La cuestión de la autoría entre la tradición oral y la escritura

Folklore studies have focused primarily on analyzing works of popular literature, leaving the authorship of these works and the processes that give rise to local and national traditions in the background. Yet, individual contributions to popular literature ought to be fully acknowledged so as to highlight how they are incorporated into a collective cultural system through processes of sharing, reproduction, codification, and transmission that respond to normative – and therefore social – needs. In this essay, the author supports this thesis based on two case studies. The first concerns the origin and spread of a traditional religious song that circulated in southern Italy in the 1930s in both oral and written form. The second concerns Rocco Scotellaro’s claim of co-authorship of the Canzone della Rabata, which was at the center of a heated controversy between him and Ernesto de Martino in the early 1950s, while it also sheds light on Scotellaro’s role in the developments of Tricarico’s Carnival parade.