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src="cid:004301ca62d6$90a164a0$81afd082@rhi.hi.is"> <BR><BR><BR><STRONG><FONT
face=Garamond>Opinn fyrirlestur/Public lecture:</FONT></STRONG></DIV>
<DIV><STRONG><FONT face=Garamond></FONT></STRONG> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Garamond><STRONG>Caught in the Cracks of Modernity? Folk Culture
and the Contemporary World</STRONG> <BR><STRONG></STRONG></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Garamond><STRONG>Barbro Klein</STRONG> (Director of SCAS:
Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies) <BR><BR><STRONG>Fimmtudag/Thursday, 19
November 2009</STRONG> <BR><STRONG>16:35-17:30</STRONG> <BR><STRONG>Oddi
101</STRONG> <BR></DIV></FONT><FONT face=Garamond></FONT>
<DIV><FONT face=Garamond>The words folk culture and folk traditions have often
been questioned inside and outside scholarly circles. Could terms invented more
than two hundred years ago, and mostly used to describe European peasant life,
possibly be anything more than arcane curiosities in the contemporary world with
its aggressive commercialism, advanced technology, transnational migrations,
global violence and rapid environmental destruction? Folklorists, on their part,
have long contended that these terms are not only useful: they are crucial to
understanding a wide range of modern phenomena and behaviours, from the heritage
activism of world-wide bureaucracies to the culture of the poorest of the urban
poor. In my presentation I will review some of the ideas through which
folklorists have argued that folk culture and related terms do not merely
designate occasional cracks in the surfaces of our contemporary existence but,
rather, help us understand some profoundly radical aspects of it.
<BR><BR><B>Félags- og mannvísindadeild Háskóla Íslands</B> <BR><B>Faculty of
Social and Human Sciences, University of Iceland</B></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>