Okay here's the deal: every semester I assign my students to go find me one article from a peer-reviewed journal and formulate a summary. One of my students, who Lord willing will transfer to my beloved Aggieland, brought me Jonathan Smith's 2007 piece on Bonfire as a "Conservative Reading of Regional Narratives, Traditional Narratives, and a Paradoxical Place."
Now bear in mind that I do work in academia and possess an advanced degree in history. But a tremendous amount of this piece was "OMG STFU with the jargon, man, dammit!" Jargon should not be a substitute for scholarship...
I dunno. He seems a bit condescending, noting his "brief notoriety" as the man who wanted to ban Bonfire. (Flash, Prof: you weren't the first...) yet he concludes by identifying himself as a conservative --at least insofar as geographers/sociologists/those of that ilk go. I'm not entirely certain his citation of Russell Kirk and S. Kierkegaard are "money" in his thesis.
That, and some of his actual "history" seems a bit off. I keep thinking that somewhere we have photographic evidence of pre-1930 Bonfires where he says none exist; he references the decline of Bonfire in terms of numbers of days devoted to cut and numbers of involvees but his citations seem weak backing these up; and he completely ignores the two prior-to-1999 disruptions of Bonfire "ritual", those being the stack collapse/unwinding of the early 1990s and the Kennedy assassination of 1963.
So
A) Who is this cat?
B) No, seriously, who is this guy and what is his speciality area?
C) Has anyone really critiqued his work on Bonfire --and not just from the "Hwy6 Runs Both Ways So GTFOH!" perspective, but from a serious academic point-of-view?
(Citation: Jonathan M. Smith, "The Texas Aggie Bonfire: A Conservative Reading of Regional Narratives, Traditional Practices, and a Paradoxical Place." Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 97(1), 2007, pp. 182–201. Available via JSTOR)
[This message has been edited by Bison (edited 12/8/2010 3:07p).]
Now bear in mind that I do work in academia and possess an advanced degree in history. But a tremendous amount of this piece was "OMG STFU with the jargon, man, dammit!" Jargon should not be a substitute for scholarship...
I dunno. He seems a bit condescending, noting his "brief notoriety" as the man who wanted to ban Bonfire. (Flash, Prof: you weren't the first...) yet he concludes by identifying himself as a conservative --at least insofar as geographers/sociologists/those of that ilk go. I'm not entirely certain his citation of Russell Kirk and S. Kierkegaard are "money" in his thesis.
That, and some of his actual "history" seems a bit off. I keep thinking that somewhere we have photographic evidence of pre-1930 Bonfires where he says none exist; he references the decline of Bonfire in terms of numbers of days devoted to cut and numbers of involvees but his citations seem weak backing these up; and he completely ignores the two prior-to-1999 disruptions of Bonfire "ritual", those being the stack collapse/unwinding of the early 1990s and the Kennedy assassination of 1963.
So
A) Who is this cat?
B) No, seriously, who is this guy and what is his speciality area?
C) Has anyone really critiqued his work on Bonfire --and not just from the "Hwy6 Runs Both Ways So GTFOH!" perspective, but from a serious academic point-of-view?
(Citation: Jonathan M. Smith, "The Texas Aggie Bonfire: A Conservative Reading of Regional Narratives, Traditional Practices, and a Paradoxical Place." Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 97(1), 2007, pp. 182–201. Available via JSTOR)
[This message has been edited by Bison (edited 12/8/2010 3:07p).]
