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The history of the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research
After its establishment in 1948, the Institute
of Ethnology and Folklore Research (what was then the Institute of Folk
Art, and from 1977 to 1990, the Institute of Folklore Research) operated
for two years exclusively as an ethnomusicological research centre. The
first generation of enthusiasts and professionals came from various fields,
working under the leadership of Vinko Zganec and, later, Zoran Palcok.
Similary to the colleagues who were soon to join them - Maja Boskovic
Stulli, the philologist, and Ivan Ivancan, the ethnochoreologist - they
were motivated by the need to collect that evidence of traditional culture
to the fullest extent possible, as it was believed to be disappearing
in its original forms or to be changing at a more accelerated pace than
previously.
At the time when Maja Boskovic-Stulli was director of the Institute, there
was an evident effort being made within initial folkloristic research,
particularly philological research, that oral literature be observed as
an art phenomenon, with the aid of a developed formal methodological approach.
The more comprehensive approach to folklore also demanded an ethnological
perspective, facilitating an insight into customary practice and the broader
social environment. The Institute’s ethnologists created the foundations
of critical ethnological scholarship which was enriched by contemporary
concepts in theory and methodology (under the directorship of Dunja Rihtman-Augustin).
This persisted in the mutual permeation of insights from field practice
and scholarly interpretations, as well as in a differentiation of their
methodologies. Research interests turned to the transformation of tradition,
both in rural and urban communities, particularly to the so-called second
existence of folklore in the modern media and contemporary everyday life,
which was to become a valuable framework for the dynamic conceptualisation
of tradition as a continuous process of transformation of various cultural
contents. Throughout the above scholarly-historical phase, the activity
of the Institute contributed to the shaping of Croatian ethnology and
folkloristics as branches of scholarship prepared to interpret culture
equally in its universal, and in its differential aspects.
At the end of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, during the directorship
of Zorica Vitez, the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research has
brought together numerous professionals with training in diverse fields
of scholarship: ethnologists, musicologists, scholars of comparative literature
and Croatian literarure, historians and art historians, ethnochoreologists,
theatrologists and linguists. A wide circle of specific interests has
developed as part of the Institute’s programmes, ranging from work on
synthesised presentations of traditional culture and a scholarly history
of ethnology, through the study of the transformation and innovation of
customary practice, oral and folk literature and the folklore theatre,
music folklore practice, the ideological frameworks for utilisation and
presentation of folklore, to themes imposed by the current war and post-war
realities in Croatia.
(according to Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research: On Its
Fiftieth Anniversary, edited by Lada Cale Feldman, Ines Prica, Zorica
Vitez; Zagreb, 1998)
Ethnomusicology and Ethnochoreology at the Institute
from Late Forties (Jerko Bezic)
Ethnomusicology and Ethnochoreology at the Institute
During the Nineties (Naila Ceribasic)
Finitis decem lustris. Fifty Years of Folklore
Research - Philological, Ethnotheatrological and the Like - at the Institute
(Ljiljana Marks i Ivan Lozica)
The First Fifty Years of Ethnological Thought
at the Institute (Dunja Rihtman-Augustin i Aleksandra Muraj)
(c) Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research 2004. Contact Impressum