folkism

English

Etymology

From folk +‎ -ism.

Noun

folkism (countable and uncountable, plural folkisms)

1. (uncountable) An ideology that emphasizes racial or ethnic identity, especially when combined with nationalism.
   • 2005, Eric Clarke, Ways of Listening, page 172:

     For example, I hear a "forward" reference to the quartets of Bartok and Shostakovitch (and perhaps more generally to a kind of imprecise "Central European nationalism/folkism”) in the bare and unharmonized motif in the viola and cello, imitated by the first and second violins, at bars 92–94 of the movement.

   • 2020, Caroline Rooney, Creative Radicalism in the Middle East, page 24:

     While Marilyn Booth notes how the Negm-Imam duo drew on 'popular oral performance and collective life', she adds that 'these songs, performed, countered the "naïve folkism” that Nasserist rhetoric – including publications for the populace in the form of poems, songs and studies of “folk life” – incorporated' (Booth 2009, 71).

   • 2020, The Ideological Condition, page 644:

     The stage animator of the Good Soldier Schweik, the teacher of Peter Weiss and Ralph Hochhuth, Piscator would have despised Utpal's glowing outbursts of patriotism, nationalism and folkism.

   1. An ideology, articulated by historian Simon Dubnow, that declared Jewish people to be a diaspora nation without a territory.
      • 2011, Kalman Weiser, Keith Ian Weiser, Jewish People, Yiddish Nation, page 153:

        Folkism viewed itself as a present-oriented phenomenon called into existence not by individuals or ideals, but by the exigencies of daily life in the Diaspora.

      • 2013, Joshua M. Karlip, The Tragedy of a Generation: The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism in Eastern Europe:

        Subsequently, this vision led him to an embrace of a populist folkism that attempted to forge a Jewish nationally autonomous space by creating an independent Jewish economics and politics.

      • 2022, Mark W. Kiel, The Jews of Częstochowa:

        Folkism in Poland drew its inspiration from several sources including Ahad Ha'am's notion of a spiritual Zionism, Chaim Zhitlovsky's zealous Yiddishism, and mostly, the historian Simon Dubnow's idea of the Jews as constituting an ethical, democratic, diaspora nation.

   2. Völkisch nationalism; the desire for a homogeneous population that excludes foreigners and the belief that different racial or ethnic groups have different rights.
      • 1999, Timothy J. Demy, Gary P. Stewart, Genetic Engineering: A Christian Response, page 134:

        For folkism, human value and human rights were associated with cultural identity just as they are for contemporary postmodernism.

      • 2013, Richard M. Lerner, Concepts and Theories of Human Development:

        It was, in essence a romantic folkism synthesized with scientific evolutionism. It included the standard Darwinian ideas of struggle (Kampf) and competition as the foundation for natural law, and therefore social law, with a curious "religion" of nature which implied a small place for rationalism, the lack of free will, and happiness as submission to the eternal laws of nature.

      • 2020, Graham Macklin, Failed Führers: A History of Britain’s Extreme Right, page 1965:

        Jordan regarded his enunciation of 'revolutionary folkism' as 'National Socialism developed to its ultimate implications'.

   3. A Japanese ideology that emphasized a common identify among East Asian peoples, associated with the fascist movement during the WWII era.
      • 1988, Harry D. Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen:

        But folkism, he urged, should not be understood as imperial expansion but rather as the necessity of the group to transcend "certain limits." "The formation of Manchukuo," he wrote, "had nothing to do with capitalism but resulted from the [needs] of Japanese folkism."

      • 2004, E. Reynolds, Japan in the Fascist Era, page 50:

        Harootunian calls this "an ideological/cultural order calling for authenticity, folkism, and communitarism” in pointing out fascism's “ideological appeal to culture and community.”

      • 2012, Roman Rosenbaum, Manga and the Representation of Japanese History, page 209:

        Explicitly anti-political and anti-religious, this 'folkism' or 'ethno-nationalism' (minzokushugi) as a general pattern of thought remains strong in contemporary Japan, and can be readily tapped into by those whose aims are in fact political.

   4. A movement within the Heathen or neo-pagan community that states one cannot convert to Heathenry unless one has the appropriate ancestry.
      • 2006, Ian Russell, Images, Representations and Heritage, page 100:

        Further, the 'slope' from mild 'folkism' to more major nationalism, including the use of symbols associated with the far right and the appropriation and use of heathen or Asatru symbolism by such groups, is documented for the USA by Gardell (2003); we have commenced some discussion of such phenomena within the UK (e.g. Blain 2004) but wish to emphasise that the majority of heathens with whom we have been in contact see this as a major problem and seek to distance themselves from 'political' and 'racial' frameworks.

      • 2011, Gundula E. Rommel, Asgard in America, page 19:

        Notwithstanding, the idea of Folkism is largely rejected by more than a hundred kindreds, including the Raven Kindreds and those affiliated with the Ring of Troth, the Irminsul Ættir, or the American Vinland Association.

      • 2016, Kathryn Rountree, Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Modern Paganism, page 54:

        Swain Wodening (n.d.) argues that tribalism allows Heathens to become Heathen without many of the hassles of universalism or folkism. Since most tribal Heathens believe folks must be adopted into the tribe, ancestry is not as much of an issue as it is with folkism.

