Eesti folkloristika kulg distsipliinist diskursiivseks formatsiooniks. Mõtteid ja tähelepanekuid
From a Discipline to a Discursive Formation: Some Ideas and Observations on Estonian Folklore Studies

Summary/Abstract: the introductory article of the special issue on folklore studies provides a brief survey of the history of Estonian folkloristics against international background, harking back to the teachings of the Enlightenment and to the works of the 18thcentury philosophers of history Giambattista Vico and johann Gottfried Herder. In the early 19th century folklore was understood as ancient poetic knowledge transmitted by the common people as opposed to the higher classes. as a result of the efforts of jakob Hurt and other enthusiasts Estonian folklore studies were established by the end of the 19th century as an empirical field of research harnessed to nation-building. In the first half of the 20th century Estonian folkloristics was institutionalized and thus the research developed into a normative discipline in terms of the geographical-historical school. In soviet Estonia the folklorists mainly kept up the pre-war tradition, with the hidden mission of offering a passive resistance to soviet ideology. the recent decades of Estonian folkloristics can be characterized by a transformation of the disciplinary normative tradition into a discursive formation with a widened circle of themes, problems and methods, some of which have partly merged into adjacent fields of research.

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