Old Wine in New Bottles

"The stories that made me fall in love with literature in the first place were tales full of beautiful impossibility, which were not true but by being not true told the truth, often more beautifully and memorably than stories that relied on being true. Those stories didn’t have to happen once upon a time either. They could happen right now. Yesterday, today or the day after tomorrow."

“There is a long tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas. As the days become shorter and the darkness creeps in, we illuminate our houses with flickering fairy lights and candles in an imitation of the fires our ancestors lit to see them through the long cold nights around the winter solstice, and to protect them from what lurked outside after crossing the veil. And what better way to pass the time during those long nights than by telling tales of these spectral visitors?  

“The weaving of stories of death and resurrection has roots in old beliefs, but there has been an unceasing appetite for these accounts through the ages, with the means of circulation evolving. One of the most famous Christmas ghost stories is of course the Victorian novel ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens, who passed the baton to the early 20th century writer M.R. James among others. Some of James’ stories have been adapted for ‘A Ghost Story for Christmas’, a series of BBC films for television originally broadcast in the 1970s and revived in the early 2000s.  

“We’ve come across a number of ghostly tales while listening to the recordings we’re digitising as part of the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project here at The Keep. The following clips were taken from recordings made between 1974 and 1996, and include accounts of recent sightings as well as retellings of local legends. They hark back to the oral tradition of storytelling but are preserved and made available through progressions in audio technology.”

Justin Hamel

The instinct to try to boost morale during a time of hardship and suffering resonates today as we face the pandemic and economic recession.

Almost 90 years ago during the Great Depression, with the unemployment rate hovering between 20 and 30%, the United States government sought ways to lift up its citizens.

Modeled on the 1933 Public Works Art Project, the federal government created the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture a year later (the name was subsequently changed to the Section of Fine Arts).

These programs were designed to employ artists.

Under the program, 1% of each federal building’s construction budget was designated to the creation of public art. The result was more than 1,200 murals being painted in post offices throughout the United States.

His monumental dictionary, after years of field work, documented Tzotzil in southern Mexico. But that was just the start of his efforts to preserve the culture.

By Neil Genzlinger

Published June 24, 2020

Robert M. Laughlin, an anthropologist and linguist whose extensive work in the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico documented and helped revitalize Mayan languages and culture, died on May 28 in Alexandria, Va. He was 85.

His son, Reese, said the cause was the new coronavirus.

Dr. Laughlin spent much of his professional life doing field work in Chiapas, beginning in the late 1950s. He learned the Tzotzil (also spelled Tsotsil) language as a graduate student with the Harvard Chiapas Project, a long-term ethnographic field study that had just been started by Professor Evon Vogt and was focusing on the town of Zinacantán. After years of painstaking work, in 1975 Dr. Laughlin published The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of San Lorenzo Zinacantán, with 30,000 entries.

Indigenous languages in the region — there are many — had been under siege since the Spanish conquest, and Dr. Laughlin’s dictionary helped spur a revival of interest in them. The dictionary, published by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, where Dr. Laughlin was curator of Mesoamerican ethnology, was not simply a compilation of which Tzotzil word equals which English word. It was a deep dive into word origins, how the language had mutated and more.

“The term ‘dictionary’ hardly does the work justice,” Judith Aissen, professor emerita of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in an email. “It is a rigorous work of linguistic scholarship, but through its entries, also the repository of a great deal of cultural knowledge.”

The dictionary, created with two local collaborators, Romin Teratol and Anselmo Peres, set an example for the field. “It has been the cornerstone of so many efforts in language and knowledge revitalization ever since,” Igor Krupnik, chair of the anthropology department at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, said by email.

But it was only the beginning for Dr. Laughlin. He wrote or collaborated on various collections of folk tales and dreams, an 18th-century Tzotzil dictionary (with John B. Haviland, an anthropology professor at the University of California, San Diego), and more. And in 1982, when some Indigenous friends asked him for help in creating a cultural association, he became one of the founders of Sna Jtz’ibajom — or, in English, the House of the Writer, a collective that promoted local writings and publications.

