Folklore studies (also known as folkloristics, tradition studies or folk life studies in the UK) is the branch of anthropology devoted to the study of folklore . This term, along with its synonyms, gained currency in the 1950s to distinguish the academic study of traditional culture from the folklore artifacts themselves. It became established as a field across both Europe and North America, coordinating with Volkskunde ( German ), folkeminner ( Norwegian ), and folkminnen ( Swedish ), among others.
167-474: Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm (4 January 1785 – 20 September 1863), also known as Ludwig Karl , was a German author, linguist, philologist, jurist, and folklorist . He formulated Grimm's law of linguistics, and was the co-author of the Deutsches Wörterbuch , the author of Deutsche Mythologie , and the editor of Grimms' Fairy Tales . He was the older brother of Wilhelm Grimm ; together, they were
334-419: A "quantitative mining of the resulting archive, and extraction of distribution patterns in time and space". It is based on the assumption that every text artifact is a variant of the original text. As a proponent of this method, Walter Anderson proposed 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
501-453: A Linear World", Donald Fixico describes an alternate concept of time. "Indian thinking" involves "'seeing' things from a perspective emphasizing that circles and cycles are central to world and that all things are related within the Universe." He then suggests that "the concept of time for Indian people has been such a continuum that time becomes less relevant and the rotation of life or seasons of
668-463: A certain bitterness of feeling afterwards sprang up between Grimm and Rask, after Rask refused to consider the value of Grimm's views when they clashed with his own. Grimm's monumental dictionary of the German Language , the Deutsches Wörterbuch , was started in 1838 and first published in 1854. The Brothers anticipated it would take 10 years and encompass some six to seven volumes. However, it
835-515: A classical ethnographic tradition which includes authors such as Herodotus and Julius Caesar . The book begins (chapters 1–27) with a description of the lands, laws, and customs of the various tribes. Later chapters focus on descriptions of particular tribes, beginning with those who lived closest to the Roman empire, and ending with a description of those who lived on the shores of the Baltic Sea , such as
1002-695: A context which is foreign to the original tradition." This definition, offered by the folklorist Hermann Bausinger, does not discount the validity of meaning expressed in these "second hand" traditions. Many Walt Disney films and products belong in this category of folklorism; fairy tales become animated film characters, stuffed animals and bed linens. These manifestations of folklore traditions have their own significance for their audience. Fakelore refers to artifacts which might be termed pseudo-folklore , manufactured items claiming to be traditional. The folklorist Richard Dorson coined this word, clarifying it in his book "Folklore and Fakelore". Current thinking within
1169-461: A culture, not just the oral traditions. Folk process is used to describe the refinement and creative change of artifacts by community members within the folk tradition that defines the folk process. Professionals within this field, regardless of the other words they use, consider themselves to be folklorists. Other terms which might be confused with folklore are popular culture and vernacular culture . However, pop culture tends to be in demand for
1336-503: 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 national pride . By the first decade of the 20th century there were scholarly societies as well as individual folklore positions within universities, academies, and museums. However,
1503-548: A difficult and painful discussion within the German folklore community. Following World War II, the discussion continued about whether to align folklore studies with literature or ethnology. Within this discussion, many voices were actively trying to identify the optimal approach to take in the analysis of folklore artifacts. One major change had already been initiated by Franz Boas. Culture was no longer viewed in evolutionary terms; each culture has its own integrity and completeness, and
1670-504: A few days later that Tacitus had spoken "with all the majesty which characterizes his usual style of oratory". A lengthy absence from politics and law followed while he wrote the Histories and the Annals . In 112 to 113, he held the highest civilian governorship, that of the Roman province of Asia in western Anatolia , recorded in the inscription found at Mylasa mentioned above. A passage in
1837-680: A job at the Kassel library , and Jacob was made second librarian under Volkel in 1816. Upon the death of Volkel in 1828, the brothers both expected promotion, and they were dissatisfied when the role of the first librarian was given to Rommel, the keeper of the archives. Consequently, they moved the following year to the University of Göttingen , where Jacob was appointed professor and librarian, and Wilhelm under-librarian. Jacob Grimm lectured on legal antiquities, historical grammar , literary history , and diplomatics , explained Old German poems, and commented on
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#17330848499902004-413: A lawyer and as an orator ; his skill in public speaking ironically counterpoints his cognomen , Tacitus ("silent"). He served in the provinces from c. 89 to c. 93 , either in command of a legion or in a civilian post. He and his property survived Domitian 's reign of terror (81–96), but the experience left him jaded and perhaps ashamed at his own complicity, instilling in him
2171-437: A life cycle of linear time (ex. baptisms, weddings, funerals). This needs to be expanded to other traditions of oral lore. For folk narrative is NOT a linear chain of isolated tellings, going from one single performance on our time-space grid to the next single performance. Instead it fits better into a non-linear system, where one performer varies the story from one telling to the next, and the performer's understudy starts to tell
2338-426: A limited time, mass-produced and communicated using mass media. Individually, these tend to be labeled fads , and disappear as quickly as they appear. The term vernacular culture differs from folklore in its overriding emphasis on a specific locality or region. For example, vernacular architecture denotes the standard building form of a region, using the materials available and designed to address functional needs of
2505-465: 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
2672-510: A modern academic discipline, folklore studies straddles the space between the social sciences and the humanities . The study of folklore originated in Europe in the first half of the 19th century with a focus on the oral folklore of the rural peasant populations. The " Kinder- und Hausmärchen " of the Brothers Grimm , first published 1812, is the best known collection of the verbal folklore of
2839-499: A negative feedback loop at the next iteration. Both performer and audience are acting within the "Twin Laws" of folklore transmission , in which novelty and innovation is balanced by the conservative forces of the familiar. Even further, the presence of a folklore observer at a performance of any kind will influence the performance itself in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Because folklore is firstly an act of communication between parties, it
3006-535: A new action. The field has expanded from a focus on mechanistic and biological systems to an expanded recognition that these theoretical constructs can also be applied to many cultural and societal systems, including folklore. Once divorced from a model of tradition that works solely on a linear time scale (i.e. moving from one folklore performance to the next), we begin to ask different questions about how these folklore artifacts maintain themselves over generations and centuries. The oral tradition of jokes as an example
3173-447: A social group and to collect their lore, preferably in situ. Once collected, these data need to be documented and preserved to enable further access and study. The documented lore is then available to be analyzed and interpreted by folklorists and other cultural historians, and can become the basis for studies of either individual customs or comparative studies. There are multiple venues, be they museums, journals or folk festivals to present
3340-455: A study of homoerotic subtext in American football and anal-erotic elements in German folklore, were not always appreciated and involved Dundes in several major folklore studies controversies during his career. True to each of these approaches, and any others one might want to employ (political, women's issues, material culture, urban contexts, non-verbal text, ad infinitum), whichever perspective
