Songs from the construction site of the highway “Brotherhood and Unity” from the archival collection of The Institute of Ethnography SASA: The types of interventions on the fieldwork annotations during the early pre-edition period

Folkloristics 8/1-2 (2023):
Author: Milan Tomašević
Text:
https://doi.org/10.18485/folk.2023.8.1_2.4

The Institute of Ethnography of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (IE SASA) has a Folklore Collection which includes about 20,000 songs and other shorter folklore genres. In the last two years the project of digitalization of that archival material has started together with the creation of “The Digital Database of the IE SASA Folklore Collection”. The largest part of the Collection was formed from 1949 to 1950, and a big part of it consists of songs recorded from brigadiers of youth work actions during the construction of the “Brotherhood and Unity” highway (a highway connecting Belgrade, Zagreb and Ljubljana). The songs were written down in field notebooks, and upon returning to Belgrade they were typed and annotated in the inventory books. In that process, in some cases, interventions on the original text were made. The paper describes the types of those interventions and discusses the possible reasons which might have motivated them.

Keywords: IE SASA Folklore Collection, post-WW2 reconstruction of Yugoslavia, The Cominform Resolution, ideological control, archival material, WW2, public morality.