Folklore studies


Folklore studies is the interdisciplinary field within cultural anthropology that examines the creation, performance, and preservation of folklore.
The term folkloristics entered academic discourse in nineteenth-century Europe and, along with its English-language counterparts, gained currency in the 1950s as scholars differentiated the study of traditional culture from the artifacts themselves. In contemporary scholarship, the word Folkloristics is favored by Alan Dundes, and used in the title of his publication. Simon Bronner uses the term folklore studies to describe the discipline's intellectual history.
By the late twentieth century the field supported international and national institutions, including UNESCO's safeguarding initiatives and the American Folklife Center, which align folkloristic research with cultural heritage policy. Contemporary folklorists investigate how folk groups create, transmit, and adapt beliefs and practices using ethnographic and comparative methods to trace cultural continuity and change.

Overview

A 1982 UNESCO document titled "Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore" declared a global need to establish provisions protecting folklore from varying dangers identified in the document. UNESCO further published the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2003. The American Folklife Preservation Act passed in 1976 by the United States Congress in conjunction with the Bicentennial Celebration included a definition of folklore, also called folklife:
"... means the traditional expressive culture shared within the various groups in the United States: familial, ethnic, occupational, religious, regional; expressive culture includes a wide range of creative and symbolic forms such as custom, belief, technical skill, language, literature, art, architecture, music, play, dance, drama, ritual, pageantry, handicraft; these expressions are mainly learned orally, by imitation, or in performance, and are generally maintained without benefit of formal instruction or institutional direction."

The legislation complemented federal preservation programs that framed cultural diversity as a national resource and linked folkloristic research with public policy.
The term folklore combines the concepts of folk and lore. Contemporary folklorists define a folk group as any community that shares identity through distinctive traditions, whether a nation or a family. This broader lens expands the artifacts under study to include verbal, material, and customary practices. Folklorists examine how these traditions circulate within groups and the contexts in which they carry meaning.
Transmission of folk artifacts depends on informal circulation within the group, often anonymous and expressed in multiple variants. This mode of continuity contrasts with high culture, which is canonized by elites and attributed to specific creators. Folklorists interpret how performances, texts, and objects gain relevance at particular moments while remaining open to reinterpretation over time.
Folklore is a naturally occurring and necessary component of any social group. Folklore does not need to be old; it continues through the modern day. It is created, transmitted, and used to establish "us" and "them" within a given group. The unique nature of a culture's folklore requires the development of methods of study by the culture at hand for effective identification and research. As a modern academic discipline, folklore studies straddles the space between the social sciences and the humanities.
Nineteenth-century European collectors such as the Brothers Grimm compiled oral literature among rural communities, aligning early folklore scholarship with philology and mythology. Franz Boas and his American students extended the field to Native American cultures and applied ethnographic methods drawn from cultural anthropology and ethnology. This interdisciplinary alliance continues to inform theoretical debates within folklore studies.
Public folklore is a relatively new offshoot of folklore studies, starting after the Second World War and modeled on the work of Alan Lomax and Ben Botkin in the 1930s. Lomax and Botkin emphasized applied folklore, with modern public sector folklorists working to document, preserve and present the beliefs and customs of diverse cultural groups in their region. These positions are often affiliated with museums, libraries, arts organizations, public schools, historical societies, etc. The most renowned of these is the American Folklife Center at the Smithsonian, which hosts the Smithsonian Folklife Festival every summer in Washington, DC. Public folklore differentiates itself from the academic folklore supported by universities, in which collection, research and analysis are primary goals.

Terminology

Folklorists use overlapping descriptors including folklore, folklife, and folk culture to discuss traditional expression. The term folklife gained currency in the second half of the twentieth century to emphasize material and customary practices alongside oral lore. Folk process describes the refinement and creative change of artifacts by community members within a tradition. Regardless of the terminology adopted, practitioners identify themselves as folklorists.
Other terms which might be confused with folklore are popular culture and vernacular culture. However, pop culture tends to be in demand for a limited time, mass-produced and communicated using mass media. Individually, these tend to be labeled fads, and disappear as quickly as they appear. The term vernacular culture differs from folklore in its overriding emphasis on a specific locality or region. For example, vernacular architecture denotes the standard building form of a region, using the materials available and designed to address functional needs of the local economy. Folk architecture is a subset of this, in which the construction is not done by a professional architect or builder, but by an individual putting up a needed structure in the local style. Therefore, all folklore is vernacular culture, but not all vernacular culture necessarily folklore.
In addition to these terms, folklorism refers to "material or stylistic elements of folklore in a context which is foreign to the original tradition." This definition, offered by the folklorist Hermann Bausinger, does not discount the validity of meaning expressed in these "second hand" traditions. Many Walt Disney films and products belong in this category of folklorism; fairy tales become animated film characters, stuffed animals and bed linens. These manifestations of folklore traditions have their own significance for their audience.
Fakelore refers to artifacts which might be termed pseudo-folklore, manufactured items claiming to be traditional. The folklorist Richard Dorson coined this word, clarifying it in his book "Folklore and Fakelore". Current thinking within the discipline is that this term places undue emphasis on the origination of the artifact as a sign of authenticity of the tradition. Adjacently, the adjective folkloric is used to designate materials having the character of folklore or tradition, at the same time making no claim to authenticity.

