Folklore 199: Car Cultures

Tuesday and Thursday 10:00 – 11:20 in 204 Chapman CRN 26873

Professor Gordon Sayre gsayre@uoregon.edu

Office: 472 PLC Ph. 346-1313 Office Hours: Tues. noon – 2 pm, Wed. 9 - 10 am

In this course we will learn about the history of the automotive industry and U.S. public policy toward cars, examine some of the many environmental issues surrounding cars, and study car design and customizing as vernacular art traditions.

Car Cultures thus takes a multi-disciplinary approach to one the most pressing social issues of our time: how can the world’s people meet their transportation needs without depleting energy supplies, polluting the air and water, or ending up hopelessly jammed in traffic? These questions have no easy answers, not least because Americans’ habits and desires, and the infrastructure of our society, have made us resistant to change, and are spreading to other parts of the world. As with many social issues in the U.S., automobiles arouse zealous critics and stubborn defenders. Our course cannot promise breakthrough solutions, but it begins from the premise that motorists’ creativity and love of their cars can be part of a solution to the problems cars cause.

The major assignment for the course will be an interdisciplinary term project involving folklore or ethnographic fieldwork. Each student, or team of students, will select and research some aspect of car enthusiasm or automotive behavior, whether monster trucks or tuners or rat rods, muscle cars or microbuses, advertisements or repairmen, parking lots or critical masses of cyclists. There is so much about our automotive behavior that is curious, mysterious, or revealing.