Folklore and Nationalism in Europe during the Long Nineteenth Century is, Timothy Baycroft writes in his introduction, “a modest attempt to engage in comparative analysis [of folklore and nationalism], both methodologically and in terms of subject matter, and to begin to explore the kinds of conclusions which can be found in cross-European disciplinary study” (1). “It is necessarily selective,” he continues, “providing individual comparative chapters and single case studies in juxtaposition in order to open up dialogue, and hopefully to provoke further thought and work in both nationalism and folklore studies.” The essays cover a number of different topics in both verbal folklore and material culture. Rather than cover all of the essays here, I will instead focus on the essays that I thought were the best in the book.
The essays on material culture include Peter Blundell Jones’s article, “Ideas of Folk and Nation in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century European Architecture,” which is a well-illustrated examination of the influence that folk styles had on European architecture in the nineteenth century. There are three essays on the relationship between museums and nationalism: Angela Schwarz, “The Regional and the Global: Folk Culture at World's Fairs and the Reinvention of the Nation,” which examines how peasant villages were displayed in the world’s fairs of the time; Daniel DeGroff’s essay, “ Ethnographic Display and Political Narrative: The Salle de France of the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro,” then examines the ethnographic presentations in a local folklore museum, the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro, asking questions such as “what is the relationship between colonial ethnography and peasant ethnography?” and “how has ethnographic display been enlisted in the service of national identity construction?”; and Anne Dymond’s “Displaying the Arlésienne: Museums, Folklife and Regional Identity in France,” which examines regional museums in Provence and their relationship to the Provençal Revival of the nineteenth century.
Detmar Klein’s “Folklore as a Weapon: National Identity in German-Annexed Alsace, 1890-1914” then looks at the use of folklore in Alsace, where the Alsatian-speaking population (Alsatian is a dialect of German), much to the frustration of the Germans who administered the province after its annexation to Germany after the Franco-Prussian War, the Alsatian-speaking “folk” strongly identified themselves as French.
Clare O’Halloran’s “Negotiating Progress and Degeneracy: Irish Antiquaries and the Discovery of the ‘Folk’, 1770-1844” focuses on antiquaries who “were all Protestant in religion and mainly the descendants of settlers,” though she also looks closely at the work of the nineteenth-century antiquarian and folklorist T. Crofton Croker.
Jonathan Roper’s “England—The Land without Folklore?” also focuses on a particular folklorist and his work, in this case William Thoms. Roper’s examination of Thoms is a welcome look at the man who gave us the term “folk-lore,” but whose work has otherwise been little noticed by folklorists.
In “National Folklore, National Drama and The Creation of Visual National Identity: The Case of Jón Árnason, Sigurður Guðmundsson and Indriði Einarsson in Iceland” Terry Gunnell takes up an intriguing problem, the influence of popular drama on a nation’s perception of its own folk culture. In a very curious dynamic, Jón Árnason’s collection of Icelandic folktales and legends was used by writers such as Sigurður Guðmundsson and Indriði Einarsson as a source for their plays, which then influenced how Icelanders understood the folk legends and folktales.
Pertti Anttonen’s “Oral Traditions and the Making of the Finnish Nation” examines the ways that oral traditions were deployed to help create Finnish history and culture. Kalevala-meter poetry was especially important in these reconstructions, but he proposes that “their main political value rested on the idea that they served to prove that the Finnish people as a national entity had not stayed in that history but made progress and became modern possessors of that history” (350). In other words, the study of folklore was not merely an end in itself, but also a way to demonstrate the modernity of the Finnish nation.
David Hopkin’s closing essay “Folklore beyond Nationalism: Identity Politics and Scientific Cultures in a New Discipline” both surveys the conclusions of the essays in the volume and makes a number of valuable observations about the role of folklore in the study of history. Hopkin emphasizes the need for historians to understand what folklorists do, and how the methods of folklore can be used to illuminate the past. He writes that “if we locate folklorists only in the realm of nineteenth-century historicism and nation building, we may neglect their other intellectual contributions. As historians undertake their search for alternatives to the established territorial categories, they might do worse than look to folklore and its long history of going beyond the national to explore both the varieties and the unities in human culture” (401).
This is a valuable collection of essays that should be read by anyone with an interest in folklore and nationalism or the history of folklore.
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[Review length: 810 words • Review posted on October 29, 2014]