Methodological premises folklore as a form of cultural appropriation If we want to offer a new conceptualisation of folksong, we first need to change our analytical perspective on folklore as a whole. Our investigation should not focus on who the folk are (and what specific culture or cultures they share), but rather on how culture is shared and on how cultural items such as songs are used and perceived by the people.196 Such a methodological premise needs to be validated with reference to two of the most important and ground-breaking approaches recently adopted in folklore and popular culture studies, and respectively elaborated by two leading scholars in the field, Xxxx Xxxxxx and Xxxxx Xxxxxxxx. While Dundes clarifies that folk culture should not be associated with a specific social category, labelled as ‘folk’ as opposed to the ‘elite’, Xxxxxxxx points out that folklore can be understood as a form of cultural appropriation. Xxxxxx’ theorisation stands in direct contrast to the intellectual background from which the term ‘folk’ emerges (cf. §1.1). As we know, the ‘folk’ were originally identified with backward peasants, the uneducated, and sometimes even with members of less advanced societies or primitive communities. The ‘folk’ thus represented the holders of rural, old- fashioned and exotic forms of culture, which were progressively dying out. While one school of folkloristics remains stuck in these nineteenth-century conceptions,197 another has succeeded in moving towards a new conception of contemporary folklore, in which far more diverse forms 196 Folk culture can be categorised in three main categories: verbal (cf. e.g. folk songs), material and customary. See Xxxx-Xxxxxxxx 2011: 12-18. 197 Cf. x.x. Xxxxx (2016), who has recently collected and analysed a series of proverbs, sayings, beliefs and superstitions from Southern Italy, in the attempt to show the unchanged folk tradition preserved to this day by agropastoral enclaves of Greek-Roman origin. of folk knowledge, folk groups, and folk cultures are at stake – including e.g. urban cultures, online forums, sports events, and so on. The main proponent of this newer attitude has been Xxxxxx (1980), who took issue with the generic conception of the ‘folk’ as the lower stratum of society (i.e. the illiterate and rural people), as opposed to the upper stratum (i.e. the literate and urban people). As an alternative, he suggested grounding the analysis of folklore in the following definition of ‘folk group’: The term ‘folk’ c...
