Folkloristics

Aarne–Thompson and the historic–geographic method

It was during the first decades of the 20th century that Folklore Studies in Europe and America began to diverge. The Europeans continued with their emphasis on oral traditions of the pre-literate peasant, and remained connected to literary scholarship within the universities. By this definition, folklore was completely based in the European cultural sphere; any social group that did not originate in Europe was to be studied by ethnologists and cultural anthropologists. In this light, some twenty-first century scholars have interpreted European folkloristics as an instrument of internal colonialism, in parallel with the imperialistic dimensions of early 20th century cultural anthropology and Orientalism. Unlike contemporary anthropology, however, many early European folklorists were themselves members of the prioritized groups that folkloristics was intended to study; for instance, Andrew Lang and James George Frazer were both themselves Scotsmen and studied rural folktales from towns near where they grew up.