Ramcharan-Crowley

Academy of Our Lady, Spalding Institute, class of 1939. A.B. Theory and Practice of Art, Northwestern Univ., Evanston, Ill, 1943. Commissioned Ensign 11/43, assigned duty aboard APA-17, USS American Legion; transferred to Coding Officer, later Secret Publications Issuing Officer for ComPhibsTraPac, WWII. Contracted poliomyelitis 4/46; spent 10 months in GA Warms Springs Foundation then 2 months at Navy Hospital, Charleston, SC. M.A. Art & Art History, Bradley University, Peoria, Ill, 1948. Ph.D. African Studies, Northwestern Univ., Evanston, Ill, 1956.

Name: Daniel Crowley Age: 8 Estimated birth year: abt 1922 Relation to head-of-house: Son Father's Name: Michel B Crowley Mother's Name: Elsie M Crowley Home in 1930: Peoria, Peoria, Illinois

Name: Daniel J. Crowley SSN: 337-14-0759 Last Residence: 95616 Davis, Yolo, California, United States of America Born: 27 Nov 1921 Died: 24 Feb 1998 State (Year) SSN issued: Illinois (Before 1951 )

In the fall 1998 issue of Western Folklore, we noted with sadness the death of Professor Daniel J. Crowley on February 24, 1998 in Oruro, Bolivia. Crowley had been participating in the latest of his many research expeditions documenting Carnival around the world. There are many ways one can remember this remarkable man. Some will think of him primarily as a student of Herskovits and Bascom, who dedicated his long and productive scholarly career to demonstrating the strong connections between African-based traditions in the New World and their sources on the mother continent, as well as to helping a broad audience understand and appreciate the creativity and beauty of these traditions. Others will recall him as a colleague and humanist who generously shared his tremendous knowledge and offered encouraging tips and suggestions to generations of students and future scholars. Readers of this journal will also recognize him as a folklorist concerned with effectively recording, comparing, and analyzing narrative and festive performances. Some will think of Crowley as a person who overcame physical disability to undertake travels most able-bod ied folks cannot even imagine. And many of us will choose to remember him as a friend and family man who enjoyed entertaining in his home (he opened his doors to the entire California Folklore Society when we met in Davis) and with his often self-deprecatory tales of adventures around the world. This issue of Western Folklore celebrates all these aspects of Dan's life by focusing on an area of his work which draws them together: the study of Carnival celebrations. If it is possible to identify the area of research which was closest to Dan Crowley's heart, then surely Carnival held that position. Crowley visited his first pre-Lenten festival in 1936 in New Orleans at the age of fifteen. However, it was his subsequent Carnival experience in Trinidad which truly convinced him of the remarkable power of this celebration. As he stated in a 1993 lecture, delivered in San Diego and printed for the first time in this issue, "the 1954 Trinidad Carnival was a revelation, as that rather stuffy British colonial society blew up into astonishing street parades preceded by daring calypso songs and showcasing the recently-invented steelband. I was delighted, fascinated, mystified, and I still am." For the remainder of his life, Crowley continued to seek out and document Carnival in its multifarious manifestations around the globe. During the past two decades, as he eased into retirement, he devoted an increasing amount of effort to this task, which required frequent absences from his university in Davis, California. Crowley's influential monograph accompanying an exhibition at the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, African Myth and Black Reality in Bahian Carnival (Crowley 1984), served to open this active, final stage of his career, as much as it was a station in his ongoing studies of African-derived cultures in the New World. He subsequently delivered and published numerous papers on his continuing Carnival research. He submitted an abstract to the Triennial Symposium on African Art held at the National Museum of African Art in 1989 for a paper entitled "The Image of Africa in Four African Carnivals," which proposed an analysis of festivals in, among other places, Tenerife, Canary Islands; Mindelo on Sao Vicente in the Cape Verde Islands; and Guinea-Bissau. Ultimately, he delivered a somewhat different paper, "The Sacred and the Pro-- fane in African and African-Derived Carnivals," to fit the theme of his session more closely. We are also publishing this conference paper for the first time in this special issue. A few years after the Smithsonian Symposium, Crowley presented "Color, Class, and Identity in Six Lusophone Carnivals" at the American Anthropological Association meeting in San Francisco, 1992, which hopped continents in order to compare festivals in Rio, Bahia, and Recife, Brazil; Guinea-Bissau; Mindelo; and Goa, India. The Goa Carnival is a discovery of which Crowley was, I think, particularly proud since it seems to be the only pre-Lenten festival in the vast Asian nation. Although Crowley cast his ethnographic eye away from the famous Carnivals of Brazil and Trinidad to an ever-expanding domain, he also continued to monitor these early