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Folklore and Anthropology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Ulrich Marzolph
Ulrich Marzolph*
Affiliation:
Georg-August-University, Göttingen; Enzyklopädie des Märchens, Akademie Wissenschaften, Göttingen
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Extract

Folklore at the Turn of the Twentieth Century in a Very Broad sense is understood to encompass the expressive culture of any notable group of people. As implied by the original meaning of the word “lore” when the term “folklore” was coined in 1846, tradition is a vital ingredient of folklore. Yet not all folklore relies on centuries of tradition: Customs may become obsolete, live on submerged for centuries before being revived, or come into being all anew: Duration rather than historical roots makes folklore. The folk, on the other hand, is not necessarily constituted by the uneducated masses, as a conservative point of view would have it: Folklore is not germane to specific social strata but rather to substantial numbers of individuals sharing similar ideas or activities. In this sense folklore encompasses a wide range of cultural expression, ranging from popular beliefs and customs to myths, legends, and other genres of oral literature/verbal art. The obvious overlap of certain aspects in folklore studies and anthropology is inter alia signaled by contemporary Persian terminology, most commonly rendering folklore as farhang-e mardom and anthropology as mardom-shenāsi.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 3-4: A Review of the “Encyclopaedia Iranica” , Summer Fall 1998 , pp. 325 - 332
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1998

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References

1. See now the interview with Professor Yarshater in this issue. –Eds.

2. See e. g. Boyle, J. A. “Popular Literature and Folklore in ᶜAttar's Mathnavis,” in Colloquio italo-irano sul poeta mistico Fariduddin ᶜAttar, (Rome, 1978), 57-70Google Scholar, discussing an early form of the folktale AT 325: The Magician and His Pupil; or the recent book by Fateme San'ati-niya, Ma'ākhez-e qesas va tamīlāt-e manavīhā-ye ᶜAttār-e Neishābūrī (Tehran 1369/1990)—clearly modelled on Badi'ozzaman Foruzanfar's standard work treating the sources of the tales in Jalal al-Din Rumi's masnavīs.

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