An offshoot of that, a few years later, was Monkey Business Theater, a troupe that performed folk tales and other works. He brought in the American puppeteer Amy Trompetter to help local participants use puppets in their storytelling.

“To her distress, the first skit they chose to perform was a folk tale that tells of a newlywed whose wife’s head mysteriously disappears at night to eat corpses,” he wrote in “Monkey Business Theater,” a 2008 book about the troupe. But the group caught on and was soon in high demand, performing throughout the region and beyond.

One of Dr. Laughlin’s most recent collaborations was “Mayan Tales From Chiapas, Mexico” (2014), in which he and two translators recorded 42 folk tales as told by the same woman, Francisca Hernández Hernández, the only Tzotzil speaker remaining in her village. The book presented the stories in English, Spanish and Tzotzil.

In the foreword, Gary H. Gossen, professor emeritus of anthropology and Latin American studies at the University at Albany, the State University of New York, wrote of Dr. Laughlin’s career: “He has earnestly and successfully returned to the native Maya communities of highland Chiapas a sense of ownership of their own literary legacy.”

Robert Moody Laughlin was born on May 29, 1934, in Princeton, N.J., to Ledlie and Roberta Howe Laughlin. His father was assistant dean of admissions at Princeton University, and his mother was a homemaker.

He grew up in Princeton, graduated from South Kent School in Connecticut in 1952 and earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature at Princeton in 1956. The next year he enrolled in a summer graduate program in anthropology at the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Mexico City, which included field work among the Mazatec, an Indigenous people in the state of Oaxaca.

His interest piqued, he enrolled at Harvard, where he received a master’s degree in anthropology in 1961 and a Ph.D. in it in 1963. In 1960 he married Miriam Elizabeth Wolfe, and after he joined the Smithsonian in 1965, they had alternated between living in Chiapas and Alexandria, Va., for decades.

Almost as challenging as compiling his monumental 1975 dictionary was physically producing it, given the complexity of the material, the multiplicity of symbols and unusual letter combinations, and the limitations of the relatively primitive computers used to produce it.

“When I went to pick it up,” Dr. Laughlin wrote in the introduction, describing the first attempt to print a proof copy, “I discovered that the Tzotzil-English section was very much as I had desired. But the English to Tzotzil section of The Great Tzotzil Dictionary had been reduced to the lowest common denominator; page after page of one letter per line arranged in a single column. This was followed by all the Latin names neatly decapitated and arranged alphabetically according to the second letter.”

“My dictionary,” he added, “became known around the museum as The Great Tzotzil Disaster.”

Modest efforts to resurrect Indigenous languages had been going on for several decades when the dictionary appeared, but the Tzotzil language and its cousins were primarily oral traditions; speakers of such languages were illiterate in them. The dictionary helped change that.

“A potential audience had slowly been building for material in Tzotzil, Tzeltal and about 30 other Mayan languages,” a 1992 article in Smithsonian magazine noted. “Laughlin’s dictionary contributed a standardized template for writing down the Mayan sounds.”

Dr. Laughlin died in a hospital in Alexandria. In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife; a daughter, Liana Laughlin; and three grandchildren.

When Dr. Laughlin’s dictionary was published, Senator William Proxmire, the prominent Wisconsin Democrat, gave it one of his Golden Fleece Awards, which he used to call attention to projects he considered frivolous. Colleagues said Dr. Laughlin had considered the award a badge of honor — “perhaps out of general contrariness,” Thor R. Anderson, his friend and sometimes collaborator, wrote in an appreciation, “but also because, at the height of that particular contretemps, fellow scholars rushed to his defense.”

In 1988, when Dr. Laughlin and Dr. Haviland published their colonial-era dictionary, “The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of Santo Domingo Zinacantán, With Grammatical Analysis and Historical Commentary,” careful readers may have noted the dedication on Page 7:

To William E. Proxmire

The Holy Face of Lucca, an 8-foot-tall crucifix with a central role in Christian iconography, has survived more than 1,000 years.

By Elisabetta Povoledo

Published June 19, 2020, NY Times

ROME — For centuries, in a picturesque Tuscan town near the Mediterranean coast, legions of pilgrims came to venerate one of Christendom’s most treasured relics — an eight-foot-tall wooden crucifix known as the “Volto Santo de Lucca.”

