Thomas A. McKean with Pedro Mendoza Mendoza (credit: Maya Tzutujil)
5.30pm to 7.30pm, Sir Duncan Rice Library, Floor 7, Craig Suite
Book your place at: elphinstone@abdn.ac.uk
Abstract
Culture is with us all the time, shaping our daily lives and helping us make sense of the world around us. While heritage is often seen as the past, something to be preserved or revived, it always informs the present and can be harnessed to help build community and self-esteem. Dr Thomas McKean explores how a folklorist’s ‘culture work’ moves beyond observation and into action, making us into activists. He will look at how the ethos of the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen – founded to build bridges between the University and the wider community – can enhance cultural confidence, community self-esteem, and cultural equity, particularly in relation to communities whose voices and knowledge have often been marginalised. His case studies include the Institute’s Doric language work over the last ten years, as well as his fieldwork exploring the transformative power of heritage craft skills in boatbuilding projects for young people in Portsoy and New York City, and his collaborations with Tz’utujil Maya communities in Guatemala, where environmental knowledge, traditional beliefs, and textile practices are mobilized in response to both cultural erosion and the climate crisis. At its heart, the Institute’s work is about cultural equity: why culture matters, who defines its value, and how community knowledge and experience can help shape more confident, sustainable, and democratic futures.
Biography
Dr Thomas McKean has been Director of the Elphinstone Institute at the University of Aberdeen since 2014. He is a Fellow of the American Folklore Society and is former Vice-President of the Société Internationale d’Ethnologie et de Folklore. As a folklorist he specialises in Scots and Gaelic song, along with custom and belief, community craft traditions and their relevance in today’s world, and fieldwork methodology. Of particular interest to McKean is the relationship of traditional practices to the individual, the role of creativity in tradition, and how traditional skills can help build individual and community resilience in challenging times. Part of the James Madison Carpenter Project team, McKean worked with cylinder and disc recordings of North-East singers made between 1929 and 1935, with support from the British Academy, the AHRC, and the National Endowment for the Humanities under the auspices of the American Folklore Society, and in association with the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
The David Buchan Lecture was launched in 2015 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Elphinstone Institute. The lecture is in memory of the influential ballad and contemporary legend scholar who was also the Institute's first appointed director. This annual event places Ethnology and Folklore firmly in the University calendar and appeals to a wide audience across the University as well as to the general public.
