Elli Köngäs-Maranda Prizes: Call for Submissions 2011

Call for Submissions 2011
Elli Köngäs-Maranda Prizes
American Folklore Society Women’s Section

Each year, the Women’s Section of the American Folklore Society awards
two prizes in honor of pioneering scholar Elli Köngäs-Maranda. The
prizes recognize superior work on women’s traditional, vernacular, or
local culture and/or feminist theory and folklore.

Student Prize
· for an undergraduate or graduate student paper (up to 30 pages in length)
· entrants must either be currently enrolled in a degree program as
of the submission deadline or have been enrolled in one during the
2010-2011 academic year
· carries an award of $100
· submission deadline is September 30, 2011
· may be submitted as email attachment (preferred) or as hard copy


Professional/Non-Student Prize
· eligible work includes: publications, films, videos, exhibitions
or exhibition catalogues, or sound recordings
· materials should have been published/produced no more than two
years prior to the submission deadline
· carries an award of $250
· submission deadline (postmarked) is September 26, 2011
· please submit three copies of books, videos, etc.


The awards will be announced at the American Folklore Society Annual
Meeting in Bloomington, IN, October 13 – 16, 2011. Prize recipients
need not be members of the Society.

Please direct all submissions and questions to:
Jennifer Spitulnik-Hughes
University of Missouri
Department of English
114 Tate Hall
Columbia, MO 65211
jspitulnik (a) gmail dot com

About Elli Köngäs-Maranda
Internationally renowned feminist folklorist Elli Kaija Köngäs-Maranda
was born in Finland in 1932. She studied Finnish folklore at the
University of Helsinki and did her doctoral dissertation at Indiana
University (1963) on Finnish-American folklore. She held various
research positions, and taught at the University of British Columbia
(1970-1976) and at Laval University from 1976 until her premature
death in 1982. She was elected a Fellow of the American Folklore
Society in 1978. Academically, she was known for her structural
analysis of traditional culture, demonstrating precision and
mathematical intellect, but also for her eloquent writing. She
published extensively and in English, French, Finnish, German, and
Russian. Her feminism was particularly evident in her research and
writing on the Lau people, based on fieldwork conducted between 1966
and 1976. In 1983, the American Folklore Society Women’s section
inaugurated two prizes in her memory, one for student work and one for
professional work, funded by highly successful auctions, T-shirt
sales, the making and raffling of a quilt, and, most recently, the
sale of note cards commemorating that quilt.

Barbro Klein’s obituary gives the most personal feminist view of Elli (see Folklore Women’s Communication, fall-winter 1983 (30-31):4-7). For an example of Elli’s work, see "The Roots of the Two Ethnologies, and Ethnilogy.” Folklore Forum 15 #1 (1982):51-58, at http://hdl.handle.net/2022/ 1765. See also Felix J. Oinas, "Elli Kaija Köngäs Maranda: In Memoriam.” Folklore Forum 15 #2 (1982):115-123, at http://hdl.handle.net/ 2022/1778. A full bibliography of her work in French and English (as well as several example studies, a longer biography, and an introduction to her contributions to folkloristics) is in Travaux et Inédits de Elli Kaija Köngäs Maranda, Cahiers du CELAT 1, 1983. A later consideration of Elli’s intellectual contributions, particularly her unusual uniting of fieldwork and structural analysis, can be found in Leila K. Virtanen, "Folklorist Elli Kaija Köngäs Maranda: A Passionate Rationalist in the Field.” The Folklore Historian 17 (2000):34-41.