Né innocente, né innocuo: il folklore tra volontà di sapere, politiche del quotidiano e storia della modernità Ovvero le istruttive vicissitudini del rapporto tra antropologi e gruppi folklorici.

By focusing on the (lack of) relations between anthropologists and folk groups, this paper intends to reach three objectives: to shed new light on the folk group as an object of study, i.e. to reconceptualise it radically as object (undefined as of yet) of anthropological research and challenge the boundaries into which folklore studies have secured their academic legitimation and scientific standing at the expense of folk groups, which were kept just out of the border as if they were the negative limit of the field itself; to reconsider some aspects of the scientific practice of Italian anthropologists in relation to this object of study, aspects related to their failure to critically face issues of knowledge construction and the related political dimensions; to call into question the uses of the notion of folklore that have been made by a variety of actors from the Post World War II period onwards, so as to also shed light onto the grey area of the relations among folk groups, the powers of Modernity, and the politics of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]