In Memoriam. Folclore y modernización disciplinaria en la obra de Santiago Bilbao

SERGIO EDUARDO VISACOVSKY

Revista de Investigaciones Folclóricas

Universidad de Buenos Aires

Lugar: Buenos Aires; Año: 2006 vol. 21 p. 169 - 177

1668-1878

After 1983, many Argentine social anthropologists ?defined here as ?porteños?? have perceived Folclore as an exotic and redundant field, since they considered its empirical object as a socialanthropologicalproperty. This perspective was a sign of the creation and strengthening of academic training in Social and Cultural Anthropology during the 1980s. However, this approach couldn?t understand the place given to Folclore by anthropologists in other time. At the beginning of the 1980s, during the last Military Dictatorship, some students of ?Ciencias Antropológicas? at Buenos Aires University decided to be trained in Folclore, because they considered that discipline to be very similar to Social Anthropology, which was forbidden at that time. The first cohort of the same degree had analogous ideals at the beginning of the 1960s: Social Anthropology hasn?t been shaped yet, and Folclore was considered a shortcut to Social Anthropology. I want to show the role played by Folclore as a way of disciplinary modernization in the 1960s through early Santiago Alberto Bilbao´s trajectory, who passed away in June 21st 2006 in Caracas,Venezuela. I hope this short article presents a different perspective of the relationship between Folclore and Social Anthropology in Argentina, and, at the same time, I would like to pay tribute to one of the greatest pioneers of our discipline.