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The Study of Folklore

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The range and influence of Dundes's scholarship was recognised in the publication of three different festschrift collections - one by proverb scholars, one by psychoanalysts and one from his former students. [2] Personal life [ edit ] Dundes was born in New York City, the son of a lawyer and a musician. His parents were not religious, and Dundes considered himself a secular Jew. [20] Dundes was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 - the first Folklorist to be recognized in this way. [18]

According to Dundes, folkloristic work will probably continue to be important in the future. Dundes writes, "folklore is a universal: there has always been folklore and in all likelihood there will always be folklore. As long as humans interact and in the course of so doing employ traditional forms of communication, folklorists will continue to have golden opportunities to study folklore" ( Devolutionary Premise, 19). According to folklorist William A. Wilson, "the study of folklore, therefore, is not just a pleasant pastime useful primarily for whiling away idle moments. Rather, it is centrally and crucially important in our attempts to understand our own behavior and that of our fellow human beings" (2006, 203). He has been described as "widely credited with helping to shape modern folklore scholarship", [1] and as "one of the most admired and influential folklorists in the world" [6] He wrote 12 books, both academic and popular, and edited or co-wrote two dozen more [7] and is credited with authoring over 250 articles. [2] One of his most notable articles was called "Seeing is Believing" in which he indicated that Americans value the sense of sight more than the other senses. Another implication of this broader defining of the term folk, according to Dundes, is that folkloristic work is interpretative and scientific rather than descriptive or devoted solely to folklore preservation. In the 1978 collection of his academic work, Essays in Folkloristics, Dundes declares in his preface, "Folkloristics is the scientific study of folklore just as linguistics is the scientific study of language. [. . .] It implies a rigorous intellectual discipline with some attempt to apply theory and method to the materials of folklore" (vii). In other words, Dundes advocates the use of folkloristics as the preferred term for the academic discipline devoted to the study of folklore. Dorson, Richard (ed.). 1972. Folklore and Folklife, An Introduction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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With this expanded social definition of folk, a wider view of the material considered to be folklore also emerged that includes, as William Wilson points out, "things people make with words (verbal lore), things they make with their hands (material lore), and things they make with their actions (customary lore)" (2006, 85). Still, some argue the discipline has gone too far in its eagerness to view lore as performance rather than object. For example, we know the Satanic ritual abuse narratives circulating in the 1990s were expressions of a recurring moral panic rooted in legend transmission. Studying similar legends, like the ones circulated during the sixteenth century European witch hunts, could give us important insights about both sets of narratives and the effect they had on people. That kind of scholarship might be useful during future moral panics. However, the only context we have for the transmission of those earlier legends is historical, and deriving an understanding of performance from documents over five hundred years old is a challenge, to say the least. So we would have to study the texts themselves.

Oring. Elliott. 1986. Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press. Ed.) (1991). Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore. University Press of Mississippi. a b "About Folklore: Alan Dundes Obituary". August 7, 2008. Archived from the original on August 7, 2008 . Retrieved February 27, 2022.

Alan Dundes, "From Etic to Emic Units in the Structural Study of Folktales", The Journal of American Folklore; Vol. 75, No. 296 (Apr. - Jun. 1962), pp. 95-105 JSTOR 538171

Shortly before his death, Dundes was interviewed by filmmaker Brian Flemming for his documentary, The God Who Wasn't There. He prominently recounted Lord Raglan's 22-point scale from his 1936 book The Hero, in which he ranks figures possessing similar divine attributions. [16] An extended interview [17] is on the DVD version of the documentary.Known unofficially as the "Jokes Professor" [6] at UC Berkeley, his classes were very popular, combining learning with "an irresistible wit and style". [1] In this introductory course, students were introduced to the many various forms of folklore, from myth, legend, and folktale to proverbs and riddles to jokes, games, and folkspeech ( slang), to folk belief and foodways. The final project for this course required that each student collect, identify, and analyze 40 items of folklore. All of this material (about 500,000 items) is housed and cataloged in the Berkeley Folklore Archives. [8] Dundes also taught undergraduate courses in American folklore, and psychoanalytic approaches to folklore (his favorite approach) in addition to graduate seminars on the history of folkloristics, from an international perspective, and the history and progression of folklore theory. Two Tales of Crow and Sparrow: A Freudian Folkloristic Essay on Caste and Untouchability. Rowman & Littlefield. The late Alan Dundes (1934-2005) was a masterful and exhaustive bibliographer who compiled numerous scholarly anthologies in the course of his career. 1 What does he wish to achieve in the present compilation? He manifestly does not seek to make a gathering of current, cutting-edge work in folkloristics; indeed, many of today’s most influential folklore scholars are not directly represented here at all. Nor does he bring together a collection of classic essays, a showcase of the best that the discipline has produced over time, for only a few of the essays might so qualify (for example, 20, 69, 82). Rather he attempts a characterization of the discipline of folklore diachronically (its founders and pioneers, its institutionalization internationally, the important theories that have given impetus and meaning to its research) and synchronically (the major genres of folklore, the influential concepts, its dominant methods), and does so by letting folklorists and related scholars present and past, on this continent and abroad, speak for themselves. In my view he succeeds, for the work gives a realistic portrait of a relatively small but worldwide scholarly field that provides an engaging and honest sense of its range and variety, its struggles, its personalities, its issues and methods. a b c d e f Fox, Margalit (April 2, 2005). "Alan Dundes, 70, Folklorist Who Studied Human Custom, Dies". The New York Times . Retrieved October 31, 2008. Abrahams, Roger D. 1972. ‘Personal Power and Social Restraint’. In Towards New Perspectives in Folklore. Austin: University of Texas Press: 19-20.

Dundes is often credited with the promotion of folkloristics as a term denoting a specific field of academic study and applies instead what he calls a "modern" flexible social definition for folk: two or more persons who have any trait in common and express their shared identity through traditions. Dundes explains this point best in his essay, The Devolutionary Premise in Folklore Theory (1969):a b c d Hansen, William (2005). "In Memoriam: Alan Dundes 1934-2005". Journal of Folklore Research. 42 (2): 245–250. doi: 10.2979/JFR.2005.42.2.245. ISSN 0737-7037. JSTOR 3814602. S2CID 144101452. a b Burress, Charles (April 2, 2005). "UC folklorist Dundes dies while teaching; His scholarship helped to create an academic discipline". San Francisco Chronicle . Retrieved October 31, 2008.

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