THE CHALLENGES OF APPLIED FOLKLORE STUDIES AND ETHNOLOGY

Pojava te pozitivna i negativna recepcija scenskog prikaza suvremenoga proštenja u struci i na televiziji kao javnome mediju, potaknuli su ponovna promišljanja o načinima vrednovanja i autoritetima koji odlučuju o reprezentativnosti pojedinih folklornih prikaza. Kontekstom oko tog scenskog prikaza, te nekoliko drugih primjera, odnosno širim kontekstom smotri folklora u nas, prikazuju se dominantni stavovi struke i različite perspektive sudionika u tim procesima.The appearance and the positive and the negative reception of the staged performance of a contemporary church feast by the profession and the TV, as a public medium, have enticed the rethinking of the ways of evaluation and the authorities which decide on the representativeness of certain folklore performances. The text discusses the questions of the folk art, especially folk dance, song, costume, their stage presentation, and the questions — what is these days considered authentic in this field of cultural activity and evaluation, what is considered representative, who creates contemporary folklore, who evaluates and interprets it and how, what is the current state of this field in Croatia, and how public opinion on this matter is created and shaped. These questions do not refer exclusively to the field of ethnochoreology, but also to ethnology and folklore studies as a whole. By analyzing and interpreting the staged performance of a contemporary church feast and partly the situation with the current folklore festival paradigms, the author answers the questions about himself and his ethnologist and folklorist coprofessionals, i.e. about the current state of the profession in Croatia. His intent is to show various perspectives by which complex social relations in a part of contemporary Croatian community are revealed