folkloristics
Sign in to savebranch of anthropology devoted to the study of folklore
Key facts
- Field
- Cultural anthropology , Anthropology , Ethnology , Cultural studies , Literary studies , Musicology , Sociology
- Origin
- Early 19th century Europe
- Key people
- Brothers Grimm , Franz Boas , Alan Dundes , Richard Dorson , Alan Lomax
- Purpose
- Study and preservation of Folklore , Oral tradition , Folk culture , Cultural heritage , and Traditional knowledge through Ethnography , Field research , and Archival research . Development of concepts like Folk process , Public folklore , and Folklife
via Wikipedia infobox
Article
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.