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- Convenors:
-
Benjamin Storsved
(Indiana University)
Madi Becker (Indiana University)
Connor Toole (Indiana University)
Twalha Abbass (Indiana University)
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Short Abstract
This panel explores the ways in which the use of audio recording devices to record folk narratives produce a “natural,” “induced natural,” or “unnatural” performance environment. We present case studies from Tanzania, Scotland, Ireland, Kyrgyzstan, and the United States to address this theme.
Long Abstract
This panel explores the ways in which the use of audio recording devices to record folk narratives produce a “natural,” “induced natural,” or “unnatural” performance environment. We present case studies from various geographical, cultural, and temporal settings.
Twalha Abbass discusses how audio recordings of folk stories from the Buhaya community in Tanzania cultivate a natural environment for performance and challenge the conventional understanding of storytelling spaces. These recordings both preserve and actively shape the ongoing life and performance of Buhaya folk narratives, revealing the inherent natures of storytelling and its technological mediation.
Madi Becker examines mid-20th century audio recordings of people living in the Scottish Highlands to explore how recording technology influenced narrative performance. This paper considers how speakers navigated the presence of the recorder and reflects on how these recordings register the intimacy of local storytelling and the distancing effects of archival capture.
Ben Storsved investigates the varying attitudes of Kyrgyz epic singers to audio recording technology and the ways in which it gives an afterlife to their own voices. Their interpretations of this technology as either an agent of demonic depersonalization or a source for international appreciation provide insight into the possibilities for the reception of such recordings.
Historical narratives from mid-twentieth century Ireland yield a sense of uncertainty, especially those concerning secret societies, tenant evictions, and faction fighting. Connor Toole explores audio recordings of historical legends in an effort to determine belief versus fiction told as entertainment and establish the local significance of these narratives.
Accepted papers
Session 1 Sunday 14 June, 2026, -Paper short abstract
Recorded archival stories collapse time, so a listener experiences both closeness and distance from the performance. Comparing versions of the “Gifts of the Little People” across Ireland and Scotland highlights how storytellers, transcribers, and audiences navigate “naturalness” in an old story.
Paper long abstract
Archival recordings of folk narratives create a collapsed time in which audiences can experience “being there,” but also a distancing effect through material evidence such as tape distortion and degradation. This paper considers a collection of 77 versions of the “Gifts of the Little People,” ATU 503, told across Ireland and Scotland in the early 20th century, all transcribed from audio recordings of storytellers held in the Irish National Folklore Collection and the School of Scottish Studies Archives. In some cases, both recording and transcription are still available, and in a few cases even publicly available online. The archival materials associated with these texts, including the recordings, metadata, and interviews from the storytelling session, inform modern understanding of the past performance environment. The act of transcription, by hand and digital, adds another layer of mediation and shapes the ways in which a story is re-performed in subsequent listening and reading. The effects of time, technology, and layers of mediation become apparent when comparing many different versions of the “same” story. A story that centers on the fairy fort, ATU 503 also highlights the ways in which storytellers imagine the overlap of the human, the natural, and the supernatural world. Examining the marks of technology can highlight the work of both storytellers and transcribers as they navigate the “natural” way to tell an old story.
Paper short abstract
Attitudes of Kyrgyz epic singers to audio recording technology and its impact on their performances and the afterlives of their voices has historically varied. Their negative or positive interpretations of this technology provide insights into the possibilities for the reception of such recordings.