3507-666: A systematic and pioneering way since the late 19th century. In the work of compiling the popular traditions of the Chilean people and of the original peoples, they stood out, not only in the study of national folklore, but also in Latin America. Ramón Laval, Julio Vicuña, Rodolfo Lenz, José Toribio Medina, Tomás Guevara, Félix de Augusta, and Aukanaw, among others, generated an important documentary and critical corpus around oral literature , autochthonous languages, regional dialects, and peasant and indigenous customs. They published, mainly during
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#17330848499903674-461: A trove of cultures rubbing elbows with each other, mixing and matching into exciting combinations as new generations come up. It is in the study of their folklife that we begin to understand the cultural patterns underlying the different ethnic groups. Language and customs provide a window into their view of reality. "The study of varying worldviews among ethnic and national groups in America remains one of
3841-399: A wide-variety of sometimes synonymous terms. Folklore was the original term used in this discipline. Its synonym, folklife , came into circulation in the second half of the 20th century, at a time when some researchers felt that the term folklore was too closely tied exclusively to oral lore. The new term folklife , along with its synonym folk culture , is meant to include all aspects of
4008-417: Is dagas. ) The appearance of Rask's Old English grammar was probably the primary impetus for Grimm to recast his work from the beginning. Rask was also the first to clearly formulate the laws of sound-correspondence in the different languages, especially in the vowels (previously ignored by etymologists ). The Grammar was continued in three volumes, treating principally derivation, composition and syntax ,
4175-589: Is a social group which includes two or more persons with common traits, who express their shared identity through distinctive traditions. "Folk is a flexible concept which can refer to a nation as in American folklore or to a single family. " This expanded social definition of folk expands the material considered to be folklore artifacts to include "things people make with words (verbal lore), things they make with their hands (material lore), and things they make with their actions (customary lore)". The folklorist studies
4342-458: Is best known for his collection of epic Finnish poems published under the title 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 lore of the rural folk would be lost. It
4509-513: Is chosen will spotlight some features and leave other characteristics in the shadows. With the passage in 1976 of the American Folklife Preservation Act, folklore studies in the United States came of age. This legislation follows in the footsteps of other legislation designed to safeguard more tangible aspects of our national heritage worthy of protection. This law also marks a shift in our national awareness; it gives voice to
4676-441: Is dedicated to Fabius Iustus, a consul in 102 AD. Tacitus's writings are known for their dense prose that seldom glosses the facts, in contrast to the style of some of his contemporaries, such as Plutarch . When he writes about a near defeat of the Roman army in Annals I,63, he does so with brevity of description rather than embellishment. In most of his writings, he keeps to a chronological narrative order, only seldom outlining
4843-420: Is found across all cultures, and is documented as early as 1600 B.C. Whereas the subject matter varies widely to reflect its cultural context, the form of the joke remains remarkably consistent. According to the theories of cybernetics and its secondary field of autopoiesis , this can be attributed to a closed loop auto-correction built into the system maintenance of oral folklore. Auto-correction in oral folklore
5010-451: Is incomplete without inclusion of the reception in its analysis. The understanding of folklore performance as communication leads directly into modern linguistic theory and communication studies . Words both reflect and shape our worldview. Oral traditions, particularly in their stability over generations and even centuries, provide significant insight into the ways in which insiders of a culture see, understand, and express their responses to
5177-593: Is just a partial list of the fields of study related to folklore studies, all of which are united by a common interest in subject matter. It is well-documented that the term folklore was coined in 1846 by the Englishman William Thoms . He fabricated it for use in an article published in the August 22, 1846 issue of The Athenaeum . Thoms consciously replaced the contemporary terminology of popular antiquities or popular literature with this new word. Folklore
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5344-548: Is possible that this refers to a brother—if Cornelius was indeed his father. The friendship between the younger Pliny and Tacitus leads some scholars to conclude that they were both the offspring of wealthy provincial families. The province of his birth remains unknown, though various conjectures suggest Gallia Belgica , Gallia Narbonensis , or Northern Italy . His marriage to the daughter of Narbonensian senator Gnaeus Julius Agricola implies that he came from Gallia Narbonensis. Tacitus's dedication to Lucius Fabius Justus in
5511-611: Is taken. His life is best studied in his own Selbstbiographie , in vol. I of the Kleinere Schriften . There is also a brief memoir by Karl Goedeke in Göttinger Professoren (Gotha (Perthes), 1872). Folklorist A 1982 UNESCO document titled "Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore" declared a global need to establish provisions protecting folklore from varying dangers identified in
5678-611: Is the Jewish Christmas Tree , a point of some contention among American Jews. Public sector folklore was introduced into the American Folklore Society in the early 1970s. These public folklorists work in museums and cultural agencies to identify and document the diverse folk cultures and folk artists in their region. Beyond this, they provide performance venues for the artists, with the twin objectives of entertainment and education about different ethnic groups. Given
5845-571: Is the later historian whose work most closely approaches him in style. Tacitus makes use of the official sources of the Roman state: the Acta Senatus (the minutes of the sessions of the Senate) and the Acta Diurna (a collection of the acts of the government and news of the court and capital). He also read collections of emperors' speeches, such as those of Tiberius and Claudius. He is generally seen as
6012-450: Is uncertainty about when Tacitus wrote Dialogus de oratoribus . Many characteristics set it apart from the other works of Tacitus, so that its authenticity has at various times been questioned. It is likely to be early work, indebted to the author's rhetorical training, since its style imitates that of the foremost Roman orator Cicero . It lacks (for example) the incongruities that are typical of his mature historical works. The Dialogus
6179-463: Is well known: inde consilium mihi ... tradere ... sine ira et studio, quorum causas procul habeo. my purpose is ... to relate ... without either anger or zeal, motives from which I am far removed. There has been much scholarly discussion about Tacitus's "neutrality". Throughout his writing, he is preoccupied with the balance of power between the Senate and the emperors , and the increasing corruption of
6346-447: The Dialogus may indicate a connection with Spain, and his friendship with Pliny suggests origins in northern Italy. No evidence exists, however, that Pliny's friends from northern Italy knew Tacitus, nor do Pliny's letters hint that the two men had a common background. Pliny Book 9, Letter 23, reports that when asked whether he was Italian or provincial, he gave an unclear answer and so
6513-712: The Germania of Tacitus . Grimm joined other academics, known as the Göttingen Seven , who signed a protest against the King of Hanover 's abrogation of the liberal constitution which had been established some years before. As a result, he was dismissed from his professorship and banished from the Kingdom of Hanover in 1837. He returned to Kassel with his brother, who had also signed the protest. They remained there until 1840 when they accepted King Frederick William IV 's invitation to move to
6680-793: The Histories (Latin: Historiae )—examine the reigns of the emperors Tiberius , Claudius , Nero , and those who reigned in the Year of the Four Emperors (69 AD). These two works span the history of the Roman Empire from the death of Augustus (14 AD) to the death of Domitian (96 AD), although there are substantial lacunae in the surviving texts. Tacitus's other writings discuss oratory (in dialogue format, see Dialogus de oratoribus ), Germania (in De origine et situ Germanorum ), and
