audio:23123; Recording Number: ShawneeLaw-01; Program Number: 01
Description
A reading of the Shawnee transcript of "Shawnee Laws." This reel contains Law One, "Rules for Men," numbered utterances 1-176. The remaining 30 reels are housed at the Archives of Traditional Music, Indiana University. This material was originally recorded in notebooks (see Ser. VI, Shawnee #17-25) in 1934 from Shawnee elder Frank Daugherty, beginning in 1932. It was later dictated in 1952 on to 31 audiotapes in 1952 with Absentee Shawnee speaker Mary Williams who had been brought to Indiana University by Voegelin. Shawnee Laws is described by Voegelin as a "semiformalized text setting forth...standards of conduct for human relationships and...the mutual obligations between men and supernaturals." However, research suggests that the originally dictated text may have been told by Frank Daugherty as jokes, as an intentionally exaggerated or fabricated set of bawdy stories and parables meant to entertain young men, or as a means of protecting cultural privacy. (See Stephen Warren and Ben Barnes, "Salvaging the Salvage Anthropologists," Ethnohistory 65 (2018): 189-214, especially 204-205.)
