology and kinship in North Carolina, Samantha Solimeo (Duke University), a feminist medical anthropologist who studies aging as a cultural process, and Cassandra White (Georgia State U), whose scholarship explores medical discourses in Brazil.
Sponsored by the General Studies Program, the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, the Program for Ethnographic Research and Community Studies (PERCS), the Women’s/Gender Studies Program, and Project Pericles.
Monday, April 8, 2006
Premiere Screening of "The Weight of a Nation"
McEwen 011, 7:30 p.m.
The documentary film “The Weight of a Nation” explores the lives of a handful of young Sudanese refugees in America trying to piece together a viable future for themselves, their families back home, and their war-torn nation.
Sudan has been ravaged by the genocide that has been occurring in the Darfur region for the past 2 years. An estimated 400,000 people have died and 1.5 million displaced. This is, sadly, only the most recent atrocity to afflict Sudan. For over 20 years, government soldiers and militias from the North have regularly raided the South, killing, raping and kidnapping its people. Two million people have been killed; 20,000 children escaped. Earlier this year, Francis Bok, one of the children able to escape, spoke to the Elon community about his horrific trials in the Sudan and his efforts to help end the violence there.
“The Weight of a Nation” helps fill in the gaps in the stories told in the mainstream media and in Bok’s compelling memoir. Abraham, Jok, Jacob and Peter—part of the “Lost Boys” of the Sudan—struggle in the United States to carve out satisfying lives for themselves while shouldering the burden of extended families back in the Sudan and of an entire nation in desperate need of aid. This film asks what happens to the few who escaped the killings? What is life after genocide like?
Produced by Elon Honors student Kevin Kindle with faculty mentor Tom Mould.
Running Time: 27 minutes
Friday, March 10, 2006
Pravina Shukla, “Art & Dress in Modern India”
Holt Chapel, 1:00 p.m.
Dr. Pravina Shukla, assistant professor of folklore at Indiana University and author of The Grace of Four Moons: Dress, Adornment and the Art of the Body in Modern India will present a slide lecture on the art of adornment in the Hindu holy city of Banaras, India. She will address issues of gender, age, caste, religion and ethnicity through the exploration of dress and jewelry in everyday life.
Thursday, March 9, 2006
 Henry Glassie, “A Story of Work and Devotion: The Ethnographer in a Muslim Land”
Yeager Recital Hall, 7:30 p.m.
Henry Glassie is College Professor of Folklore at Indiana University and serves as Co-Director of Turkish Studies with adjunct appointments in Central Eurasian Studies, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and American Studies. Glassie has published 13 books, including Turkish Traditional Art Today, which was named among the notable books of the year by the New York Times, and for which he was honored with the Award for Superior Service by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and the Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts by the Assembly of Turkish American Associations. Drawing upon twenty years of ethnographic field study in the cities and villages of modern Turkey, Glassie will use the art of everyday life as an entry into Islamic history, culture and thought.
Monday, March 6, 2006
Terese Stratta, “Using Qualitative Research Methods in Sports Research”
Holt Chapel, 7:30 p.m.
Dr. Terese M. P. Stratta is currently employed as an Assistant Professor of Sport Management in the Department of Human Performance & Sport Sciences at Winston Salem State University, NC. Dr. Stratta has served as a marketing research consultant for both professional and amateur
sport organizations. Her research has focused on cultural meanings across sport contexts, with particular emphasis on the experiences of African American women in the sport industry.
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