6847-513: The Agricola , Tacitus asserts that he wishes to speak about the years of Domitian, Nerva and Trajan. In the Histories the scope has changed; Tacitus says that he will deal with the age of Nerva and Trajan at a later time. Instead, he will cover the period from the civil wars of the Year of the Four Emperors and end with the despotism of the Flavians . Only the first four books and twenty-six chapters of
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7014-464: The Annals fixes 116 as the terminus post quem of his death, which may have been as late as 125 or even 130. It seems that he survived both Pliny (died c. 113 ) and Trajan (died 117). It remains unknown whether Tacitus had any children. The Augustan History reports that Emperor Marcus Claudius Tacitus (r. 275–276) claimed him for an ancestor and provided for the preservation of his works, but this story may be fraudulent, like much of
7181-477: The Augustan History . Five works ascribed to Tacitus have survived (albeit with gaps), the most substantial of which are the Annals and the Histories . This canon (with approximate dates) consists of: The Annals and the Histories , published separately, were meant to form a single edition of thirty books. Although Tacitus wrote the Histories before the Annals , the events in the Annals precede
7348-599: The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities is underway to update the Deutsches Wörterbuch to modern academic standards. Volumes A–F were planned for completion in 2012 by the Language Research Centre at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the University of Göttingen . The first work Jacob Grimm published, Über den altdeutschen Meistergesang (1811),
7515-459: The Ciceronian period , where sentences were usually the length of a paragraph and artfully constructed with nested pairs of carefully matched sonorous phrases, this is short and to the point. But it is also very individual. Note the three different ways of saying and in the first line ( -que , et , ac ), and especially the matched second and third lines. They are parallel in sense but not in sound;
7682-511: The Fenni . Tacitus had written a similar, albeit shorter, piece in his Agricola (chapters 10–13). The Agricola (written c. 98 ) recounts the life of Gnaeus Julius Agricola, an eminent Roman general and Tacitus's father-in-law; it also covers, briefly, the geography and ethnography of ancient Britain . As in the Germania , Tacitus favorably contrasts the liberty of the native Britons with
7849-601: 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 version 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" than the newer, more scattered versions. The historic-geographic method has been succinctly described as
8016-509: The Histories . The second half of book 16 is missing, ending with the events of 66. It is not known whether Tacitus completed the work; he died before he could complete his planned histories of Nerva and Trajan, and no record survives of the work on Augustus and the beginnings of the Roman Empire , with which he had planned to finish his work. The Annals is one of the earliest secular historical records to mention Jesus of Nazareth , which Tacitus does in connection with Nero's persecution of
8183-537: The Histories ; together they form a continuous narrative from the death of Augustus (14) to the death of Domitian (96). Though most has been lost, what remains is an invaluable record of the era. The first half of the Annals survived in a single manuscript from Corvey Abbey in Germany, and the second half in a single manuscript from Monte Cassino in Italy; it is remarkable that they survived at all. In an early chapter of
8350-515: The Reinhart Fuchs in 1834. His first contribution to mythology was the first volume of an edition of the Eddaic songs, undertaken jointly with his brother, and was published in 1815. However, this work was not followed by any others on the subject. The first edition of his Deutsche Mythologie (German Mythology) appeared in 1835. This work covered the whole range of the subject, attempting to trace
8517-687: The Romance languages is founded entirely on Grimm's methods, which have had a profound influence on the wider study of the Indo-European languages in general. Jacob is recognized for enunciating Grimm's law , the Germanic Sound Shift, which was first observed by the Danish philologist Rasmus Christian Rask . Grimm's law, also known as the "Rask-Grimm Rule" or the First Germanic Sound Shift,
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#17330848499908684-642: The Smithsonian Folklife Festival and many other folklife festivals around the country. Folklore interest sparked in Turkey around the second half of the nineteenth century when the need to determine a national language came about. Their writings consisted of vocabulary and grammatical rule from the Arabic and Persian language. Although the Ottoman intellectuals were not affected by the communication gap, in 1839,
8851-545: The Tanzimat reform introduced a change to Ottoman literature. A new generation of writers with contact to the West, especially France, noticed the importance of literature and its role in the development of institutions. Following the models set by Westerners, the new generation of writers returned to Turkey bringing the ideologies of novels, short stories, plays and journalism with them. These new forms of literature were set to enlighten
9018-559: The University of Berlin , where they both received professorships and were elected members of the Academy of Sciences. Grimm was not under any obligation to lecture, and seldom did so; he spent his time working with his brother on their dictionary project. During their time in Kassel, he regularly attended the meetings of the academy and read papers on varied subjects, including Karl Konrad Friedrich Wilhelm Lachmann , Friedrich Schiller , old age, and
9185-512: The University of Marburg where he studied law, a profession for which he had been intended by his father. His brother joined him at Marburg a year later, having just recovered from a severe illness, and likewise began the study of law. Jacob Grimm became inspired by the lectures of Friedrich Carl von Savigny , a noted expert of Roman law ; Wilhelm Grimm, in the preface to the Deutsche Grammatik (German Grammar), credits Savigny with giving
9352-454: The literature of the Middle Ages . Towards the close of the year, he returned to Kassel, where his mother and brother had settled after Wilhelm finished his studies. The following year, Jacob obtained a position in the war office with a small salary of 100 thalers . He complained that he had to exchange his stylish Paris suit for a stiff uniform and pigtail, but the role gave him spare time for
9519-718: The number of folk festivals held around the world, it becomes clear that the cultural multiplicity of a region is presented with pride and excitement. Public folklorists are increasingly being involved in economic and community development projects to elucidate and clarify differing world views of the social groups impacted by the projects. Once folklore artifacts have been recorded on the World Wide Web, they can be collected in large electronic databases and even moved into collections of big data . This compels folklorists to find new ways to collect and curate these data. Along with these new challenges, electronic data collections provide
9686-594: The persecution of Christians and one of the earliest extra-Biblical references to the crucifixion of Jesus . Details about the personal life of Tacitus are scarce. What little is known comes from scattered hints throughout his work, the letters of his friend and admirer Pliny the Younger , and an inscription found at Mylasa in Caria . Tacitus was born in 56 or 57 to an equestrian family. The place and date of his birth, as well as his praenomen (first name) are not known. In
9853-423: The traditional artifacts of a group and the groups within which these customs, traditions and beliefs are transmitted. Transmission of folk artifacts is necessary to their preservation over time outside of study by cultural archaeologist. Beliefs and customs are passed informally within a folk group mainly anonymously and in multiple variants. This is in contrast to high culture , characterized by recognition by
10020-645: 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
10187-600: The Christians . Tacitus wrote three works with a more limited scope: Agricola , a biography of his father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola; the Germania , a monograph on the lands and tribes of barbarian Germania; and the Dialogus , a dialogue on the art of rhetoric. The Germania ( Latin title: De Origine et situ Germanorum ) is an ethnographic work on the Germanic tribes outside the Roman Empire. The Germania fits within
