Folkloristics

Folkloristics (also Laography) is the formal, academic discipline devoted to the study of folklore. The term itself derives from the nineteenth-century German designation folkloristik (i.e., folklore). Ultimately, the term folkloristics is used to distinguish between the materials studied, folklore, and the study of folklore, folkloristics. In scholarly usage, folkloristics represents an emphasis on the contemporary, social aspects of expressive culture, in contrast to the more literary or historical study of cultural texts.

Other terms that may be confused with folkloristics include the adjective “folkloristic,” to mean an academically oriented study, and the term “folkloric", to mean materials having the character of folklore or tradition. Besides, scholars specializing in folkloristics are known as folklorists.

Alan Dundes

Before the term folkloristics can be fully understood, it is necessary to understand that the terms folk and lore are defined in many different ways. While some use the word folk to mean only peasants or remote cultures, the folklorist Alan Dundes (1934–2005) of the University of California at Berkeley calls this definition a “misguided and narrow concept of the folk as the illiterate in a literate society” (Devolutionary Premise, 13).