reviews


Book Reviews 195 

context of such complexity, the index pro­
vides insufficient subject guidance. In 
short, this work is an indirect and convo­
luted read, not recommended for a day 
at the beach.—Albert F. Bartovics, 
Harvard Business School, Boston. 

Documenting Cultural Diversity in the 
Resurgent American South: Collec-
tors, Collecting, and Collections. Eds. 
Margaret R. Dittemore and Fred J. 
Hay. Chicago: ACRL, 1997. 122p. $21 
alk. paper ($17.50 ACRL members) 
(ISBN 0-8389-7897-5). LC 97-3357. 

How does one know the past? Beyond 
that, how do individuals or groups re­
phrase and shape changing identities, 
particularly when those individuals or 
groups have been, to greater or lesser 
extents, marginalized? Political docu­
ments, journalistic records, personal 
journals, and letters have informed the 
written records exemplified by our li­
braries’ holdings of mainstream history 
books, thereby positing histories as un­
derstood by the more educated, and po­
litically and economically powerful, el­
ements of society. Groups such as 
Louisiana’s Cajuns, or Isleños, or up­
land South Primitive Baptists make and 
retain their histories and changing iden­
tities differently, through orality and 
folklife practices. Their changing identi­
ties intertwine with the culture and his­
tories of both mainstream and 
nonmainstream groups in complex 
ways. Regional mythologies and folk­
lore have been emblematic of the 
American South probably more than of 
any other region: When not trivialized 
or caricatured, Southern folk cultures 
have been loved nearly to death, as in 
Cajun cooking or “quaint” mountain 
music. At times, they have been per­
ceptively recognized as expressive art, 
and outside observers as well as mem­
bers of diverse groups within the South 
have amassed invaluable documenta­
tion of indigenous history and folk tra­
ditions. How this documentation is to be 

preserved, understood, and interpreted 
is the salient question addressed by 
folklorists and archivists in this impor­
tant collection of essays. 

Editors Margaret R. Dittemore and 
Fred J. Hay have selected key papers 
from two conference programs of the 
Anthropology and Sociology Section of 
the ACRL. Part I deals with issues of 
documentation of southern folk culture 
through strategies such as film, sound 
recording of musical traditions, and oral 
history. Part II focuses on one state, Loui­
siana, and demonstrates how documen­
tary material can be used to reinforce 
often beleaguered cultural identities by 
giving a more authentic and resonant 
voice to these groups vis-à-vis the 
greater culture. 

The contributors address both prac­
tical questions of creating, locating, pre­
serving, indexing, cataloguing, and 
making available archival and docu­
mentary material; and larger issues of 
interpretation and misinterpretation, 
advocacy, and interfacing of folklife 
materials with other materials in reach­
ing fuller understandings of people, his­
tory, and cultures. In their illuminating 
paper, “Talk about Trouble!: Documen­
tation of Virginia Culture,” Nancy J. 
Martin-Perdue and Charles L. Perdue 
Jr., draw on their long-time study of WPA 
Federal Writers Project interview ma­
terial from Virginia in the 1930s and 
early 1940s. They found these materi­
als to be scattered in numerous loca­
tions, usually disorganized, frequently 
in deteriorating condition. One archivist 
referred to WPA material in his care as 
“that JUNK in the basement.” Beyond 
the immediate problems of locating, 
sorting through, and indexing the ma­
terial, the Perdues alert us that we must 
not take this fascinating and rich body 
of oral history at face value, as it usu­
ally represents what they term “nego­
tiated biography”—due to the “unequal 
relations that existed between the per­
son whose life was narrated and the 



196 College & Research Libraries March 1996 

writer of that person’s life history.” They 
also use their own folklore fieldwork to 
illustrate the fact that WPA workers fre­
quently blurred the boundaries between 
expressive folk culture and factual and 
historical information. 

In her essay, “Journals and Voices: 
Mosaics of Community,” Elizabeth Rauh 
Bethel also seeks a broader view by in­
tegrating her fieldwork with the written 
historical record, as she puts it, “awak­
ening to the resonant connection be­
tween two forms of data: the journals, 
ledgers and other written records of the 
past; and the voices of the present, that 
reflect on and preserve the memories 
of a shared heritage.” One form bal­
ances and corrects the other; the voices 
of the living “old heads” in the black 
community of Promised Land in South 
Carolina revealed textures of experi­
ence unavailable through the written 
record. Yet even the sensitive 
fieldworker was mistaken in assuming 
that the name Promised Land referred to 
a spiritual concept; really, the old-tim­
ers informed her, it meant that their fore­
bears “promised to pay for it, but never 
did”—and discovery of South Carolina 
Land Commission documents verified 
their oral testimony. 

Other forms of documentation are 
discussed by Daniel W. Patterson in “A 
Case for the Folklife Documentary Film” 
and in Beverly Patterson’s paper, 
“Bridging the Gap: An Indexing Project 
for Folk Music Recordings.” Daniel 
Patterson explores the gamut of folklife 
films dealing with the South, from works 
of dubious value and authenticity to 
films that may be too specialized for 
wide appeal. He finds that some of the 
most interesting and valuable films 
have been collaborations, as when 
documentary film artist Les Blank 
worked with collector Chris Strachwitz 
on the survey of Cajun music, J’ai Eté au 
Bal, and with folklorist Cece Conway on 
Sprout Wings and Fly, a fine documen­
tary film on traditional mountain musi­

cian Tommy Jarrell. Patterson laments 
difficulties in locating films in a system­
atic way and argues that it is partly the 
diversifed nature of the folklore disci­
pline, ranging through academia, arts 
agencies, independent enthusiasts and 
producers, and museums: “Although the 
field is bubbling with activity, it lacks a 
unified voice.” In a way, this may be 
just as well, although more accessibil­
ity and greater articulation of standards 
are needed. 

