Hocbigg - Folklore Studies

Introduction

Folklore Studies (or folkloristics) is the academic study of unofficial, expressive culture. Rather than analyzing institutional fine arts or corporate mass media, folkloristics examines the creative traditions people share informally in everyday life—including oral tales, proverbs, rituals, festivals, vernacular architecture, craft, and internet memes. Studying folklore reveals how groups navigate cultural identity, negotiate shared values, and articulate collective anxieties through traditional forms.

This curriculum is designed for self-directed, independent learners and assumes no prior background in cultural anthropology, linguistics, or literary studies. It focuses strictly on the foundational concepts, historical theories, expressive genres, and field methods that constitute a core undergraduate education in the discipline.

How to Navigate This Curriculum

The curriculum balances conceptual foundations with genre-specific analysis and ethnographic practice:

Start with the foundations: Begin with Introduction to Folklore Studies and History and Theory of Folkloristics. These two subjects provide the essential theoretical vocabulary—such as folk groups, informal transmission, the twin laws of conservative tradition and dynamic variation, and performance theory—that underpins the rest of the field.
Explore the core genres: Once the foundational frameworks are established, the four genre-focused subjects—Folk Narrative and Verbal Art; Customary Lore, Ritual, and Vernacular Belief; Material Culture and Folklife; and Digital and Contemporary Folklore—can be explored in any sequence based on your personal focus.
Consolidate with fieldwork: Conclude with Ethnographic Fieldwork and Cultural Documentation. This subject translates theory into practice, teaching you how folklorists conduct ethical participant observation, record oral histories, and collaborate with living communities.

This guide provides the core baseline every student in the discipline needs. After mastering these foundational subjects, you can explore specialized subdisciplines in Advanced Topics, engage with seminal monographs and theoretical papers in Readings, or watch extended lecture series in Courses.

Communities

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Curriculum

Introduction to Folklore Studies

This subject introduces the defining principles of folklore, examining how folk groups form, how unofficial culture is informally transmitted, and how tradition balances dynamic variation.

Folklore doesn't meme what you think it memes (TEDxUSU / Lynne S. McNeill) - Start with this 10-minute video lecture for an engaging, accessible overview of how folklorists define folk groups and unofficial culture in modern everyday life.

Folklore Rules: A Fun, Quick, and Useful Introduction to the Field of Academic Folklore Studies (Lynne S. McNeill) - The fastest, most approachable entry point for independent learners, providing a concise 100-page orientation to foundational concepts, genres, and analytical terms.

Living Folklore: An Introduction to the Study of People and Their Traditions (Martha Sims and Martine Stephens / Internet Archive) - A comprehensive alternative to Folklore Rules, better suited for learners who prefer a traditional, full-semester textbook with detailed explanations and pedagogical exercises.

The Dynamics of Folklore (Barre Toelken / Internet Archive) - A complementary theoretical work to study after reading either introductory textbook, introducing the twin laws of folklore—conservative stability and dynamic variation.

History and Theory of Folkloristics

This subject charts the intellectual development of folklore studies from nineteenth-century romantic nationalism through comparative, psychoanalytic, structuralist, and performance-centered frameworks.

Folkloristics: An Introduction (Robert A. Georges and Michael Owen Jones) - The primary historical survey textbook for this subject, tracing the intellectual evolution of the discipline from nineteenth-century origins to contemporary paradigms.

The Study of Folklore (Alan Dundes / Internet Archive) - A complementary primary-source anthology to read alongside Georges and Jones, compiling landmark historical essays on functionalist, psychoanalytic, and structuralist approaches.

Verbal Art as Performance (Richard Bauman / Internet Archive) - A sequential monograph to study after the survey texts, exploring the discipline's major modern theoretical breakthrough: performance theory and communicative competence.

International Folkloristics in the Twenty-First Century (American Folklore Society / Alan Dundes) - A complementary 1-hour video address that synthesizes historical theoretical debates and defends the scientific and humanistic value of grand theory in the discipline.

Folk Narrative and Verbal Art

This subject investigates major oral narrative genres, including myths, legends, folktales, and proverbs, alongside structural morphology and comparative tale-type classification systems.

Popular Culture and Narrative: Use and Abuse of the Fairy Tale (MIT OpenCourseWare / William Donaldson) - The primary structured course for this subject, providing a complete university syllabus, lecture notes, and guided assignments on oral narrative and fairy-tale analysis.

The Folktale (Stith Thompson / Internet Archive) - A foundational reference study to use alongside the MIT course, establishing the comparative historic-geographic method and motif/tale-type classification.

Morphology of the Folktale (Vladimir Propp / Internet Archive) - A complementary structuralist classic to read after Thompson, analyzing wonder tales through thirty-one invariant sequential narrative functions.

The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings (Jan Harold Brunvand / Internet Archive) - A complementary modern case study showing how comparative narrative tools and motif analysis apply to urban legends and contemporary belief tales.

Customary Lore, Ritual, and Vernacular Belief

This subject explores calendar customs, rites of passage, vernacular religion, folk medicine, and ritualized festive behaviors within cultural communities.

The Rites of Passage (Arnold van Gennep / Internet Archive) - The core theoretical text for this subject, formulating the classic tripartite sequence of separation, transition (liminality), and incorporation in ritual.

Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction (Richard M. Dorson / Internet Archive) - A complementary genre survey; read Chapters 8 through 11 for authoritative overviews on folk religion, folk medicine, festivals, and traditional games.

The Dynamics of Folklore (Barre Toelken / Internet Archive) - Provides complementary case studies to Van Gennep and Dorson; read Chapters 4 and 5 to examine how cultural worldview and vernacular belief systems operate in practice.

Material Culture and Folklife

This subject analyzes physical traditional expressions, including folk craft, traditional art, vernacular architecture, and foodways, as tangible embodiments of community identity and values.

Material Culture (Henry Glassie) - The primary theoretical monograph for this subject, exploring how handmade objects, tools, and vernacular architecture embody human consciousness and cultural history.

Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction (Richard M. Dorson / Internet Archive) - A practical complementary companion to Glassie; study Part II (Chapters 12–16) for foundational overviews of folk craft, traditional art, and architectural typologies.

Digital and Contemporary Folklore

This subject investigates the emergence and transmission of folklore in networked spaces, focusing on internet memes, creepypasta, participatory digital culture, and virtual folk groups.

Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World (Trevor J. Blank, ed. / Utah State University Press) - An open-access foundational reader analyzing how traditional folklore processes adapt to digital environments, featuring Lynne S. McNeill's seminal chapter "The End of the Internet."

Memes in Digital Culture (Limor Shifman) - A concise, complementary study to Blank's anthology, providing a structured conceptual model for analyzing internet memes as dynamic units of vernacular expression.

Ethnographic Fieldwork and Cultural Documentation

This subject teaches practical field methodologies for cultural documentation, focusing on participant observation, ethnographic interviewing, audio-visual recording, and the ethics of community collaboration.

Folklife and Fieldwork: An Introduction to Cultural Documentation, 4th Edition (Stephen Winick and Peter Bartis / Library of Congress) - The primary practical field manual for cultural documentation, covering research design, ethics, interviewing techniques, audio-visual recording, and field logging.

Living Folklore: An Introduction to the Study of People and Their Traditions (Martha Sims and Martine Stephens / Internet Archive) - A complementary academic guide; read Chapters 6 and 7 for structured instructions on framing research questions, analyzing fieldwork data, and writing ethnographic folklore studies.