Paper short abstract:

Our paper discusses the history of Folklore in Switzerland and the role of archival materials for the institutionalizing of a disciplinary discourse during the first half of the 20th century. It is argued that collections formed the condition for the dissemination of fixed cultural elements within society.

Paper long abstract:

A widely accepted history about Folklore is that its institutionalization formed a part of the societal compensation of the cultural changes produced by industrialization. Thus, in Folklore and Heritage studies, collecting and preserving culture are often identified with fixation. Broadening this interpretation, we would like to argue that collecting as a technology of storing cultural elements was also aiming to preserve them for the future and enabling flows of knowledge: The early Folklorists did not only fix and therefore bring to an end what they collected, but at the same time they made the cultural elements known to the public, who had no knowledge about them anymore. The collection and mediation of folk culture - e.g., via teaching materials, museums, or Atlas projects - raised the awareness of the vernacular within society and in a certain historical context.

Our paper focuses on scientific practices such as collecting, on the storage technologies and on the special forms of mediation (through maps as well through teaching materials) in order to get an insight into the conceptions of (folk) culture that are constructed by these practices and technologies. A second step will be to connect these conceptions of (folk) culture with the wider spread discourses within society. Thus we can see how orders of (folk) culture reflect the order of the given society. The paper derives from a research project on intangible cultural heritage and is based on empirical data collected in the archives of the Swiss Folklore Society.