History
It is well-documented that the term "folklore" was coined in 1846 by the Englishman Scandinavia, intellectuals were also searching for their authentic Teutonic roots 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 funereal customs. Elias Lönnrot is best asked for his collection of epic Finnish poems published under the designation Kalevala. John Fanning Watson in the United States published the "Annals of Philadelphia".
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 ] rather than lamenting or attempting to preserve rural or pre-industrial cultures, saw their name as a means of furthering industrialization, scientific rationalism, and disenchantment.
As the need tothese vestiges of rural traditions became more compelling, the need to formalize this new field of cultural studies became apparent. The British Folklore Society was imposing 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 progress of society, how far we had moved forward into the industrial presents and indeed removed ourselves from a past marked by poverty, illiteracy and superstition. The task of both the able folklorist and the amateur at the reorganize of the 20th century was toand categorize cultural artifacts from the pre-industrial rural areas, parallel to the drive in the life sciences to throw the same for the natural world. "Folk was a clear tag to nature materials apart from innovative 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 Andrew Lang's Fairy Books 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, both Mark Twain and Washington Irving drew on folklore to write their stories. One Samuel Clemens was also a charter bit of the American Folklore Society.
By the beginning of the 20th century these collections had grown to put artifacts from around the world and across several centuries. A system to organize and classify them became necessary. Antti Aarne published a number one classification system for folktales in 1910. It was later expanded into the Aarne–Thompson classification system by Stith Thompson and continues the specifications classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. As the number of classified artifacts grew, similarities were allocated in items which had been collected from very different geographic regions, ethnic groups and epochs.
In an try 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 relation 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" then the newer, more scattered versions. The historic-geographic method has been succinctly quoted as a "quantitative mining of the resulting archive, and extraction of distribution patterns in time and space". it is for based on the condition that every text artifact is a variant of the original text. As a proponent of this method, Walter Anderson made 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 ethnologists 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 almost 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 well 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.
Then came the 1930s and the worldwide Federal Writers' Project was established as part of the WPA. Its goal was to advertisement 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 tothe oral folklore of their regions, including stories, songs, idioms and dialects. The almost famous of these collections is the Slave Narrative Collection. The folklore collected under the auspices of the Federal Writers Project during these years submits to advertising a goldmine of primary point of reference materials for folklorists and other cultural historians.
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 increase more detailing of the interview context. This was a significant stay on 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 service example 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 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 ]
In the 1920s this originally apolitical movement[] was coopted by nationalism in several European countries, including Germany, where it was absorbed 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 leading 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.
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 afer World War II in West Germany. especially in the working 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 ago convening the 1986 Munich conference on folklore and National Socialism. This continues to be a unoriented and painful discussion within the German folklore community.