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#173308484999010354-499: The European peasantry. This interest in stories, sayings and songs, i.e. verbal lore , continued throughout the 19th century and aligned the fledgling discipline of folklore studies with literature and mythology . By the turn into the 20th century, European folklorists remained focused on the oral folklore of the homogeneous peasant populations in their regions, while the American folklorists, led by Franz Boas , chose to consider Native American cultures in their research, and included
10521-416: The German language against the quasi-philosophical methods then in vogue. In 1822 the book appeared in a second edition (really a new work, for, as Grimm himself says in the preface, he had to "mow the first crop down to the ground"). The considerable gap between the two stages of Grimm's development of these editions is shown by the fact that the second volume addresses phonology in 600 pages – more than half
10688-447: The German language and those of the Getae , Thracians, Scythians, and other nations whose languages were known only through Greek and Latin authors. Grimm's results were later greatly modified by a wider range of available comparisons and improved methods of investigation. Many questions that he raised remain obscure due to the lack of surviving records of the languages, but his book's influence
10855-521: 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 main 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
11022-498: The Roman invasion were famous for their skill in oratory and had been subjugated by Rome. As a young man, Tacitus studied rhetoric in Rome to prepare for a career in law and politics; like Pliny, he may have studied under Quintilian ( c. 35 AD – c. 100 ). In 77 or 78, he married Julia Agricola, daughter of the famous general Agricola . Little is known of their domestic life, save that Tacitus loved hunting and
11189-538: The advent of the digital age , the question once again foregrounds itself concerning the relevance of folklore in this new century. Although the profession in folklore grows and the articles and books on folklore topics proliferate, the traditional role of the folklorist is indeed changing. The United States is known as a land of immigrants; with the exception of the first Indian nations , everyone originally came from somewhere else. Americans are proud of their cultural diversity . For folklorists, this country represents
11356-455: The amateur at the turn of the 20th century was to collect and classify cultural artifacts from the pre-industrial rural areas, parallel to the drive in the life sciences to do the same for the natural world. "Folk was a clear label to set materials apart from modern 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
11523-504: The atrocities which he ordered; with Domitian it was the chief part of our miseries to see and to be seen, to know that our sighs were being recorded... From his seat in the Senate , he became suffect consul in 97 during the reign of Nerva , being the first of his family to do so. During his tenure, he reached the height of his fame as an orator when he delivered the funeral oration for the famous veteran soldier Lucius Verginius Rufus . In
11690-584: The auspices of the Federal Writers Project during these years continues to offer a goldmine of primary source 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 include more detailing of
11857-718: The beliefs and customs of diverse cultural groups in their region. These positions are often affiliated with museums, libraries, arts organizations, public schools, historical societies, etc. The most renowned of these is the American Folklife Center at the Smithsonian, which hosts the Smithsonian Folklife Festival every summer in Washington, DC. Public folklore differentiates itself from the academic folklore supported by universities, in which collection, research and analysis are primary goals. The field of folklore studies uses
12024-604: The bigger picture, leaving the readers to construct that picture for themselves. Nonetheless, where he does use broad strokes, for example, in the opening paragraphs of the Annals , he uses a few condensed phrases which take the reader to the heart of the story. Tacitus's historical style owes some debt to Sallust . His historiography offers penetrating—often pessimistic—insights into the psychology of power politics, blending straightforward descriptions of events, moral lessons, and tightly focused dramatic accounts. Tacitus's own declaration regarding his approach to history ( Annals I,1)
12191-642: The brothers an awareness of science. Savigny's lectures also awakened in Jacob a love for historical and antiquarian investigation, which underlies all his work. It was in Savigny's library that Grimm first saw Bodmer 's edition of the Middle High German minnesingers and other early texts, which gave him a desire to study their language. At the beginning of 1805, he was invited by Savigny to Paris, to help him in his literary work. There Grimm strengthened his taste for
12358-547: The concept of a comparative Germanic grammar had been grasped by the Englishman George Hickes by the beginning of the 18th century, in his Thesaurus . Ten Kate in the Netherlands had made valuable contributions to the history and comparison of Germanic languages. Grimm himself did not initially intend to include all the languages in his Grammar , but he soon found that Old High German postulated Gothic , and that
12525-505: The constant rhythms of the natural world. Within the last decades our time scale has expanded from unimaginably small ( nanoseconds ) to unimaginably large ( deep time ). In comparison, our working concept of time as {past : present : future} looks almost quaint. How do we map "tradition" into this multiplicity of time scales? Folklore studies has already acknowledged this in the study of traditions which are either done in an annual cycle of circular time (ex. Christmas, May Day), or in
12692-691: The country's origins. He wished for a united Germany, and, like his brother, supported the Liberal movement for a constitutional monarchy and civil liberties, as demonstrated by their involvement in the Göttingen Seven protest . In the German revolution of 1848 , he was elected to the Frankfurt National Parliament . The people of Germany had demanded a constitution, so the Parliament, formed of elected members from various German states, met to form one. Grimm
12859-491: The customs and beliefs of the group. Or it can be performance for an outside group, in which the first goal is to set the performers apart from the audience. This analysis then goes beyond the artifact itself, be it dance, music or story-telling. It goes beyond the performers and their message. As part of performance studies, the audience becomes part of the performance. If any folklore performance strays too far from audience expectations, it will likely be brought back by means of
13026-667: The digital age, the binary thinking of the 20th century structuralists remains an important tool in the folklorist's toolbox. This does not mean that binary thinking was invented in recent times along with computers; only that we became aware of both the power and the limitations of the "either/or" construction. In folklore studies, the multiple binaries underlying much of the theoretical thinking have been identified – {dynamicism : conservatism}, {anecdote : myth}, {process : structure}, {performance : tradition}, {improvisation : repetition}, {variation : traditionalism}, {repetition : innovation}; not to overlook
13193-414: The discipline is that this term places undue emphasis on the origination of the artifact as a sign of authenticity of the tradition. Adjacently, the adjective folkloric is used to designate materials having the character of folklore or tradition, at the same time making no claim to authenticity. There are several goals of active folklore research. The first objective is to identify tradition bearers within
13360-658: The document. UNESCO further published the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2003. The American Folklife Preservation Act (P.L. 94-201) passed in 1976 by the United States Congress in conjunction with the Bicentennial Celebration included a definition of folklore, also called folklife : "...[Folklife] means the traditional expressive culture shared within
13527-431: The elites of a given society and identified as specific works created by individuals. The folklorist study the significance of these beliefs, customs and objects for the group. In folklore studies "folklore means something – to the tale teller, to the song singer, to the fiddler, and to the audience or addressees". The field assumes cultural units would not be passed along unless they had some continued relevance within
13694-428: 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 present and indeed removed ourselves from a past marked by poverty, illiteracy and superstition. The task of both the professional folklorist and
