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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)