Folkloristics
Folklore is a cultural and social science that primarily deals with phenomena of human everyday culture. At German universities, the subject is also performed as a European Ethnology, Popular Culture, empirical / comparative cultural studies or cultural anthropology. The focus is in the European cultural space, where processes such as globalization or transnationalization make the views of the European borders necessary; there are overlaps with the global research-based anthropology ( ethnology, social anthropology ).
Subject area
The ethnography examines cultural phenomena of material culture (such as tools, customs, folk songs ) and the subjective attitudes of the people on these. Fields of interest in so-called traditional canon ( eg, processed, folk song, Sage, house research, etc.) with its focus on rural sections of the population were long the center ethnological research. Since its re-orientation in the 1960s and 1970s, the folklore is understood as a cultural science, culture in a broad and dynamic sense than the entire life of a particular context ( social, religious or ethnic ) society or social group understands. Through their variety of sources (empirical methods, image analysis, object analysis, written sources) can be as the spatial, social and historical context are always taken into account.
Due to the wealth of cultural phenomena, there are a large number of ethnological fields of work: workers, image, custom research, narrative, family, community and city (partially) research, equipment, gender (or women's studies ), Interethnic Research, clothing ( original costume research ), reader and reading material research, song and music research, media, medial culture, food research, travel and tourism research, popular piety and popular drama research. Other priorities include Bodylore, intercultural communication, Museology, Folklore Legal and living and housekeeping. In terms of museums, remains one of the most important ethnological fields of work, have the equipment, the craft, and house a major research priority. Many social and economic history ( outdoor and industrial ) Museums present the results dar.
Most starting problems of the present, but is not limited to such, it focuses on cultural contacts, developments or currents, and shall in front of both empirical and hermeneutic. The preoccupation with questions of the accelerated knowledge transfer, social mobility, multiculturalism and the cultural transfer and migration, integration and exclusion are some example of modern research topics.
Important disciplines of folklore are in the objective area of literature, art and music science; regarding the approach to everyday life, social, economic history, geography, cultural sociology and social psychology; in terms of the research objective ethnology, cultural anthropology and, in part, the political science.
Methods
With the variety of research fields methodenpluralistischer approach goes hand in hand. This includes the source archival research and the analysis of material culture as well as the image research, the photo and film analysis, as well as the discourse and media analysis. As a science, with mainly empirical approach, they also used qualitative methods, such as field research and participant observation and scientific interviews, as the narrative interview or oral history.
Trade history
Beginnings in the Modern
As at the time of Humanism in Germany Germania of Tacitus was rediscovered by scholars, people began to be interested in the lives of " ordinary people ", by comparing the content of his work with the present. Like many other humanities subjects, there was also the folklore of the relevant at the beginning of the modern currents of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. In the context of the Enlightenment emerged around 1750 Enlightenment statistics or States customer. They saw their task in a comprehensive description of the country, which should deliver in terms of best governability and optimizing the efficiency of the absolutist ruler in depth knowledge of the countries and populations. In the perimeters of the statistics came in 1780, the term folk and Ethnology first time - both terms were initially used as a synonym. Sustainable formative had the romance, the search for supernatural, the authentic and National demanded an intensive examination of one's own history and past. Then, based the early interest for example in mythology, poetry, fairy tales, legends or folk songs, with Johann Gottfried Herder theoretical foundations and concepts delivered. Important representatives of this phase, for example, Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, or the Brothers Grimm.
So understood, the folklore is both a product and a symptom of modernity: The accelerated by industrialization and often perceived as a threat to social and cultural changes have led to a preoccupation with seemingly stable elements in the culture that you found mainly in the rural milieu believed.
From the mid-19th century, the subject began to institutionalize: 1852 called Hans von Aufseß and the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg for cultural and historical collections of the Middle Ages and the early modern era to life. Six years later (1858 ) Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl began to campaign for a " folklore than science." More than three decades afterwards ( 1889) establishes Rudolf Virchow in Berlin (later) German Museum of Ethnology, the Museum of European Cultures is called today; a year later Karl Weinhold founded, also in Berlin, the first club of Folklore, who published a journal from 1891. More clubs and museums originated in Austria, Bavaria and Switzerland, in the 20th century folklore eventually became a university teaching profession. The first (then still unpaid ) professor of folklore in 1931 by Viktor Geramb at the Karl- Franzens- University in Graz.
