摘要：The basic question this article poses is: what do the concepts of people, folk culture and folklore mean today, and can they be operationalized for the purpose of modern research work? A short analysis of the disciplines that mostly treated these subjects (ethnology, folkloristics) shows that they were not defined from the social aspect and that as time passed the basic concept (people) was reduced to only one social stratum — the peasants. This can to a certain extent be explained by the historic genesis of the disciplines themselves (ethnology and folkloristics), which started to develop in the nineteenth century whith the appearance of new national cultures. However, the main reason for this reduction is a static approach to the phenomena. Neglecting the diachronic moment necessarily narrows down the grasp of relations and processes so the fact that the cultures of some groups (strata) interfered with each other was often overlooked. Since a people is not a culturally homogeneous community but is formed by different social groups that can be very heterogeneous, research should be directed in that direction. Therefore, the author considers that the concept of subculture would be of great heuristic value when analysing the concepts of people and folk culture and would help to describe differences both among separate subcultures, and among the separate units of the same subculture. In that way the concept of people, earlier used in ethnological and folkloristic research, should be replaced by the concept of the (small) group of immediate contact based on local communities and limited by the framework of personal social relations. This shift from people to (small) group gives a new impulse to ethnological and folkloristic research because it makes urban environments the subject of modern ethnological, anthropological and folkloristic research, as well.
