2016 Folklorica Editor's Note


 

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Editor’s Note 2015 
 

This year’s volume of Folklorica demonstrates the power and creativity of 
vernacular culture. It features articles that articulate the role folklore plays in our 
lives in contexts that span the personal and intimate to international mass media 
and social networks. They represent the range of contemporary approaches to data 
sources for our scholarship, from the Internet to stories told in a family circle.  but 
also demonstrate that folkloristics, a discipline often associated with the past, has 
an important voice in the analysis and understanding of political events and 
identity in the globalizing world today. 

 Elena Boudovskaia brings us an analysis of a storytelling performance by a 
mother and son in a Rusyn family. The role of storytelling by these two 
generations reinforces the importance of narrative as a factor in the creation and 
maintenance of identity within social and kin networks. The heart of our field, the 
story, has not lost its resonance, but remains vibrant and relevant today. It is 
especially rewarding to present material from the Rusyn tradition, one that is rich 
and yet often overlooked in the context of the “larger” Slavic groups that have 
dominated their homeland. 

Olga Lyanda-Geller also focuses on story, but in this case turns to the 
interplay of literary, popular and oral sources in her analysis of “Masha and the 
Bear” in the Russian tradition. Her article represents the rewards of focusing on 
textual analysis, one of the hallmarks of folklore studies. It also reveals how 
intertwined orality, popular culture and literature have always been. The 
willingness to embrace intertextuality in this way represents a contemporary view 
of the folk tradition that is not bound by the insistence on “original” and “oral,” 
but takes a broader view of how we draw on a variety of sources to create our folk 
stories. 

The articles by Natalia Lysiuk and by Larisa Fialkova and Maria 
Yelenevskaia take us to the events on the Maidan and in Ukraine since 2014. 
Lysiuk examines the vernacular expression of these cataclysmic happenings, in 
particular toward Victor Yanukovich, in Kiev itself. She finds a richness of 
material that connects to past folk tradition, but also to popular culture and literary 
sources, like Lyanda-Geller. Her work illustrates the innovation of the folk 
imagination in the context of political upheaval and protest. Fialkova and 
Yelenvskaia focus on the same events, but among Russians and Ukrainians in the 
Israeli diaspora. Their “fieldwork” was not on the ground in the Maidan, but in 
the virtual space of the diaspora community, on social networks including 
Facebook, blogs and discussion boards. Their analysis of this “netlore” 
demonstrates the role that the digital age is having on folklore and its 



 

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dissemination, but also the persistence of the material in coping with dissent and 
political and personal upheaval. 

I wish to express my thanks to the external reviewers of these articles for 
their thoughtful and timely commentary; to the authors for their fine work and 
patience with revisions; and to my editorial assistant, Rick Spencer, for all his 
diligence and care with this year’s volume. 

Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby, Editor