Classification and Functions

Contextualizing Hariani Peasant Women’s Folksongs within Folkloristics

Abstract

Despite numerous attempts at defining what ‘folklore’ actually is consensus still eludes the academicians. Likewise, Folkloristics—the systematic study of ‘folklore’—too is a discipline with porous and unguarded borders imbibing within its scope almost all approaches and tools of analysis—be it the linguistic, the sociological, the anthropological, the literary, the historical, the structuralist, the cultural and what not. The proposed paper focuses primarily on ‘Hariani peasant women’s folksongs’ from a literary point of view in order to classify them within the existing categories of folksongs in general. Regarding the functional aspect of these folksongs, the paper will first enumerate various tasks folksongs perform as such within a cultural landscape, and then contextualize the folksongs chosen for analysis within Folkloristics. During the process, new categories and functions of folksongs are hoped to emerge whose accommodation within the existing categories is bound to re-mark certain boundaries and thus re-define the scope of the ‘folklore’ studies.

This is the first of the proposed three presentations on the issue at hand during the tenure of my Associateship at IIAS, Shimla.