Book Reviews
231
Diagnosing Folklore: Perspectives on Dis-
ability, Health, and Trauma. Ed. Trevor J.
Blank and Andrea Kitta. (Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2015. Pp. x + 232, acknowl-
edgments, contributors, index.)
Jon D. Lee
Suffolk University
The folkloristic study of disability, health, and
trauma, while still small, has blossomed in the
past few decades as folklorists have taken the
discipline’s cultural theories and applied them
to the changing landscape of health manage-
ment. Diagnosing Folklore moves these theories
still further by providing a series of case studies,
each of which offers new perspectives and mod-
els that add nuance and critical evaluation to
existing paradigms, expanding our base of
knowledge and providing directions for future
research.
The volume’s 10 essays are organized into
three sections. Part 1 examines “Disability, Eth-
nography, and the Stigmatized Vernacular”;
part 2 continues with “Folk Knowledge, Belief,
and Treatment in Regional and Ethnic Health
Praxis”; and part 3 concludes with “The Perfor-
mance of Mental Illness, Stigma, and Trauma.”
The majority of the authors featured will be fa-
miliar to folklorists who study health issues,
demonstrating the editors’ care in selecting
their sources. Evident, too, are the breadth and
depth of referenced topics and folk groups, in-
cluding studies of Special Olympics athletes,
diabetic patients, autistic Javanese, women
healers, deranged psychopaths, people with bi-
polar disorder, medical fetishists, and veterans.
The volume’s introduction ties these dispa-
rate groups together. The editors state that they
aim to expand the study of health and stigma
by “further [stimulating] dialogue on theory
and fieldwork methodologies in conceptualiz-
ing folkloristic approaches to the study of dis-
ability, health, and trauma,” since “over the last
five years, there [has been] a comparative ab-
sence of corresponding, published folkloristic
scholarship” (p. 3) in these areas. They empha-
size the need for scholars to “act as more than
ventriloquists, making sure that the primary
purpose of their scholarship aligns with the in-
tent of their participants” (p. 4), and they call
JAF 130_2 text.indd 231
for a more expansive examination of the roles
of stigma, disability, and power relationships in
folkloristic studies of health and medicine, since
the “need for scholarship in these areas is not
only theoretical, but also practical” (p. 14). This
last point especially echoes throughout the vol-
ume’s essays, each of which attempts to provide
a series of points that could be applied by both
folklorists and health practitioners to further
the dialogue between examiner and examinee.
Among these essays, several stand out. Amy
Shuman’s “Disability, Narrative Normativity,
and the Stigmatized Vernacular of Communi-
cative (in)Competence” renews the call for
communicative competence between folklorist
and interviewee by highlighting the importance
of multiple recognized valences of “normalcy.”
By examining interviews of individuals with
intellectual disabilities, Shuman demonstrates
how “communicative competence depends
upon the co-­production of meaning” (p. 30)
created by interviewer and interviewee, as well
as by careworker and interviewee. In doing so,
Shuman “asks whether the category of normal
conversation might be expanded to include”
such co-­production (p. 33), thus providing a
critique of ableism and evincing how standard
definitions of “normalcy” fall short by stigma-
tizing difference. It is only by recognizing that
co-­produced meaning is also valid that folklor-
ists can move away from these faults.
Sheila Bock and Kate Parker Horigan’s “In-
voking the Relative: A New Perspective on Fam-
ily Lore in Stigmatized Communities,” and
Michael Owen Jones’ “Latina/o Local Knowl-
edge about Diabetes: Emotional Triggers, Plant
Treatments, and Food Symbolism,” bridge the
gap between the stigmatized vernacular and
ethnic health praxis through their shared ex-
amination of lay responses to diabetes and how
families create critical loci of response and
meaning. Horigan’s interviews with survivors
of Hurricane Katrina, for example, confront the
stigma that survivors of tragedies face, espe-
cially when forced to choose between personal
and familial salvation. Both race and poverty
complicate these issues, creating fatalistic re-
sponses among those suffering, whose frequent
efforts to supplement help offered through of-
ficial channels with that provided by folk
knowledge are often met with official scorn. As
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