13861-399: The empire. Nonetheless, the image he builds of Tiberius throughout the first six books of the Annals is neither exclusively bleak nor approving: most scholars view the image of Tiberius as predominantly positive in the first books, and predominantly negative after the intrigues of Sejanus . The entrance of Tiberius in the first chapters of the first book is dominated by the hypocrisy of
14028-415: The event of doing something within a given context, for a specific audience, using artifacts as necessary props in the communication of traditions between individuals and within groups. Beginning in the 1970s, these new areas of folklore studies became articulated in performance studies , where traditional behaviors are evaluated and understood within the context of their performance. It is the meaning within
14195-607: The expulsion of Bonaparte and the reinstatement of an elector, Grimm was appointed Secretary of Legation accompanying the Hessian minister to the headquarters of the allied army. In 1814, he was sent to Paris to demand restitution of books taken by the French, and he attended the Congress of Vienna as Secretary of Legation in 1814–1815. Upon his return from Vienna, he was sent to Paris again to secure book restitutions. Meanwhile, Wilhelm had obtained
14362-461: The field of folklore studies even as it continues to be a point of discussion within the field. Public folklore is a relatively new offshoot of folklore studies, starting after the Second World War and modeled on the work of Alan Lomax and Ben Botkin in the 1930s. Lomax and Botkin emphasized applied folklore , with modern public sector folklorists working to document, preserve and present
14529-491: The fifth book survive, covering the year 69 and the first part of 70. The work is believed to have continued up to the death of Domitian on September 18, 96. The fifth book contains—as a prelude to the account of Titus's suppression of the First Jewish–Roman War —a short ethnographic survey of the ancient Jews , and it is an invaluable record of Roman attitudes towards them. The Annals , Tacitus's final work, covers
14696-522: The first decades of the 20th century, linguistic and philological studies, dictionaries, comparative studies between the national folklores of Ibero-America, compilations of stories, poetry, and religious traditions. In 1909, at the initiative of Laval, Vicuña and Lenz, the Chilean Folklore Society was founded, the first of its kind in America. Two years later, it would merge with the recently created Chilean Society of History and Geography. With
14863-513: The folktales they could find, partly from the mouths of the people, partly from manuscripts and books, and published in 1812–1815 the first edition of those Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales), which has carried the name of the brothers Grimm into every household of the western world. The closely related subject of the satirical beast epic of the Middle Ages also held great charm for Jacob Grimm, and he published an edition of
15030-440: The following year, he wrote and published the Agricola and Germania , foreshadowing the literary endeavors that would occupy him until his death. Afterward, he absented himself from public life, but returned during Trajan 's reign (98–117). In 100, he and his friend Pliny the Younger prosecuted Marius Priscus [ la ] ( proconsul of Africa) for corruption. Priscus was found guilty and sent into exile; Pliny wrote
15197-486: The fore following World War II; as spokesman, William Bascom formulated the 4 functions of folklore . This approach takes a more top-down approach to understand how a specific form fits into and expresses meaning within the culture as a whole. A third method of folklore analysis, popular in the late 20th century, is the Psychoanalytic Interpretation, championed by Alan Dundes . His monographs, including
15364-432: The frivolous prosecutions which resulted ( Annals , 1.72). Elsewhere ( Annals 4.64–66) he compares Tiberius's public distribution of fire relief to his failure to stop the perversions and abuses of justice which he had begun. Although this kind of insight has earned him praise, he has also been criticized for ignoring the larger context. Tacitus owes most, both in language and in method, to Sallust, and Ammianus Marcellinus
15531-480: The governing classes of Rome as they adjusted to the ever-growing wealth and power of the empire. In Tacitus's view, senators squandered their cultural inheritance—that of free speech —to placate their (rarely benign) emperor. Tacitus noted the increasing dependence of the emperor on the goodwill of his armies. The Julio-Claudians eventually gave way to generals, who followed Julius Caesar (and Sulla and Pompey ) in recognizing that military might could secure them
15698-461: The group, though their meaning can shift and morph with time. Folklore is a naturally occurring and necessary component of any social group. Folklore does not need to be old; it continues through the modern day. It is created, transmitted, and used to establish "us" and "them" within a given group. The unique nature of a culture's folklore requires the development of methods of study by the culture at hand for effective identification and research. As
15865-642: The hatred of tyranny evident in his works. The Agricola , chs. 44 – 45 , is illustrative: Agricola was spared those later years during which Domitian, leaving now no interval or breathing space of time, but, as it were, with one continuous blow, drained the life-blood of the Commonwealth... It was not long before our hands dragged Helvidius to prison, before we gazed on the dying looks of Mauricus and Rusticus , before we were steeped in Senecio 's innocent blood. Even Nero turned his eyes away, and did not gaze upon
16032-523: The historian's mother was a daughter of Aulus Caecina Paetus , suffect consul of 37, and sister of Arria, wife of Thrasea. His father may have been the Cornelius Tacitus who served as procurator of Belgica and Germania ; Pliny the Elder mentions that Cornelius had a son who aged rapidly ( NH 7.76 ), which implies an early death. There is no mention of Tacitus's suffering such a condition, but it
16199-530: The illustration of the great, the popular tradition for the elucidation of the written monuments. Grimm's Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (History of the German Language) explores German history hidden in the words of the German language and is the oldest linguistic history of the Teutonic tribes. He collected scattered words and allusions from classical literature and tried to determine the relationship between
16366-506: The imperial system (see Tacitean studies , Black vs. Red Tacitists). His Latin style is highly praised. His style, although it has a grandeur and eloquence (thanks to Tacitus's education in rhetoric), is extremely concise, even epigrammatic —the sentences are rarely flowing or beautiful, but their point is always clear. The style has been both derided as "harsh, unpleasant, and thorny" and praised as "grave, concise, and pithily eloquent". A passage of Annals 1.1 , where Tacitus laments
16533-457: 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 near where they grew up. In contrast to this, American folklorists, under
16700-514: The influence of the German-American Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict , sought to incorporate other cultural groups living 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
16867-534: The interview context. This was a significant move 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 framework 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
17034-399: The investigation of our earlier language, poetry and laws. These studies may have appeared to many, and may still appear, useless; to me they have always seemed a noble and earnest task, definitely and inseparably connected with our common fatherland, and calculated to foster the love of it. My principle has always been in these investigations to under-value nothing, but to utilize the small for
17201-431: The last of which was unfinished. Grimm then began a third edition, of which only one part, comprising the vowels, appeared in 1840, his time being afterwards taken up mainly by the dictionary. The Grammar is noted for its comprehensiveness, method and fullness of detail, with all his points illustrated by an almost exhaustive mass of material, and it has served as a model for all succeeding investigators. Diez 's grammar of
17368-458: The later stages of German could not be understood without the help of other West Germanic varieties including English, and that the literature of Scandinavia could not be ignored. The first edition of the first part of the Grammar , which appeared in 1819, treated the inflections of all these languages, and included a general introduction in which he vindicated the importance of a historical study of
