Folkloristics is a discipline that studies the general traditions, folklore, and cultural lifestyles of individual communities, mainly through the research and collection of folkloric legends, traditional rituals, and customs.
The subjects of these studies range from those more closely connected to daily life, such as clothing, food, housing, livelihood, familial ceremonies, and rites, to legends, folktales, folk songs, strange phenomena, divination, and even religion.
In the Meiji and Taisho periods, folkloric studies were known as "ethnography", and the subject matter was still vague, however, in the Showa period, Kunio Yanagida, who is considered the father of Japanese folkloristics, used the term "folklore" to describe his research, which he called "folkloric theory" or "locality studies", and the term has come to be in general use ever since.
In folkloric studies, the research method is mainly fieldwork since the object of study is the folk traditions handed down in a local community over generations, or in other words, matters that haven't been preserved in literature.
It is a very significant field of research, as it systematizes the lives of ordinary people from the past to the present, clarifying matters of the world as seen from the perspective of the common man, which many other studies, such as religious studies, history, sociology, and archaeology, have overlooked or failed to address.
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