Koost lagunev või uuenev folkloristika? Filoloogilisi vaateid
Disintegration or renewal of folkloristics? Some philological perspectives

Summary/Abstract: It has become customary in Estonian research tradition to consider folkloristics as a philological discipline, while the scholarship has had a retrospective and archival orientation. Presupposing the existence of a primeval cultural unity, now lost, and considering folklore as part of the Finno-Ugric heritage has certainly contributed to the philological thought. However, interest in the social environment of folklore and research of its non-verbal forms already appeared before the Second World War, manifested in the works of several scholars, such as Oskar Loorits, Rudolf Põldmäe, Richard Viidalepp, and Herbert Tampere. Hence, the turn of folklore studies towards more social and performative aspects is not a recent phenomenon but relies on the local research tradition. Conceptualising folklore as a disappearing phenomenon and survival from the past, which was typical of the early period of research, has had an international impact with some ramifications. Also, there are scholars who have seen folkloristics as a declining discipline. Such pessimistic views are on the one hand linked with essentialist definitions of folklore (which are incompatible with its social and functional dynamics), and on the other hand with the post-structural deconstruction of the key concept ’folklore’, as the object and focus of research constantly seems to fade away. As an abstract category ’folklore’ needs constant rethinking and currently there is a strong tendency to conceptualise it as performative practice. Folkloristics is a discipline that is both socially and textually oriented and is strongly connected with general trends in the humanities, such as the development of digital scholarship. The recent definition of folkloristics as ’philology of the vernacular’ by Richard Bauman is relevant both for international and Estonian research.

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