fieldwork sites for new developments. At the CFS meeting in Sacramento in 1992 he spoke on "The Bahian Carnival Revisited after Abertura." The paper investigated the impact of the "more or less democratic form of government," following fifteen years of military dictatorship, on the expressive forms of Carnival. At the 1997 meeting of our society in Santa Barbara, he similarly updated "Tradition and Innovation in the Trinidad Carnival." One of the great attractions of Carnivals for the researcher is their ability to transform their content and appearance in response to the changing conditions under which participants live. Rather than mourn the loss of older elements in the festivals, Crowley enjoyed watching and documenting how "the Festival of Innovation continues to change in unexpected ways," and he was always interested in hearing about the latest developments in places he had visited, and about those few he had not. Initially, Crowley restricted his Carnival research to African and African-- derived Carnivals, feeling that he could more adequately justify these investigations to his Dean or anyone else who might raise an eyebrow at his disappearing from Davis each February. Thus he presented papers such as "Identity and Protest in the Cape Town `Coon Carnival'," at the 1990 meeting of the Southwestern Anthropological Association in Long Beach, and the comparative study of Carnivals at the Smithsonian meeting. During the active period of Carnival research late in his life, Crowley also published a paper on the Carnival of Guinea-Bissau (Crowley 1989) and searched for the Carnival reportedly held in Ziguinchor, southern Senegal. This Senegalese festival proved to be an intriguing case. Crowley organized a University Research Expedition (UREP) to document this little-known celebration in 1990, but at the last minute discovered that it had been held only once, in 1979. He reported this finding in "Who Killed the Ziguinchor Carnival?" at the 1990 CFS meeting in Santa Rosa. Instead of expressing what would have been understandable disappointment, Crowley described how he used the opportunity of visiting Ziguinchor not only to record details about the one-time celebration through oral interviews, but also to ponder the significance of a Carnival not taking hold among the population. There is a relief only a folklorist can know when he discovers that the supposedly traditional item he is trying to study is "a mere work of art," a one-time shot that has never been handed down by word of mouth. In these terms, the Ziguinchor Carnival wasn't killed off because it had never come alive; it was not continued by its participants the next year. But how did this "once-only" Carnival come about in the first place? Apparently the burdens of preparation and fund-raising (factors often neglected in studies of festivals) outweighed the pleasures they produced for the locals, who instead opted to hold only an annual dance (which Crowley missed by a day). Even as Crowley salvaged the expedition by trans forming it into an investigation into the art market in West Africa, he wondered, "will the Ziguinchor Carnival stay dead?" In the last years of his life, Crowley no longer restricted his investigations to African-derived Carnivals. He proposed a University Research Expedition to study the Carnival of Buenos Aires in 1993, but this expedition did not come to fruition. Five years later, he successfully proposed a research adventure to Bolivia for a comparative study of Andean Carnivals. Before departing on this journey, he submitted a proposal to report his findings at the CFS meeting in Sacramento in the spring of 1998. This turned out to be Dan's final Carnival investigation: he passed away on Martes de Challa (which coincided with Mardi Gras day) in the city of Oruro, Bolivia. In this issue we reprint the abstract he submitted to the CFS program committee as a final glimpse at the excitement for his research that Dan maintained until the end. While Dan joked in his San Diego address that studying Carnival was a way to earn a living without working, the abstract reveals that, like most New World festivals, the Carnival of Oruro contains a complex set of themes and images which challenge the ethnographer attempting to document and interpret it adequately. Cynthia LeCount, co-director with Dan on the Bolivia UREP expedition and an expert in Bolivian textiles and costuming, begins the scholarly process by providing us with a more extensive look at this fascinating celebration, including its interplay of religion, narrative, costume, and drama. LeCount touches on the history, sociology, and geography of the city and its Carnival. She also documents how the contemporary Carnival of Oruro, as in so many other places (cf. Mintz 1997, Tokofsky 1992), is largely the product of twentieth-century revivals and revisions of older practices and mythologies. It is no wonder that the Carnival of Oruro captivated Dan's interest as vividly as all the other Carnivals he witnessed. Whenever Crowley traveled, he sought out Carnival celebrations, and was always on the look-out for new and unexpected elements of the pre-- Lenten festival. On his way to the Japan in 1984, he took a detour through the Nordic countries, in part because he had heard that Carnival celebrations existed even