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Folkloristics (also ''Laography'') is the term used by academic folklorists for the formal, academic discipline devoted to the study of folklore. The term itself derives from the nineteenth-century German designation ''folkloristik'' (i.e., folklore). Ultimately, the term ''folkloristics'' is used to distinguish between the materials studied, folklore, and the study of folklore, folkloristics. In scholarly usage, ''folkloristics'' represents an emphasis on the contemporary, social aspects of expressive culture, in contrast to the more literary or historical study of cultural texts. Other terms that may be confused with ''folkloristics'' include the adjective “folkloristic,” to mean an academically oriented study, and the term “folkloric", to mean materials having the character of folklore or tradition. Besides, scholars specializing in folkloristics are known as folklorists. ==Alan Dundes== Before the term ''folkloristics'' can be fully understood, it is necessary to understand that the terms ''folk'' and ''lore'' are defined in many different ways. While some use the word ''folk'' to mean only peasants or remote cultures, the folklorist Alan Dundes (1934–2005) of the University of California at Berkeley calls this definition a “misguided and narrow concept of the folk as the illiterate in a literate society” (''(Devolutionary Premise )'', 13). Dundes is often credited with the promotion of ''folkloristics'' as a term denoting a specific field of academic study and applies instead what he calls a “modern” flexible social definition for ''folk'': two or more persons who have any trait in common and express their shared identity through traditions. Dundes explains this point best in his essay, ''(The Devolutionary Premise in Folklore Theory )'' (1969): :“A folk or peasant society is but one example of a ‘folk’ in the folkloristic sense. Any group of people sharing a common linking factor, e.g., an ''urban'' group such as a labor union, can and does have folklore. ‘Folk’ is a flexible concept which can refer to a nation as in American folklore or to a single family. The critical issue in defining ‘folk’ is: what groups in fact have traditions?” (emphasis in the original, see (footnote 34 ), 13) With this expanded social definition of ''folk'', a wider view of the material considered to be folklore also emerged that includes, as William Wilson points out, “things people make with words (verbal lore), things they make with their hands (material lore), and things they make with their actions (customary lore)” (2006, 85). Another implication of this broader defining of the term ''folk'', according to Dundes, is that folkloristic work is interpretative and scientific rather than descriptive or devoted solely to folklore preservation. In the 1978 collection of his academic work, ''Essays in Folkloristics'', Dundes declares in his preface, “Folkloristics is the scientific study of folklore just as linguistics is the scientific study of language. (. . ) It implies a rigorous intellectual discipline with some attempt to apply theory and method to the materials of folklore” (vii). In other words, Dundes advocates the use of ''folkloristics'' as the preferred term for the academic discipline devoted to the study of folklore. According to Dundes, folkloristic work will probably continue to be important in the future. Dundes writes, “folklore is a universal: there has always been folklore and in all likelihood there will always be folklore. As long as humans interact and in the course of so doing employ traditional forms of communication, folklorists will continue to have golden opportunities to study folklore” (''(Devolutionary Premise )'', 19). According to folklorist William A. Wilson, “the study of folklore, therefore, is not just a pleasant pastime useful primarily for whiling away idle moments. Rather, it is centrally and crucially important in our attempts to understand our own behavior and that of our fellow human beings" (2006, 203). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Folkloristics」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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