The Infiltration of Soviet Folklore

Drawing on Margaret Archer’s critical realist theory, the article interprets the history of Latvian folklore studies in the 20th century as a process of social morphogenesis. It demonstrates how the Latvian Folklore Archive and its successors emerged at the intersection of national identity formation, Soviet ideological control and the reflexive agency of individual scholars. Using Archer’s notions of structure, culture and agency, as well as the morphogenetic cycle (T1–T4), the study analyses how institutional frameworks and political pressures constrained and enabled folkloristic practice. While Soviet rule transformed folklore collection into an ideologically regulated field, it also opened up spaces for ‘silent resistance’, semantic code-switching and the informal preservation of traditional material in a somewhat paradoxical way.

Folklore · Ideology · Latvian · Politics · Reading (process) · Reflexivity · European Linguistics and Anthropology · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Soviet and Russian History