in Protestant Denmark and Iceland. He also embraced the expatriate Caribbean Carnivals in North America and London, many of which he never managed to witness. He even served as a judge for the San Francisco Carnival, which takes place on Memorial Day weekend and features groups influenced by Caribbean, Central and South American dance, costume, and music traditions. Apparently Dan hoped to bring together this vast array of experiences in a comprehensive treatment of Carnival. Among his notes was a plan for a full-length monograph: "Carnivals Outside Europe: A Comparative Study." Although Dan would not achieve this gargantuan task, he planted seeds that will surely lead to an equally significant understanding of the festival. These seeds were not just in the form of his many papers and presentations. Perhaps more important, he planted the future of Carnival studies through his energetic and ready willingness to share his thoughts and exchange ideas with others, and to encourage and support students pursuing their own studies. Judith Bettelheim's remembrance, which follows LeCount's paper on Oruro, makes this aspect of Dan's character clear. This issue of Western Folklore continues with three more studies inspired, in part, by Crowley's work. Ray Allen's treatment of Carnival and J'Ouvert in Brooklyn, New York, would have delighted Dan. Indeed, just as Crowley traced "the rise and fall of the steelband" in his paper on tradition and innovation in Trinidad Carnival, Allen documents the changing forms of Trinidadian-influenced Carnival celebrations in New York since the 1920s. Like its source in the Caribbean, the New York version (which occurs on Labor Day weekend) has continued to change in response to shifts in the demographics of the city and in the preferences of participants. Most recently, an early morning J'Ouvert procession featuring steelbands has coexisted with the larger afternoon Carnival. The J'Ouvert itself has rapidly gained wide popularity, and, as the Trinidadian and Caribbean diaspora continues to develop, the celebration will surely also change. Jonathan Lohman moves between Trinidad and New Orleans, sites of Crowley's first two Carnival experiences, to vividly document how Mardi Gras extends well beyond its short public duration to become part of the lives of individuals and communities throughout the year. As more and more studies provide us with the sort of ethnographic detail Crowley called for, we find that where it is enacted, Carnival indeed plays as much a role in the lives of residents as do "more serious" elements of culture. To cite one additional example, a recent study of modern Fasnacht in Basel, Switzerland, bears the intentionally ambiguous title Zwischentone ("overtones," but literally, "between tones"), in part to signify the importance of the period "between Fasnachts, in the long months between March and February [when] Fasnacht participants spend a good portion of their free time together as civilians, and not only to practice their marches. Life in and with the clique, the bar-b-que party, the ice-hockey games, the hikes and also the sewing of costumes, demonstrate that contemporary Fasnacht cliques are part of `leisure society'" (Burckhardt-Seebass et al. 1998: 17). In my own contribution, which concludes this issue, I take up Dan's call for more detailed descriptions of participation in Carnival. In particular, I argue that Carnival scholarship pays far too little attention to the roles women play in various celebrations. I attempt to begin remedying this by documenting a women's Carnival custom in a German town. By comparing my account with other reports, I suggest possible contours of a distinctly feminine form of Carnival celebration. While each of us who knew Dan holds memories of personal encounters with him, it is as much through our ongoing pleasure in researching in places and on topics Dan loved that we keep these memories alive and vigorous. This issue begins with a transcription of the Distinguished-Scholar Lecture Dan gave on invitation at the annual meeting of the Southwestern Anthropological Association, held jointly with the annual meeting of the California Folklore Society in San Diego in April, 1993. This was the first time I saw and heard Dan. At the time I had just begun teaching folklore at UCLA, and although I am not the "certain critic" Crowley mentioned at the start of his address, my views at that time did indeed agree with those of the nameless critic. I recall standing at the back of the banquet room during the lecture staunchly defending theoretical approaches to Carnival to anyone who would listen. When I had the opportunity to teach a course on Carnival a few years later, I immediately introduced my students to Bakhtin and the other theorists of festivity Crowley boasted of neglecting. As it turns out, during this course I was also presented with the opportunity of hosting Dan Crowley as a guest speaker in the class. He arrived with his usual entourage and two Kodak carrousels. As he took the students around the world in eighty slides accompanied by his enthusiastic, non-stop commentary pointing out the distinctive features of each local celebration, I watched my students discover a genuine excitement for Carnival that my more theoretical introduction failed to ignite. Following