This collection of essays is a result of a series of conferences held on folklore in Indian society. It may be regarded primarily as reflecting American scholarship on South Asia and therefore provides an opportunity to discuss both its dynamism and its limits.
Folklore as a discipline was long dominated by a conceptual framework with emphasis on the recording of disappearing forms of narratives, riddles, performances and other ‘lore’ of the ‘folk’. It was informed by an evolutionist paradigm and the dominant dichotomy was that between ‘classical’ and ‘folk’. Just as the museum in western culture records items of material culture of peoples whose ways of life are seen to be disappearing (ironically within the framework of the same processes which have made the acquisi-tion and recording of the displayed items in the museum possible), so folklore was the record of their items of non-material culture. Happily this model of folklore does not hold the same power over researchers as it once did, not least due to the fact that historians have begun to address this material as living material rather than as the fossilized remains of disappearing ways of life. Blackburn and Ramanunjan’s book similarly looks at various aspects of folklore as related to people’s ways of life.