Belief and the American Folk

The history of folklore scholarship has come under increasing scrutiny in terms of cultural representations of the folk, but the role of folk belief in the construction of the folk has not been thoroughly examined. An investigation into American folklore scholarship of the last one hundred years reveals that folk belief has been used to justify both romantic images of the folk as wise and natural and scientific rationalistic images of the folk as pathological, with complex combinations of the two extremes. More recently, reflexive ethnography and cultural politics have offered ways of escaping the restrictions of these older paradigms in folk belief studies, although problems still remain.