Dan's lecture, the students surrounded him in his wheelchair, hungry for more information about the various sites and for suggestions on how they should pursue their own interests. With the help of Dan Crowley and my students, I learned that the task is not to impose theory onto Carnival, but to let the events and their participants speak to us as we attempt to develop adequate models and explanations for the remarkable continuity and creativity which, as Dan pointed out in his San Diego lecture, characterizes the festival around the globe. Dan enjoyed a somewhat self-deprecating image of himself as antitheoretical, and certainly did have a distaste for some of the directions cultu-al studies has taken over the past decade. In particular, he was distressed that his love for African and African-based cultures around the world came to be seen by some as "colonialist" (as he notes in the San Diego lecture) and as appropriation. He told my students that he no longer wore the beautiful Kente cloth of Ghana he had cherished for decades because a passer-by once told him he had no right to do so. But Dan adapted to changing scholarly and societal trends. He continued to inspire younger researchers at the university and beyond through his writing, teaching, and research expeditions. He enjoyed a good laugh about the elevation of his early work to canonical status by some recent schools of theory, but he continued to insist that only careful, even painstaking description can and should provide the basis for such theorizing, even if he preferred to leave the latter to others. If the essays in this issue are any indication, Daniel Crowley's legacy will continue for some time in the form of new research into Carnival and other folkloric traditions around the world. [Footnote] 1I would like to thank George Rich for his tremendous help compiling this special issue of Western Folklore. [Reference] Works Cited [Reference] Burckhardt-Seebass, Christine et al., eds. 1998. Zwischentone. Fasnacht and stadtische Gesellschaft in Basel 1923-1998. Basel: Buchverlag der Basler Zeitung. Crowley, Daniel J. 1984. African Myth and Black Reality in Bahian Carnaval. Los Angeles: UCLA Museum of Cultural History. . 1989. The Carnival of Guinea-Bissau. The Drama Review 33: 74-86. Mintz,Jerome. 1997. Carnival Song and Society. Gossip, Sexuality and Creativity in Andalusia. Oxford: Berg. Tokofsky, Peter. 1992. The Rules of Fools: Carnival in Southwest Germany. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.

I cannot remember exactly how or when we first met. I have certain memories of an African Studies Association meeting, of first hearing Dan discuss carnival in Port of Spain, or was it Bahia? I distinctly remember searching for all his writings during my graduate years at Yale, when I was preparing for my orals and then again when I was writing my doctoral dissertation on Caribbean Festivals. We corresponded about Trinidad and he guided me to additional sources on celebrations on smaller islands. That would have been in 1976 and 1978-79. Dan, Pearl and I gave papers on a panel on Carnivals for a conference at San Jose State University, maybe it was a regional meeting of a folklore or anthropology society. That would have been in 1980 or 1981, when I was teaching there. Maybe that was when we first actually met and became friends and colleagues. As I continued my academic career in California, I had more opportunities to visit Dan and Pearl at their home in Davis. I cannot decide what I enjoyed more: Was it hearing Dan give a paper (almost never from a written text) complete with many off the cuff critical and sarcastic remarks? I often marveled at his ability to see through artifice, and cut to the core of an issue, very often at the expense of so-called political correctness. Or was it those marvelous meals in Davis, when Dan and Pearl would get warmed up by telling slightly different but complementary stories about their fieldwork, their travels, and their many adventures? Those were real mentoring experiences. During winter 1986-87, when Trinidadian Pamela Franco was working on her MA. with me at San Francisco State, I brought her to Davis to officially meet Dan and Pearl. Of course she knew about them, and was familiar with Dan's writings on Trinidad. It was wonderful to listen to the three of them question and kibitz about their respective work. (Pamela, a faculty member at Illinois State, Chicago Circle, is now completing her doctoral dissertation for Emory University Appropriately, it is a revisionist view of Trinidad Carnival, "Shifting Ground: An Early History of Afro-Creole Women's Performance in Trinidad Carnival.") Dan also served as an advisor to the exhibition "Caribbean Festival Arts," which I co-curated for the Saint Louis Art Museum in 1987-88. After I began my work on Cuban Carnaval we had new areas to discuss, and I still am in awe of the range of his knowledge and experience. We often bumped into one another at conferences and cultural events. I was so delighted when we both served as jurors for San Francisco Carnaval in the early 1990s. He was still as merciless as ever, with that Crowley humor filled with caustic remarks. Spunky to the end, every time I saw Dan I marveled at his dignity and ability to humor us all. What aplomb (a plum)!

