The Semi-Scholars

At the beginning of his career, van Gennep devoted his studies to non-European cultures to the School of Oriental Languages and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes .Beginning in 1924 when he published The folklore, van Gennep was devoted to the preparation of folklore as a scientific discipline and made the study of French popular culture.Opposed to evolutionism as folklorists Sébillot Paul and Peter Saintyves who engaged in collecting and archaic survivals, van Gennep developed a method known as biological, in order to address the facts of popular culture in their dynamism and to study what he called the psychic conditions as customs. The method developed by van Gennep proceeds by direct observation and investigation of the facts of living folklore, that is to say customs always run on the field investigation and observable by the folklorist.To account for the processing time of the facts of folklore, van Gennep developed the concept of traditional chain and fastened to the study of the phenomena of diffusion . Taking the historical-geographical method known as Finnish, van Gennep worked in France, the mapping in order to identify areas of folklore and study the various factors involved in the diffusion process.Known to have assigned to an object of folklore study and for the discipline with a set of investigative tools (mostly questionnaires) and analysis methods, van Gennep was also a controversial intellectual, liaising tense with some of his contemporaries he has often criticized the writings (including Durkheim and Mauss ). He conducted most of his work outside of the academic institution and was dismissed from the university post he held only briefly in his career (1912-1915, Chair of Ethnography of the University of Neuchâtel), after publicly questioned the neutrality of Switzerland vis-à-vis Germany.Van Gennep has published an impressive number of articles and monographs related to folklore.