17535-418: The law to High German in any case is entirely Grimm's work. The idea that Grimm wished to deprive Rask of his priority claims is based on the fact that he does not expressly mention Rask's results in his second edition, but it was always his plan to refrain from all controversy or reference to the works of others. In his first edition, he calls attention to Rask's essay and praises it ungrudgingly. Nevertheless,
17702-553: The letters of Sidonius Apollinaris his name is Gaius , but in the major surviving manuscript of his work his name is given as Publius . One scholar's suggestion of the name Sextus has been largely rejected. Most of the older aristocratic families failed to survive the proscriptions which took place at the end of the Republic , and Tacitus makes it clear that he owed his rank to the Flavian emperors ( Hist. 1.1 ). The claim that he
17869-519: The life of his father-in-law, Agricola (the general responsible for much of the Roman conquest of Britain ), mainly focusing on his campaign in Britannia ( De vita et moribus Iulii Agricolae ). Tacitus's Histories offers insights into Roman attitudes towards Jews , descriptions of Jewish customs, and context for the First Jewish–Roman War . His Annals are of interest for providing an early account of
18036-641: The literary duo known as the Brothers Grimm . Jacob Grimm was born 4 January 1785, in Hanau in Hesse-Kassel . His father, Philipp Grimm , was a lawyer who died while Jacob was a child, and his mother Dorothea was left with a very small income. Her sister was the lady of the chamber to the Landgravine of Hesse, and she helped to support and educate the family. Jacob was sent to the public school at Kassel in 1798 with his younger brother Wilhelm . In 1802, he went to
18203-417: The local economy. Folk architecture is a subset of this, in which the construction is not done by a professional architect or builder, but by an individual putting up a needed structure in the local style. Therefore, all folklore is vernacular culture, but not all vernacular culture necessarily folklore. In addition to these terms, folklorism refers to "material or stylistic elements of folklore [presented] in
18370-513: The masses. He later produced a collection of four thousand proverbs. Many other poets and writers throughout the Turkish nation began to join in on the movement including Ahmet Midhat Efendi who composed short stories based on the proverbs written by Sinasi. These short stories, like many folk stories today, were intended to teach moral lessons to its readers. The study of folklore in Chile was developed in
18537-499: The most extensive literary use of American folklore of its time. By the beginning of the 20th century these collections had grown to include artifacts from around the world and across several centuries. A system to organize and categorize them became necessary. Antti Aarne published a first classification system for folktales in 1910. It was later expanded into the Aarne–Thompson classification system by Stith Thompson and remains
18704-492: The most important unfinished tasks for folklorists and anthropologists." Contrary to a widespread concern, we are not seeing a loss of diversity and increasing cultural homogenization across the land. In fact, critics of this theory point out that as different cultures mix, the cultural landscape becomes multifaceted with the intermingling of customs. People become aware of other cultures and pick and choose different items to adopt from each other. One noteworthy example of this
18871-434: The motives of the characters, often with penetrating insight—though it is questionable how much of his insight is correct, and how much is convincing only because of his rhetorical skill. He is at his best when exposing hypocrisy and dissimulation; for example, he follows a narrative recounting Tiberius's refusal of the title pater patriae by recalling the institution of a law forbidding any "treasonous" speech or writings—and
19038-607: The mythology and superstitions of the old Teutons back to the very dawn of direct evidence, and following their evolution to modern-day popular traditions, tales, and expressions. Grimm's work as a jurist was influential for the development of the history of law , particularly in Northern Europe. His essay Von der Poesie im Recht ( Poetry in Law , 1816) developed a far-reaching, suprapositivist Romantic conception of law. The Deutsche Rechtsalterthümer ( German Legal Antiquities , 1828)
19205-417: The national understanding that diversity within the country is a unifying feature, not something that separates us. "We no longer view cultural difference as a problem to be solved, but as a tremendous opportunity. In the diversity of American folklife we find a marketplace teeming with the exchange of traditional forms and cultural ideas, a rich resource for Americans". This diversity is celebrated annually at
19372-471: The need to collect these vestiges of rural traditions became more compelling, the need to formalize this new field of cultural studies became apparent. The British Folklore Society was established 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
19539-493: The new emperor and his courtiers. In the later books, some respect is evident for the cleverness of the old emperor in securing his position. In general, Tacitus does not fear to praise and to criticize the same person, often noting what he takes to be their more admirable and less admirable properties. One of Tacitus's hallmarks is refraining from conclusively taking sides for or against persons he describes, which has led some to interpret his works as both supporting and rejecting
19706-538: The opportunity to ask different questions, and combine with other academic fields to explore new aspects of traditional culture. Computational humor is just one new field that has taken up the traditional oral forms of jokes and anecdotes for study, holding its first dedicated conference in 1996. This takes us beyond gathering and categorizing large joke collections. Scholars are using computers firstly to recognize jokes in context, and further to attempt to create jokes using artificial intelligence . As we move forward in
19873-574: The origin of language. He described his impressions of Italian and Scandinavian travel, interspersing more general observations with linguistic details. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1857. Grimm died in Berlin at the age of 78, working until the very end of his life. He describes his own work at the end of his autobiography: Nearly all my labours have been devoted, either directly or indirectly, to
20040-499: The origin of the Icelandic language , gave the same comparisons, with a few additions and corrections, and even the same examples in most cases. As Grimm in the preface to his first edition expressly mentioned Rask's essay, there is every probability that it inspired his own investigations. But there is a wide difference between the isolated permutations described by his predecessors and his own comprehensive generalizations. The extension of
20207-466: The original binary of the first folklorists: {traditional : modern} or {old : new}. Bauman re-iterates this thought pattern in claiming that at the core of all folklore is the dynamic tension between tradition and variation (or creativity). Noyes uses similar vocabulary to define [folk] group as "the ongoing play and tension between, on the one hand, the fluid networks of relationship we constantly both produce and negotiate in everyday life and, on
20374-569: The other, the imagined communities we also create and enact but that serve as forces of stabilizing allegiance." This thinking only becomes problematic in light of the theoretical work done on binary opposition , which exposes the values intrinsic to any binary pair. Typically, one of the two opposites assumes a role of dominance over the other. The categorization of binary oppositions is "often value-laden and ethnocentric", imbuing them with illusory order and superficial meaning. Another baseline of western thought has also been thrown into disarray in
20541-522: The outdoors. He started his career (probably the latus clavus , mark of the senator) under Vespasian (r. 69–79), but entered political life as a quaestor in 81 or 82 under Titus . He advanced steadily through the cursus honorum , becoming praetor in 88 and a quindecimvir , a member of the priestly college in charge of the Sibylline Books and the Secular Games . He gained acclaim as
20708-511: The pairs of words ending " -entibus … -is " are crossed over in a way that deliberately breaks the Ciceronian conventions—which one would, however, need to be acquainted with to see the novelty of Tacitus's style. Some readers, then and now, find this teasing of their expectations merely irritating. Others find the deliberate discord, playing against the evident parallelism of the two lines, stimulating and intriguing. His historical works focus on
