ABSTRACT
TEXT Central to folklife studies-as well as to linguistics, anthropology, literary criticism, and other related disciplines-the concept of “text” has expanded since the twentieth century to encompass written depictions of a wide range of human behavior that attempt to represent the behavior as comprehensively and accurately as possible. The recording of texts is important because it helps establish material as folklore by drawing attention to its multiple existence and variation, especially when links of learning and customary practice from one person to another are difficult to ascertain. For linguists and anthropologists of the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century, “text” referred to written documentation of the verbal component of discourse. Researchers scrupulously reproduced exactly what they heard, sometimes using phonetic symbols to represent sounds in languages they did not understand. Such texts provided linguists with their primary resources for analyzing vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar, while anthropologists used them as sources of information about the cultures of the individuals whose spoken language they had documented.
