Folklore and Folklore Studies in Latin America

FISCHMAN, FERNANDO

A Companion to Folklore

Wiley-Blackwell

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 2012; p. 265 - 285

The word "folklore" is of widespread use in Latin America. The usages and understandings of the term coined by William Thoms that were incorporated into the Spanish and Portuguese languages as "folklore" or "folclore" have been the outcome of historically grounded and naturalized processes of conceptualization. The establishment of Folklore Studies as a field of intellectual inquiry and political application since the last decades of the nineteenth century involved the development of practices of collection, transcription, archival, classification, publication, dissemination, and recreation. All those tasks were undertaken by an array of actors: academic scholars, public sector officials, independent collectors, and members of the cultural industries (writers, journalists, musicians, singers, dancers). Hence, the perceptual phenomena that fall under the rubric of "folklore" in Latin America at present got to have that quality as a result of the works carried out in the eclectically constituted field of Folklore Studies. The multiple mediations of the diverse actors involved in the field have shaped the past and present understandings of the term "folklore" in different directions. At certain levels - the educational discourse, the media, commonplace speech- the term "folklore" evolved with a remarkable semantic consistency throughout the decades. Therefore, in those contexts of use "folklore" currently encompasses expressive forms tied to regional, national, or continental identities as in the formative years of the field. In that understanding, a complex conformed by music, songs, dances, food, legends, and costumes, among other expressions, are considered to be "folklore" because they are "ours", they are "authentic", they are "telluric", and a seemingly endless set of essentialist associations. At other levels -in the controversies within the academy and between the academics and the non-academic scholars- the term "folklore" has been and still is- polysemic. In those quarters, there is a constant unsettled disagreement about the term´s scope. That disagreement expresses ideological as well as conceptual contradictions with regard as to how to define this field of study and practice and how to characterize its sociological constituency.