A New History of Folkloristics

Prat Ferrer, Juan José. Bajo el árbol del paraíso. Madrid: CSIC & IE Universidad, 2008, 471 pp. ISBN: 978-84-00-8703-6

Bajo el árbol del paraíso (Under the Tree of Paradise) studies the paradigms, symbols, and other constructs that learned men have used in the development of Folkloristics. Custom reformers, antiquarians, humanists and historians developed a great interest of building a national culture based on preservation of a prestigious past under the idea of an original Golden Age. The founders of this discipline looked for the cultural identity of the people, focusing their attention on rural cultures, which kept the surviving remains of an original culture, conceived as the authentic soul of the people. Several schools of thought were interested in looking for the origin of traditions and their diffusion through Europe, after the discovery of international folklore forms (the nationalist orientation was never abandoned). Other schools centered their attention on studying forms and laws that govern cultural productions, and finally there were those which looked for an individual meaning to cultural items through their psychological study, or a meaning for the community through Social Sciences.

Besides studying the relationship between Folkloristics and other disciplines, this book analyzes changes toward more dynamic orientations, which try to find people’s culture within the context of performances, taking into account the new forms of cultural communication developed in the 20th Century. New tendencies are also studied that show new perspectives to this discipline after postmodernism and other schools, the arrival of cybernetics and the incorporation of women and subaltern cultures to Cultural Studies. The book includes an index of authors.

Juan José Prat Ferrer, doctor in Philology and in Communication, has developed his career, both as a teacher and researcher, in various US and Spanish Universities. At present, he directs the Language Center at IE University. He has published a good number of papers on folklore and Folkloristics, on the verbal arts in the Middle Ages and on the relationship between orality and writing, as well as on the manifestation of mythical thinking in today’s societies.