Folklore as Part of Intangible Cultural Heritage: Where to Place It?

The present paper deals with the term folklore and its use within the Czech professional and amateur context. It comments not only on various terms related to folklore and its connotations, but also on the general term of intangible cultural heritage, because folklore is considered to be part of it. The authors show several cultural and political determinations of an approach to folklore and its understanding by Czech society. (In the Czech lands, the folklore movement originated as a product of a national awareness process). Within the Czech environment, folklore has come to be a specified category, which is determined by a scholarly definition on the one side, and on the other side, is determined by a general assumption of what cultural heritage values should look like in order to be protected and preserved. In field research, a scholar faces a huge part of a culture whose many parts are considered traditional by its bearers. This part of culture grows from folk tradition; it is shaped and inspired by it, or just looks for a way how to handle it. The original unity of the bearer, place, and time has been changed, and today it also reaches spheres which completely transgress the borders of folk culture and which are linked with mass culture and its many symbols, such as the media. What remains is the unity with the active sphere of a person s life and his/her self-expression.