The Lore of Folklore: (An Anthropological Perspective)

he term folklore usually refer to legends, stories, music, oral history, dance, jokes, proverbs, customs, popular beliefs, ballads, superstitions and so forth, within the particular group. From the 19th century, folklore as discipline has gone through different stages of development. Some folklorists describe it as the artistic communication within a small group while the other looks at it as the study of superstitions in a scientific way. Within a particular community, folklore functioned to maintain solidarity, educate its members, strengthen cohesiveness of community, improve their cognitive ability and offer them hundreds of ways so that they can interact with each other. There are different schools of thought which explain the significance of folklore in their own way, ranging from comparative school, functional school, psychoanalytical school to structural school. In short folklore tries to mediate between people in an informal way. This article deals with the historical development of the concept of folklore.