ABSTRACT
Movement of cultural products from one setting to another, or from one audience to another, has become such a commonplace in our time that the notions of setting and audience lose their stability. Even less stable is the notion of authenticity, which motivates much of the interest in folklore. The questions “What is authentic folklore?” and “How can I distinguish it from the inauthentic, the commercialized, or the fabricated?” grow out of dichotomies like fictional vs. factual writing, whose polarization in our time has been beautifully delineated by Raymond Williams (1977:145–157), but whose antagonism goes back at least to Plato. We tend to see inauthenticity when colorful and attractive elements of traditional dance in, for instance, the Tyrol or East Africa are cultivated for the pleasure of tourists. In folktale collections, inauthenticity is less obvious. But what difference exists between cultivating colorful elements of folklife for tourists and presenting folktales from, say, Madagascar for a European audience? In both cases, artistic behavior leaves one audience and performance context for another; in both cases, some capital gain is expected, either financial or cultural. Printing colonial folktales in French—a microcosm of the folklorization of native cultures (Bouillon 1981:143)—is an instance of Hans Moser’s definition of folklorismus, “the performance of functionally and traditionally determined elements outside their local or class community” (Moser 1962).
