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Folklore studies (also known as folkloristics and, in the United Kingdom, as tradition studies or folk life 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.
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 science 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.
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.
Folklorists employ diverse research tools and methodologies in their work.
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.
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 Oral traditions 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 Social progress, 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 fairy tales 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.
In an effort to understand and explain the similarities found in tales from different locations, the Finnish folklorists Julius and Kaarle Krohne developed the Historical-Geographical method, also called the Finnish method. Using multiple variants of a tale, this investigative method attempted to work backwards in time and location to compile the original version from what they considered the incomplete fragments still in existence. This was the search for the "Urform", which by definition was more complete and more "authentic" than the newer, more scattered versions. The historic-geographic method has been succinctly described as a "quantitative mining of the resulting archive, and extraction of distribution patterns in time and space". It is based on the assumption that every text artifact is a variant of the original text. As a proponent of this method, Walter Anderson proposed additionally a Law of Self-Correction, i.e. a feedback mechanism which would keep the variants closer to the original form.
It was during the first decades of the 20th century that Folklore Studies in Europe and America began to diverge. The Europeans continued with their emphasis on oral traditions of the pre-literate peasant, and remained connected to literary scholarship within the universities. By this definition, folklore was completely based in the European cultural sphere; any social group that did not originate in Europe was to be studied by Ethnology and cultural anthropologists. In this light, some twenty-first century scholars have interpreted European folkloristics as an instrument of internal colonialism, in parallel with the imperialistic dimensions of early 20th century cultural anthropology and Orientalism. Unlike contemporary anthropology, however, many early European folklorists were themselves members of the prioritized groups that folkloristics was intended to study; for instance, Andrew Lang and James George Frazer were both themselves Scotsmen and studied rural folktales from towns near where they grew up.
In contrast to this, American folklorists, under the influence of the German-American Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, sought to incorporate other cultural groups living in their region into the study of folklore. This included not only customs brought over by northern European immigrants, but also African Americans, Acadians of eastern Canada, Cajuns of Louisiana, Hispanics of the American southwest, and Native Americans. Not only were these distinct cultural groups all living in the same regions, but their proximity to each other caused their traditions and customs to intermingle. The lore of these distinct social groups, all of them Americans, was considered the bailiwick of American folklorists, and aligned American folklore studies more with ethnology than with literary studies.
As chairman of the Federal Writers' Project between 1938 and 1942, Benjamin A. Botkin supervised the work of these folklore field workers. Both Botkin and John Lomax were particularly influential during this time in expanding folklore collection techniques to include more detailing of the interview context. This was a significant move away from viewing the collected artifacts as isolated fragments, broken remnants of an incomplete pre-historic whole. Using these new interviewing techniques, the collected lore became embedded in and imbued with meaning within the framework of its contemporary practice. The emphasis moved from the lore to the folk, i.e. the groups and the people who gave this lore meaning within contemporary daily living.
In the postwar years, departments of folklore were established in multiple German universities. However an analysis of just how folklore studies supported the policies of the Third Reich did not begin until 20 years after World War II in West Germany. Particularly in the works of Hermann Bausinger and Wolfgang Emmerich in the 1960s, it was pointed out that the vocabulary current in Volkskunde was ideally suited for the kind of ideology that the National Socialists had built up. It was then another 20 years before convening the 1986 Munich conference on folklore and National Socialism. This continues to be a difficult and painful discussion within the German folklore community.
In this period, folklore came to refer to the event of doing something within a given context, for a specific audience, using artifacts as necessary props in the communication of traditions between individuals and within groups. Beginning in the 1970s, these new areas of folklore studies became articulated in performance studies, where traditional behaviors are evaluated and understood within the context of their performance. It is the meaning within the social group that becomes the focus for these folklorists, foremost among them and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Enclosing any performance is a framework which signals that the following is something outside of ordinary communication. For example, "So, have you heard the one…" automatically flags the following as a joke. A performance can take place either within a cultural group, re-iterating and re-enforcing the customs and beliefs of the group. Or it can be performance for an outside group, in which the first goal is to set the performers apart from the audience.