Paper long abstract
A performance studies approach to oral and oral-derived narrative emphasizes a recognition of the impacts of the setting, such as the presence of an audio-recording device, on the text of the performance. Such performance settings are often labeled as “natural,” “induced natural,” or “unnatural/artificial” depending on the specific circumstances. While folklorists can analyze these performance events as outsiders, another invaluable analytical source in understanding the nature of a performance setting can be found in the “vernacular theory” of the performers themselves. Performances of Kyrgyz oral epics, first textualized in the 1850s, have been captured by audio-recording devices since the beginning of the twentieth century. The first audio recording was collected in 1904 on wax cylinders from the bard Kenje Kara (1859-1929). Beginning in the 1930s, the performances of Saiakbai Karalaev (1894-1971) were broadcast via radio, and later, television broadcasts, in the Soviet Union. In recent years, the bards Talaantaaly Bakchiev (b. 1971) and Doolot Sydykov (b. 1983) have worked as scholars alongside academics in modern recording studios to produce texts for computer analysis. This paper investigates the varying attitudes of Kyrgyz epic singers to audio recording technology and the ways in which it gives an afterlife to their own voices. Their interpretations of this technology as either an agent of demonic depersonalization, a source for international appreciation, and a means to deeper scholarly insight, respectively, provide insight into the possibilities for the reception of such recordings.
Paper short abstract
This presentation examines anecdotes concerning faction fights in Ireland. A faction fight is a brawl between two groups intended for recreation or to settle disputes. It questions what similarities and differences exist between faction fights and why this motif endures in Irish folklore studies.
Paper long abstract
What do you get when you combine crowds, local celebrations, and free-flowing librations? In pre-Famine Ireland, this combination was often the recipe to faction fighting. Faction fighting occurs when two groups of individuals, oftentimes men, but sometimes women, agree to brawl for both recreation and entertainment to settle disputes. So popular were faction fights that even today, the term “Donnybrook,” named after the Donnybrook Fair, has entered common parlance. Consisting of around 230 entries in the National Irish Folklore Collection, the concept of a faction fight is not uncommon among the corpus of materials that make up the Irish National Folklore Collection. The purpose of this presentation is to examine this material in greater detail. What can we glean from anecdotes concerning faction fights about Irish communities of the past? How do anecdotes told by word-of-mouth differ from those written by hand? What is it about the faction fight that makes it stand out among other motifs found within the Irish Folklore Collection? Furthermore, what are some of the key differences between oral anecdotes and transcribed anecdotes concerning faction fights? What can attribute to these differences? These are but some of the questions that I am interested in.
Paper short abstract
Recordings of Calum Ruadh, crofter and bard of Skye, reveal how land and livelihood shaped his identity and songs. Archival contexts have reframed these as national heritage, showing how “natural” lives and environments can be transformed by recording and preservation.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how recordings of Gaelic bard Calum Ruadh (Calum Nicolson, 1902–1978) in the School of Scottish Studies Archives complicate ideas of “natural” and “unnatural” contexts in folk narrative research. Ruadh, a crofter on the Isle of Skye, consistently framed his sense of self through crofting, a way of life intimately tied to land and community within the Gàidhealtachd. Yet in the archive, this identity is often overshadowed by his status as a bard, repositioning him within a curated narrative of national heritage.
Ruadh himself resisted these frameworks. He spoke of private songs, refusing to surrender them to the public record. At the same time, he expressed hope that his work might reach future listeners, using oral tradition both as self-expression and as testimony to the struggles of crofters in the modern era. His words reveal how environment, livelihood, and memory intertwined in shaping his storytelling practice.
Recording technology, intended to capture traditions in their most “natural” state, tried to create an “induced natural” setting: domestic yet mediated, personal yet drawn into nationalist projects that seek to preserve the culture of the Gàidhealtachd as a symbol of authentic Scottishness. Following scholars’ insights into archival silences, I argue that these recordings demonstrate how archives both preserve and transform tradition, elevating some voices while quieting others. By listening to the tension between his crofting and bardic identities, between silence and song, we can better understand how narratives of nature and nation emerge from the (un)natural contexts of the recording process.
Paper short abstract
By reflecting on listening as labour, as error, and listening out, access is enabled to unspoken, intimate, or traumatic narratives, fostering recognition, dialogue, and reciprocal understanding. In this paper, listening is questioned as the final destination of narratives in different settings.
