Where there are no spectators: Loving authentic folklore in post-folkloric Slovakia

This dissertation follows the ideas and activities of a movement to "return to authentic folklore" in contemporary Slovakia. I ask how a new group of cultural actors attempts to establish its authority to authentically represent folklore, and I ask how they address the apparent paradox that authentic folklore is conceptualized as something intimate, not performed for any audience, and yet this non-performed material must be performed in order to introduce it to the public. Although the problem of "performing authenticity" has already been the object of considerable research, I emphasize several ways in which this case stands out. I characterize the specificity of this contemporary movement's discourse relative to that of earlier regimes of authenticity, such as the regime established under Communist Party rule in Slovakia between 1948 and 1989. Whereas Communist folklore discourse emphasized the continuity between old, authentic forms and contemporary social expression, today's movement emphasizes temporal discontinuity. Whereas Communist folklore discourse invoked "the people" as an enduring subject of politics and culture, uniting the old and the new, today's movement rhetorically constructs "the folk" as a traditional---distinctly not modern---"bearer" (rather than "creator") of folklore, whose presence is largely limited to an authentic past, and whose cultural expression is portrayed as fundamentally apolitical. I interpret this rhetorical shift as an attempt to come to terms with the shifting frames of the acceptable in post-Communist context. I reflect on the observation made by a number of political theorists that the contemporary moment has become "post-political," as a result of which "the people" has lost prestige as a category of political discourse---even while, in principle, "the people" still offers conceptual grounding for notions of democratic legitimacy. I observe a parallel ambiguity in public aesthetic expression. Folklore and the notion of "the folk" have not disappeared, but they have been reformulated. "The folk" serves as a legitimating principle for a genre of folklore performance that claims the authority to accurately represent authentic folk traditions. At the same time, the contemporary authentic folklore movement insists that these representations are distinct from the real thing; it rhetorically establishes that public performances are never fully authentic, and that the authentic "folk" should remain untouched by political or aesthetic manipulation, in a more or less unchanging, pre-modern sphere.;The dissertation's chapters follow a series of challenges that the authentic folklore movement has faced in its work of reformulating folklore. In the process, I outline and analyze the elaborate procedures that the movement has developed in order to address these challenges. I argue that these specific challenges derive from tensions inherent in the movement's notion of authentic folklore (and to a certain extent inherent in the notion of authentic folklore in general). Of chief importance is the idea that authentic folklore is engaged in "for one's own pleasure" rather than for the sake of an audience or a public; yet at the same time authentic folklore advocates believe that folklore should be made accessible to a "broad public" that is not able to engage in folklore "for its own pleasure" because it has lost contact with authentic folk traditions. Ideally, in authentic folklore "there are no performers or spectators," yet the authentic folklore movement must perform folklore to spectators in order to teach them about this ideal. My dissertation traces the movement's attempts to create---however tentatively---a public that ceases to be an audience, becoming an active participant in the enactment of folklore, yet never fully merging with the "folk." The public is encouraged to identify with the folk as a grounding figure of public identity, without becoming the folk and without "politicizing"---mobilizing or transforming---the meaning of the folk's shared cultural expression. The dissertation is accompanied by one supplementary recording of a performance by Folklore Ensemble Hornad, with whom the author spent most of his time during fieldwork.