Alan Dundes
Encyclopedia
Alan Dundes, was a folklorist at the University of California, Berkeley
. His work was said to have been central to establishing the study of folklore
as an academic discipline. He wrote 12 books, both academic and popular, and edited or co-wrote two dozen more. 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.
, where he studied English and met his wife Carolyn. Sure that he would be drafted upon completion of his studies, Dundes joined the ROTC and trained to become a naval communications officer. When it turned out that the ship he was to be posted to, stationed in the Bay of Naples, already had a communications officer, Dundes asked what else that ship might need, not wanting to give up such a choice assignment. He then spent two years maintaining artillery guns on a ship in the Mediterranean. Upon completion of his service, Dundes attended Indiana University
to pursue a Ph.D in folklore
. He quickly established himself as a force to be reckoned with in the field of folkloristics
. He completed his degree very quickly and went on to a teaching position at the University of Kansas
where he stayed for only a year before being offered a place in the University of California, Berkeley
anthropology department teaching folklore. Dundes held this position for 42 years, until his death in 2005.
, legend
, and folktale to proverb
s and riddles to jokes, game
s, 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. 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.
Dundes was also a great supporter of the New Student Orientation Program at UC Berkeley(CalSO). He frequently gave the opening address during summer orientation programs, whetting students' appetites about the type of instruction they might receive at the University. These addresses were littered with jokes and stories which were a trademark of Dundes' lectures in his popular anthropology class and were a favorite of both in-coming students and the orientation staff alike.
and the Qur'an
as folklore. However, of all his articles, the one that earned him death threats was "Into the Endzone for a Touchdown" an exploration of the homoerotic subtext inherent in the terminology and rituals surrounding American football. In 1984 Dundes was invited to give the plenary address at the American Folklore Society
annual meeting. The paper he gave is entitled "Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder" and uses folkspeech, customs, material culture, and so forth to demonstrate the anal-erotic fixation of German national character. Reaction to this paper was incredibly strong and because of it, Dundes declined to attend the AFS annual meeting for the next 20 years. When he finally did attend again, in 2004, he again gave a plenary address, this time taking his fellow folklorists to task for being weak on theory. In his opinion, the presentation of data, no matter how thorough, is useless without the development and application of theory to that data. It is not enough to simply collect, one must do something with what one has collected.
The former student and benefactor, wished to remain anonymous. Apparently he called the University prior to the donation to find out if Dundes was still teaching, or as Dundes told it, "to see if I was still alive." The student mentioned that he intended to send a check, but Dundes said he was not sure the student would follow through.
The check was made out to the university, Dundes said, but with instructions that he could use it in any manner he saw fit.
"I could just take all my students to Fiji and have one hell of a party," he said.
The professor instead decided to invest it in the study of folklore. The money funds a Distinguished Professorship of Folkloristics and helps fund the university's folklore archives and provides grants for folklore students.
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.http://department.monm.edu/classics/courses/Clas230/MythDocuments/HeroPattern/default.htm An extended interview http://homepage.mac.com/brianflemming/iblog/images/DundesInterviewExcerpts.mov is on the DVD
version of the documentary.
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
. His work was said to have been central to establishing the study of folklore
Folklore
Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...
as an academic discipline. He wrote 12 books, both academic and popular, and edited or co-wrote two dozen more. 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.
Career
Dundes attended Yale UniversityYale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
, where he studied English and met his wife Carolyn. Sure that he would be drafted upon completion of his studies, Dundes joined the ROTC and trained to become a naval communications officer. When it turned out that the ship he was to be posted to, stationed in the Bay of Naples, already had a communications officer, Dundes asked what else that ship might need, not wanting to give up such a choice assignment. He then spent two years maintaining artillery guns on a ship in the Mediterranean. Upon completion of his service, Dundes attended Indiana University
Indiana University
Indiana University is a multi-campus public university system in the state of Indiana, United States. Indiana University has a combined student body of more than 100,000 students, including approximately 42,000 students enrolled at the Indiana University Bloomington campus and approximately 37,000...
to pursue a Ph.D in folklore
Folklore
Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...
. He quickly established himself as a force to be reckoned with in the field of folkloristics
Folkloristics
Folkloristics is the formal academic study of folklore. The term derives from a nineteenth century German designation of folkloristik to distinguish between folklore as the content and folkloristics as its study, much as language is distinguished from linguistics...
. He completed his degree very quickly and went on to a teaching position at the University of Kansas
University of Kansas
The University of Kansas is a public research university and the largest university in the state of Kansas. KU campuses are located in Lawrence, Wichita, Overland Park, and Kansas City, Kansas with the main campus being located in Lawrence on Mount Oread, the highest point in Lawrence. The...
where he stayed for only a year before being offered a place in the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
anthropology department teaching folklore. Dundes held this position for 42 years, until his death in 2005.
Teaching methods
Alan Dundes was an engaging lecturer, his Introduction to Folklore course attracting upwards of 400 students in some years. In this course, students were introduced to the many various forms of folklore, from mythMythology
The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...
