Folkloristics has always thrived on collections, and in Folklore: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, Alan Dundes has edited a collection of scholarship from 1841 to the present that aims to cover the principal concepts of the discipline. The four volumes run to more than 1,500 pages, including a comprehensive index in the fourth and introductions to each volume by the editor. All of the collected essays are in English, save for some quotations in German and French that have not been translated. The fact that there are eighty-six in all makes evaluation of each impossible, so the following will deal with the work as a whole.
Dundes has not attempted to be comprehensive in terms of the subjects of folklore. His interest lies in the history and development of the discipline itself. Many of the essays are diachronic, concerned with how scholars have become interested in, collected, and analyzed folklore, as well as with its implications for various aspects of the world that produced such study.
With the very first of the volumes, “From Definition to Discipline”, themes become apparent. Perhaps the first is that these essays demonstrate the relationship of folklore to other academic disciplines. Philology, Anthropology, Linguistics, Ethnology, History, and others arise time and again. Also apparent are the national (and nationalistic) interests and the international scope of the discipline. The first volume contains essays on Israel, Germany, Venezuela, Russia, the United States, India, Argentina, Palestine, Mexico, and other places. These chart the growth of folkloristics as an independent and unique discipline in each country, with attention to history and the struggle to define exactly what is meant by the term “folklore.”
The attention to history and development is no less evident in the second volume, “The Founders of Folklore.” This volume demonstrates, through essays as diverse in from as reminiscences and intellectual pedigree, that folkloristics is much older than the term itself. Again, the essays represent a broad range of countries, but the latter three volumes focus overwhelmingly on Europe; in particular, Germany’s importance in the history of the study of folklore is emphasized. The second volume gives evidence of this, with essays on the Grimms, Manhardt, Herder, and a number of others.
Volume III is about “The Genres of Folklore,” and Dundes points out that folklorists often identify themselves by which of these they study. Represented are a great variety, but they are taken almost exclusively from oral tradition. A single essay deals with dance, another with belief, and another with van Gennep’s rites of passage, but other types of folklore (such as material culture or folk drama) are conspicuously absent. Here folklore is treated as it was in the past: as a largely oral discipline. Essays deal with ballads, legends, Märchen, myths, proverbs, riddles, and many other types of verbal art. It is important to note that these essays are scholarly and not collections; they may give examples of the genre with which they are concerned, but that is not their purpose. As with the work as a whole, these essays are concerned with folkloristics as the study of folklore, not with the subject of study. Essays were chosen to describe the history of scholarship rather than to provide representative examples of the genres.
In Volume IV, Dundes has arranged a selection of essays on “Theories and Methods.” A number of essays delineate the techniques and necessities of field collection, and several deal with the need and difficulties of classification. The theories are often discussed in terms of their main proponents (such as the discussion of Marxist theory through Gramsci), which highlights a tendency of the collection as a whole. The volumes complement each other not only in overall subject matter, but also in that they often revisit similar themes and ideas from different perspectives. For example, F. Max Müller is the subject of an essay in Volume III, and also the anonymous writer of the opening essay of Volume IV. James Frazer is described in Volume III as well, and his theories are discussed in several of the essays in other volumes.
The collection is not without its weaknesses. For example, should one infer from the fact that there is but one essay on folklore in Africa that the continent has been neglected? The notes and bibliographies do much to make up for deficits such as this one, but the scope—despite its breadth, could be wider in matters such as this. However, the benefits of this collection are manifold, as has been illustrated.
The division into four volumes is useful and does reflect disciplinary tendencies, but ideas weave in and out of each essay so that together the four volumes form a unified whole. The discipline is nothing without the founders who defined it, whose theories and methods are still applied to the genres of folklore today. The emphases of the editor again become clear: folklore must be collected, and done so with care and precision; it must then be classified for proper analysis, and then it must be interpreted; its role in culture must be examined.
Dundes concludes the collection with an essay examining “Folklore, Legends, and Sexuality Education.” This provides an example of the practical uses of the study of folklore. The other essays in Volume IV highlight the academic uses of folklore, and, with the other volumes, demonstrate its role in nationalism and the evolution of ideas about its origin. But this concluding essay underscores a trend throughout the work as a whole: Dundes is trying to point the way to new scholarship. He does so by choosing essays that examine the past with the hope of paving the way for the future. This is most clearly demonstrated in the essay on the historical geographical method, which criticizes early uses of the techniques, but also points out the validity of many of them if placed in the proper academic context.
To the editor, the proper context seems to be that the scholar must be aware of the history of the discipline, in all its aspects. To that end, he includes essays on theories that have been cast aside by scholarly trends (along with re-evaluations of them), and essays on eras when folklore was put to less than savory uses, such as the four essays on the use of folklore in Germany during and after the Third Reich. Such scrutiny of the history of the discipline is healthy, and can only lead to advancement of ideas.
In his introduction to the whole work, Dundes states that his purpose is to “define folkloristics in such a way as to encourage anyone with an interest in folklore to join with those of us folklorists who share a passion for such traditions and who wish to gain an understanding of how the discipline came to exist and how folklorists go about analyzing tradition” (xxv). In this, he has largely succeeded. This important and useful collection also serves his overall goal: “[T]o make key essays more accessible to a wider audience of readers.”
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[Review length: 1170 words • Review posted on September 19, 2006]