Counter-views
Some cultural studies scholars maintained that the construction of the category "folk" was born out of super-ordinate's essentialist gaze that de-sign-ates otherness in the form of a discipline, "Folklore". The dichotomous divisions between folk/non-folk, tribe/non-tribe, civil/savage, sastriya/loukika typically reflect colonial pedagogy that constitutes otherness by deploying different exonyms to peripheral other, ignoring the ethno/endonyms as used by a community from their subject-position. These divisions between dominant centre and dominated periphery gave birth to some surrogated subjects like "Folklore" or "Anthropology" in contrast to the white men's epistemological fields such as "History", "Sociology" or "Physiology". These subjects subjectify as well as objectify dominated and peripheral "other" in the way of surrogating the "scientific" construction of "human beings".
The problem is with the imaginative boundary between these two. From the standpoint of enlightened science, the limit or boundary of different epistemological fields needs to be enumerated or well defined, i.e., in this case, the binaries like Folk language/language, folk-art/non-folk-art, Folksong/Classical song, Folk drama/theatre must be distinguished according to the existing enlightened “scientific” logic. However the construction of such boundary, diachronically, is not always transparent, but rather fuzzy; and on the other hand it reflects a tension of maintaining the boundary.
In case of the folk-language/standard language binary, linguistic imperialism is also evident in the terms like "dialect", "folk-language" or "standard language". The constitution of Folklore and Anthropology is colonially derived disciplines that surrogate white men’s History and Sociology. It may be illustrated that the fuzziness of such boundaries reveals the nature of subsumption through subjectification (birth of a discipline), objectification (a group of people are treated/categorized and analyzed as a stable object) as well as subjection (others’ bodies are under the control of the centre).
Read more about this topic: Folklore, Categories of Folklore