Beverly Patterson calls attention to 
the wealth of important southern tradi­
tional music that was issued on com­
mercial LPs during the heyday of that 
format; these are rapidly becoming dif­
ficult to access and are in danger of 
nearly disappearing as a resource. Most 
were compiled as labors of love by en­
thusiasts, collectors, folklorists—this re­
viewer had a hand in several—and li­
braries need to heed Patterson’s exhor­
tation to obtain these recordings while 
it is still possible, as well as the equip­
ment for their preservation and use. 

The very subtitle of the program at 
which the second group of papers pub­
lished here was read, “Empowering 
People through Diversity,” using as it 
does two current buzzwords, suggests a 
more political and less complex schol­
arly analysis than the papers discussed 
above. There are potential pitfalls when 
identity politics are linked to artistic or 
scholarly work, but the writers here 
strive for a healthy balance and correc­
tion of past distortions and inadequacies, 
and back their advocacy with sound re­
search. Florence E. Borders brings to light 
new historical material that demon­
strates that many Afro-Louisiana 
women, both free and slave, in pre-Eman­
cipation times had notable entrepre­
neurial and other accomplishments that 
belie long-accepted stereotypes. 

Borders’s work is one of advocacy 
and pride “without apology” of what 
Afro-Louisiana women achieved 
“against the odds.” Likewise, the late 



 

Book Reviews 197 

Ulysses S. Ricard Jr. detailed the suc­
cesses of Creole blacks in Louisiana, 
slave and free; of the latter, he main­
tained that their “accomplishments in 
military, economic, literary, and artistic 
endeavors were not matched by any 
other free blacks in the United States.” 
Ricard expressed the hope that the ar­
chives he worked with at the Amistad 
Research Center “can be used, directly 
and indirectly, to combat racism and 
prejudice.” 

Like all the participants in the Louisi­
ana meeting, Marcia Gaudet grew up in 
the culture she discusses, in her case 
that of the Cajun culture, whose history 
she outlines and describes as being a 
diverse group defying “one-dimen­
sional” stereotypes. She recognizes, but 
has difficulty in working through, the 
complexities of folk traditions being re­
vived in the flare of media attention and 
local promotion; her example is the 
Cajun Mardi Gras. She quotes folklorist 
Barry Ancelet’s view that the colorful 
masked ritual really “invert[s] reality 
and mock[s] the observer.” Gaudet in­
dicates that documentary material and 
folklore studies are essential in moving 
to a multidimensional understanding. 
The striking photographs of the Cajun 
Mardi Gras by Irby Gaudet III, repro­
duced in the book, are eloquent docu­
ments of a tradition continuing to evolve 
in the 1990s. Another very direct expres­
sion is Irvan Perez’s actual singing of 
Decimas, the old and new topical and lyric 
songs of the Spanish-speaking south 
Louisiana Isleños community in which 
he grew up. Preceded by a brief history 
of his culture, the songs are the real 
heart of Perez’s presentation. 

Probably due to the necessarily lim­
ited focus of the meetings that produced 
the papers here published, some impor­
tant topics are not dealt with: folk mate­
rial culture and visual art (these are usu­
ally in the domain of museums rather 
than libraries and archives); new modes 
of documentation such as self-docu­

mentation of families, groups, cultures, 
through video; and the computer revo­
lution as it documents and proliferates 
information about previously localized 
cultures (e.g., Georgia’s McIntosh 
County Shouters, practitioners of the 
coastal slave ring-shout tradition, now 
have their own Web site). If new con­
ferences and publications covering 
these topics are as insightful and well 
edited as this one, they will be doing a 
great service to the library and 
archiving profession, the general pub­
lic, and especially the groups whose his­
tories and cultures need to be both pre­
served and better understood.—Art 
Rosenbaum, University of Georgia, Athens. 

Eshelman, William R. No Silence!: A Li­
brary Life. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 
1997. 340p. $59 alk. paper (ISBN 0­
8108-3241-0). LC 96-53095. 

My old friend Eshelman’s memoir works 
best if you read it the way it appears 
that he wrote it, back and forth in time 
and picking and choosing events and 
places to build emphases and relation­
ships for yourself. It may be that age 
and experience, plus an ample dose of 
the “library press” as practiced by him, 
Eric Moon, Kathleen Molz, Art Plotnik, 
Gerry Shields, and others is a prerequi­
site for full understanding. Hold on, 
though, this is no Portrait of the Artist as 
a Young Man, it is primary source mate­
rial in library history, and you have to 
mine it to get the ore. I did not begin at 
the beginning, although that early life 
and the hardships of a pacifist, consci­
entious objector in World War II gives 
the reader perspective on the rest of 
the story. 

I looked for material that would en­
rich my own memory and understand­
ing of all that has happened. I wanted to 
smelt and refine out the metal of some 
professional and personal history I had 
lived. I wanted to test some sympathetic, 
but not identical, perspectives from a 
point of view with which I agree, against