Folklore studies

Folklore studies examines expressive traditions—including stories, customs, beliefs, and material culture—and how people create, transmit, perform, and interpret them.

Folklore: Traditions and expressive forms shared within groups and transmitted through communication, practice, or imitation. This is the subject matter folklore studies investigates.
Folklore transmission: The processes by which folklore passes among people and across generations through communication and practice. It describes the social pathways that sustain traditions.
Ethnography: A research approach based on sustained engagement with people and close description of their social worlds. It helps document folklore within the relationships and settings that give it meaning.
Brothers Grimm: Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were German scholars whose nineteenth-century publications shaped the study and circulation of folktales. Their collections helped establish comparative tale study and raised questions about editing and authenticity.
Literary criticism: The interpretation and evaluation of literary works, often through attention to form, language, history, and meaning. Folklore studies also analyzes verbal art but gives special weight to transmission and social use.
Oral tradition: Cultural knowledge and expressive forms passed between people through spoken communication. It shows how stories and other verbal traditions circulate beyond written texts.
Memetics: The study of cultural information as units that replicate and vary through transmission. Its replication model can be compared with folklore’s socially situated transmission.
Participant observation: A research method in which investigators take part in activities while observing and recording them. It can reveal performance conventions unavailable through collected texts alone.
William Thoms: William Thoms was an English antiquarian who introduced the word “folklore” in 1846. His coinage gave a name to the field’s emerging subject matter.
Cultural anthropology: The comparative study of human cultures, social relations, and meanings, often grounded in ethnographic research. It shares field methods with folklore studies but addresses a broader range of cultural life.

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