The Study of Folklore

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Bendix, Regina (2005). "Alan Dundes (1934-2005)". The Journal of American Folklore. 118 (470): 485–488. doi: 10.2307/4137668. ISSN 0021-8715. JSTOR 4137668.

In 1966 Dundes was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 1972 was named a senior fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities. [18] Folklorists focus on the study of human creativity within specific cultural and social contexts, including how such expressions (i.e. stories, music, material culture and festivals) are linked to political, religious, ethnic, regional, and other forms of group identity. Suggested Books and Articles about Folklore and Folk Groups 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 folk or peasant society is but one example of a 'folk' in the folkloristic sense. Any group of people sharing a common linking factor, e.g., an urban group such as a labor union, can and does have folklore. 'Folk' is a flexible concept which can refer to a nation as in American folklore or to a single family. The critical issue in defining 'folk' is: what groups in fact have traditions?" (emphasis in the original, see footnote 34, 13)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]

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). 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. 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. Bauman, Richard. 1972. ‘Differential Identity and the Social Base of Folklore’. In Towards New Perspectives in Folklore. Austin: University of Texas Press: 38. In 1980 Dundes served as president of the American Folklore Society [19] and in 1993 he was awarded the Pitrè Prize, an international lifetime achievement award in folklore. [2]The second volume, The Founders of Folklore, is a selection of essays upon persons who figure notably in the historical development of folkloristics. It begins with the late eighteenth-century romantic nationalist Johann Gottfried Herder (25), continues with the Brothers Grimm (26), and proceeds to others. Among the scholars treated here are the Britons Lawrence Gomme (30) and James George Frazer (33), the Germans Max Müller (31) and Wilhelm Mannhardt (32), the Italian Giuseppe Pitrè (34), the Hungarian Béla Bartók (40), the Frenchman Arnold van Gennep (41), the Dutchman Jan de Vries (42), and the Russian Vladimir Propp (44). Notice is also taken of the prodigious Danish collector Evald Tang Kristensen (38) and the gifted Irish informant Peig Sayers (39).

Dundes asserts that “folk” can refer to “any group of people whatsoever who share at least one common factor. It does not matter what the linking factor is-it could be a common occupation, language, or religion-but what is important is that a group…have some traditions that it calls its own” (Dundes, 1965: 2). 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 number of mostly minor typos, especially in foreign words, are found throughout the volumes. Some of them of course may reproduce errors in the original publications, but others (such as misspelled scholarly names) presumably do not. Abrahams, Roger D. 1972. ‘Personal Power and Social Restraint’. In Towards New Perspectives in Folklore. Austin: University of Texas Press: 19-20.Dundes, Alan. 1980. “Who Are the Folk?” In Interpreting Folklore. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. a b "About Folklore: Alan Dundes Obituary". August 7, 2008. Archived from the original on August 7, 2008 . Retrieved February 27, 2022. Before the term folkloristics can be fully understood, it is necessary to understand that the terms folk and lore are defined in many different ways. While some use the word folk to mean only peasants or remote cultures, Alan Dundes of the University of California at Berkeley calls this definition a "misguided and narrow concept of the folk as the illiterate in a literate society" ( Devolutionary Premise, 13).

Alan Dundes (September 8, 1934 – March 30, 2005) [1] was an American folklorist. He spent much of his career as a professional academic at the University of California, Berkeley and published his ideas in a wide range of books and articles.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.