Folklore's Crisis

Abstract

The field of folklore is experiencing topic drift, as the gap widens between the name of the field and what it now signifies. This article traces the history of a mutating disciplinary subject and its relationship to the discipline's formation, institutionalization, and name. Three themes are of special importance: folklore's temporality or the problem of a contemporary subject, orality and the question of technology, and folklore as a mode of cultural production. This explication of folklore as a keyword goes to the root of our history as a field, to the atavism that popular understanding preserves in the notion of folklore as error, and to the revolutionary energy that Walter Benjamin found in its embrace.

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