2. (uncountable) Synonym of populism
   • 1999, Christopher Warhurst, Between Market, State, and Kibbutz, page 59:

     These movements were intensely nationalist, highly moral and, although middle class, discovered folkism 'as a reaction against bourgeois society' (Joll, 1983: 154).

   • 2001, Thomas Lahusen, Harbin and Manchuria: Place, Space and Identity, page 200:

     The communal body, wrapped with the social fabric of folkism, naturalized social relations, thus erasing any differences of class, gender, or region.

   • 2016, Paul Jackson, Colin Jordan and Britain's Neo-Nazi Movement:

     He focused on the failures of institutions such as the church, describing Christianity as a 'spiritual cancer' that threatened racial survival, and also decried the monarchy, whose existence was not deemed incompatible with the 'revolutionary folkism of the vanguard'.

   • 2022, John O'Loughlin, Evaluations and Revaluations, page 37:

     But never forget that while fascist Reds are one thing and Fascists quite another, Social Transcendentalists would be different again, being the logical extension beyond petty-bourgeois folkism to the proletarian classlessness of the Centre, more radical and absolutist in every respect.

3. (uncountable) An artistic aesthetic that is based on traditional practices that are passed on from individual to individual, such as folk tales, folk music, common cultural practices, etc.
   • 1996, Bāṃlāra itihāsa o saṃskr̥tite nagara, page 219:

     The emergence of folkism in Bangladeshi cinema had much to do with what in the romantic tradition is called escapism.

   • 2000, Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel, page 151:

     And so, in a sense, folklore was, in the rhetoric of the thirties, a makeshift, used more as an enabling language, a medium, than anything else. In the postwar forties, this veneer of folkism rubbed off as easily as, in the thirties, it had been laid on.

   • 2002 October, “Cory Branan: The Hell You Say”, in CMJ New Music Monthly, number 106, page 52:

     While the electric energy there and on the smarter "Jolene" inoculates the disc from soft-focus folkism, Branan generally does better when quieting down to shine light on a woman "by the vending machine talking to a Marine" (on the beautiful "Troublesome Girl") or the gal with "the fake tattoos that say 'Forever Yours'" on "Crackerjack Heart."

4. (uncountable, more specifically) A movement within Nigerian theater started by Sam Ukala that focuses on folk tales as a reaction against colonialism.
   • 1996, Sam Ukala, “'Folkism': Towards a National Aesthetic Principle for Nigerian Dramaturgy”, in New Theatre Quarterly, volume 12, number 47, page 285:

     Apart from the African folktale's capacity for clear communication and its popularity among the folk, there are other reasons why it should provide a matrix for folkism.

   • 2023, Tekena Mark, Directing the Play, page 49:

     Folkism permits the audience to feel but sacrifices the luxury of sustained empathy, in contrast to epic drama, which exhorts the audience to reason (p. 286).

   • 2024, Samuel Ravengai, Decolonising African Theatre, page 1989:

     He then explained folkism as the use of history, culture, concerns, and aspirations of Nigerian people to compose and perform deploying African confentions.

5. (countable) A folksy saying, expression, or practice.
   • 1998, James Von Geldern, Louise McReynolds, Entertaining Tsarist Russia, page 47:

     Quaint folkisms, rejected by the folk, did exert some influence – a selective influence, surely – on upper-class and noble writers, such as the great poet Aleksandr Pushkin.

   • 2007, Beth Roy, Parents' Lives, Children's Needs, page 211:

     Step-parenting is proverbially the hardest of relatiohships to build successfully. For many o fhte millions who start over again with children in the equation, that folkism proves woefully true.

   • 2013, David Lindauer, The Ordeal: A Cautionary Tale, page 41:

     But fifty years ago we found ourselves at the confluences of several forces that upset the apple-cart (Tom found the folkisms interspersed with the intelligent dialogue quite amusing, but forced and artificial).

   • 2019, Peter La Chapelle, I'd Fight the World, page 202:

     In his 1954 campaign, Folsom adopted the slogan "Y'all come," a regional folkism that signaled Southern hospitality but also hinted at Folsom being the most accepting candidate in terms of working with and seeking votes from blacks.

6. (uncountable, philosophy) A philosophical stance that meaning is based on common usage by ordinary people rather than an abstract principle.
   • 1982, Cha-yong Cho, Guardians of Happiness: Shamanistic Tradition in Korean Folk Painting, page 20:

     Once one accepts the concept of folkism in man's thought, this leads to a consideration of folkism in religion.

   • 2003, R.J. Nelson, Naming and Reference: The Link of Word to Object:

     This compromises the note of purportedness in reference that it seems to me folkism means to sound. Either the intentionality of reference is accepted as a datum or it has to be explained. Folkism short-stops the question, both ways.

   • 2020, Mark Balaguer, “Moral Folkism and the Deflation of (Lots of) Normative and Metaethics”, in José L. Falguera, Concha Martínez-Vidal, editor, Abstract Objects: For and Against, page 297:

     In particular, I argue that (i) moral folkism leads us to the deflationary conclusion that many of the normative and metaethical questions that philosophers discuss are settled by empirical facts about what ordinary folk happen to mean by their words — and so they're not settled by mind-independent facts about reality.