This analysis then goes beyond the artifact itself, be it dance, music or story-telling. It goes beyond the performers and their message. As part of performance studies, the audience becomes part of the performance. If any folklore performance strays too far from audience expectations, it will likely be brought back by means of a negative feedback loop at the next iteration. Both performer and audience are acting within the "Twin Laws" of Folk process, in which novelty and innovation is balanced by the conservative forces of the familiar. Even further, the presence of a folklore observer at a performance of any kind will influence the performance itself in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Because folklore is firstly an act of communication between parties, it is incomplete without inclusion of the reception in its analysis. The understanding of folklore performance as communication leads directly into modern linguistic theory and communication studies. Words both reflect and shape cultural worldviews. Oral traditions, particularly in their stability over generations and even centuries, provide significant insight into the ways in which insiders of a culture see, understand, and express their responses to the world around them.
Three major approaches to folklore interpretation were developed during the second half of the 20th century. Structuralism in folklore studies attempts to define the structures underlying oral and customary folklore. Once classified, it was easy for structural folklorists to lose sight of the overarching issue: what are the characteristics which keep a form constant and relevant over multiple generations? Functionalism in folklore studies also came to the fore following World War II; as spokesman, William Bascom formulated the 4 functions of folklore. This approach takes a more top-down approach to understand how a specific form fits into and expresses meaning within the culture as a whole. A third method of folklore analysis, popular in the late 20th century, is the Psychoanalytic Interpretation, championed by Alan Dundes. His monographs, including a study of homoerotic subtext in American football and anal-erotic elements in German folklore, were not always appreciated and involved Dundes in several major folklore studies controversies during his career. True to each of these approaches, and any others one might want to employ (political, women's issues, material culture, urban contexts, non-verbal text, ad infinitum), whichever perspective is chosen will spotlight some features and leave other characteristics in the shadows.
With the passage in 1976 of the American Folklife Preservation Act, folklore studies in the United States gained formal federal recognition alongside other cultural heritage programs. The legislation presented cultural diversity as a national resource rather than a liability. "We no longer view cultural difference as a problem to be solved, but as a tremendous opportunity. In the diversity of American folklife we find a marketplace teeming with the exchange of traditional forms and cultural ideas, a rich resource for Americans". This perspective is showcased annually at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and many other folklife festivals around the country.
Using the language of the "common people" to create literature, influenced the Tanzimat writers to gain interest in folklore and folk literature. In 1859, writer Sinasi, wrote a play in simple enough language that it could be understood by the masses. He later produced a collection of four thousand proverbs. Many other poets and writers throughout the Turkish nation began to join in on the movement including Ahmet Mithat who composed short stories based on the proverbs written by Sinasi. These short stories, like many folk stories today, were intended to teach moral lessons to its readers.
Public folklore was introduced into the American Folklore Society in the early 1970s. Public folklorists work in museums and cultural agencies to identify and document the diverse folk cultures and artists in their regions. They develop performance and exhibition programs that educate audiences about traditional practices while supporting community participation. Major folk festivals, including the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, exemplify this outreach. Public folklorists also contribute to economic and community development projects by communicating local cultural priorities to planners and policy makers.
Subsequent scholarship on binary opposition highlights the values embedded in such pairs. One element often assumes dominance, and the resulting classifications can import ethnocentric hierarchies or suggest an illusory order.
Awareness has grown that different cultures have different concepts of time (and space). In his study "The American Indian Mind in a Linear World", Donald Fixico describes an alternate concept of time. "Indian thinking" involves "'seeing' things from a perspective emphasizing that circles and cycles are central to world and that all things are related within the Universe." He then suggests that "the concept of time for Indian people has been such a continuum that time becomes less relevant and the rotation of life or seasons of the year are stressed as important." In a more specific example, the folklorist Barre Toelken describes the Navajo as living in circular times, which is echoed and re-enforced in their sense of space, the traditional circular or multi-sided hogan. Lacking the European mechanistic devices of marking time (clocks, watches, calendars), they depended on the cycles of nature: sunrise to sunset, winter to summer. Their stories and histories are not marked by decades and centuries, but remain close in, as they circle around the constant rhythms of the natural world.
Recent discussions extend the relevant time scale from the very small (such as ) to deep time, challenging the simple division of past, present, and future. Folklore scholarship distinguishes between traditions linked to annual cycles, including Christmas and May Day, and those tied to life-cycle rituals such as baptisms, weddings, and funerals. Narrative traditions operate within non-linear systems: performers adapt a story across successive tellings and apprentices introduce new variations in response to audience, setting, and purpose.
