Folklore: Populism and Miserabilism in Ethnography

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

"All ethnography is fiction" contended Edmund Leach, and it is true that ethnography may sometimes demand qualities of imagination in other contexts more typical of literature. While ethnography "at home," in the work of folklorists especially, was often understood to be a "national science," documenting and mapping the national culture, ethnographers were not alone in creating representations of the nation. The work of many writers was in part informed by their ethnographic engagement (Ibsen and Yeats, for example, both collected folklore), and literature (as Fredric Jameson has intimated) can itself be an "allegory for the nation." Romanticism was particularly important here, with its esthetic attempts to rescue tradition from the homogenizing and universalizing logic of the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Tradition in this way was often ethnicized or nationalized (as Volksgeist), with the corollary that modernity was seen as a mortal threat to ethnic or national specificity. Populist politics typically evoked the nation that would exist only for the traducement of its elites, hence representing the plebs as the real people (as Ernesto Laclau argues). In these terms the work of many writers and folklorists was implicitly or explicitly populist. But ethnography too could be used to identify the obstacles to political unity and integration, both at the national and the imperial level. This indeed is a well-known part of the history of anthropology, but also of folklore studies. If Romantic folklorists wished to record and preserve folklore in the spirit of cultural relativism, "metropolitan" folklorists saw it through a universalistic lens, strongly influenced by the evolutionism of Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871) for which it was a "survival" from an earlier era. This course will look at the intersection of folklore, literature and nationalist and colonial politics in 18th, 19th and early 20th century cultural history, using critical works from anthropology, folklore studies, history, literary theory and sociology.