Resistance Through Song

Concentrating primarily on the so-called ‘Navvies,’ this paper interprets the songs of metal workers among casual labourers in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain as an expression of shared values and aspirations. The term ‘Navigators’ or ‘Navvies’ was first used of Irish refugees of Celtic origin, though some were of ‘English settlement’ origin, who came to Scotland and England in the 19th century to take part in manual work. This study focuses first on songs which concentrated on working conditions, and later discusses songs (which have usually been neglected) in which the workplace features more than one singer. The last part of the study examines a Scottish demonstration and march to London in the 1980s when metal workers resisted the planned closure of their rolling mill with a ‘sung’ march to London that echoes the resistance of the early Navvies and others. In an article in Imagined States (2001), written in collaboration with the present writer, Reimund Kvideland made a study of ‘rallar(e)’ (navvies) in Norway and Sweden between 1880 and 1930. He wrote, ‘the railway navvies constructed a new genre of narrative song and employed it to give voice to a unique and positive occupational worldview […] This occupational group created a compensatory and imagined state in which inverted and opposing values prevailed.’ This process is what I aim to investigate in relation to the material described above.©2020 Department of Languages and Literatures, University of Gothenburg. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0).fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Imagined States

An international ensemble of folklore scholars looks at varied ways in which national and ethnic groups have traditionally and creatively used imagined states of existence-some idealizations, some demonizations-in the construction of identities for themselves and for others. Drawing on oral traditions, especially as represented in traditional ballads, broadsides, and tale collections, the contributors consider fertile landscapes of the mind where utopias overflow with bliss and abundance, stereotyped national and ethnic caricatures define the lives of others, nostalgia glorifies home and occupation, and idealized and mythological animals serve as cultural icons and guideposts to harmonious social life. Italian Canadian Luisa Del Giudice looks at the rich Italian variants of the traditional gastronomic utopia called Il Paese di Cuccagna, the Land of Cockaigne, a mythic land of plenty where rivers run with \u27milk and honey\u27 (wine, beer, coffee, or rum), food falls like manna from heaven, work is banished, and no one ever grows old and considers its persistence in immigrant worldview. From New Delhi, Sadhana Naithani examines the preface-d space that as India, colonial British authors imagined and passed on to readers in formulaic prefaces to collections of Indian folklore. Reimund Kvideland, of Norway, and Gerald Porter, an English scholar teaching in Finland, show how nineteenth-century Norwegian and English railway navvies (itinerant laborers) idealized their low-status occupations in song. In a second essay, Gerald Porter demonstrates through broadside ballad texts the role of caricatures of the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish in constructing Englishness. Turks were among the others Germans demonized, as Tom Cheesman, who teaches in Wales, explains in his paper on their historical representations in German street ballads. Cozette Griffin-Kremer of France paints a sweeping picture of the landscape of the mind that written and popular traditions of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales built around bovine bodies, the human-cow partnership, and the mysteries of domestication, thereby providing conceptions of transcendence of the human condition. Finally, Vaira Freibergs, a scholar and the current president of Latvia, explains the images of longing for idealized childhood homes that married women, exiled by a patrilocal culture, expressed in Latvian folksong.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1070/thumbnail.jp

