Folkdeath and folklife

The earliest European folklorists were nostalgic for ruins and popular antiquities. As they roved the countryside viewing monuments and inquiring about the odd, old peasant customs, they realized these were in danger of being lost, even to memory when they had fallen from use. Noting them down, writing about them, drawing them, was a way of collecting and preserving the specimens. Material objects could be collected and stored, if not at home then in a building set aside for such a purpose, a museum, a historical society. The imminent disappearance of the artifact, custom, song, or tale came to be a necessary condition for folklore: if it wasn't near to vanishing (or vanished), it wasn't folklore. I call this nostalgic, romantic vision folkdeath. But inevitably the nineteenth-century European conservation movement affected folklorists. Was it possible to conserve folklore in its natural state? Was it possible to preserve, not by collecting and archiving, but by sustaining aspects of folklife within genuine folk cultural settings? Was it possible, in a kind of Frankenstein-like movement, to generate folklife from folkdeath?