Where There Are No Spectators: Loving Authentic Folklore in Post-Folkloric Slovakia

0429186 - FLÚ 2015 US eng D - Thesis
Feinberg, Joseph Grim
Where There Are No Spectators: Loving Authentic Folklore in Post-Folkloric Slovakia.
University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology. Defended: Chicago. 15.05.2014. - Chicago, 2014. 293 s.
Institutional support: RVO:67985955
Keywords : authenticity * folklorism * performance theory * poetics * post-politics * public and private spheres
Subject RIV: AC - Archeology, Anthropology, Ethnology

This dissertation follows the ideas and activities of a movement to "return to authentic folklore" in contemporary Slovakia. I ask how a new group of cultural actors attempts to establish its authority to authentically represent folklore, and I ask how they address the apparent paradox that authentic folklore is conceptualized as something intimate, not performed for any audience, and yet this non-performed material must be performed in order to introduce it to the public. Whereas Communist folklore discourse had emphasized the continuity between old, authentic forms and contemporary social expression, today's movement emphasizes temporal discontinuity. Whereas Communist folklore discourse had invoked "the people" as an enduring subject of politics and culture, today's movement rhetorically constructs "the folk" as a "bearer" (rather than "creator") of folklore, whose presence is largely limited to an authentic past.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0234348