The oral tradition of jokes as an example is found across all cultures, and is documented as early as 1600 B.C. Whereas the subject matter varies widely to reflect its cultural context, the form of the joke remains remarkably consistent. According to the theories of cybernetics and its secondary field of autopoiesis, this can be attributed to a closed loop auto-correction built into the system maintenance of oral folklore. Auto-correction in oral folklore was first articulated by the folklorist Walter Anderson in his monograph on the King and the Abbot published 1923. To explain the stability of the narrative, Anderson posited a “double redundancy”, in which the performer has heard the story from multiple other performers, and has himself performed it multiple times. This provides a feedback loop between repetitions at both levels to retain the essential elements of the tale, while at the same time allowing for the incorporation of new elements.
Another characteristic of cybernetics and autopoiesis is self-generation within a system. Once again looking to jokes, we find new jokes generated in response to events on a continuing basis. The folklorist Bill Ellis accessed internet humor message boards to observe in real time the creation of following the 9/11 terrorist attack in the United States. "Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful.", that is before they have successfully mapped into the traditional joke format.
Second-order cybernetics states that the system observer affects the systemic interplay; this interplay has long been recognized as problematic by folklorists. The act of observing and noting any folklore performance raises without exception the performance from an unconscious habitual acting within a group, to and for themselves, to a performance for an outsider. "Naturally the researcher's presence changes things, in the way that any new entrant to a social setting changes things. When people of different backgrounds, agendas, and resources interact, there are social risks, and where representation and publication are taking place, these risks are exacerbated..."
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."
The legislation complemented federal preservation programs that framed cultural diversity as a national resource and linked folkloristic research with public policy.
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.
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.
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 Volkskunde to include in their collection. In Scandinavia, intellectuals were also searching for their authentic Teutons and had labeled their studies Folkeminde (Danish) or Folkermimne (Norwegian). 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".
Aarne–Thompson and the historic–geographic method
By the beginning of the 20th century these collections had grown to include artifacts from around the world and across several centuries. A system to organize and categorize them became necessary. Antti Aarne published a first classification system for folktales in 1910. It was later expanded into the Aarne–Thompson classification system by Stith Thompson and remains the standard classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. As the number of classified artifacts grew, similarities were noted in items which had been collected from very different geographic regions, ethnic groups and epochs.
Great Depression and the Federal Writers' Project
Then came the 1930s and the worldwide Great Depression. In the United States the Federal Writers' Project was established as part of the WPA. Its goal was to offer paid employment to thousands of unemployed writers by engaging them in various cultural projects around the country. These white collar workers were sent out as field workers to collect the oral folklore of their regions, including stories, songs, idioms and dialects. The most famous of these collections is the Slave Narrative Collection. The folklore collected under the auspices of the Federal Writers Project during these years continues to offer a goldmine of primary source materials for folklorists and other cultural historians.
German folklore in the Third Reich
In Europe during these same decades, folklore studies were drifting in a different direction. Throughout the 19th century folklore had been tied to romantic ideals of the soul of the people, in which folk tales and folksongs recounted the lives and exploits of ethnic folk heroes. Folklore chronicled the mythical origins of different peoples across Europe and established the beginnings of nationalism. By the first decade of the 20th century there were scholarly societies as well as individual folklore positions within universities, academies, and museums.
In the 1920s nationalism in several European countries, including Germany, coopted folklore studies and absorbed them into emerging Nazi ideology. The vocabulary of German Volkskunde such as Volk (folk), Rasse (race), Stamm (tribe), and Erbe (heritage) were frequently referenced by the Nazi Party. Their expressed goal was to re-establish what they perceived as the former purity of the Germanic peoples of Europe. The German anti-Nazi philosopher Ernst Bloch was one of the main analysts and critics of this ideology. "Nazi ideology presented racial purity as the means to heal the wounds of the suffering German state following World War I. Hitler painted the ethnic heterogeneity of Germany as a major reason for the country's economic and political weakness, and he promised to restore a German realm based on a cleansed, and hence strong, German people. Racial or ethnic purity" was the goal of the Nazis, intent on forging a Greater Germanic Reich.
After World War II
Following World War II, the discussion continued about whether to align folklore studies with literature or ethnology. Within this discussion, many voices were actively trying to identify the optimal approach to take in the analysis of folklore artifacts. One major change had already been initiated by Franz Boas. Culture was no longer viewed in evolutionary terms; each culture has its own integrity and completeness, and was not progressing either toward wholeness or toward fragmentation. Individual artifacts must have meaning within the culture and for individuals themselves in order to assume cultural relevance and assure continued transmission. Because the European folklore movement had been primarily oriented toward oral traditions, a new term, folklife, was introduced to represent the full range of traditional culture. This included music, dance, storytelling, crafts, costume, foodways and more.
