Фолклорът в модерната епоха: между изкуство и масова култура (проблеми на методологията)
Folklore in the modern age: between art and pop culture (methodological problems)

Summary/Abstract: The paper represents a theoretical attempt to reconsider the research traditions in the sphere of the Bulgarian traditional culture. The main focus is on the ideas of the Bulgarian scholar Ivan Shishmanov. His theories are considered in a discussion with the arguments made by Ernst Renan in his lecture “What is a nation?” delivered in the Sorbonne in 1882. The conceptualization developed by Shishmanov, on which the Bulgarian folklore science was based, is analyzed in the context of the European humanitarian ideas and in view of the ideological messages from the age of Romanticism which influenced them. The author critically reflects upon reducing folklore artifacts to artworks – a key idea in the conceptual basis of the early Bulgarian ethnography. In this way the cracks in the “great ideological narrative” are revealed along with the mechanisms through which the folklore (folklore which experts and elites try to code as a basis of the high national culture) is turned into a part of a faster growing pop culture.

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