Alfred Louis Kroeber was an American cultural anthropologist. He received his PhD under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1901, the first doctorate in anthropology awarded by Columbia. He was also the first professor appointed to the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He played an integral role in the early days of its Museum of Anthropology, where he served as director from 1909 through 1947. Kroeber provided detailed information about Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi people, whom he studied over a period of years. He was the father of the acclaimed novelist, poet, and writer of short stories Ursula K. Le Guin.
Kópavogur is a town in Iceland that is the country's second largest municipality by population.
Folklore studies is the branch of anthropology devoted to the study of folklore. This term, along with its synonyms, gained currency in the 1950s to distinguish the academic study of traditional culture from the folklore artifacts themselves. It became established as a field across both Europe and North America, coordinating with Volkskunde (German), folkeminner (Norwegian), and folkminnen (Swedish), among others.
Alan Dundes was an American folklorist. He spent much of his career as a professional academic at the University of California, Berkeley and published his ideas in a wide range of books and articles.
Public folklore is the term for the work done by folklorists in public settings in the United States and Canada outside of universities and colleges, such as arts councils, museums, folklife festivals, radio stations, etc., as opposed to academic folklore, which is done within universities and colleges. The term is short for "public sector folklore" and was first used by members of the American Folklore Society in the early 1970s.
Huldufólk or hidden people are elves in Icelandic and Faroese folklore. They are supernatural beings that live in nature. They look and behave similarly to humans, but live in a parallel world. They can make themselves visible at will. Konrad von Maurer cites a 19th-century Icelandic source claiming that the only visible difference between normal people and outwardly human-appearing huldufólk is, the latter have a convex rather than concave philtrum below their noses.
Simon J. Bronner is an American folklorist, ethnologist, historian, sociologist, educator, college dean, and author.
Stith Thompson was an American folklorist: he has been described as "America's most important folklorist".
John Frederick Lindow is an American philologist who is Professor Emeritus of Old Norse and Folklore at University of California, Berkeley. He is a well known authority on Old Norse religion and literature.
Jason Baird Jackson is an American anthropologist who is Professor of Folklore and Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. He is "an advocate of open access issues and works for scholarly communications and scholarly publishing projects." At IUB, he has served as Chair of the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology and as Director of the Folklore Institute. According to the Journal of American Folklore, "Jason Baird Jackson establishes himself as one of the foremost scholars in American Indian studies today."
Dorothy Noyes is an American folklorist and ethnologist whose comparative, ethnographic and historical research focuses on European societies and upon European immigrant communities in the United States. Beyond its area studies context, her work has aimed to enrich the conceptual toolkit of folklore studies (folkloristics) and ethnology. General problems upon which she has focused attention include the status of "provincial" communities in national and global contexts, heritage policies and politics, problems of innovation and creativity, and the nature of festival specifically and of cultural displays and representations generally.
Christian Giordano was a Swiss anthropologist and sociologist born in Lugano, Switzerland. Since 1989, he has been Professor of Ethnology and Social Anthropology and Head of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. He has also been teaching 'Contemporary Social Theories' at the UNESCO Chair in Intercultural Exchanges, Bucharest in Romania.
Gearóid Mac Eoin was an Irish academic whose studies focused especially on aspects of Irish language, literature and history.
The International Society for Ethnology and Folklore is a professional association of scholars in the fields of ethnology, folklore studies, and cultural anthropology based in Amsterdam at the Meertens Institute. The goal of SIEF is to create professional networks between its scholars and their institutes and to stimulate research in general. To accomplish that every two years an international scholarly congress is organised and a General Assembly is held. Within its framework various special interest working groups are active: on cultural heritage, religion, rituality, cultural analysis, etc.
Archer Taylor was one of America's "foremost specialists in American and European folklore", with a special interest in cultural history, literature, proverbs, riddles and bibliography.
Museum folklore is a domain of scholarship and professional practice within the field of folklore studies (folkloristics).
Monique Scheer is an American-German historical and cultural anthropologist and professor at the University of Tübingen, Germany, where she also serves as Vice-President for International Affairs and Diversity.
Luis Nicanor Pablo Díaz González-Viana, is a Spanish anthropologist, philologist and writer. He is considered a pioneer of Spanish anthropology specializing in popular culture, ethnology and identities. He is a researcher at the Spanish National Research Council.
Peter Jan Margry is a Dutch historian and European ethnologist who was till November 2022 professor European Ethnology at the University of Amsterdam and, from 1993 to 2022, senior fellow at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences research center Meertens Institute in the Netherlands. Previously, he worked in The Hague and Den Bosch where he held positions as archivist-researcher, historian and archival inspector successively at the Dutch National Archives, the Court of Audit (Netherlands) and the province of North Brabant. During the 1990s he was also active as a consultant on document heritage, working in Suriname and Papua (Indonesia).
James Danandjaja, born Tan Soe Lien was an Indonesian anthropologist known as the foremost scholar on Indonesian folklore. He was a professor of anthropology at the University of Indonesia for nearly twenty years, establishing the field of Indonesian folkloristics. He studied under the eminent anthropologist Koentjaraningrat and renowned folklorist Alan Dundes.
