Between Primitiveness and Nationalist Endeavours

Abstract

Chapter 2 examines the schism between folklore studies and anthropology at the turn of the twentieth century. A number of scholars in folklore studies had taken a sceptical view towards the romanticist outline of folklorist research in the last decades of the nineteenth century, arguing that the distinct features of domestic folklore could be better understood when they were related to the findings of colonial anthropologists. Such an integrative approach to primitivism, however, was increasingly challenged as folklore studies once more became a distinctly nationalist endeavour. After the 1920s, its relation to colonial anthropology was increasingly disputed by the rise of völkisch approaches in folklore studies.