Hear a talk on the evolution of cultural traditions in the context of nation-building
According to Konstantin Bogdanov, folklore is shaped by the role society ascribes to tradition. There are many scholarly definitions of tradition, but people invariably turn to it at the moment they realize how traumatic their present is. The definition of folklore studies is close to schizophrenic: it’s “what folklorists talk about” as well as “everything folklorists are interested in.” But no matter how we understand tradition and folklore, the social role of those two concepts is determined by the utopian idea of translating social reality into symbols and creating a “symbolic universe” made up of material and virtual constituents of cultural heritage. In such a context folklore (folk wisdom, popular knowledge) is naturally used to cope with challenges posed by modernization and social change, and acts as a tool for those in power to use for social, cultural, and ideological stabilization. This talk focuses on several episodes in the history of this controlling strategy.