History of Folklore Studies

History of Folklore Studies Introduction Folklore studies emerged as a formal academic discipline in Europe during the late 18th and 19th centuries. What began as a movement to preserve and document traditional ways of life evolved into a sophisticated scholarly field that examines how people create, share, and pass down cultural knowledge. Understanding the history of folklore studies helps us appreciate how the discipline's focus has shifted—from collecting dusty artifacts to analyzing living culture—and what scholars today consider important about folklore. The Romantic Origins: Folklore as National Identity In the 1770s, Johann Gottfried von Herder, a German philosopher and writer, transformed how people thought about folk traditions. Instead of viewing them as primitive remnants of a backwards past, Herder celebrated oral traditions as organic cultural expressions rooted in specific places and communities. His work was revolutionary because it suggested that folklore revealed something essential and authentic about a people. This perspective took on urgent political significance after the Napoleonic invasions of Europe. German scholars and scholars from smaller nations like Finland, Estonia, and Hungary began systematically collecting and studying folk traditions. They weren't simply preserving interesting customs—they were building cultural foundations for nationalist movements and political independence. By documenting their distinct folk traditions, these nations could argue for their unique identities and right to self-determination. Folklore became a tool for nation-building. The 19th-Century European Focus Throughout the 1800s, European folklorists developed a particular way of understanding folklore. They emphasized contrast: folk traditions represented the authentic, rural, and oral world, while modernity represented the urban, written, and industrial world. This meant that European folklorists primarily focused their attention on peasant populations living in rural areas, viewing them as the "real" bearers of folklore. This approach had an important limitation: it assumed that folklore existed mainly in remote villages and among people living traditional lifestyles. Urban workers, immigrants, and modernizing communities were largely ignored as sources of folklore. <extrainfo> The romantic idea that "true" folklore only existed in rural, preindustrial communities would influence folklore studies for generations. Even today, many people mistakenly believe that folklore is something old and disappearing rather than something actively created in contemporary communities. </extrainfo> The American Turn: Expanding the Definition By the turn of the 20th century, folklore studies expanded to North America, and something significant changed. While European folklorists remained focused on homogeneous peasant oral traditions, American folklorists took a broader approach. Led by influential figures like Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, American scholars began incorporating Native American customs, beliefs, and entire cultural systems into folklore study. This was crucial because it shifted folklore from being about isolated, quaint traditions to being about how culture actually works. American folklorists aligned folklore studies with cultural anthropology and ethnology—disciplines that examined entire ways of life. They asked not just "what are these traditions?" but "how do these traditions function within living communities?" This American expansion is important for your understanding: it moved folklore studies away from the narrow European model of peasant traditions and toward a more inclusive view of culture. Naming the Discipline: "Folkloristics" For decades, scholars simply used the term "folklore" to mean both the cultural traditions themselves and the study of those traditions. By the 1950s, it became clear that this created confusion. The academic discipline needed its own term. The word folkloristics (also called "folklore studies") emerged to distinguish the scholarly field from the artifacts it studied. This seemingly simple terminological change reflects something important: folklore studies had matured into a recognized academic discipline with its own methods, questions, and approaches—distinct from simply collecting old stories and songs. The American Folklife Preservation Act (1976) In January 1976, the United States passed the American Folklife Preservation Act (Public Law 94-201). This legislation is worth understanding because it provides an official definition of what "folklife" encompasses, and this definition shapes how scholars think about the field. According to the Act, folklife consists of traditional expressive culture shared within: Families Ethnic groups Occupations Religions Regions More specifically, folklife includes customs, beliefs, technical skills, language, literature, art, architecture, music, play, dance, drama, ritual, pageantry, and handicraft. The Act also emphasizes a crucial point: folklife is learned orally, by imitation, or in performance, without formal instruction. Notice what this definition accomplishes. It's not limited to rural peasants or ancient traditions. It includes occupational traditions (think of specific practices among construction workers or nurses), religious traditions, urban ethnic communities, and more. The Act essentially legalized the broader American approach to folklore by establishing it as official policy. How Folklore Studies Evolved as a Discipline Before World War II: Folklore as Preservation Before World War II, folklorists operated under a particular assumption: folklore was disappearing. Industrial society, urbanization, and modernization were destroying traditional ways of life. The folklorist's job was therefore to collect folk artifacts before they vanished forever—to serve as a kind of cultural archaeologist. This preservation mindset shaped methodology. Folklorists collected songs, stories, and customs as isolated texts or objects with little attention to how they functioned in living communities. A folksong was valuable as a document to be filed away, not as something people actually performed and enjoyed together. <extrainfo> This preservation impulse continues to influence folklore studies today, even though scholars now recognize that folklore isn't disappearing—it's constantly being created and transformed in new contexts. </extrainfo> The Historic-Geographic Method To organize the flood of collected material, folklorists developed the historic-geographic method. This approach tracked a particular piece of verbal lore (a tale type, a ballad, a proverb) across geographic space and through historical time. By mapping where versions of a story appeared and how it changed, scholars hoped to understand its origins and distribution. This method treated folklore as texts to be isolated, analyzed, and compared—much like philologists compared language variants. The focus remained on the artifact itself rather than on how people actually used it. The Behavioral Turn: A Fundamental Shift After World War II, folklore studies experienced what scholars call the "behavioral turn." The key insight was simple but transformative: folklore should be studied as behavior and communication within active cultural contexts, not as isolated texts. Three scholars are particularly important for understanding this shift: Alan Dundes' 1964 Essay. In his essay "Texture, Text and Context," Dundes argued forcefully that analyzing folklore texts while ignoring their context was incomplete. You couldn't truly understand a folktale if you ignored how people actually told it, what occasion prompted the telling, who was listening, and what it meant to the community. Context wasn't decoration—it was essential to understanding. Dan Ben-Amos's 1967 Presentation. In 1967, Dan Ben-Amos introduced the behavioral approach to the American Folklore Society. He argued that folklore should be understood as communicative behavior—something people do, not just something they possess. Richard Dorson's 1972 Synthesis. By 1972, Richard Dorson could observe that the field was clearly moving from viewing folklore as "text" to viewing it as human behavior and communication. This wasn't a complete rejection of earlier work, but a fundamental reorientation about what questions folklorists should ask. This shift changed what folklorists studied. Instead of only analyzing the words of a folksong, they might examine how a group performed it together, what emotions it evoked, what social function it served. Instead of collecting stories as texts, they might study storytelling as an event—how the storyteller interacted with the audience, how the story changed based on context. Understanding the Modern Discipline The trajectory from 18th-century romantic nationalism to contemporary folklore studies shows a consistent pattern: the field keeps getting broader and more attentive to actual cultural practice. Early folklorists asked: "What are these old traditions?" Modern folklorists ask: "How do people create, perform, share, and transform cultural knowledge?" That's a fundamentally different set of questions, and it means contemporary folklore studies encompasses much more than peasant customs. It includes how office workers develop shared stories, how families maintain traditions, how occupational groups develop specialized knowledge, how religious communities express faith, and how ethnic communities maintain identity in contemporary contexts. The images throughout this section illustrate this expansion: traditional crafts, contemporary performances, community celebrations, and occupational practices all represent folklife as understood by modern scholarship.