Over boeren en bosjesmannen. Momenten van toenadering en distantie tussen volkeren en volkenkunde

Samenvatting

On Peasants and Bushmen. Moments of Rapprochement and Alienation between Folkore and Anthropology. Under the aegis of colonialism, anthropology in the Netherlands had gained a foothold in academia by the 1910s. At that same time, students of folklore (volkskunde) began attempting to institutionalize their discipline. They perceived anthropology as a sister discipline and proposed to use the fieldwork methods and comparative materials of ethnography. On their part, anthropologists, who still embraced evolutionism, thought that folklore studies had the potential to shed light on what had survived from earlier development stages in their native society. However, the rapprochement between folklorists and anthropologists was brief. From the mid-1930s onward, interpersonal contacts and exchanges of ideas between folklorists and anthropologists became fewer and fewer, as developments internal and external to both anthropology and folklore led to their estrangement. 71 References. Adapted from the source document.