Packy Jim

Ray Cashman is an associate professor of folklore at Indiana University. He is the author of Storytelling on the Northern Irish Border, which won both the Chicago Folklore Prize of the American Folklore Society and the Donald Murphy Prize of the American Conference for Irish Studies.

• List of IllustrationsPreface: Packy Jim Is Your ManA Note on Language Introduction: Using Tradition, Constructing a Self1 Person and Place, Life and Times2 Authority and Rules3 Power and Politics4 Place, History, and Morality5 Place, the Supernatural, and Cosmology6 Belief and Skepticism7 Community in a World of Limited Good8 WorldviewAfterword: Real Folklore AcknowledgmentsAppendix: Transcription StyleNotes on the Recitations, Songs, and Traditional StoriesNotes on the ChaptersReferencesInternational Motif IndexMigratory Legend Type IndexSubject Index

Skillfully presents and analyzes stories naturally emerging from conversation and expressing a worldview that is both communal and formed by unique life experience. ... Highly recommended."" - Choice""Draws on interviews with Packy Jim McGrath, a Donegal storyteller who grew up on a smuggling route on the border of the Republic and Northern Ireland."" - Chronicle of Higher Education""Octogenarian bachelor Packy Jim emerges here as both typical and singular, a barometer of continuity and change. McGrath's resilience, dignity, and strong sense of self manifest clearly in his stories, which locate him both in the technological consumerist future and in the primordial self-sufficient past. Ray Cashman's sharp and sympathetic observation delivers a classic ethnography that stakes a major claim for folkloristic studies as cutting-edge humanities research."" - Lillis Laoire,National University of Ireland–Galway""A brilliant testament to the ethnographer's art, the deeply rooted wisdom of an 'ordinary' person, and the complex ways in which folklore figures in everyday life along the Irish border."" - James P. Leary, author of Folksongs of Another America