The Role of Singing in Places of Work as an Aspect of Women's Popular Culture

Naisten populaarikulttuuri on usein liitetty kulutukseen, ei niinkään tuottamiseen. Lukuisat tutkimukset ovat kuitenkin osoittaneet, että työskennellessään yhdessä sekä pienissä työpajoissa, että tehdasteollisuudessa naiset todennäköisesti laulavat miehiä useammin ja he myös laulavat yhdessä eivätkä ainoastaan yksinään. Juuri nämä naisryhmät ovat jääneet vaille työlaulujen kerääjien huomiota, eivätkä kerääjät ole myöskään olleet kiinnostuneita yhdessä laulamisesta. Tässä artikkelissa haluankin tarkastella juuri yhteislaulamisen dynamiikan kehittymistä työpaikoilla. On jossain määrin paradoksaalista, että tähän dynamiikkaan usein liittyy jopa niinkin henkilökohtaisia asioita kuin sopivan puolison valinta. Nauhoitetun musiikin toistamisella työpaikoilla on tietty funktio, kun taas Belfastissa tehty tutkimus osoitti, että naisten oma laulaminen ei ole ainoastaan voimaannuttavaa vaan myöskin vastavuoroista. Naisten työlaulujen on todettu palvelevan kolmea tarkoitusta, jotka ovat aikajärjestyksessä: rytmin luominen työprosessiin, yhteisöllisyyden rakentaminen ja ryhmäidentiteetin aikaan saaminen. Laulut loivat usein diskursiivisen kontekstin, jossa naiset itse puhuivat eivätkä tarvinneet ketään puhumaan puolestaan. He itse toimivat symbolisen minuutensa siirtämisessä puhujaan. Artikkelissa esitän, että työlaulujen kaltaiset sosiaaliset käytänteet voivat syntyä ja elää ainoastaan kiinteässä yhteisössä, jonka jäsenet viettävät yhdessä tuntikausia työnsä ääressä tai toimiessaan yhdessä työn ulkopuolella mielenosoituksessa tai karnevaaleissa.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

The tender cabin boy : cannibalism and the subject

Cannibalism is a narrative of the self and ofthe other. Dramatising as it does the fear that the body’s boundaries are unstable and can be breached, it remains the representative barbarism, yet it also lies at the center of Western culture, in the form of the Catholic Mass, for example. From Othello’s ‘anthropophagi’ to the racist jokes of the 1950s, the theme of cannibalism in popular discourse has coincided with periods of high colonialism when relations with the other are at their most sharp. As The Silence of the Lambs showed it is also a popular contemporary narrative of alienation. This paper examines the topos of cannibalism in nineteenth century popular songs relating to the sea. Given the horror with which the practice was condemned in the nineteenth century, particularly by the proselytising churches, it is paradoxical that it became central to popular representations of contemporary capitalism as a metaphor of the colonial project. Bloodsucking and dismembering became regular features of popular legend. In these songs the victims are not the colonial other but usually disempowered members of the ship’s crew such as cabin boys. They exist against a background of several documented cases of actual cannibalism. The song representations became so widely known that they attracted parody and burlesque in light opera and the music hall

The tender cabin boy : cannibalism and the subject

Cannibalism is a narrative of the self and ofthe other. Dramatising as it does the fear that the body’s boundaries are unstable and can be breached, it remains the representative barbarism, yet it also lies at the center of Western culture, in the form of the Catholic Mass, for example. From Othello’s ‘anthropophagi’ to the racist jokes of the 1950s, the theme of cannibalism in popular discourse has coincided with periods of high colonialism when relations with the other are at their most sharp. As The Silence of the Lambs showed it is also a popular contemporary narrative of alienation. This paper examines the topos of cannibalism in nineteenth century popular songs relating to the sea. Given the horror with which the practice was condemned in the nineteenth century, particularly by the proselytising churches, it is paradoxical that it became central to popular representations of contemporary capitalism as a metaphor of the colonial project. Bloodsucking and dismembering became regular features of popular legend. In these songs the victims are not the colonial other but usually disempowered members of the ship’s crew such as cabin boys. They exist against a background of several documented cases of actual cannibalism. The song representations became so widely known that they attracted parody and burlesque in light opera and the music hall

