“Josip Tomec, Collector”: Class and Folklore Collection in Nineteenth-Century Croatia

An 1897 collecting guide for a Croatian folklore journal suggests literate peasants as highly privileged lay collectors. In reality, despite their advantageous access to the journal’s quarry, difficulty in mastering practices of knowledge transmission and the privileged language of the journal’s style regularly proved to be insurmountable impediments to their aspirations. The correspondence of peasant collectors reveals the ways they navigated engagement with nineteenth-century folklore collection projects and theoretical paradigms that valorized their social position while at the same time yoking them to it.