Review of The Catch Pen

Authors

Jill Morstad, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Date of this Version

1994

Document Type

Article

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly 14:1 (Winter 1994). Copyright © 1994 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Abstract

Folklore is but one facet of the human phenomenon we call culture. In the West, the study of cowboys as "folk," that is, as learners, knowers, performers, observers, and teachers of folklore is increasingly grounded in a wider study of general ethnography and cowboy culture. Clearly, such a wider study is precisely the aim of organizers and participants in the National Cowboy Symposium and Celebration, a selection of whose efforts have been gathered into The Catch Pen. Here, editors Ainsworth and Davis have assembled twenty-five artifacts of lived and living Texas folklore in evidence of the continuing existence of the cowboy, whose individual and collective history has been recorded and analyzed as sign and symbol.