The Origins of the Urban Areas Folklore Studies in Greece: the Work of Dimitrios S. Loukatos

Folkloristics 8/1-2 (2023):
Author: Manolis G. Varvounis
Text:
https://doi.org/10.18485/folk.2023.8.1_2.6

Since the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, Greek folk culture has displayed clear signs of the influences of modernity and post-modernity. Thus even popular culture shows the influence of phenomena derived from cultural globalization, which can be perceived in the adoption of foreign cultural prototypes, secularization, as described by Augé. These are phenomena that form part of the so called ‘urban folklore studies’ and from the 2000s onwards, more than anything else, they attracted the attention of Greek scholars of folklore. Urban folklore studies today deal with social phenomena through ethnographic fieldwork and employ cross disciplinary collaboration both with social anthropology and with urban sociology. Prof. Dimitrios S. Loukatos was the founder of urban folklore studies in Greece. His work was pioneering, since he laid the foundations for future studies and identified the main research topics. In this paper we examine the contribution of his academic legacy.

Keywords: Greek folklore, urban folklore, modernist cultural phenomena, Dimitrios S. Loukatos.