Methodology

There are several goals of active folklore research. The first objective is to identify tradition bearers within a social group and to collect their lore, preferably in situ. Once collected, these data need to be documented and preserved to enable further access and study. The documented lore is then available to be analyzed and interpreted by folklorists and other cultural historians, and can become the basis for studies of either individual customs or comparative studies. There are multiple venues, be they museums, journals or folk festivals to present the research results. The final step in this methodology involves advocating for these groups in their distinctiveness.
Folklorists employ diverse research tools and methodologies in their work.
  • Conduct fieldwork to meet informants where they live, work, and perform
  • Access archival folklore collections
  • Work with folk museums to view collections and present findings
  • Use library and online bibliographies to find relevant articles
  • Utilize indexes for artifact categorization
  • Provide clear source annotations
  • Master terminology across academic fields and colloquial usage
  • Use printed sources to identify folk tradition variants
  • Build international connections to compare artifacts and methods
  • Study history of folklore studies to understand past biases and improve current analysis
The folklorist also rubs shoulders with researchers, tools and inquiries of neighboring fields: literature, anthropology, cultural history, linguistics, geography, musicology, sociology, psychology. This is just a partial list of the fields of study related to folklore studies, all of which are united by a common interest in subject matter.

History

From antiquities to lore

It is well-documented that the term folklore was coined in 1846 by the Englishman William Thoms. He fabricated it for use in an article published in the August 22, 1846 issue of The Athenaeum. Thoms consciously replaced the contemporary terminology of popular antiquities or popular literature with this new word. Folklore was to emphasize the study of a specific subset of the population: the rural, mostly illiterate peasantry. In his published call for help in documenting antiquities, Thoms was echoing scholars from across the European continent to collect artifacts of older, mostly oral cultural traditions still flourishing among the rural populace. In Germany the Brothers Grimm had first published their "Kinder- und Hausmärchen" in 1812. They continued throughout their lives to collect German folk tales to include in their collection. In Scandinavia, intellectuals were also searching for their authentic Teutonic roots and had labeled their studies Folkeminde or Folkermimne. Throughout Europe and America, other early collectors of folklore were at work. Thomas Crofton Croker published fairy tales from southern Ireland and, together with his wife, documented keening and other Irish funeral customs. Elias Lönnrot is best known for his collection of epic Finnish poems published under the title Kalevala. John Fanning Watson in the United States published the "Annals of Philadelphia".
With increasing industrialization, urbanization, and the rise in literacy throughout Europe in the 19th century, folklorists were concerned that the oral knowledge and beliefs, the lore of the rural folk would be lost. It was posited that the stories, beliefs and customs were surviving fragments of a cultural mythology of the region, pre-dating Christianity and rooted in pagan peoples and beliefs. This thinking goes in lockstep with the rise of nationalism across Europe. Some British folklorists, rather than lamenting or attempting to preserve rural or pre-industrial cultures, saw their work as a means of furthering industrialization, scientific rationalism, and disenchantment.
As the need to collect these vestiges of rural traditions became more compelling, the need to formalize this new field of cultural studies became apparent. The British Folklore Society was established in 1878 and the American Folklore Society was established a decade later. These were just two of a plethora of academic societies founded in the latter half of the 19th century by educated members of the emerging middle class. For literate, urban intellectuals and students of folklore the folk was someone else and the past was recognized as being something truly different. Folklore became a measure of the progress of society, how far we had moved forward into the industrial present and indeed removed ourselves from a past marked by poverty, illiteracy and superstition. The task of both the professional folklorist and the amateur at the turn of the 20th century was to collect and classify cultural artifacts from the pre-industrial rural areas, parallel to the drive in the life sciences to do the same for the natural world. "Folk was a clear label to set materials apart from modern life…material specimens, which were meant to be classified in the natural history of civilization. Tales, originally dynamic and fluid, were given stability and concreteness by means of the printed page."
Viewed as fragments from a pre-literate culture, these stories and objects were collected without context to be displayed and studied in museums and anthologies, just as bones and potsherds were gathered for the life sciences. Kaarle Krohn and Antti Aarne were active collectors of folk poetry in Finland. The Scotsman Andrew Lang is known for his 25 volumes of Andrew Lang's Fairy Books from around the world. Francis James Child was an American academic who collected English and Scottish popular ballads and their American variants, published as the Child Ballads. In the United States, Mark Twain was a charter member of the American Folklore Society. Both he and Washington Irving drew on folklore to write their stories. The 1825 novel Brother Jonathan by John Neal is recognized as the most extensive literary use of American folklore of its time.