On the Creation and Dissemination of Folkloric Discourse: Dance Research, Nationalism, and the Former Yugoslavia

Abstract:Since the 1930s, Yugoslav "folk" or "traditional" dances have gained the attention of many scholars who were interested not only in studying their form, but their attachments to nationalism and prevailing political ideologies. Such cultural expressions, which were later labeled as "folklore," developed with Romantic nationalism in the Yugoslav area. In this paper, I argue that through their quest for collecting peasant music and dance expressions for the purpose of creating an archive, folklorists and dance researchers were invested in creating discourses that were directly dependent on the emergence and the politicization of terms such as narodna kultura (folk culture), "folklore," and "tradition." This series of shifts allowed for social dances to assume greater import and provide a source of pride and appreciation for the communities associated with their performance. Finally, I trace the creation and the development of the fields of folklore and ethnochoreology. In order to do so, I analyze the work of dance researchers in Yugoslavia and in independent Macedonia, Serbia, and Croatia, who collected and archived this body of knowledge and published some of the first texts that represent peasant dance as folklore.