Paper long abstract
The main theme of this paper is listening in different settings. Listening is not a passive reception, but an active, relational, and affectively charged practice. It can also be understood through the concept of listening as labour, which involves effort, exposure, and the capacity to recognize meaning even where language fails. At the same time, listening becomes a site of error, where meanings are not mechanically reproduced but shift, break, and reassemble, opening space for new understanding. Awareness of listening as error encourages dialogue, reflection, and a deeper understanding of the other. Acknowledging this imperfection makes listening an ontological act – a way of being with others and a key element of open, living dialogue.
In this context, listening out or listening beyond the expected – active, attentive, and anticipatory listening, often oriented toward what remains unspoken or what might be unexpectedly heard – indicates sensitivity to what is marginal, fragmentary, difficult, traumatic, intimate, unspoken, or hard to articulate. Power in this framework does not primarily reside with the speaker, but with the listener, whose listening enables the recognition and articulation of another’s suffering. In this sense, listening becomes an absorption of the voice, an act that is not passive but builds relationships and creates the possibility for political and emotional reciprocity. Listening can thus take the form of recovery, repair, reproduction, or even consumption.
Paper short abstract
This research on Nuru Sadiki, a Tanzanian hunter and radio storyteller explores how he uses the sound of a dog's harness to create an appealing performance, listeners' dogs react, revealing how technology can amplify the power of oral narrative.
Paper long abstract
In this paper, I explore the mediatization of folk narrative through a community radio program in my home region of Bukoba, Tanzania. As a folklorist studying far from home, I tune in every Sunday to Kasibante FM, listening to local storytellers on the Asili Yetu (Our Roots), the show that runs in Haya language. My research focuses on one performer, Nuru Sadiki, a hunter who narrates through song and verse. When he comes to the studio, he brings his dog’s metal harness, and its distinctive jingling sound has become central to his performance. This practice caught my attention when listeners began calling in to share a curious phenomenon: their own dogs at home were reacting to the sound, barking and running toward the radio. This response prompted my central research question, “How can a mediated performance feel so closer to authentic?” Drawing on Richard Bauman’s performance theory (1977), I argue that Sadiki uses the harness to “key” his performance, transforming the radio studio into a virtual forest soundscape, an acoustic frame that creates a powerful sensory connection with his audience. My analysis of these broadcasts demonstrates how radio, as a medium of Walter Ong’s “secondary orality” (1982), does not diminish the narrative’s texture. Instead, by removing the visual, radio heightens the audience's imaginative co-performance, proving that technology can be a powerful and unexpectedly "natural" conduit for the ongoing life of folklore.
Paper short abstract
This paper argues that the Blues is both a narrative and ecological archive, expressing African American relationships to land, labor, belief, and community. Through Blues Ecology and Narrative, it reveals how sound, environment, and memory intertwine as records of Black life and cultural survival.
Paper long abstract
This paper explores how the Blues serves as both a narrative and an ecological archive, articulating African American relationships to land, labor, belief, and each other. Building on my developing frameworks of Blues Ecology and Blues Narrative, I argue that the music is more than an aesthetic form: it is a living record of environmental knowledge and social memory that encodes the natural and cultural worlds of Black life in the U.S. South.
Blues Ecology situates the music in its soundscapes and landscapes, the fields, rivers, crossroads, plantations, and porches that shape its timbre and meaning, while Blues Narrative focuses on how these elements become stories about survival, displacement, and continuity. Drawing from fieldwork, oral histories, and performance analysis, I examine how Blues texts carry traces of folk belief, spirituality, agricultural labor, and community traditions, and how these are sometimes misinterpreted or flattened in public discourse and archival framing.
Rather than treating the “natural” as merely background, this work centers the human–nonhuman entanglements that animate the Blues: wind and water, trains and highways, animals and spirits, the soil itself. I ask how these relationships are remembered, reimagined, or contested when the Blues is moved from its local landscape into national, global, or institutional narratives. By reframing the Blues as both a nature-culture narrative and a site of environmental memory, this paper argues that understanding its “naturalness” requires listening to its full ecology, labor, belief, land, and sound, on its own terms.