Botkin's landmark work, Lay My Burden Down (1945) was the first American book to treat oral testimonies as historical evidence, and it was another thirty years before this became accepted practice. The Abolition movement had similarly used the oral narratives of escaped slaves, such as those collected by William Still in his Underground Railroad Records, to draw support for their cause. He saw the dissemination of these materials as having the potential to improve race relations in the United States and to combat prejudice. Botkin and Alan Lomax coined the phrase "applied folklore," akin to "applied anthropology" and other applied social sciences, as the study concerned with the use of folklore and traditional cultural materials to address or solve real social problems.īotkin's development of the approach emerged from his work on the collection by the Federal Writers' Project of oral narratives of former slaves, when he worked for the Library of Congress. While the study of folklore remained strong in academic communities, it was not until the mid-twentieth century that the discipline grew beyond "pure" research, to emerge as a movement that incorporated application and problem solving as one of its aims. Later developments, based on "performance" analysis, regarded each form as an event that emerges from the interaction between performer and audience and which fulfills a particular role or function in the social group. Standards of identification were devised, and every example was classified by place and date, with a view to determining the original forms as well as patterns of distribution. Only in the twentieth century did ethnographers begin to attempt to record folklore without overt political goals. Johann Gottfried von Herder first advocated the deliberate recording and preservation of folklore to document the authentic spirit, tradition, and identity of the German people the belief that there can be such authenticity is one of the tenets of the romantic nationalism that Herder developed.
The term "folklore" was coined in 1846 by the Englishman William Thoms, who wanted to use an Anglo-Saxon term for what was then called "popular antiquities." The concept developed as part of the nineteenth-century ideology of romantic nationalism, leading to the reshaping of oral traditions to serve modern ideological goals. It is theirs to remember, change, forget…is that which is at once traditional and variable." Study of Folklore
Folklore "remains wholly within the control of its practitioners. Both paradigms raise the question of whether folklore can be viewed as a common phenomenon and therefore broken into broad categories, or as specific cultural artifacts of a given society.įolklorists tend to bridge both worlds, as, for example, Dan Ben-Amos attempted to create a comprehensive understanding of folklore for all disciplines by arguing that folklore is either "a body of knowledge, a mode of thought, or a kind of art." While this thesis may not be as inclusively used as Ben-Amos hoped, modern scholars usually view folklore as both literature and unique cultural phenomena. Thus, the founder of French folkloristic study, Arnold van Gennep, believed folklore was the key to understanding the creative force within small groups of societies. Scholars of literature focus primarily on structure, narrative style, content, and genre, while anthropologists view folklore as a means to understand the views of a culture. There is no clear-cut definition of the term "folklore," mainly because academics of different disciplines study the same material from completely separate perspectives.
As the world is increasingly globalized, preservation of traditional folklore and the ongoing development of new materials are important ways in which unique cultural expressions can be maintain and their wisdom transmitted to future generations.įolklore generally refers to the body of material, in a variety of forms, that expresses the traditions of a particular culture.