Abstract
THIS PAPER WILL DISCUSS a well-known situation referred to in the above quotations,' with reference to its historical-sociological background. Precisely how did this situation arise, and why is the status of English folklore studies so weak by comparison with that of our immediate Celtic neighbors with their various research centers such as the Ulster Folk Museum, the Manx Museum, the Folklore Commission of Ireland, the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh, and the Welsh Folk Museum at St. Fagans, in Cardiff? To obtain some understanding of what has happened to English folklore studies, it is necessary to state the obvious: that the study of folklore cannot be viewed in isolation, because it is in no sense an abstract thing. It derives from the people-indeed it is the people-and by the people I mean all levels of society, not a limited concept applying only to those at the lowest end of the social scale. Folklore expresses the ideological rote of a nation, class, or other social group, and for this reason it may be justifiably described as inflammable: not only the obscene materials classified as ethnographic dynamite by Goldstein, but folklore in its every aspect.2 We have only to consider the role folklore has played in nationalistic endeavor to see the truth of this statement. The Marxian Socialist countries
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