Editing Folklore (section)

=== Backstory ===
Before the [[World War II|Second World War]], folk artifacts had been understood and collected as cultural shards of an earlier time. They were considered individual vestigial artifacts, with little or no function in the contemporary culture. Given this understanding, the goal of the folklorist was to capture and document them before they disappeared. They were collected with no supporting data, bound in books, archived and classified more or less successfully. The [[Folklore studies#Aarne–Thompson and the historic–geographic method|Historic–Geographic Method]] worked to isolate and track these collected artifacts, mostly verbal lore, across space and time.

Following the Second World War, folklorists began to articulate a more holistic approach toward their subject matter. In tandem with the growing sophistication in the social sciences, attention was no longer limited to the isolated artifact, but extended to include the artifact embedded in an active cultural environment. One early proponent was [[Alan Dundes]] with his essay "Texture, Text and Context", first published 1964.{{sfn|Dundes|1980}} A public presentation in 1967 by [[Dan Ben-Amos]] at the American Folklore Society brought the behavioral approach into open debate among folklorists. In 1972 Richard Dorson called out the "young Turks" for their movement toward a behavioral approach to folklore. This approach "shifted the conceptualization of folklore as an extractable item or 'text' to an emphasis on folklore as a kind of human behavior and communication. Conceptualizing folklore as behavior redefined the job of folklorists..."{{sfn|Gabbert|1999|page=119}}{{efn|A more extensive discussion of this can be found in "The 'Text/Context' Controversy and the Emergence of Behavioral Approaches in Folklore", {{harvnb|Gabbert|1999}}}}

Folklore became a verb, an action, something that people do, not just something that they have.{{sfn|Bauman|Paredes|1972|page=xv}} It is in the performance and the active context that folklore artifacts get transmitted in informal, direct communication, either verbally or in demonstration. Performance includes all the different modes and manners in which this transmission occurs.