, legend
Legend
A legend is a narrative of human actions that are perceived both by teller and listeners to take place within human history and to possess certain qualities that give the tale verisimilitude...
, and folktale to proverb
Proverb
A proverb is a simple and concrete saying popularly known and repeated, which expresses a truth, based on common sense or the practical experience of humanity. They are often metaphorical. A proverb that describes a basic rule of conduct may also be known as a maxim...
s and riddles to jokes, game
Game
A game is structured playing, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more often an expression of aesthetic or ideological elements...
s, and folkspeech (slang), to folk belief and foodways
Foodways
In social science foodways are the cultural, social and economic practices relating to the production and consumption of food.- Definitions :...
. 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. 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.
Dundes was also a great supporter of the New Student Orientation Program at UC Berkeley(CalSO). He frequently gave the opening address during summer orientation programs, whetting students' appetites about the type of instruction they might receive at the University. These addresses were littered with jokes and stories which were a trademark of Dundes' lectures in his popular anthropology class and were a favorite of both in-coming students and the orientation staff alike.
Controversy
Strongly opinionated, Dundes was not at all averse to the controversy that his theories often generated. He dealt frequently with folklore as an expression of unconscious desires and anxieties and was of the opinion that if people reacted strongly to what he had to say, he had probably hit a nerve and was probably on to something. Some of his more controversial work involved examining the New TestamentNew Testament
The New Testament is the second major division of the Christian biblical canon, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....
and the Qur'an
Qur'an
The Quran , also transliterated Qur'an, Koran, Alcoran, Qur’ān, Coran, Kuran, and al-Qur’ān, is the central religious text of Islam, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God . It is regarded widely as the finest piece of literature in the Arabic language...
as folklore. However, of all his articles, the one that earned him death threats was "Into the Endzone for a Touchdown" an exploration of the homoerotic subtext inherent in the terminology and rituals surrounding American football. In 1984 Dundes was invited to give the plenary address at the American Folklore Society
American Folklore Society
The American Folklore Society is the US-based professional association for folklorists, with members from the US, Canada, and around the world. It was founded in 1888 by William Wells Newell, who stood at the center of a diverse group of university-based scholars, museum anthropologists, and men...
annual meeting. The paper he gave is entitled "Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder" and uses folkspeech, customs, material culture, and so forth to demonstrate the anal-erotic fixation of German national character. Reaction to this paper was incredibly strong and because of it, Dundes declined to attend the AFS annual meeting for the next 20 years. When he finally did attend again, in 2004, he again gave a plenary address, this time taking his fellow folklorists to task for being weak on theory. In his opinion, the presentation of data, no matter how thorough, is useless without the development and application of theory to that data. It is not enough to simply collect, one must do something with what one has collected.
Endowment of a professorship
Dundes fiercely defended the importance of the discipline of folkloristics throughout his career. Towards the end of his life, he received a check from a former student, which he asked his wife to open. She read the figure out as $1,000. In fact, the check was for $1,000,000. This money allowed Dundes to endow the university with a Distinguished Professorship in Folkloristics, thereby ensuring that upon his retirement folklore would not be abandoned in the department.The former student and benefactor, wished to remain anonymous. Apparently he called the University prior to the donation to find out if Dundes was still teaching, or as Dundes told it, "to see if I was still alive." The student mentioned that he intended to send a check, but Dundes said he was not sure the student would follow through.
The check was made out to the university, Dundes said, but with instructions that he could use it in any manner he saw fit.
"I could just take all my students to Fiji and have one hell of a party," he said.
The professor instead decided to invest it in the study of folklore. The money funds a Distinguished Professorship of Folkloristics and helps fund the university's folklore archives and provides grants for folklore students.
Interview by Flemming
Shortly before his death, Dundes was interviewed by filmmaker Brian FlemmingBrian Flemming
Brian Flemming is an American film director and playwright.- Early career :Flemming was born and raised in California's San Fernando Valley, and studied English at the University of California, Irvine, graduating in 1998...
for his documentary, The God Who Wasn't There
The God Who Wasn't There
The God Who Wasn't There is a 2005 independent documentary written and directed by Brian Flemming. The documentary questions the existence of Jesus, examining evidence that supports the Christ myth theory against the existence of a historical Jesus, as well as other aspects of Christianity.- Jesus...
. He prominently recounted Lord Raglan's
FitzRoy Somerset, 4th Baron Raglan
Major FitzRoy Richard Somerset, 4th Baron Raglan was a British soldier, beekeeper, farmer and independent scholar. He is best known for his book The Hero, where he systematises hero myths.- Life :...
22-point scale from his 1936 book The Hero, in which he ranks figures possessing similar divine attributions.http://department.monm.edu/classics/courses/Clas230/MythDocuments/HeroPattern/default.htm An extended interview http://homepage.mac.com/brianflemming/iblog/images/DundesInterviewExcerpts.mov is on the DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
version of the documentary.
Works
- Pagter, Carl R. (Co-author). Never Try to Teach a Pig to Sing.