Seeing Dan Crowley speak at the AFS Meetings in Pittsburgh, however - the excitement in his voice, the way he described his experiences with such festive spirit, the jokes he cracked about his own position as ethnographer and even his own physical condition-assured me that it is okay, in fact most advantageous, not only to love what you study, but to study what you love. Dan's passion for Carnival and all things festive did not diminish the quality of his work, but brought unusual insights to it This all-too-short encounter with Dan encouraged me to stay the course, to continue to mix business and pleasure, and to book the next available flight to Trinidad's Carnival-for which I will be forever grateful. This paper has been written in his honor.

CROWLEY, DANIEL J. (1921-1998) Daniel J. Crowley received his doctorate in anthropology from Northwestern University in 1956, where he was mentored by pioneering Africanist scholars Melville J. Herskovits and William R. Bascom. Focusing at first on the cultures of the Caribbean, Crowley undertook a study of the oral traditions that he encountered on New Providence Island in the Bahamas and eventually presented his findings in _I Could Talk Od Story Good: Creativitiy in Bahamian Folklore_ (1966), a volume still hailed as a pioneering work of folktale scholarship. Like many of the Northwestern graduates of his era, Crowley was keenly interested in the processes of cultural change and the impact of contemporary conditions on the received patterns of tradition. Consequently, in his research, the dynamic behaviors of narrators as they attempted to keep their stories fresh and exciting for their audiences were highlighted. Crowley's studies in the West Indies earned him a brief teaching appointment at the University College of the West Indies in Port of Spain, Trinidad. During his tenure, he experienced a tranformative encounter with the famous Trinidadian celebration of carnival. This annual celebration, an exciting fusion of music, song, dance, theater, costume, and parades so fascinated Crowley that for the rest of his life he investigated the event not only on various islands in the West Indies but also Brazil, Bolivia, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, and Goa. The "carnival volume" of the Caribbean Quarterly, which was edited by Crowley in 1956, is still acknowledged as the foundational work for all students of this traditional festival. Crowley turned his attention to Africa in 1960, when he traveled to what is now Democratic Republic of the Congo to analyze the art of the Chokwe people in the Katanga (now shaba) province. Although a civil war would cut short his planned research, he was still able to conduct many in-depth interviews with a wide range of artisans including potters, carvers, and weavers, and to collect more than eight hundred examples of their work. His field investigations on artists' lives would later be complimented by a long series of studies on contemporary marketing practices for indigenous art in various African countries. Appearing regularly in the the magazine _African Arts_ from 1970 through 1985, his reports would eventually expand beyond Africa to include the native arts of the Pacific, Southeast Asia, South America, and the circumpolar regions. Because he was eager to embrace all the world's cultures as his topic of study, Crowley was an energetic traveler whose collective journeys would encircle the globe at least nine times. But within the broad scope of his scholarship, the peoples of Africa and the African diaspora were his foremost concern. He never forgot Herskovits's assertion that racist thinking in the United States and Europe had denied Africans and their descendants recognition for their impressive history of cultural achievements. Crowley set as his chief goal the investigation of African and African American art, in both its visual and verbal modes, to help ensure that their history would not become merely a past denied.