Table Of ContentANALYTIC ESSAYS IN FOLKLORE
Studies in Folklore 2
GENERAL EDITOR
Richard M. Dorson
MOUTON PUBLISHERS • THE HAGUE • PARIS • NEW YORK
ALAN DUNDES
University of California
Berkely, California
Analytic Essays in Folklore
MOUTON PUBLISHERS • THE HAGUE PARIS • NEW YORK
ISBN: 90 279 3231 X
© 1975, Mouton Publishers, The Hague, The Netherlands
First editic:i, Second printing 1979
No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint,
microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.
Printed in The Netherlands
To my wife Carolyn who shared the excitement of
researching and writing these essays
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For permission to reprint the essays in this volume, I wish to thank the follow-
ing publishers and societies: American Anthropological Association, American
Folklore Society, The University of California Press, The Catholic University
of America Press, the Folklore Institute of Indiana University, The Edward C.
Hegeler Foundation, the Kroeber Anthropological Society, Eleanor and Leonard
Manheim, the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, Inc., The
University of New Mexico Press, the New York Folklore Society, Prentice-Hall,
Inc., the Tennessee Folklore Society, and Dr. George B.Wilbur.
FOREWORD
"Why collect folklore?" is a question the folklorist repeatedly encounters from
puzzled and not necessarily unsympathetic colleagues in established disciplines.
They wonder aloud what contribution of import will result from this ceaseless
accumulation of texts and their identification with hieroglyphic letters and num-
bers. No better response can be made to this bafflement than to place in an in-
quisitor's hands the present selection of his essays by Alan Dundes, who obtained
his doctorate in folklore at Indiana University in 1962 and became a full professor
at the University of California in Berkeley in the anthropology department at the
age of thirty-three. For Dundes is first and foremost a theorist, an analyst, a
bold speculator about the meaning of the materials of folklore to their human con-
veyors. While in my classes in folklore I insisted on the student documenting
each textual item of folklore with informant data, Dundes, once a student in those
classes, went one better on becoming the instructor and required that his student
collectors in addition interpret the meaning of the recorded text. His quest for
meanings has led him to seek context along with text, metafolklore as well as
folklore, and thereby to reorient the conception of fieldwork; interpretations of
tradition bearers should carry at least as much weight as those of investigators.
The special achievement of Dundes, who has already contributed so substantially
to folklore studies in the twelve years of his professional career to date, becomes
clearer when seen against other folklore scholarship. Characteristically the monu-
ments in our discipline have taken the forms of handbooks, indexes, monographs,
collections, dictionaries, encyclopedias, bibliographies. Compilation, codification,
annotation are the watchwords. What is often lacking in the mountainous literature
of folkloristics is the play of the inquiring mind over the materials. Andrew Lang
had the gift, but we can think of few volumes to place alongside those provocative
essays he pooled into Custom and Myth in 1884. Alan Dundes also possesses the
gift for creative scrutiny of the folklore genres. He pulls them apart structurally,
probes into them psychologically, extends them culturally to such matters as el-
ephant jokes and bathroom inscriptions. To the lexicon of the folklorist he has
added linguistic terms such as "etic" and "emic" units, morphological concepts
such as "lack" and "lack liquidated", typologies of collectors such as "anal re-
tentive" and "anal ejective". His examinations of familiar folklore sayings, be-
liefs, and daily habits have revealed the present anxieties and future aspirations
of Americans caught in the system, and their tendency to divide all life's activi-
ties into three parts. In one scintillating article after another he has shown, or
suggested, the ways in which folklore reflects our conscious and unconscious
thoughts.
The success of a discipline depends upon the quality of the minds it attracts.
In attracting Alan Dundes, a brilliant speaker, teacher, and scholar, folklore
has again proved its mettle.
Richard M. Dorson
Indiana University
