Views on local space and identities: the teacher folklore survey (Argentina, 1921)

Abstract

The 1920s decade was extremely rich in terms of processes and problems of singular relevance and was also a prolific decade in terms of debates and generation of new proposals. The social climate of the postwar period put into crisis the most rationalist precepts installed by nineteenth-century liberalism and favoured the inclusion of forms of knowledge linked to the spiritual and sensitivity, beyond the pre-eminence of reason. To explore some of the educational priorities, we will focus on the National Survey of Folklore carried out in 1921, the results of which were gathered in the Folklore Collection. It was an initiative in which teachers from schools throughout the country were instructed to collect the folkloric elements they found in their communities: beliefs and customs, narrations and legends, popular art and science to know and prescribe about “the spirit of the people”.