Folklore studies (also known as folkloristics, tradition studies or folk life studies in the UK) is the academic discipline devoted to the study of folklore. This term, along with its synonyms, gained currency in the 1950s to distinguish the academic study of traditional culture from the folklore artifacts themselves. It became established as a field across both Europe and North America, coordinating with (German), (Norwegian), and (Swedish), among others.
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 (P.L. 94-201) passed in 1976 by the United States Congress in conjunction with the Bicentennial Celebration included a definition of folklore, also called folklife: "...[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." This law in conjunction with other legislation was designed to protect the natural and cultural heritage of the United States in alignment with efforts to promote and protect the cultural diversity of the United States and recognize it as a national strength and a resource worthy of protection.
The term folklore contains component parts folk and lore. The word folk originally applied to rural, frequently poor and illiterate peasants. A contemporary definition of folk is a social group which includes two or more persons with common traits, who express their shared identity through distinctive traditions. "Folk is a flexible concept which can refer to a nation as in American folklore or to a single family." This expanded social definition of folk expands the material considered to be folklore artifacts to include "things people make with words (verbal lore), things they make with their hands (material lore), and things they make with their actions (customary lore)". The folklorist studies the traditional artifacts of a group and the groups within which these customs, traditions and beliefs are transmitted.
Transmission of folk artifacts is necessary to their preservation over time outside of study by cultural archaeologists. Beliefs and customs are passed informally within a folk group mainly anonymously and in multiple variants. This is in contrast to high culture, characterized by recognition by the elites of a given society and identified as specific works created by individuals.
The folklorist studies the significance of these beliefs, customs and objects for the group. In folklore studies "folklore means something – to the tale teller, to the song singer, to the fiddler, and to the audience or addressees". The field assumes cultural units would not be passed along unless they had some continued relevance within the group, though their meaning can shift and morph with 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.
The study of folklore originated in Europe in the first half of the 19th century with a focus on the oral folklore of the rural peasant populations. The "Kinder- und Hausmärchen" of the Brothers Grimm, first published 1812, is the best known collection of the verbal folklore of the European peasantry. This interest in stories, sayings and songs, i.e. verbal lore, continued throughout the 19th century and aligned the fledgling discipline of folklore studies with literature and mythology. By the turn of the 20th century, European folklorists remained focused on the oral folklore of the homogeneous peasant populations in their regions, while the American folklorists, led by Franz Boas, chose to consider Native American cultures in their research, and included the totality of their customs and beliefs as folklore. This distinction aligned American folklore studies with cultural anthropology and ethnology. American folklorists thus used the same data collection techniques as these fields in their own field research. This diverse alliance of folklore studies with other academic fields offers a variety of theoretical vantage points and research tools to the field of folklore studies, even as it continues to be a point of discussion within the field.
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 the primary goals.
Terminology The field of folklore studies uses a wide-variety of sometimes synonymous terms. Folklore was the original term used in this discipline. Its synonym, folklife, came into circulation in the second half of the 20th century, at a time when some researchers felt that the term folklore was too closely tied exclusively to oral lore. The new term folklife, along with its synonym folk culture, is meant to include all aspects of a culture, not just the oral traditions. Folk process is used to describe the refinement and creative change of artifacts by community members within the folk tradition that defines the folk process. Professionals within this field, regardless of the other words they use, consider themselves to be 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 [presented] 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.
The specific tools needed by folklorists to do their research are manifold. The researchers must be comfortable in fieldwork; going out to meet their informants where they live, work, and perform. They need to access archives housing a vast array of unpublished folklore collections. They will want to work with folk museums, to both view the collections, and present their own findings. Bibliographies maintained by libraries and on line contain an important trove of articles from around the world. The use of indexes allow them to view and use the categorization of artifacts which have already been established. All work by a folklorist must be appropriately annotated in order to provide identifiable sources of the work. For all folklorists terminology becomes a skill to master as they rub elbows not only with related academic fields but also with the colloquial understanding (what exactly is a fairy tale?). This shared vocabulary, with varying and sometimes divergent shades of meaning, needs to be used thoughtfully and consistently. The use of printed sources to locate and identify further variants of a folk tradition is a necessary adjunct to the field research. Because the transmission of folk artifacts preceded and ignored the establishment of national and political boundaries, it is important to cultivate international connections to folklorists in neighboring countries and around the world to compare both the artifacts researched and the methodology used. A knowledge of the history of folklore studies is called for to identify the direction and more importantly the biases which the field has taken in the past, enabling us to temper the current analysis with more impartiality.
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