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A practitioner of ceremonial magic performs the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram, tracing symbols and chanting phrases in a fixed sequence. To scholars working in different traditions of folklore study, this single event could be understood in radically different ways: as a survival of ancient temple rites, as an emergent performance shaped by the practitioner's immediate circumstances, as a script embedded in a specific social milieu, as a site where power relations and the ethnographer's own position become visible, or as a digital assemblage when the pentagram is drawn on a screen in a virtual circle. The history of how folklorists have approached ritual and performance is a story of successive frameworks that redefined what counts as evidence, what a satisfying explanation looks like, and what questions are worth asking.
Early in the twentieth century, the Myth and Ritual School (active roughly 1900–1950) proposed that myth and ritual were inseparably linked: myths were not stories invented to explain natural phenomena but rather the verbal correlates of ritual acts. Drawing on comparative ancient Near Eastern texts and ethnographic reports of seasonal and kingship rites, scholars such as Jane Ellen Harrison and S. H. Hooke argued that ritual performance preceded and generated mythic narratives. The school treated evidence as primarily textual and archaeological, focusing on recurring patterns in agricultural cycles, kingship renewal, and sacrifice across cultures. A satisfying explanation meant showing how a given myth derived from a concrete ritual practice, often with reference to Frazerian categories of magic, religion, and science. The approach was heavily universalizing, assuming that similar rituals worldwide stemmed from a shared human psychology or historical diffusion. By mid-century, the Myth and Ritual School declined because its sweeping claims could not account for the diversity of local contexts: it read myths as fixed scripts rather than as living performances, and it ignored the social and historical specificities of the communities that enacted them.
Beginning in the 1960s, Performance Theory fundamentally reoriented folkloristic inquiry. Instead of treating ritual texts as static objects to be classified, researchers like Richard Bauman and Roger D. Abrahams shifted attention to the event itself—the act of performing in a particular time and place. The unit of study became the performance event, understood as a communicative interaction in which meaning emerges through the interplay of performer, audience, and context. Evidence now included not only the words spoken but also gestures, intonation, audience responses, and the social dynamics of the occasion. A satisfying explanation described how performers creatively used traditional forms to achieve specific effects, often adapting them on the spot. Performance Theory did not simply discard the textual evidence of the Myth and Ritual School; it reinterpreted those texts as possible scripts that performers might invoke, but it insisted that the script alone could not account for what happened in performance. This framework made possible the analysis of spontaneous variation, improvisation, and the negotiation of authority between performer and audience—aspects the earlier school had largely overlooked.
Contextual Folkloristics emerged in the 1970s as a direct extension and critique of Performance Theory. While Performance Theory had foregrounded the event, Contextual Folkloristics argued that the event could not be fully understood without embedding it in the broader social and cultural contexts that shaped it. Researchers such as Dan Ben-Amos and Linda Dégh demanded richer ethnographic evidence: not just the performance itself, but the community's norms, history, economic conditions, and the place of the performance within the group's everyday life. A satisfying explanation linked the performance to structural patterns of kinship, politics, and worldview. Where Performance Theory might have treated the performer-audience interaction as relatively self-contained, Contextual Folkloristics insisted that the performance was a window into the whole social fabric. This framework preserved Performance Theory's focus on the event but narrowed its explanatory scope by requiring that all claims be grounded in detailed, long-term fieldwork. It coexists with Performance Theory because researchers can choose to emphasize event dynamics or social structure depending on their questions.
By the 1980s, a further shift brought Critical and Reflexive Folkloristics to the fore. This framework challenged the earlier schools' assumption that the folklorist could be an objective observer. Scholars such as Kirin Narayan and Deborah Kapchan argued that the ethnographer's own positionality—gender, class, ethnicity, institutional affiliation—shapes every aspect of research, from what questions are asked to how performances are interpreted. Evidence now included the researcher's own experiences and relationships in the field. A satisfying explanation was one that acknowledged the power dynamics at play and reflected critically on the knowledge-production process. Critical and Reflexive Folkloristics did not replace Contextual Folkloristics; rather, it added a layer of methodological self-awareness. While Contextual Folkloristics embedded the performance in social context, this framework asked who benefits from that embedding, whose voice is heard, and how the folklorist's presence alters the performance. It transformed fieldwork practice by making reflexivity a standard concern.
Since the early 2000s, Digital Folklore has confronted folklorists with phenomena that blur older boundaries. When a ritual such as the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram is performed on a video call or shared as a meme, concepts of co-presence, community, and tradition shift. Digital Folklore does not simply apply Performance Theory's event focus to screens; it raises new analytical problems. What counts as a performance when participants are geographically dispersed and interacting asynchronously? How does the platform itself—its affordances, algorithms, and moderation policies—shape the ritual? Evidence now includes screenshots, chat logs, metadata, and the design of digital spaces. A satisfying explanation accounts for how digital environments transform the conditions under which ritual and performance happen, often challenging assumptions about embodiment and immediacy. This framework coexists with earlier ones: a digital ritual can still be analyzed through Performance Theory's lens of emergent meaning, but only if the specificities of the digital context are foregrounded.
Four of the five frameworks remain active in contemporary folklore studies: Performance Theory, Contextual Folkloristics, Critical and Reflexive Folkloristics, and Digital Folklore. They coexist because they address different aspects of the same phenomena. Performance Theory is best suited for close analysis of event dynamics; Contextual Folkloristics for linking those events to social structures; Critical and Reflexive Folkloristics for interrogating the researcher's role; and Digital Folklore for understanding contemporary media ecologies. Areas of convergence include a shared commitment to ethnographic fieldwork, attention to context, and rejection of universalizing claims. The main disagreements revolve around how much weight to give to digital vs. embodied experience, whether reflexivity should be a routine requirement or a special focus, and how to balance event-level detail with structural analysis. There is no consensus on whether digital platforms create entirely new forms of ritual or merely extend preexisting dynamics. The field today is thus a pluralistic landscape where each framework offers a distinct lens, and the most insightful studies often combine them.