Belief and the American Folk

Bibliographic Data

ID2810233
AuthorsPatrick B Mullen (corresponding author)
Year2000
Volume113
Issue448
Pages119-143
Publication date2000-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American Folklore (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8715 • E-ISSN: 1535-1882
PublisherUniversity of Illinois Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2307/541285
OpenAlexW2315659301
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited24

The history of folklore scholarship has come under increasing scrutiny in terms of cultural representations of the folk, but the role of folk belief in the construction of the folk has not been thoroughly examined. An investigation into American folklore scholarship of the last 100 years reveals that folk belief has been used to justify both romantic images of the folk as wise and natural and scientific rationalistic images of the folk as pathological, with complex combinations of the two extremes. More recently, reflexive ethnography and cultural politics have offered ways of escaping the restrictions of these older paradigms in folk belief studies, although problems still remain

Aesthetics · Art · Belief system · Epistemology · Ethnology · Folk psychology · Folklore · Literature · Political science · Politics · Reflexivity · Romance · Scholarship · Scrutiny · Sociology · Anthropology · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Law · Music History and Culture · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis · Philosophy

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