2. Study of folklore

Folkloristics is the term which prefer to use by academic folklorists for the formal, academic discipline devoted to the study of folklore. The term itself originates from the nineteenth-century German designation folkloristik. Finally, the term folkloristics is used to differentiate between the materials studied, folklore, and the study of folklore, folkloristics. In scholarly utilization, folkloristics represents an emphasis on the contemporary, social aspects of expressive culture, in contrast to the more literary or historical study of cultural texts. [1, p. 5]

The study of folklore attempts to analyze these traditions so as to display the common life of the human mind apart from what is contained in the formal records of culture which compose the heritage of a people. [1, p. 16]

This type of research has been a respected academic specialty in Europe for generations. But in the United States the field of folklore is relatively new, and it tends to be narrowly understood by many people who may have been attracted to it through treatments in the popular media, where the world «folklore» is very loosely applied to several kinds of non-folk materials.

The study of folklore leads one onto many fields. Ballads, songs, folk tales and legends may be considered in relationship to parallel types of standard literature; folk speech, folk saying, and dialects are subjects for linguistic research; popular customs, beliefs, and bits of folk wisdom may be explained by the aid of psychology and sociology and may even contribute to these sciences; folk arts and crafts may inspire new direction in the fine arts.

Anthropology, philosophy, religions, and history are other learned disciplines that cover many of the fields of human activity that the folklorist also approaches; but he has his own special purpose or points of view and his own somewhat different methods.

Folklore includes the unrecorder traditions of a people. The study of folklore analyzes and records these traditions because they display the commons life of the mind below the level of «high» or formal culture, which is recorded by civilization as the learned heritage of their times. Only by turning to the folklore of peoples, analyzing into its meanings and functions, and searching for links between different bodies of tradition may we hope to understand the spiritual and intellectual life of man in its broadest dimensions.

From early on folklorists sought to classify the material they collected. Really, the main shift in folkloristics was a move from collection and categorization , to a new focus on synthesis. The new generation of folklorists acknowledge the interactions between how an individual tells a story and how the audiences react and interact, and interrelationships between art, architecture and other expressive elements of culture. Folklorists today look at the dynamic relations between the socially given, the traditional, and the creative individual. The field has double checked itself from a focus on the traditional and ready-made, to a focus on the balance of traditional and emergent, socially given and creative [12, p.36].

Such synthetic work looks to better understand the world by recognizing the circular system of individual, group, and expression. Folklorists today have and use theories, but they also strive to maintain an empirical richness in their study, letting the fieldwork, the data, and the people involved direct the big picture as much as possible [1, p. 89].