Jason Baird Jackson

Jason Baird Jackson Associate Professor of Folklore;
Director, Mathers Museum of World Cultures

Office: 508 N. Fess 301 via 206
Phone: (812) 856-1868
E-mail: jbj indiana.edu

Website

Education

Ph.D. Indiana University, 1998

Research Interests

Cultural endangerment and revitalization; material culture; belief and ritual; cultural history; verbal art; museum work; American and Native American Studies (Eastern North America)

Courses Recently Taught

The New Social Problems: Expressive & Communal Responses
Native American Folklore
Public Practice in Folklore & Ethnomusicology
Curatorship
Theories of Material Culture

Awards and Distinctions

2010-11: GPSO/IU Graduate School Faculty Mentor Award
2005: IU Trustees Teaching Award

Publication Highlights

"The Story of Colonialism, or Rethinking the Ox-Hide Purchase in Native North America and Beyond." The Journal of American Folklore. 126 (499) (2013): 31-54.
(editor) Yuchi Indian Histories Before the Removal Era. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012).
We are the One Percent: Open Access in the Era of Occupy Wall Street. Anthropologies. 12 (2012). [open access!]
"Pictureing Traditional Culture: Heritage as Subject and Motivation in the Work of Three Muscogee (Creek) Painters." American Indian Magazine. 37(1) (2011):64-73.
"Boasian Ethnography and Contemporary Intellectual Property Debates. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 154(1) (2010):40-49.
(with Christopher Kelty, Michael M. J. Fischer, Alex “Rex” Golub, Kimberly Christen, Michael F. Brown, and Tom Boellstorff) “Anthropology of/in Circulation: the Future of Open Access and Scholarly Societies.” Cultural Anthropology. 23(3) (2008):559-588. [open access!]
Yuchi Ceremonial Life: Performance, Meaning and Tradition in a Contemporary American Indian Community. Studies in the Anthropology of North American Indians. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003).

I am a folklorist and ethnologist whose teaching and research work bridges the fields of folklore, cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology and ethnohistory. I have collaborated with Native American communities in Oklahoma (USA) since 1993, when I began a lifelong personal and research relationship with the Yuchi people. My studies concern, most centrally, the nature of customary arts, practices and beliefs and the role that these play in social life. In addition to the ethnography and ethnology of Eastern North America, I am increasingly also pursuing projects exploring emerging issues (often quite contested) in the areas of intellectual property, cultural property and heritage policy. Lastly, most of my career has been spent working as a curator in museum contexts and I remain deeply engaged with research in, and teaching about, museums, especially museums of art and ethnography. I previously served (2005-2009) as the editor of the journal Museum Anthropology and I founded and now edit the open access journal Museum Anthropology Review. Among my current projects is a book on the role of community rituals in shaping historical consciousness among the native peoples of Eastern North America. In this project I am seeking to extend the arguments of my first book, Yuchi Ceremonial Life: Performance, Meaning and Tradition in a Contemporary American Indian Community (University of Nebraska Press, 2003) and the forthcoming volume Yuchi Folklore (University of Oklahoma Press, 2013). Learn more about my teaching, curatorial and research work online at: www.jasonbairdjackson.com. Learn more about the Mathers Museum of World Cultures, for which I serve as Director, online at: www.mathers.indiana.edu.