The study of power and creativity at the grass roots, a rubric under which fall seven
distinct but interrelated areas of folklore and folklife research. When folklorists use the
term, they refer to the relationship between political life and folk expression in the
following ways: (1) the folklore of politics, meaning the folklore that emerges from the
political process and political conflict; (2) the politics of folklore, meaning the impact on
people’s lives and well-being as a result of their culture, their folklore, and their creation
and dissemination of that culture; (3) the politics of folkloristics, meaning the political
implications of the study of folklore; (4) the politics of applied folklore policy, meaning
the political implications of government, corporate, and other nongovernmental policies
regarding the implementation of folklore and cultural programming; (5) political
interpretations of folklore by scholars; (6) folk political organization and alternative
social institutions, meaning how power relationships among individuals and classes are
expressed and negotiated informally in society or within smaller groups, and how small
groups relate to the larger society; and (7) political belief as folklore, what may be called
the study of ideology from a belief-centered perspective.
North American folklorists have paid the most attention to protest songs, political and
ethnic jokes, folklore in the laservation. Some hotly political topics have not been
discussed within the framework of politics and folklore, such as war, bor movement,
Communism, and most recently cultural conslavery, genocide, and, to some extent,
feminism, while other political issues of concern to folklorists elsewhere in the world
have drawn less attention to North America—namely, nationalism, folklorismus,
colonialism, Nazism, and revolution.