The Place of Folklore within the Construction of the Contemporary World Cover Image

Miejsce folkloru w konstruowaniu współczesnego świata
The Place of Folklore within the Construction of the Contemporary World

Author(s): Jan Kajfosz
Subject(s): Anthropology, Customs / Folklore, Media studies, Communication studies, Cultural Anthropology / Ethnology, Theory of Communication, Methodology and research technology, Crowd Psychology: Mass phenomena and political interactions, Sociology of Culture
Published by: Szkoła Wyższa Psychologii Społecznej
Keywords: popular culture; e-folklore; communicative society; folkloristic text; tacit; media

Summary/Abstract: The paper answers the question, how folkloristic narrations participate in the social construction of reality. The notion of folklore relates here - in accordance with propositions of P.G. Bogatyrev and R. Jakobson – to poetic texts aimed at la langue. Such texts are conventional in the sense that their semantic structures are broadly reproduced inside one communicative society. Habitualisation based on more or less accurate repeatability of stereotypical representations,motives, action scenarios, rationalisations and motivations, is the source of relatively stabile world image. Folkloristic texts participate this way in constitution of experiences, beliefs and cognitive (noetic and behavioral) habitsof its agents. In the folkloristic creativity the collective images of the past which legitimize changing social institutions are very often unnoticed adjusted to such changes. Hence, narratives reproduced within a society which are considered by its members as memorates are very often fabulated. The author focuses especially on connotation which seems to be crucial for “tacit“ legitimizations of various phenomena. He follows diverse reciprocal legitimizations between representations in folkloristic narratives and representations spread by media.

  • Issue Year: 33/2012
  • Issue No: 03
  • Page Range: 44-61
  • Page Count: 17
  • Language: Polish