Barbro Klein (Director of SCAS: Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies)
Caught in the Cracks of Modernity? Folk Culture and the Contemporary World
Opinn fyrirlestur/Public lecture, Oddi 101, 16:35-17:30 Thursday / fimmtudag 19 November 2009
The words folk culture and folk traditions have often been questioned inside and outside scholarly circles. Could terms invented more than two hundred years ago, and mostly used to describe European peasant life, possibly be anything more than arcane curiosities in the contemporary world with its aggressive commercialism, advanced technology, transnational migrations, global violence and rapid environmental destruction? Folklorists, on their part, have long contended that these terms are not only useful: they are crucial to understanding a wide range of modern phenomena and behaviours, from the heritage activism of world-wide bureaucracies to the culture of the poorest of the urban poor.
In my presentation I will review some of the ideas through which folklorists have argued that folk culture and related terms do not merely designate occasional cracks in the surfaces of our contemporary existence but, rather, help us understand some profoundly radical aspects of it.
