Arnold van Gennep: Structuralist and Apologist for the Study of Folklore in France

Abstract

ARNOLD VAN GENNEP (1873-1957) was the first modern folklorist of France. At a time when the field of folklore was in disrepute with the literary folklorists, when ethnologists and sociologists such as Marcel Mauss denied its claim to an autonomous field of study, and when folklorists still argued over its purview, van Gennep was the primary theorist and collector of folklore whose work not only maintained interest in the subject, but provided specific models of gathering, collating and interpretating folklore. The turn of the century marked the appearance of two studies critical of the comparative method used by the literary folklorists Emmanuel Cosquin, Gaston Paris and L6opold Sudre. Joseph B6dier's Les Fabliaux, 1895 (whose 'agnosticism' killed interest in folklore in France),' was followed in 1914 by Lucien Foulet's Le Roman de Renard. Both works marked the eclipse of literary interest in the historical development of popular narratives and the relationship of folklore to the creation of literature. It was determined that the historical basis which provided the scientific definition of philology and literary history was inappropriate to the study of orally transmitted artifacts. Van Gennep's tireless efforts to redefine the scholarly approach to folklore using the methods of function and context proper to Marcel Mauss's school of ethnography/sociology to clearly define the coherent nature of the constituent elements of popular traditions and the autonomy of its scope was the single example of creative genius in French folkloristics to rival the significant strides made elsewhere in Europe and America from 900oo to 1935. Van Gennep came to the study of folklore from the science of religions at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes where his teachers had been Leon Marillier, Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert. The study of comparative religions (like the study of medieval French