volkskunde

Volkskunde, literally meaning “folk science,” is an interdisciplinary field that studies the culture, customs, beliefs, artifacts, and social practices of ordinary people. It aims to document and interpret everyday life, with attention to regional variation, historical change, and processes of cultural transmission. In different contexts it is closely related to ethnology, folklore studies, and cultural anthropology.

Scholars in Volkskunde use fieldwork, ethnography, oral history, and the collection of folk songs, legends, proverbs, and other forms of oral tradition. They analyze material culture such as clothing, tools, architecture, and crafts, and they study language, dialects, rituals, calendars, and ceremonies. The approach combines historical sources with contemporary observation to understand how communities create, maintain, and transform their practices.

Origin and development of Volkskunde trace back to 18th- and 19th-century Europe, amid rising interest in national and regional cultures during modernization. It evolved into formal academic programs in universities and research institutes. The field has sometimes intersected with nationalist projects, while later scholarship emphasized critical, comparative, and transdisciplinary methods. In some contexts, the label Volkskunde has been supplemented or replaced by ethnology, folkloristics, or cultural anthropology.

Today the term remains most common in German-speaking regions and, to some extent, in the Netherlands and Belgium, where it denotes a scholarly study of folk life, traditions, crafts, and everyday practices. Public folklore institutions, archives, museums, and journals continue to support research and preservation of intangible cultural heritage, alongside broader interdisciplinary inquiries into culture and society.