AN INTEGRATED METHOD TO OBTAIN THREE-DIMENSIONAL COORDINATES USING PANNING AND TILTING VIDEO CAMERAS

Kinematic measurements of sports performances have generally been gathered using stationary cameras. Many activities, however, cover dimensions that are much larger than the athlete, resulting in measures that are less accurate than desired. One solution is to increase the resolution of the acquisition equipment. Hardware providing sufficient resolution, if possible to find, may be prohibitively expensive. Another solution is to use rotating cameras to follow the athlete’s movements. Until now, this procedure demanded time-consuming calibrations and expensive, specialized equipment. An efficient, accurate, and inexpensive method was developed to quantify threedimensional motion from rotating video cameras. The procedure uses two 20,000 count/revolution optical encoders embedded in specially machined tripod heads to sense the angular positions of the cameras. One encoder is aligned vertically to measure pan positions, while the other is aligned horizontally to measure tilt. The pan and tilt angles are printed on each video image by an interface unit. The images are then recorded on videotape and imported into a computer using a commercial frame grabber. Locations on the body may be identified manually or automatically if markers are placed on the athlete. As the points are tracked, the pan and tilt angles are decoded and stored with the digitized data. Custom software modules use these data to compute the 3D coordinates via ray-tracing techniques. Calibration, conducted before or after the performance, requires three to nine vertical rods of known length placed near the volume of interest. No on-site measurements or background markers are needed. Furthermore, calibration does not restrict camera positioning; the locations depend upon the focal length of the camera lenses, the resolution of the encoders, the shape of the movement volume, and the speed of the athlete. Dynamic accuracy was measured by moving a 0.900 m long rod through a 2 m x 4 m x 15 m volume while sampling from two 60 Hz video cameras. Nine hundred images were analyzed. The endpoints of the rod were digitized and its length computed for each video image. The mean length of the rod was 0.891 m and the Root Mean Square Error was 0.005 m. These measures compared better than other reported methods. Applications have ranged from multi-stride running in the laboratory or on a track, long jumping, high jumping, gymnastics, pole vaulting, and ski jumping

Some Supplementary Studies with Wheat Proteins

[Abstract Not Included] Introduction The importance of selecting only foods containing proteins of high nutritive value has been somewhat over-emphasized in the past because of the failure to recognize the possibility of supplementary relationships among proteins that are not of high quality. Hart (11) has wisely suggested that a food should not be relegated to an inferior class because its proteins, when fed alone, are not of high biological value. Sherman (31) has reminded us that with a knowledge of the nutritional chemistry of the proteins of various foods, it becomes relatively easy to utilize their supplementary relationships so that even an inexpensive mixed diet shall be safe from such shortages of individual amino acids as have been illustrated in feeding experiments with isolated proteins. Also, it becomes important to reform the traditional habit of speaking of animal protein as if it alone were efficient in this connection, for we now know that several of the plant proteins are similarly effective. Thus animal proteins may not be essential for normal nutrition for Wright (37) has stated that in any mixed diet, even if wholly of plant origin, the proteins are sure to be sufficiently varied to compensate for any individual inadequacies in amino-acid content, if only the total amount of protein is sufficient. Supplemental relationships among proteins are not new, for Osborne and Mendel (26) first demonstrated the remarkable supplemental effect of adding small quantities of more efficient proteins to zein. McCollum et al. (19) has pioneered in the study of supplementary materials for cereal grains, seed proteins and other foods. Mitchell (25) has discussed the supplementary relationships between the proteins of corn and milk, corn and gelatin, and other proteins; and Sure (33) has investigated the relationships occurring between cereal grains. Mixtures of legumes and wheat, as they occur in diets of the near East, have been studied by Adolph (1). According to Sure (34), it is impossible to raise enough cattle for human consumption in over-populated, under-privileged countries. The knowledge that vegetable calories are inefficiently converted into animal tissues, for human consumption, is well known (35). Thus, by utilizing the supplementary relationships among proteins, the more readily available cereal grains and legumes could be used advantageously to replace some of the proteins from animal sources. Keys (17) states that in actual practice the importance of protein quality is much less than previously supposed. In ordinary diets, even of the vegetarian type, the protein moiety is made up of many different proteins and the chance that all of them will be low in one or more amino acids is small. Osborne and Mendel (28) have demonstrated that whole wheat proteins, considered in their entirety, are adequate for promoting normal growth if eaten in sufficient amounts. However, in the production of white flour, the high quality bran and embryo proteins are removed, thus reducing the nutritive value of the flour. The work of Fence (29) has shown that 85% of the total protein in wheat flour can be accounted for in a crude gluten preparation and that approximately one half of the total albumin and nearly all of the globulin in flour is retained by crude gluten. The following investigations are concerned with the supplemental effect of various food proteins on the crude gluten fraction of wheat flour