Global folklore studies
Folklore studies and nationalism in Turkey
Folklore interest sparked in Turkey around the second half of the nineteenth century when the need to determine a national language came about. Their writings consisted of vocabulary and grammatical rule from the Arabic and Persian language. Although the Ottoman intellectuals were not affected by the communication gap, in 1839, the Tanzimat reform introduced a change to Ottoman Empire literature. A new generation of writers with contact to the West, especially France, noticed the importance of literature and its role in the development of institutions. Following the models set by Westerners, the new generation of writers returned to Turkey bringing the ideologies of novels, short stories, plays and journalism with them. These new forms of literature were set to enlighten the people of Turkey, influencing political and social change within the country. However, the lack of understanding for the language of their writings limited their success in enacting change.
Folklore studies in Chile
Chilean cultural historians note that systematic folklore research took shape in the late nineteenth century as scholars documented traditions among rural and Indigenous communities. Ramón Laval, Julio Vicuña, Rodolfo Lenz, José Toribio Medina, Tomás Guevara, Félix de Augusta, and Aukanaw, among others, generated an important documentary and critical corpus around oral literature, autochthonous languages, regional dialects, and peasant and indigenous customs. They published, mainly during the first decades of the 20th century, linguistic and philological studies, dictionaries, comparative studies between the national folklores of Ibero-America, compilations of stories, poetry, and religious traditions. In 1909, at the initiative of Laval, Vicuña and Lenz, the Chilean Folklore Society was founded, the first of its kind in America. Two years later, it would merge with the recently created Chilean Society of History and Geography.
21st century
Digital communication networks have reshaped how folklore is recorded, circulated, and archived, even as the profession expands through new publications and institutional programs.
Globalization
Folklorists characterize the United States as a society shaped by successive migrations that generate overlapping cultural networks. Alan Dundes argues that documenting these interactions is vital for understanding how ethnic communities express distinct worldviews within a pluralist setting.
Computerized databases and big data
Once folklore artifacts have been recorded on the World Wide Web, they can be collected in large electronic databases and even moved into collections of big data. This compels folklorists to find new ways to collect and data curation these data. Along with these new challenges, electronic data collections provide the opportunity to ask different questions, and combine with other academic fields to explore new aspects of traditional culture. Computational humor is just one new field that has taken up the traditional oral forms of jokes and anecdotes for study, holding its first dedicated conference in 1996. This takes us beyond gathering and categorizing large joke collections. Scholars are using computers firstly to recognize jokes in context, and further to attempt to create jokes using artificial intelligence.
Binary thinking of the computer age
Digital-era scholarship continues to employ twentieth-century structuralist models that interpret folklore through binary pairs. Analysts use these frameworks to map tensions between dynamicism and conservatism, anecdote and myth, process and structure, performance and tradition, improvisation and repetition, variation and traditionalism, and repetition and innovation. Building on this approach, Richard Bauman argues that the core of folklore lies in the interplay between tradition and creativity. Dorothy Noyes similarly describes folk groups as ongoing negotiations between fluid networks of relationship and the imagined communities that stabilize allegiance.
Linear and non-linear concepts of time
Western folklore scholarship long reflected a belief in linear progress expressed through sequential causality and improvement. Proverbs such as "You reap what you sow" and "A stitch in time saves nine" illustrate this temporal orientation. Early practitioners of the historic-geographic school applied the model by reconstructing proto-texts from recorded fragments and mapping variants through Spacetime grids.
Cybernetics
Cybernetics emerged in the twentieth century as the study of system functions and processes. Its goal is to identify and understand closed signaling loops in which an action generates environmental change and subsequent feedback that initiates further activity. The field expanded from mechanistic and biological systems to cultural and societal applications, including folklore. When scholars decouple folklore from purely linear models of tradition, they examine how performances sustain themselves across generations through adaptive feedback.
Scholarly organizations and journals
Notable folklorists
For a list of notable folklorists, go to the category list.
Associated theories and methods
See also
Notes
Citations
(2025). 9789916217986, Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. ISBN 9789916217986
(1998). 9780874212396, Utah State University Press. ISBN 9780874212396
(1994). 9780253318213, Indiana University Press. ISBN 9780253318213
(1976). 9780674330207, Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674330207
(1994). 9780253318213, Indiana University Press. ISBN 9780253318213
(2025). 9780252071096, University of Illinois Press. ISBN 9780252071096
(2025). 9780874216530, University Press of Colorado. ISBN 9780874216530
External links
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