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10 - Colonial Legacies in European Folklore Studies
- Edited by Marjet Brolsma, Alex Drace-Francis, Krisztina Lajosi-Moore, Enno Maessen, Marleen Rensen, Jan Rock, Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez, Guido Snel
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- Book:
- Networks, Narratives and Nations
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 16 November 2022
- Print publication:
- 11 July 2022, pp 127-136
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Summary
Abstract
Folklore studies are rightly traced from the ideas of Herder and the Grimm brothers and are usually seen as a kind of domestic ethnography. This chapter explores a wider non-European dimension, both in the conceptualization of folklore studies and in the continued engagement of folklorists with non-western cultures. Referencing Irish and Italian case studies, it shows how the research field carries its own colonial legacies.
Keywords: folklore; folklife; ethnography; colonialism
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.
18 - Celebrations and the Rituals of Life
- from PART II - People, Culture and Communities
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- By Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, Professor of Irish Language and Literature, Concurrent Professor of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame
- Edited by Eugenio F. Biagini, University of Cambridge, Mary E. Daly, University College Dublin
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland
- Published online:
- 09 August 2018
- Print publication:
- 27 April 2017, pp 297-311
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Summary
Introduction
To study the celebrations and rituals of life is to focus on the collective, the ‘people’, the force of tradition. ‘Traditional’ cultures hence are often characterised by the notion of the commons – farmers sharing their seeds and storytellers sharing their tales – though traditions are no more likely to be evenly shared than other resources. Often it was only through the legal criterion of delinquency that individual agency in popular culture was identified: the background to a sensational murder trial in 1895, for example, was the ‘collective’, ‘traditional’, belief in fairy abduction. The antiquaries, travel writers, and proto-folklorists and proto-anthropologists who in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ‘discovered’ and described popular culture indeed saw a collective phenomenon. As scientific fields, folklore and anthropology were conceptualised in the German-speaking lands in the 1770s and 1780s ‘as part of the Enlightenment endeavour to create some order in the growing body of data on peoples, nations or Völker in the world of that era’. These data contributed both to the study of the inhabitants of a single polity (Volkskunde) and to the comparative study of peoples (Völkerkunde). But it is in the Herderian Volksgeist and in its Romantic expansion that we find the key notion that is at the core of the later development of these fields.
Herder's location of cultural authenticity in the traditions peculiar to each people – expressed in his anthology of Volkslieder (1778–9) – thus was an essential development: the oral artistic genres of folksong and folktale transcended the material conditions of rural life – as ‘art’. The word ‘folk-lore’ dates from 1846 and was coined by William John Thoms who, in a letter to the antiquarian journal The Athenaeum, sought the editor's aid ‘in garnering the few ears which are remaining, scattered over that field from which our forefathers might have gathered a goodly crop’. Raymond Williams sees the genesis of the ‘folk’ term and its derivatives in English in the context of the new urban industrial society, contending that it had the effect of ‘backdating all elements of popular culture’, in contradistinction to modern forms ‘either of a radical and working-class or of a commercial kind’.
13 - Folk culture
- from Part II - Cultural practices and cultural forms
- Edited by Joe Cleary, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Claire Connolly, Cardiff University
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture
- Published online:
- 28 May 2006
- Print publication:
- 20 January 2005, pp 225-244
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Summary
Introduction
This chapter surveys current and past definitions and theories of Irish folklore. It relates our understanding of folklore and folklife to the ways in which these knowledges have developed and become institutionalised and argues for the special place of folklore studies in our understanding of Irish subaltern culture more generally.
In practice, ‘folk culture’ usually distinguishes those aspects of popular culture which have long been established in agrarian society and are associated with a particular way of life – especially that of peasants – from more recent and non-rural forms. The latter, of course, may be traditional too, but are usually seen as being a product of modern rather than traditional society. Folk culture in another sense refers to an ideal of authenticity, as in the attribution by the Romantic thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau to nature of various social phenomena supposedly uncorrupted by culture: the ‘noble savage’ and then the peasant challenged the decadence of aristocratic society. Johann Gottfried von Herder explicitly contrasted natural writing (Naturpoesie) with the artifice of civilisation (Kunstdichtung). Ireland in the same period sawa heated Irish controversy over James Macpherson’s appropriation of the common Gaelic Ossianic poems. The Ossian poems prefigured European romanticism with their wild native energy. To Herder these poems, along with Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) by Bishop Percy (a friend and mentor to the pioneering editor and translator of Irish poetry, Charlotte Brooke), were the epitome of Naturpoesie.