Developments in the 20th century
Basic questions - for example, for a definition of folk or after the emergence of popular culture goods - were first described in 1900 in Basel by Eduard Hoffmann Krayer, John Meier, among others. In the early 1920s formulated Hans Naumann his that build theory of sunken cultural and primitive commons. As Hoffmann- Krayer Naumann took a two-layer theory - he believed that significant cultural manifestations of life are always created by high social and merely taken over by lower.
On the narrative research field, the Finnish school for the first half of the century was the tone. The cultural space research was able to establish from the Rhineland in 1926 in large parts of the German-speaking world. In the late 1920s the Schwietering School enriched with their socio- functionalist approach folklore. A more psychological approach mediated Adolf spamer from 1936 in Berlin.
In the era of National Socialism was a racist and popular educational ethnography, completely lost its claim to be scientific, the dominant doctrine. Older notions of a permanent, in race and habitat -rooted national and tribal character, as they were represented among others by Martin voters were against this exploitation. After the Second World War, the demand was voiced mainly by sociologists to the person deprive its independence.
However, a new hope brought in 1946 Richard Weiss ' Folklore of Switzerland with them, and because of its ( for its time very exemplary ) psychological- functional perspective. In the Federal Republic of Germany and also in Austria we did in the aftermath notwithstanding difficult to reflect the exploitation of their own times by the Nazis critical. Not least because it seemed important individual institutions to define the subject matter of folklore new or supplement. 1970 were discussed at the Falkensteiner meeting called the different ideas with the outcome of a paradigm shift: It rejected the former understanding of popular culture and instead wanted more research on contemporary issues and dedicated to socio-cultural problems. Manifested this discussion has to put in the (incidentally, continuing to this day ) debate about how the subject is to rename this way to the outside world a signal of self-prescribed reorientation. Institute renaming were the consequence: Berlin, Freiburg and Marburg opted for European Ethnology, Frankfurt am Main for Cultural Anthropology, Göttingen for " Cultural Anthropology / European Ethnology ", Tübingen for Empirical Cultural Studies, Regensburg for comparative cultural studies. Elsewhere you left it with the old name or chose a double name, eg folklore / European Ethnology in Munich and Münster, folklore / cultural history in Jena, European Ethnology / Folklore in Innsbruck, Wurzburg and Kiel, cultural anthropology / ethnology in Mainz as well as ethnology and cultural anthropology in Graz. At present there are 28 university institutes in the German language area (as of 2005). The German Folklore Society ( DGV ), which was founded in 1963 in Marburg in the sense of Volkstumsforschung, leads by its own account the work of the Federation of Associations of Folklore (founded in 1904) continued.
Hermann Bausinger stated in his 1961 paper published in popular culture in the technological world the self-understanding of the subject as research on predominantly peasant traditions and cultural content in question. In particular, the term was " popular culture " to question, since it postulates a seemingly unchanging, original culture. Following construction Ingers criticism, new research approaches and priorities that are first of all, the field of contemporary popular culture into focus developed. Konrad Köstlin however, criticized the fact that these "modern folklore " in many cases, only an idealized representation of the working class would have brought ( as bearers of folk culture ), while on the other hand, accuses the "old" folklorists to have idealized the rural culture - the isolated approach, so Köstlin, but was the same in both cases.
Current Situation
The folklore is so far out at German universities as a separate subject under the name of European ethnology or cultural anthropology and examines the Other in their own ( German and European ) culture. Be emphasized at a folkloristic approach phenomena of everyday culture. The emphasis is in Europe, where processes such as globalization or transnationalization have taken away the look beyond the borders of Europe necessary and led to a major intersection with ethnology. This continued until today substantive and methodological approaches have led in recent years to debates about the demarcation of the social and cultural sciences.
Unlike the name suggests European Ethnology, the tray is however anchored up today exclusively in the German -speaking world. A discussion of research approaches or case studies from other countries will take place only to a small extent. The situation has worsened for the folklore at the University of Bonn; it is the first compartment, which is threatened by the cuts in the financial budget of the Faculty of Arts of the closure.