Folk tales, magic, and politics interpretation of folklore in Slovak ethnography

Abstract

Myths, religion and magic have been important areas of investigation in the social sciences and humanities; their interpretation in concrete political contexts can illustrate both theoretical advance and political processes. The selected works point to the main ideas of the theoretical perspectives that dominated the study of folklore: the mythological school, the evolutionary interpretation, the structuralist trend, and the Soviet school of ethnography based on the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, i.e. in the period from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (1867 - 1989).