20875-488: The people of Turkey, influencing political and social change within the country. However, the lack of understanding for the language of their writings limited their success in enacting change. Using the language of the "common people" to create literature, influenced the Tanzimat writers to gain interest in folklore and folk literature. In 1859, writer Sinasi , wrote a play in simple enough language that it could be understood by
21042-506: The period from the death of Augustus in AD ;14. He wrote at least sixteen books, but books 7–10 and parts of books 5, 6, 11, and 16 are missing. Book 6 ends with the death of Tiberius , and books 7–12 presumably covered the reigns of Caligula and Claudius . The remaining books cover the reign of Nero, perhaps until his death in June 68 or until the end of that year to connect with
21209-685: The policies of the Third Reich did not begin until 20 years after World War II in West Germany. Particularly in the works 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 before convening the 1986 Munich conference on folklore and National Socialism. This continues to be
21376-468: The political power in Rome. ( Hist. 1.4 ) Welcome as the death of Nero had been in the first burst of joy, yet it had not only roused various emotions in Rome, among the Senators, the people, or the soldiery of the capital, it had also excited all the legions and their generals; for now had been divulged that secret of the empire, that emperors could be made elsewhere than at Rome. Tacitus's political career
21543-479: 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
21710-415: The pursuit of his studies. In 1808, soon after the death of his mother, he was appointed superintendent of the private library of Jérôme Bonaparte , King of Westphalia , into which Hesse-Kassel had been incorporated by Napoleon . Grimm was appointed an auditor to the state council, while retaining his superintendent post. His salary rose to 4000 francs and his official duties were nominal. In 1813, after
21877-539: The recent past. In western culture, we live in a time of progress , moving forward from one moment to the next. The goal is to become better and better, culminating in perfection. In this model time is linear, with direct causality in the progression. "You reap what you sow", "A stitch in time saves nine", "Alpha and omega", the Christian concept of an afterlife all exemplify a cultural understanding of time as linear and progressive. In folklore studies, going backwards in time
22044-406: The research results. The final step in this methodology involves advocating for these groups in their distinctiveness. The specific tools needed by folklorists to do their research are manifold. The folklorist also rubs shoulders with researchers, tools and inquiries of neighboring fields: literature, anthropology, cultural history, linguistics, geography, musicology, sociology, psychology. This
22211-477: 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 Great Depression . In the United States the Federal Writers' Project
22378-464: The second edition of the first part of his Grammar . The correspondence of single consonants had been more or less clearly recognized by several of his predecessors, including Friedrich von Schlegel , Rasmus Christian Rask and Johan Ihre , the last having established a considerable number of literarum permutationes , such as b for f , with the examples bœra = ferre ("to bear"), befwer = fibra ("fiber"). Rask, in his essay on
22545-401: The severe school of classical philology, to Old and Middle High German poetry and metre. Both Brothers were attracted from the beginning by all national poetry, whether in the form of epics, ballads or popular tales. They published In 1816–1818 a collection of legends culled from diverse sources and published the two-volume Deutsche Sagen (German Legends). At the same time they collected all
22712-442: The social group that becomes the focus for these folklorists, foremost among them Richard Baumann and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett . Enclosing any performance is a framework which signals that the following is something outside of ordinary communication. For example, "So, have you heard the one…" automatically flags the following as a joke. A performance can take place either within a cultural group, re-iterating and re-enforcing
22879-419: The standard classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. As the number of classified artifacts grew, similarities were noted in items which had been collected from very different geographic regions, ethnic groups and epochs. In an effort to understand and explain the similarities found in tales from different locations, the Finnish folklorists Julius and Kaarle Krohne developed
23046-740: The state of the historiography regarding the last four emperors of the Julio-Claudian dynasty , illustrates his style: "The histories of Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius and Nero, while they were in power, were falsified through terror and after their death were written under the irritation of a recent hatred", or in a word-for-word translation: Tiberiī Gāīque et Claudiī ac Nerōnis rēs flōrentibus ipsīs—ob metum—falsae, postquam occiderant—recentibus ōdiīs—compositae sunt. Tiberius's, Gaius's and Claudius's as well as Nero's acts while flourishing themselves—out of fear—counterfeited, after they came to fall—resulting from new-found hate—related are. Compared to
23213-407: The story, also varying each performance in response to multiple factors. Cybernetics was first developed in the 20th century; it investigates the functions and processes of systems. The goal in cybernetics is to identify and understand a system's closed signaling loop, in which an action by the system generates a change in the environment, which in turn triggers feedback to the system and initiates
23380-431: The study of German Volkskunde had yet to be defined as an academic discipline. 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
23547-553: The tale, while at the same time allowing for the incorporation of new elements. Tacitus Publius Cornelius Tacitus , known simply as Tacitus ( / ˈ t æ s ɪ t ə s / TAS -it-əs , Latin: [ˈtakɪtʊs] ; c. AD 56 – c. 120 ), was a Roman historian and politician. Tacitus is widely regarded as one of the greatest Roman historians by modern scholars. The surviving portions of his two major works—the Annals (Latin: Annales ) and
23714-408: The totality of their customs and beliefs as folklore. This distinction aligned American folklore studies with cultural anthropology and ethnology . American folklorists thus used the same data collection techniques as these fields in their own field research . This the diverse alliance of folklore studies with other academic fields offers a variety of theoretical vantage points and research tools to
23881-567: The two ancient fragments of the Hildebrandslied and the Weißenbrunner Gebet , Jacob having discovered what until then had never been suspected — namely the alliteration in these poems. However, Jacob had little taste for text editing, and, as he himself confessed, working on a critical text gave him little pleasure. He therefore left this department to others, especially Lachmann, who soon turned his brilliant critical genius, trained in
24048-507: The tyranny and corruption of the Empire; the book also contains eloquent polemics against the greed of Rome, one of which, that Tacitus claims is from a speech by Calgacus , ends by asserting, Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. ("To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."—Oxford Revised Translation). There
24215-584: The various groups in the United States: familial, ethnic, occupational, religious, regional; expressive culture includes a wide range of creative and symbolic forms such as custom, belief, technical skill, language, literature, art, architecture, music, play, dance, drama, ritual, pageantry, handicraft; these expressions are mainly learned orally, by imitation, or in performance, and are generally maintained without benefit of formal instruction or institutional direction." This law in conjunction with other legislation
24382-421: The volume. Grimm had concluded that all philology must be based on rigorous adherence to the laws of sound change , and he subsequently never deviated from this principle. This gave to all his investigations a consistency and force of conviction that had been lacking in the study of philology before his day. His advances have been attributed mainly to the influence of his contemporary Rasmus Christian Rask . Rask
24549-487: The world around them. Three major approaches to folklore interpretation were developed during the second half of the 20th century. Structuralism in folklore studies attempts to define the structures underlying oral and customary folklore. Once classified, it was easy for structural folklorists to lose sight of the overarching issue: what are the characteristics which keep a form constant and relevant over multiple generations? Functionalism in folklore studies also came to
