Frontiers, Settlements, and Development in Folklore Studies, 1972-1985

Abstract

rary anthropological study of folklore with an additional consideration of others. Space considerations and intellectual saliency limit the total number of works we consider representative of these trajectories. Our title and primary focus come from our examination of the scholarly shape of the field as it has developed since the marked intervention in the early and mid 1970s of a new conceptual approach in the study of folklore. We refer to the clear emergence of and contextually centered understandings of folklore as social behavioral process and as situated communicative interaction (23, 122). Our essay primarily focuses on the achievements and limitations of this central trajectory in folklore studies since 1972. In his most recent formulation of the concept of performance, Bauman (15) usefully identifies three related definitions and uses of performance in contemporary sociocultural analysis: as situated, ordinary cultural practice, an approach indebted to the Marxian concept of praxis; as cultural displays or, to use Abrahams' term, enactments (3), an approach closely identified with a particular wing of symbolic anthropology (Singer, Geertz, V. Turner, and Peacock among others) which while closely allied to folklore we nonetheless exclude from this space-limited review; finally, as the situated interactional practice of verbal art-oral poetics. It is this third sense of that Bauman identifies as his own, and it is also the central concern of anthropological