ABSTRACT
The idea of popular culture', as opposed to learned culture', is a late eighteenth-century one, first formulated by the German writer J. G. Herder. Antiquaries had, of course, described popular customs before this: Henry Bourne, for example, the curate of All Saints'. The political reason for the discovery of popular culture was that it fitted into and legitimated the movements of national liberation which erupted all over Europe in the early nineteenth century, in Greece, Serbia, and Belgium. The discovery of the people was a nativistic' movement in the sense that it was an attempt by a number of European countries, many of which were under foreign domination, to revive their traditional cultures. The popular cultures that developed were different from those of pre-existing lower classes, and not necessarily identical to the working-class cultures of later periods of urban industrial capitalism. Harker's comments were warmly received and Adrian Rifkin reinforced his point about the dangers of studying culture as an object.
