Izvorni znanstveni članak
Folk culture and the people: Some problems of modern conceptualization and research
Snježana Čolić
Sažetak
The basic question this article
poses is: what do the concepts
of people, folk culture and folklore
mean today, and can they be
operationalized for the purpose
of modern research work? A short
analysis of the disciplines that
mostly treated these subjects
(ethnology, folkloristics) shows
that they were not defined from
the social aspect and that as time
passed the basic concept (people)
was reduced to only one social
stratum — the peasants. This can to
a certain extent be explained by
the historic genesis of the
disciplines themselves (ethnology
and folkloristics), which started
to develop in the nineteenth
century whith the appearance of
new national cultures. However,
the main reason for this reduction
is a static approach to the
phenomena. Neglecting the
diachronic moment necessarily
narrows down the grasp of
relations and processes so the fact
that the cultures of some groups
(strata) interfered with each other
was often overlooked. Since a
people is not a culturally
homogeneous community but is
formed by different social groups
that can be very heterogeneous,
research should be directed in that
direction. Therefore, the author
considers that the concept of
subculture would be of great
heuristic value when analysing the
concepts of people and folk culture
and would help to describe
differences both among separate
subcultures, and among the separate
units of the same subculture. In
that way the concept of people,
earlier used in ethnological and
folkloristic research, should be
replaced by the concept of the
(small) group of immediate contact
based on local communities and
limited by the framework of
personal social relations. This
shift from people to (small) group
gives a new impulse to ethnological
and folkloristic research because
it makes urban environments the
subject of modern ethnological,
anthropological and folkloristic
research, as well.
Ključne riječi
Hrčak ID:
119724
URI
Datum izdavanja:
8.6.1990.
Posjeta: 2.303 *