Paper short abstract:

Anti-elitist perspectives potentially reproducing new forms of elitism, which may exclude from the folklore collector's sight present-day vernacularities in cultural production and argumentation.

Paper long abstract:

As a result of reflexive and nationalist-critical discourse, deconstruction, rather than construction, has become the key idea in shaping research in folkloristics and the arguments for its social significance. A critical look at past research practices and their ideological-argumentative premises has prevailed, as well as examining in transnational, cross-border contexts cultural processes that were previously examined in the national and patriotic framework. Nationalizing narratives are now seen as expressions of banal nationalism and as theoretically justified targets of deconstruction, even though the premises in such deconstruction may be more political than theoretical. The risk here is that anti-elitist perspectives may reproduce new forms of elitism which exclude from the folklore collector's sight present-day vernacularities in cultural production and argumentation. Instead of elevating these to the status of a folkloristic object, as the civilized classes of the 19th and early 20th centuries did with the "traditional folk", today's agents of populist nationalism tend to be looked down upon as low class and competent only in qualitatively weak argumentation. Their expressive culture is not even listed or studied, at least conventionally, as internet folklore.