Scope and Content
The Joel Martin Halpern Collection consists of photographs, slides, photocopies of photographs, photocopies of articles, audiotapes, videocassettes, published book materials, texts in native languages, manuscripts, reproductions of visual images, and ephemera related to his ethnographic field documentation undertaken from 1949 to 2000 in Asia, Europe, and North America. The materials were assembled by Joel Martin Halpern, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and by his wife and colleague Barbara Kerewsky-Halpern. The Halperns conducted their fieldwork primarily from the 1950s to the 1990s, principally in the area of the former Yugoslavia, as well as in other areas of the Balkans. Their most intensive fieldwork was among the Serbs. In addition to this work, Joel Halpern conducted his own ethnographic research among Laotian, Vietnamese, and Inuit ethnic groups. The research materials in this collection emphasize historic aspects of folk culture. This includes documentation of material culture, such as architecture, agricultural implements, household utensils, and costume, as well as intellectual culture, such as music within the context of peasant tradition and village folk beliefs, and oral tradition in the setting of kinship structures and the structure of community social organization.
Much of the primary source material of this collection consists of photographs of Balkan areas, especially Serbian and Bulgarian villages. There is also a series of sound recordings of music and interviews with Serbians and Bulgarians (see tape logs), as well as a collection of folklore programs recorded from Sofia radio, plus videocassettes of Bosnian and Serbian rural life. In addition there are interviews with Canadian Inuit people and tapes from the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation recorded from broadcasts in the Baffin Island area.
Manuscript and photograph dates in the Container List usually refer to publication or photography dates; the collection contains many photocopies, with some originals.