ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a move toward such an emergent cultural history and of many forms and uses of the 'folk' that the case of Guga reveals. It focuses on the novel is striking in stylistic terms in multiple ways; it is the only point in the novel where the narrator takes harsh and direct, admonitory tone. The Guga tradition in its premodern form thus reflects a variety of relationships between the 'folk' and the 'elite', the oral and literate; the same is true in the present. The valorization of the folk in this context also reflected broader discourses of the day: the idea of 'folk' in Europe represented the search for 'essential' cultural sources for emerging European 'nations'. The representation of the folk is always, as Rustom Bharucha has argued, 'fragmented, dispersed, and ruptured through the mediations of "national culture", festivals, intercultural exchange and cultural tourism' – the forms of cultural production that now reproduce 'the folk' on international stages.
