Culture in Everyday Life University of Aberdeen
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- Society & Culture
This series features lectures from the Elphinstone Institute Archives delivered by scholars working in the fields of Ethnology, Ethnomusicology, and Folklore. Rooted in the study of vernacular culture, they explore an incredible variety of topics from community building, legends, rituals, traditional music and dance, to language, memorialisation, digital culture, customs, and much more.
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'A Blond Wig for Maid Marion': Aberdeen and Scotland's Folk Dramas by Donald Smith
From Mystery Plays to the Robin Hood revels at May Day, Aberdeen played a full role in Scotland’s popular dramas. Donald Smith explores some older forms of live entertainment, and their present day revival. Should we still go ‘A-Maying’? What does Robin Hood have to do with the Granite City? And does climate change mean we should move theatre back outdoors?
In 2019, Donald Smith, the then Director of Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland, gave a public talk as part of the Elphinstone Institute’s Public Lecture Series entitled 'A Blond Wig for Maid Marion': Aberdeen and Scotland's Folk Dramas. -
Singing Time and Singing Place
This presentation, which was recorded at the Elphinstone Institute’s 2017 symposium dedicated to memory of Bill Nicolaisen, by Elphinstone Institute Director, Dr Thomas A McKean, looks at performed and sung ballad texts in the light of Bill Nicolaisen’s ideas of time – performance, narrative, and historical – and place, beyond the beyond. Ballads and their performance express and encapsulate, ignore and elide time and place in dynamic, sometimes illogical ways, pulling and stretching realities to maximise impact. Using North-East ballads, Dr McKean explores some of the ways singers and composers use and are affected by these concepts.
For more information about Dr McKean’s work, please visit: (abdn.ac.uk)https://www.abdn.ac.uk/people/t.a.mckean/ -
Building Community Self-Esteem: Advocating for Culture
Hear about a folklorist’s journey from scholar to activist to facilitator of change, and back again. Through narratives of migration, motherhood, courage, and food, Skillman uses the transformative power of story to create agency and resilience among refugee and immigrant women in the USA. These stories and more illustrate our responsibility as cultural advocates to help build and foster community self-esteem and well-being.
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Words for Tunes: Robert Burns as a Lyric-Writer by Adam McNaughtan
Adam McNaughtan delivers an illustrated talk with Gordeanna McCulloch entitled ‘Words for Tunes: Robert Burns as a Lyric-Writer’ at the Cullerie Singing Weekend in 2009.
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Music and the Memory Spectrum by Michael Pickering
In this episode, Emeritus Professor Michael Pickering maps out the major ways in which music figures in registering and referencing the past, both in autobiographical memory and in vernacular memory.
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Leonard Primiano on Catholic Kitsch
The late Leonard Primiano discusses his research on Catholic kitsch in this guest lecture given at the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen.