Folklore Studies, Fieldwork and the Making of a Domestic Anthropology in Fin-de-Siècle Britain

This article follows the ‘communities of knowledge-making’ that formed around folklore collection at the end of the nineteenth century. Often regarded as eccentric or marginal figures in the history of human science, these collectors in fact engaged in lively and sophisticated discussions about the methodologies needed to study the mental lives of fellow human beings. The article tracks how these collectors came to emphasize the virtues of immersive, first-hand ethnographic fieldwork, in a way that built on a longstanding tradition of antiquarian studies at the local level. In doing so, they cut against the grain of prevailing social-evolutionist theories that insisted on seeing folkloric material as relics from an earlier stage of civilization and instead came to view their subjects as members of living, functioning communities. As such, the article shows how these folklore collectors made major contributions to the emergence of a culturally-relativist outlook in the human sciences at the turn of the century.