ABSTRACT
Since the late eighteenth century, the notion of popular culture, in the sense of folk culture, has constituted a significant aspect of European and American cultural life. The long and victorious war waged by the Counter-Reformation Church and the absolutist state on popular culture was construed as the assertion of the city over the countryside, of reason and science over magic and superstition, and of bourgeois upbringing over the coarse manners of the vulgar. Problems of definition which had been encountered with the concept of popular culture also extended to the equally problematic notion of popular religion. The culture of the popular strata, far from being all of a piece and homogeneous, had, just as did the so-called dominant culture, its internal differences and its deep divisions. In the 1980s the concept of popular culture came under radical scrutiny also in the field of demology.
