Folklore and Ethnological Research on Slovenian Folk Culture

This research programme is a set of interdisciplinary research that examines the broad fields of folkloristics and ethnology, connecting it to the new concepts and discourses from various humanistic sciences. It is divided to interconnected research topics, which continue with the research of the past programme while it also adds new content: A1 Folk and arts, intertextuality and performativity in folk drama and theatre; zoo and botany phenomena in folklore, literature and culture, A2 Surviving with a song, creating tradition,A3 Folk in the written code, A4 Music and identity processes, A5 Ethno-identity dances in Slovenia, B Folk music practices in audio recordings, C Cognitive and perceptive perspectives: emotional perception and semantics of folklore and ethnomusicological heritage in users and on carriers. They present the basis for scientific research, stipulating that folkloristic and ethnological research of Slovenian spiritual culture deals with the issues of creative and functional communication of the folk spiritual traditions, their textures, texts, context and barriers. The individual aspects are interdisciplinary and examine the social elements of spiritual culture and determine the differences as well as the similarities in structure, function and poetry, in the historical context, while it also takes into account the traditions changing due to new social circumstances, new cultural dynamics and transformations of cultural practices. Folkloristic hypothesis that the elements of the folk spiritual culture are some of the clearest indicators of ethnic characteristics converge with the ethnological aspects that determine how these elements are affected by the barriers and the social context in which they are realised. The core of the research includes systematic research of the broadest area of folk spiritual culture and its creative transformation based on field research, and critical approach to sources, systematization, digitalisation of the field and archive material. We are combining diachronic research of folk spiritual culture with synchronic research, which enables us to observe, first, innovations and modern phenomena that is only becoming a tradition, or invented tradition, especially the genres that have been overlooked and belong in the area of intertextuality and performativity; furthermore, song traditions that enable survival, issues arising from the creativity in folk in written code, music and dance in identity processes and the issue of folk music practices on audio carriers. We plan to connect further with the research from the field of cognitive science that connects humanistic and cognitive sciences with innovative technologies and methods from the field of information technology in order to determine general patterns and specifics of understanding folk song and music and to continue with the examination of connections between ecology and folklore, culture, literature (ethnobotany) and to establish a new discipline of zoofolkloristics in the European area with the help of cultural and critical animalistics and ecocriticism.