The term ‘folklore’ means both a body of material and the academic discipline devoted to its study. Although the description of customs, verbal lore and, more rarely, material culture was not unknown even in medieval Europe, the idea of the systematic collection and analysis of such data emerged most strongly with the dramatic rise of European romantic *nationalism in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Inspired by philosophies such as those of †G.B. Vico (1668–1744) and †J.G.Herder (1744–1803), nationalist scholars sought in folkloric materials the empirical basis for their claims about essentialized national character. In many cases they also sought demonstrable connections with the cultural glories of supposed collective ancestors. Nationalism gave folklore its greatest impetus, charging it with preserving the evanescent treasures of the oral archive for a literate posterity. It even legitimated textual ‘emendation’, which sometimes amounted to outright forgery, on the combined grounds of scholarly sophistication and insiders’ instinctive knowledge, and for the practical reason that the defence of national interests demanded cultural cleansing (analogous in some countries to concurrent linguistic ‘purification’). In Finland Elias Lönnrot (1802–1884) ‘reconstructed’ the Kalevala from texts collected at geographically dispersed sites; in Greece N.G.Politis (1852–1921), while a philological comparativist of extraordinary erudition and scope, reconstructed ‘original texts’ from similarly dispersed oral variants, treating them as if they were chronologically fixed manuscript versions. In a very real sense, the attempts to reconstitute Urtexte expressed metonymically the programmes of national regeneration they were intended to serve.
Just as anthropology reached maturity as the study of colonized others, academic folklore first appeared to reach coherence as the study of the domestic exotics to be found in the rural hinterland of nation-states (initially in Europe, then in many Asian countries—notably India, Japan, and Korea—as well as virtually the rest of the world). As a discipline, indeed, folklore partially shares the institutionalized genealogy of anthropology, notably in its early adherence to forms of survivalism and *evolutionism—epistemologies, however, that folklore was far slower to reject. Although they did not long retain the original survivalist tenet—namely, that the folklore of countryside and colony was the residue of an earlier, childhood phase of human history—they easily inverted it to argue that this lore instead represented in degenerate form the lost glories of newly reconstructed pasts (see Hodgen 1936). In totalitarian ideologies such as Nazism, folklore was used to invest notions of national and racial purity with scientific authority. In almost all cases, a romantic form of censorship suppressed the lore of sexuality, subjecting the peasantry to a bourgeois moral code. The city—again Nazism provides an extreme example—represented the ‘corruption’ of the pure national virtues. It was not until the post-World War II era, and especially with the influential work of the psychoanalytic folklorist Alan Dundes in the United States, that the categories of urban and industrial folklore began to gain currency, and that obscene or politically subversive folklore gained academic respectability.
The philological origins and direction of much academic folklore prompted a strongly taxonomic emphasis. In the early nationalistic studies, this often served the purpose of drawing a clear line between allegedly historical and *mythological texts. As folklorists began to engage in more global and comparative research, however, it produced less parochial and politically motivated work. Already in the nineteenth century Child’s (1857) study of balladry allowed subsequent scholars to trace the migration of specific themes and motifs to the New World. Such philological approaches remained tied to genealogical models of textual interrelationships (stemmatics). Notable among the later products of the classificatory tradition was Stith Thompson’s monumental Index of Tale-Types (1932–36), a work of such comprehensive scope that later scholars continue to find it a sure guide requiring modification only in matters of detail. Another tradition, powerfully influenced by French *structuralism and its Russian antecedent, †Vladimir Propp’s (1968) taxonomic and formal study of Russian folktales, attempted to organize oral traditions according to structural and semantic properties; developments in literary theory have also promoted a focus on such themes as genre theory—permitting greater attention to the conceptual and social contexts of performance—as well as on audience reception and performance. These moves have permitted a more perceptive view of humour, irony and insult as culturally negotiated assessments rather than as intrinsic properties of inert texts.
In the United States, where folklore played an important role in establishing both the European origins and the New World distinctiveness of the earlier settlers, a more theoretical approach has been energized by the study of indigenous *aesthetics and by what has become known as ‘the ethnography of communication’ as well as the active development there of †semiotics. Especially prominent in this arena has been the work of R.Bauman; working in a Jakobsonian linguistic idiom and with a strong interest in †speech act theory, he and others (including a number of prominent †ethnomusicologists) have developed a performative perspective on folklore that frees it from the rigidity of older taxonomic approaches. Framing, play, ambiguity, and the contested evaluation of competence emerge as no less important than formal textual features.
Material culture is an increasingly studied dimension of folklore, and is especially relevant to the discipline’s role in museums. While museum displays often serve ideological ends such as promoting a sense of national unity by highlighting commonalities in artefact form and use, they may also focus on use, aesthetic principles, and processes of the transmission of technical knowledge. Studies of material objects may also situate them in wider matrices of use and meaning—for example, the utensils used to prepare ritual and ordinary foods and the relationship of this entire culinary complex to cosmology, ritual and social practices. Here, in fact, the most careful folkloric research is indistinguishable from *ethnography. More generally, it can be said that, as folklore moves from philological classification to social and performative contextualization, its relationship to aspects of social structure and practice ceases to warrant a distinct epistemology, but that, concomitantly, it demands that anthropologists pay serious attention to the constitutive (or performative) properties of expressive forms.
Bauman, R. (1977) Verbal Art as Performance, Newbury, MA: Rowley House
——(ed.) (1992) Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments, New York: Oxford University Press
Child, F. (1857) English and Scottish Ballads, Boston: Little, Brown
Cocchiara, G. (1981) The History of Folklore in Europe, Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues
Dorson, R. (1972) Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Dundes, A. (1980) Interpreting Folklore, Bloomington: Indiana University Press
Herzfeld, M. (1982) Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece, Austin: University of Texas Press
Hodgen, M. (1936) The Doctrine of Survivals: A Chapter in the History of Scientific Method in the Study of Man, London: Allenson
Janelli, R. (1986) ‘The Origins of Korean Folklore Scholarship’, Journal of American Folklore, 99 (391): 24–49
Propp, V. (1968) Morphology of the Folktale, 2nd edn Austin: University of Texas Press
Thompson, S. (1932–6) Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folk-Tales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books, and Local Legends, Bloomington: Indiana University/Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia
Wilson, W. (1976) Folklore and Nationalism in Modern Finland, Bloomington: Indiana University Press
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