If American folklore studies have a hero, it is Alan Dundes. At the time when Richard Dorson was setting the bounds for folklore as an American university discipline, Dundes, his student, was permanently enlarging those bounds and annexing new territory. These were his formative years, when he made his great discoveries. (“Formative years” and “great discoveries” are Ernest Jones’s words for the first part of the career of Sigmund Freud, who was to have such an influence on Dundes.) By that time he was already converted to psychoanalytic interpretation as the most credible way to reveal “the meaning of folklore,” Simon Bronner’s well-chosen title for the twenty essays in this definitive collection. Reading through the early and late essays in sequence, a reader will learn the variety of Dundes’ interests and the breadth of his conception of folklore. No book could better illustrate his brilliant range of insights, and no book could be a better introduction to the prime years of American folklore studies. The very first essay, addressed to teachers, is a layperson’s introduction to the field and stands as Dundes’ enduring answer to the question, “What is folklore and why study it?”
Early in his career, in a 1965 book that defined folkloristics, which still stands as the basic textbook for many non-Western scholars, Alan Dundes defined folklore as open-ended, much as W. Thoms had done when he coined the word in 1846. After listing sixty-one genres in The Study of Folklore, Dundes said the list “does not include all the forms.” Folkloristics was as multifarious as folklore. New genres were constantly being discovered; seemingly non-folk groups came to be seen as folk, with their own lore; orality and oral transmission were no longer a sine qua non, for chain letters and autograph books exemplified written folklore; new ways to uncover “the meaning” could be expected to come along in the next years. The editor’s title for this book is well chosen.
In these formative years, Alan Dundes embraced, or discovered, or tried out an intimidating number of innovative scholarly and critical methods, which greatly broadened the study of folklore. Complaining that folklore genres were never properly defined, he collaborated with Robert Georges on a definition of the riddle genre, based on formalist-structuralist principles. Then, in a far-reaching and comprehensive formulation, Alan Dundes proposed a trifold way of defining the genres of folklore and analyzing people’s words. One topic is the “texture”: in verbal folklore, texture means the phonemes and morphemes of language. Another is the “text,” a single version or performance, as transcribed. The third level is the “context,” “the specific social situation in which that particular item is actually employed” (“Texture, Text, and Context,” Southern Folklore Quarterly 28 [1964], 251-265. The essay appears in the collection Interpreting Folklore, to which this book is a copious supplement.) Then Dundes seized on the formalist method of the Russian V. Propp and applied it to Native American narratives (a blow for the international folkloristics he always championed). This “morphological” approach would define every genre and make it possible to compare the formal characteristics of verbal and nonverbal materials (156-163). Combining the time-honored comparative method with the newer structural analysis would yield a worldwide method for the study of symbols, supremely demonstrated in an essay in which he tramples the noted Clifford Geertz at his own cockfight game (287-316, a 1993 essay which the editor identifies as Dundes’ favorite). The comparative-plus-formal method would supply data for the psychoanalytic interpretation of culture. This method was his closest analogue to the ambition of French contemporary scholars to construct a unified theory which would call together all the social sciences. When the semiotician Paul Bouissac took up circuses, Dundes approved him; when Roland Barthes took up wrestling, Dundes ignored him. Thus Dundes could continually sound one of his favorite themes, the lack of progress in folklore studies (e. g., 167), at the same time as he identified deterioration as a defining characteristic throughout the history of folklore studies. Rather, Alan Dundes sought and found methods that would serve his discipline.
He conceived critical or interpretive methods (propounded in over fifty articles and books before he reached the age of thirty-two) as he conceived folklore: an open-ended list. In fact this folklorist, who never tired of screaming about the lack of theory in folklore studies, was enacting a perfectly understandable theory of his own, so obvious that it could never be stated: what we call folklore comprises so many different modes of expressive culture that it requires multiple interpretive modes. The very multiplicity of topics treated in his essays, coupled with the multiplicity and contradictions in his writing, is itself Alan Dundes’ Grand Theory.
The editor’s first section, titled “Structure and Analysis,” defines the terms and demonstrates some of Dundes’ essential approaches. Context became a mandate when Alan Dundes used his favorite word, must, in italics: “folklorists must actively seek to elicit the meaning of folklore from the folk” (81). He invented or adopted the word metafolklore to mean “folkloristic statements about folklore.” Even unconscious sexual meanings, Dundes thought, can be revealed through oral literary criticism (77-87). His idea was timely. “Reader-reception” or “reader-response” criticism of literature was just emerging; American folklorists, under the influence of field anthropology and this essay, began to attend more closely to the infinite variability of both folklore and its variant interpretations. Then Alan Dundes assigned another task to his colleagues: to take archived folklore materials “back into the field,” so that the folk can interpret their past or present meaning (86). He could always think up something for folklorists to do.
The second section of the collection, “Worldview and Identity,” calls on folklorists, as the editor says, to broaden their attention and take in “the study of human thought” (179). The section includes Dundes’ invention (1971) of the analytic category of “folk ideas” as evidence of worldview, at the moment when folklorists were annexing territory formerly claimed by anthropologists. He continued that movement by developing anthropologist Dorothy Lee’s insight about linearity in the American world view (200-210).
It is in the third section, “Symbol and Mind,” with its emphasis on psychoanalytic interpretation, that we find the richest material. Even here, the contradiction in this mode of interpretation--defended most fully in the book Parsing Through Customs--stares out. It was Dundes himself who called critics to factor cultural conditioning into their interpretations, to offset the seeming universalism of psychoanalytic interpretation, yet his narrow Freudianism, which often ignores cultural context, seldom follows his own counsel. When he amasses enough material from different cultures, as he supremely does in “Gallus as Phallus” (285-316), the interpretation becomes a convincing argument for uncovering “the unconscious symbolic dimensions of human behavior” (311). A larger folklore theory would enlarge Dundes’ notion of context to include the kind of unspoken social and political forces he hints at in interpreting the “Walled-Up Wife” ballad (118). For this and all the essays, the editor ends his headnotes (instructive if often repetitious) with references to other related studies.
Dundes was what Richard Rorty calls an “edifying” thinker, skeptical about systematic folkloristics but creative and tireless in interpreting folklore, as becomes clear from the “postscripts” that follow four of the essays. His extraordinary combination of “charisma, generosity, and rigor” (one student’s words for what many felt) championed students who became prominent, like Kirin Narayan and Regina Bendix, and colleagues like Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Wolfgang Mieder. His vivid contemporary examples, like jokes and graffiti, and his wide-ranging choice of interpretive and research methods produced memorable effects on students and the public. For folklore students as for scholars in other disciplines, who sorely need an idea of what folklore studies are about, The Meaning of Folklore is a necessary tool.
A Dundes index:
Number of bibliographical references in an essay of 10 1/2 pages (215-225): 85
Number of analytic methods used, applied or mentioned: at least 12
Number of genres of folklore analyzed in the essays: 18
Number of uses of the first person singular in editor’s preface: 65
Number of uses of the first person singular in three essays by author, randomly selected: 12
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[Review length: 1359 words • Review posted on April 23, 2008]