- (1964)."The Morphology of North American Indian Folktales".
- (Ed.) (1965). The Study of Folklore.
- (1968). "The Number Three in American Culture." In Alan Dundes (ed.), Every Man His Way: Readings in Cultural Anthropology. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
- (1969). "Thinking Ahead: A Folkloristic Reflection of the Future Orientation in American Worldview".
- (1971). "A Study of Ethnic Slurs".
- (1972). "Folk Ideas as Units of Worldview".
- (1975). "Slurs International: Folk Comparisons of Ethnicity and National Character".
- (1980). Interpreting Folklore. Indiana University PressIndiana University PressIndiana University Press, also known as IU Press, is an academic publisher at Indiana University that specializes in the humanities and social sciences. It was founded in 1950. Its headquarters are located in Bloomington, Indiana....
. - (1984). Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder: A Portrait of German Culture Through Folklore.
- (Ed.) (1984). Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth. University of California PressUniversity of California PressUniversity of California Press, also known as UC Press, is a publishing house associated with the University of California that engages in academic publishing. It was founded in 1893 to publish books and papers for the faculty of the University of California, established 25 years earlier in 1868...
. - (with C. Banc)(1986) "First Prize: Fifteen Years. An Annotated Collection of Political Jokes" ISBN 0-8386-3245-9
- (1987). Cracking Jokes: Studies of Sick Humor Cycles & Stereotypes. Ten Speed Press.
- Pagter, Carl R. (Co-author) (1987). When You're Up to Your Ass in Alligators...: More Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire. Wayne State University PressWayne State University PressWayne State University Press , founded in 1941, is a university press that is part of Wayne State University. It publishes under its own name and also the imprints Painted Turtle and Great Lakes Books....
. - (Ed.) (1989). Little Red Riding Hood: A Casebook. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin PressUniversity of Wisconsin PressThe University of Wisconsin Press is a non-profit university press publishing peer-reviewed books and journals. It primarily publishes work by scholars from the global academic community but also serves the citizens of Wisconsin by publishing important books about Wisconsin, the Upper Midwest, and...
. - (Ed.) (1990). In Quest of the Hero. Princeton University PressPrinceton University Press-Further reading:* "". Artforum International, 2005.-External links:* * * * *...
. - (Ed.) (1991). Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore. University Press of MississippiUniversity Press of MississippiThe University Press of Mississippi, founded in 1970, is a publisher that is sponsored by the eight state universities in Mississippi:*Alcorn State University*Delta State University*Jackson State University*Mississippi State University...
. - (1991) The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore. University of Wisconsin Press
- (Ed.) (1992). The Evil Eye: A Casebook. University of Wisconsin Press.
- (1993). Folklore Matters. University of Tennessee PressUniversity of Tennessee PressThe University of Tennessee Press is a university press associated with the University of Tennessee.UT Press was established in 1940 by the University of Tennessee Board of Trustees.The University of Tennessee Press issues about 35 books each year...
. - (Ed.) (1994). The Cockfight: A Casebook. University of Wisconsin Press.
- Edmunds, Lowell (Co-ed.) (1995). Oedipus: A Folklore Casebook. University of Wisconsin Press.
- Pagter, Carl R. (Co-Author) (1996). Sometimes the Dragon Wins: Yet More Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire. Syracuse University PressSyracuse University PressSyracuse University Press, founded in 1943, is a university press that is part of Syracuse University. The areas of focus for the Press include Middle East Studies, Native American Studies, Peace and Conflict Resolution, Irish Studies and Jewish Studies, among others. The Press has an international...
. - (Ed.) (1996). The Walled-Up Wife: A Casebook. University of Wisconsin Press.
- (1997). From Game to War and Other Psychoanalytic Essays on Folklore. University of Kentucky Press.
- (1997). Two Tales of Crow and Sparrow: A Freudian Folkloristic Essay on Caste and Untouchability. Rowman & Littlefield.
- (Ed.) (1998). The Vampire: A Casebook. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press.
- Pagter, Carl R. (Co-author) (2000). Why Don't Sheep Shrink When It Rains?: A Further Collection of Photocopier Folklore. Syracuse University Press.
- (1999). Holy Writ as Oral Lit: The Bible as Folklore. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
- (2002). Bloody Mary in the Mirror: Essays in Psychoanalytic Folkloristics. University Press of MississippiUniversity Press of MississippiThe University Press of Mississippi, founded in 1970, is a publisher that is sponsored by the eight state universities in Mississippi:*Alcorn State University*Delta State University*Jackson State University*Mississippi State University...
. - (2003). The Shabbat Elevator and Other Sabbath Subterfuges. Rowman & Littlefield.
- (2003). Fables of the Ancients?: Folklore in the Qur'an. Rowman & Littlefield.
- (2003). Parsing Through Customs: Essays by a Freudian Folklorist. The University of Wisconsin Press.
- (2004). "As the Crow Flies: A Straightforward Study of Lineal Worldview in American Folk Speech".
- (Ed.) (2005). Recollecting Freud. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press.