24716-528: 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, Mark Twain was a charter member of the American Folklore Society. Both he and Washington Irving drew on folklore to write their stories. The 1825 novel Brother Jonathan by John Neal is recognized as
24883-578: The year are stressed as important." In a more specific example, the folklorist Barre Toelken describes the Navajo as living in circular times, which is echoed and re-enforced in their sense of space, the traditional circular or multi-sided hogan . Lacking the European mechanistic devices of marking time (clocks, watches, calendars), they depended on the cycles of nature: sunrise to sunset, winter to summer. Their stories and histories are not marked by decades and centuries, but remain close in, as they circle around
25050-505: Was a comprehensive compilation of sources of law from all Germanic languages, whose structure allowed an initial understanding of older German legal traditions not influenced by Roman law. Grimm's Weisthümer (4 vol., 1840–63), a compilation of partially oral legal traditions from rural Germany, allows research of the development of written law in Northern Europe. Jacob Grimm's work tied in strongly with his views on Germany and its culture. His work on both fairy tales and philology dealt with
25217-635: Was also a valid avenue of exploration. The goal of the early folklorists of the historic-geographic school was to reconstruct from fragments of folk tales the Urtext of the original mythic (pre-Christian) world view. When and where was an artifact documented? Those were the important questions posed by early folklorists in their collections. Armed with these data points, a grid pattern of time-space coordinates for artifacts could be plotted. Awareness has grown that different cultures have different concepts of time (and space). In his study "The American Indian Mind in
25384-448: Was asked whether he was Tacitus or Pliny. Since Pliny was from Italy, some infer that Tacitus was from the provinces, probably Gallia Narbonensis. His ancestry, his skill in oratory, and his sympathetic depiction of barbarians who resisted Roman rule (e.g., Ann. 2.9 ) have led some to suggest that he was a Celt . This belief stems from the fact that the Celts who had occupied Gaul prior to
25551-582: Was descended from a freedman is derived from a speech in his writings which asserts that many senators and knights were descended from freedmen ( Ann. 13.27 ), but this is generally disputed. In his article on Tacitus in Pauly-Wissowa , I. Borzsak had conjectured that the historian was related to Thrasea Paetus and Etruscan family of Caecinii , about whom he spoke very highly. Furthermore, some later Caecinii bore cognomen Tacitus, which also could indicate some sort of relationship. It had been suggested that
25718-437: Was designed to protect the natural and cultural heritage of the United States in alignment with efforts to promote and protect the cultural diversity of the United States and recognize it as a national strength and a resource worthy of protection. The term folklore contains component parts folk and lore . The word folk originally applied to rural, frequently poor and illiterate peasants. A contemporary definition of folk
25885-477: Was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1863. Jacob Grimm died on 20 September 1863, in Berlin, Germany from disease, at the age of 78. The following is a complete list of Grimm's separately published works. Those he published with his brother are marked with a star (*). For a list of his essays in periodicals, etc., see vol. V of his Kleinere Schriften , from which the present list
26052-544: Was established as part of the WPA . Its goal was to offer 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 to collect the oral folklore of their regions, including stories, songs, idioms and dialects. The most famous of these collections is the Slave Narrative Collection . The folklore collected under
26219-471: Was first articulated by the folklorist Walter Anderson in his monograph on the King and the Abbot published 1923. To explain the stability of the narrative, Anderson posited a “double redundancy”, in which the performer has heard the story from multiple other performers, and has himself performed it multiple times. This provides a feedback loop between repetitions at both levels to retain the essential elements of
26386-412: Was largely lived out under the emperor Domitian. His experience of the tyranny, corruption, and decadence of that era (81–96) may explain the bitterness and irony of his political analysis. He draws our attention to the dangers of power without accountability, love of power untempered by principle, and the apathy and corruption engendered by the concentration of wealth generated through trade and conquest by
26553-550: Was not progressing either toward wholeness or toward fragmentation. Individual artifacts must have meaning within the culture and for individuals themselves in order to assume cultural relevance and assure continued transmission. Because the European folklore movement had been primarily oriented toward oral traditions, a new term, folklife , was introduced to represent the full range of traditional culture. This included music , dance , storytelling , crafts , costume , foodways and more. In this period, folklore came to refer to
26720-469: Was of a purely literary character. Yet even in this essay, Grimm showed that Minnesang and Meistergesang were really one form of poetry, of which they merely represented different stages of development, and also announced his important discovery of the invariable division of the Lied into three strophic parts. Grimm's text-editions were mostly prepared in conjunction with his brother. In 1812 they published
26887-478: Was posited that the stories, beliefs and customs were surviving fragments of a cultural mythology of the region, pre-dating Christianity and rooted in pagan peoples and beliefs. This thinking goes in lockstep with the rise of nationalism across Europe. Some British folklorists, rather than lamenting or attempting to preserve rural or pre-industrial cultures, saw their work as a means of furthering industrialization, scientific rationalism, and disenchantment . As
27054-413: Was profound. Grimm's famous Deutsche Grammatik (German Grammar) was the outcome of his purely philological work. He drew on the work of past generations, from the humanists onwards, consulting an enormous collection of materials in the form of text editions, dictionaries, and grammars, mostly uncritical and unreliable. Some work had been done in the way of comparison and determination of general laws, and
27221-567: Was selected for the office largely because of his part in the University of Göttingen's refusal to swear to the king of Hanover. In Frankfurt, he made some speeches and was adamant that the Danish-ruled but German-speaking duchy of Holstein be under German control. Grimm soon became disillusioned with the National Assembly and asked to be released from his duties to return to his studies. He
27388-418: Was the first law in linguistics concerning a non-trivial sound change . It was a turning point in the development of linguistics, enabling the introduction of a rigorous methodology to historic linguistic research. It concerns the correspondence of consonants between the ancestral Proto-Indo-European language and its Germanic descendants, Low Saxon and High German , and was first fully stated by Grimm in
27555-950: Was to emphasize the study of a specific subset of the population: the rural, mostly illiterate peasantry. In his published call for help in documenting antiquities, Thoms was echoing scholars from across the European continent to collect artifacts of older, mostly oral cultural traditions still flourishing among the rural populace. In Germany the Brothers Grimm had first published their " Kinder- und Hausmärchen " in 1812. They continued throughout their lives to collect German folk tales to include in their collection. In 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 funeral customs. Elias Lönnrot
27722-557: Was two years younger than Grimm, but the Icelandic paradigms in Grimm's first editions are based entirely on Rask's grammar; in his second edition, he relied almost entirely on Rask for Old English. His debt to Rask is shown by comparing his treatment of Old English in the two editions. For example, in the first edition he declines dæg, dæges , plural dægas , without having observed the law of vowel-change pointed out by Rask. (The correct plural
27889-433: Was undertaken on so large a scale as to make it impossible for them to complete it. The dictionary, as far as it was worked on by Grimm himself, has been described as a collection of disconnected antiquarian essays of high value. It was finally finished by subsequent scholars in 1961 and supplemented in 1971. At 33 volumes at some 330,000 headwords, it remains a standard work of reference to the present day. A current project at
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