Joep Leerssen stresses the seminal importance of Herder's cultural relativism to European “national awakenings,” and points out that “all of the Romantic (and later) preoccupation with popular culture, from the Grimms’ collection of fairytales to the birth of folklore studies” is due to it. This cultural relativism was informed by the non-European world. Unlike Vico, who showed little interest in exotic cultures, and Rousseau and philosophes such as Montesquieu whose interest in them was more philosophical than ethnographic, Herder sought out and was well-read in non-western ethnographic accounts.

The concept of oral tradition, central to folklore studies, originally emerged from the field of theology, but took an ethnographic turn early in the eighteenth century through its application to indigenous American societies. The most important example is Mœurs des sauvages amériquains, compareés aux moeurs des premiers temps (Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times, 1724), by the Jesuit missionary Joseph-François Lafitau, in which he stressed how the sophisticated arts, laws and customs of the Iroquois were transmitted by oral tradition.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's ideas on language were an important influence on the German scholars who were to the fore in official Russian expeditions to Siberia in the eighteenth century. Gerhard Friedrich Müller, who had read Lafitau, wrote of the new research field of historia gentium, “history of peoples,” and in 1740 coined the term Völlker-Beschreibung, the “description of peoples.” August Ludwig Schlözer, his junior colleague, brought his research programme to central Europe, where new terms emerged in the 1760s, 1770s and 1780s: Ethnographia, Völlkerkunde, Ethnographie, Ethnologia and Volkskunde. The difference between Volkskunde and Volkerkunde was between the historical and descriptive study of one's own people and the comparative study of many, or of all, peoples.