Folk-life Research in Our Time

Abstract

FOLK-LIFE research has often been regarded as a branch of anthropology in Sweden called' folklivsforskning' or 'Nordic' or 'regional European ethnology'. 1 Anthropology is in Great Britain and U.S.A. generally divided into several branches. First we have physical anthropology, which, however, is a subject we cannot discuss in this connection. Of main interest, on the other hand, is social anthropology. An American anthropologist has recently defined this subject as 'the development of scientific generalizations about a culture, or about culture, society and personality in a n10re universal sense '.2 In the United States the word has often been used interchangeably with ethnology, but most American anthropologists now emphasize social anthropology as a generalizing approach to human behaviour characteristic of the social or behavioural sciences, with the focus on particular problems relating to 'culture, society and personality'. Some researchers define cultural anthropology (' man study') as that facet of anthropology' which describes and seeks general understanding about 'human customs' or 'cultural behaviour'. These definitions do not imply any decisive difference between the spheres of the two subjects, although their respective trends are somewhat different.