According to the legend, “The Holy Face of Lucca” had been sculpted by a divine hand and remained hidden for centuries before an Italian bishop discovered it on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the eighth century. The crucifix was put on a ship with no crew and miraculously set sail to the Tuscan coast, where an angel helped guide the relic to its final home in a cathedral in Lucca.

On Friday, science provided another story — and it is remarkable in its own right.

The crucifix was shown to be the oldest surviving wooden carving in Europe. And it remains in remarkable condition, the downcast eyes of Christ on the cross still captured in dramatic detail.

“A new chapter opens for art history,” said Annamaria Giusti, one of Italy’s best-known art restorers and a consultant for the Cathedral of San Martino, which authorized the study of the crucifix to coincide with the commemoration of the 950th anniversary of its foundation.

Speaking at a news conference in the nave of the cathedral, Ms. Giusti said that the dating of the relic to a period between the end of the eight century and the middle of ninth century raised fresh questions about its origins and its iconography and would lead to new areas of research.

“The Volto Santo was regarded as one of the true icons of Christ,” comparable to the Shroud of Turin, whose devotees believe shows an image of Christ, said Stefano Martinelli, an art historian who is an expert on the icon.

It is also, he said, a “symbol of pride for a city-state that remained an independent republic for seven centuries, with a celestial defender on its side.”

For Lucca, it was not just a devotional question, “but also political and of identity.”

Stories, passed from generation to generation, held that the crucifix had been carved by Nicodemus, who is mentioned in the Bible several times, including helping to prepare the body of Christ for burial.

By the late Middle Ages, the image was so well known in Northern Europe that it became an object of devotion of the French nobility. “By the face of Lucca” was an oath sworn by William II of England and it is mentioned in Dante’s Inferno.

And it remains central to two heartfelt religious ceremonies in Lucca every spring and fall.

Though the crucifix had been the subject of many theological discussions given its central place in Christian iconography, it only attracted the attention of art historians about a century ago.

For lack of other works to compare it to, early scholarship saw stylistic similarities with a late 12th century artist who worked mostly in northern Italy, and though debated, many art historians came to believe that the current crucifix was a 12th century copy of the lost 8th century original.

That theory was soundly contradicted by the new radiocarbon results.

Last December, experts from the National Institute of Nuclear Physics took three samples of wood from the crucifix — one from each arm and from the lower part of the gown adorning Jesus, as well as a tiny sample of the strata of canvas that allowed paint to better affix to the sculpture.

Radiocarbon dating at an accelerator mass spectrometry lab in Florence dated the wood “to the end of the seventh century and the middle of the ninth,” said Mariaelena Fedi, the researcher from the institute who supervised the scientific investigation. Also known as carbon 14 dating, the technique is mainly used to date organic materials, like wood.

“Generally canvas gives a more accurate dating,” because wood can have been cut years before it is carved, Ms. Fedi said at the news conference. Finding canvas to test “was a great opportunity.”

Enthusiasm over the new dating should not overshadow the icon’s religious significance, said the Rev. Paolo Giulietti, the archbishop of Lucca.

For 12 centuries untold numbers of pilgrims had come “to pray, to touch, to cry, to rejoice in front of this image.”

But Ms. Giusti pointed to the fact that unlike bronze or marble, wood is very perishable, and that 1,000-year-old statues are few and far between.

"Using the latest recording technology available to him in the 1930s – aluminum discs – University of Virginia English instructor Arthur Kyle Davis Jr. recorded hundreds of traditional folksongs and ballads from Virginia residents, mostly in the Appalachian region.

His work for the Virginia Folklore Society created one of the earliest collections of its kind in North America, including some of the earliest recordings of African American musicians in the state.

Now, the University Library has made 173 of those discs – containing nearly 700 songs – available online, digitizing the recordings with support from a grant from the “Recordings at Risk” program, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and administered by the Council on Library and Information Resources."

Anne E. Bromley, UVA Today

The British Library has made available around 350 English folk songs recorded by composer Percy Grainger in different regions of England between 1906 and 1909.

Read more here

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