大学共同利用機関法人 人間文化研究機構　国立民族学博物館

Objectives

This research attempts to make clear the facts concerning the state of folkloristics before it was transformed into an academic discipline. We are aware that its existence clearly generated sympathetic responses from diverse cultural movements in different locations. Our aim is to describe the formation of folkloristics and determine its position in multifarious cultural movements occurring among people. Before folkloristics underwent academic transformation during the 1960s, it was involved with literature (including short forms of poetry and fiction), history (local history), archaeology, as well as natural history with a close connection to such humanistic knowledge, existing as a way to identify and select the actual products of folk knowledge in various locations. Such locally focused movements engaged in negotiations with the outside and established extensive ties with intellectuals in other locales. This was accomplished by forging contacts with individuals, as well as through their periodical publications or the local educational system.

In addition, early Japanese anthropologists had quite a few points of contact with these kinds of cultural movements. Through the discovery of legend, orally transmitted culture and the memories of elders, folklorists were able to self-reflect and reevaluate their own lifestyles. This practical approach began to grow in these local cultural movements. Through this research we hope to survey in the broad sense the development of humanistic knowledge in modern Japan, including folkloristics, and thus open new horizons through reassessment based on multidimensional dynamics.