Metadiscursive Practices and Scholarly Authority in Folkloristics

Recent research on the social / political and literary power of relations between texts is used in criticizing the metadiscursive practices - methods used in locating, extracting, editing, and interpreting discourses - of folklorists, anthropologists, and other practitioners. The Grimms' construction of « Kinder- und Hausmarcher » provides a social example of the way scholars manipulate literary features in creating the illusion that a written text reflects a prior oral text - while at the same time rendering this process invisible. The retention of these metadiscursive practices in contextualist and performance-based approaches and ethnopoetics is examined.