History and folklore: a historiographical survey

Folklore, August, 2004 by Peter Burke

Abstract

This article is designed as an introduction to the other articles in this special edition of Folklore. It argues that the relationship between historians and folklorists has undergone three phases: the "age of harmony" prior to the First World War, when both disciplines were in their infancy; the "age of suspicion" from the 1920s to the 1970s, when historians tended to define their field narrowly as the development of the nation-state, and to stress their "scientific" methodology based on contemporary archival documents; and the "age of rapprochement" since the 1970s as historians ventured into new areas--popular culture, micro-history, "history from below"--borrowing methodologies from the social sciences as they did so. And it looks forward to an "age of co-operation" between the two disciplines.

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This introduction, or overture to the concert that follows, is not intended to tell the reader what the relation between folklore and the historian should be. It is historiographical, designed to set the scene or construct the context for this special edition of Folklore by offering a brief survey of both the communication and non-communication between the two disciplines in the past, looking in particular at Britain but also at other parts of Europe. In order to provoke responses--originally from listeners, and now from readers--I shall divide this overview into three periods, describing them as the age of harmony, the age of suspicion and the age of rapprochement.

Needless to say, there are local variations. In Italy, for example, which has long been marked by what might be called a "culture of historicism," a historical approach was never abandoned and the tradition of historical folklore was passed on relatively smoothly from the Sicilian scholar Giuseppe Pitre in the late nineteenth century, to mid-twentieth-century figures such as Giovanni Cocchiara, Paolo Toschi, and Ernesto De Martino--a remarkable polymath who was at his ease in sociology and psychoanalysis as well. A similar point might be made about Germany, another historicist culture, from Otto Clemen (1938) and Will-Erich Peuckert (1948), students of folklore in the age of the Reformation, to Wolfgang Bruckner's (1966) work on the social history of images and Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann's (1965) study of the effect of nineteenth-century economic changes on the popular beliefs and customs that Mannhardt had treated as timeless, or at least as very old.

In any case, it cannot be assumed that the two parties, historians and folklorists, changed their attitudes at exactly the same time. The assumption of symmetry and of fairly precise turning-points that can be labelled are little more than the organising devices necessary to a brief introductory paper. What follows should be read as nothing more than an attempt to sketch a general model of the changing relations between the two disciplines, a model for others to test in their own areas, geographical or otherwise, and to modify whenever and wherever this seems to be appropriate. Generally speaking, I am confident that emphases changed during the period under discussion, but I am equally certain that individual--not to say individualistic--scholars did not always march in step.

The Age of Harmony

What I am calling the "age of harmony" extends from the origins of folklore as a concept in 1846 (replacing that of "popular antiquities") until the 1920s or thereabouts. In Britain the period might be symbolised by Sir James Frazer, a scholar who might be described almost equally well as a classicist, a historian, a folklorist and an anthropologist (Ackerman 1987). His Golden Bough first appeared in 1890, and his Folklore in the Old Testament in 1918. In 1908, G. L. Gomme published a study entitled Folklore as a Historical Science (Dorson 1968, 202-65). On the Continent, one might take the example of the German scholar Wilhelm Mannhardt, whose Wald- und Feldkulte (from which Frazer learned a good deal) appeared in 1875-7. Another striking example is that of the Finnish historical-geographical school (Julius Krohn, Antti Aarne and others), which studied variations in folktales over time and from region to region. The approach adopted by the school was described in Kaarle Krohn's Die folkloristische Arbeitsmethode (1926).

Disciplinary boundaries were not as sharp in those days as they later became. The German scholar Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, for example, might almost equally well be described as a social or cultural historian or as a folklorist. The same goes for Frederik Troels-Lund, a Dane who made an ambitious study of material culture and daily life in "the North" (Denmark and Norway), published in fourteen volumes from 1879 onwards (Stoklund 1983; Christiansen 2000, 64-76). This enterprise of his coincided, surely not by accident, with the rise of open-air museums in Scandinavia, beginning with Skansen in Stockholm, the result of the initiative of Artur Hazelius (1833-1901), and followed by Bygdoj in Oslo and Lyngby in Copenhagen, museums that were inspired by the displays of folk costume at the Paris Exhibition of 1867.