The Study of Folklore

by Alan Dundes

Like new used copy

Genres: Folklore, Nonfiction

481 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1965

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Bill Weaver · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful description of a complex and evolving body of scholarship that remains timeless in a sense like its object of study even as society continues its autopoiesis. It is true that the book is so good I had to go through it (at various points, in pieces one could say) multiple times as well. There is a separation between folklore itself and ‘folkloristics’ (the study of folklore) and at times it appears as unbridgeable as the distance between quantum particles and a physics textbook. This is of course true with all academic disciplines to a degree, as it is with sociology and what it describes as “society”. Niklas Luhmann says it is all within society so in a sense such distinctions are mere phantasms. Certainly from the perspective of social systems theory, there is no objective separation - both are part of the same ongoing description of modern society. Nonetheless, “a controversy has raged for many years among folklorists over the very definition of their subject matter; . . . The point at issue was whether folklore should be confined to the study of survivals from the past, to phenomena which in the nature of things are approaching exhaustion, or whether it should also include the new manufacture of a certain class of data possessing the same characteristics as the familiar survivals.” (p. 92) From a certain academic perspective then, if “[p]rint is a contaminator, a reverser and freezer of versions” (p. 15) and if, “once recorded, very little subsequent use may be made of . . . archival collections [which] often moulder on our shelves waiting for the professional folklorist, or someone else . . .” (p. 280), then folklore becomes frozen strangely enough, living only in the shadows of a ‘print’ and now a ‘digital’ society. Academics here walk a narrow line where they “must always be on . . . guard against rewriting” or “the marks of artistic handling” (p. 15) regarding “tales . . . of popular tradition . . . considerably more timeless than manuscripts. . .” (p. 240). Peeking through the trees of this vast forest, one can sense underneath all this academic detritus that this ‘timeless’ material is actually quite fun. At times the whole book left me wanting to ask (some of) the academic purists within, as the Joker (a more modern coyote perhaps) puts it- ‘why so serious?’ Does entertainment have to be removed entirely to count as analysis? Even if origins remain somewhat mysterious, entertainment perhaps is taken as not serious enough or too “obvious” (p. 33) for scholars who are desperate to discuss the ‘repressed’ meaning or the ‘function’ of these magical tales. At times, the scholars seem to act as if the audience is unaware of what is happening, as if the Cheyenne do not understand a fart joke about Coyote well enough (p. 212), as if only academics can unleash the hidden meaning on a deeper level than ‘mere entertainment’. Any student of Mel Brooks I’m sure might argue that the repressed when put on display for an audience is entertaining precisely because it has been repressed. I do see now that Bascom is concerned that “folklore cannot be dismissed simply as a form of amusement.” (p. 290) Bascom’s article is compelled to delve beyond the surface- “beneath a great deal of humor lies a deeper meaning [and the] same is true for . . . fantasy[.]” (p. 290) Thus one can sense the conflict between folklore which in “many nonliterate societies . . . is highly regarded” (p. 293) and modern social systems that might downplay the importance of such primarily oral communication occurring outside of what a literate society might deem to be its ‘most crucial subsystems’. I feel perhaps there is no need to go any deeper, as to my mind amusement allows the paradox to become naked in a sense, even if the humor itself might function as “a fig leaf” (p. 132). Humor allows West Africans to openly discuss “the cheating and tricks of the priests, the rascality of a chief—things about which everyone knew, but concerning which one might not ordinarily speak in public.” (p. 290) But as a systems theorist might, we could perhaps ask the question of academics - what are they repressing? What is their blind spot? Wherein lies the dark wood that scholars dare not enter? Academics are their own sort of chiefs and priests we might begin to suspect. To apply the idea of “Interdiction” (p. 209) equally to a John Carpenter film and to the Cheyenne oral tradition about Coyote failing to heed (direct and literal) warnings against overusing his magical powers seems to me scientifically unsound. This book does not offer such a direct comparison between modern forms and traditional, but others have been tempted in this direction, and from the example you can see the difficulty with using traditional folklore (or traditional folklore studies) as a measure of more modern forms of popular entertainment. Still, just as social systems theorists are concerned with the self-generation of social systems, folklorists too make similar claims that “the spread of folktales from one society to another is strictly comparable to the spread of tobacco, a religious ritual or concept, a tool or a technique, or a legal principle. Again, there is the question of acceptance or rejection, and if accepted the subsequent modification to fit the new item into the other cultural patterns, a process which anthropologists speak of as integration.” (pp. 29-30) Setting aside for the moment the apparent blunder (from the systems theory perspective) of handling separate ‘cultures’ as ‘societies’, the social systems theorist might note that the transcribing or “acceptance” of an “item” of folklore into literate form might be considered a type of modification or integration of folklore into a literate ‘culture’ or, as they say, modern society. Bascom so far of all the scholars grasps the most important question - if “folklore is one of the human universals[,] . . . why [has] the importance of folklore . . . decreased as the written and printed word have spread and mechanical devices such as phonographs, radio, moving picture, . . . television [and now the Internet] have been developed.” (p.296) Bascom offers a few ideas that hint at the differentiation of modern subsystems, but his most profound insight is the possibility that modern integrations of folklore might in fact act as opposition to literate forms and might even “suggest that the individual destroy or even disregard the institutions and conventions of society”. (p. 297) The question might be whether folklore and its modern incarnations in the form of conspiracy theory, gossip, rumor, disinformation and even counterintelligence, might conceivably threaten to collapse the very differentiation which defines modern society. From the perspective of a literate, differentiated (modern) society, folklore in a sense could be perceived as a form of totalitarianism. Folk horror genre in its modern form might be described essentially as an exploration of such a collapse of modern differentiation. This might also explain why totalitarian strains of communication such as communism (Marxism) and fascism (Nazism) seek to control popular forms of art and entertainment to such a degree. Still even in liberal democratic segments of global society, one could argue that at least outside confines of the narrow academic discipline itself, folklore is threatening to power, and is generally denigrated as a source of information or authority. See for example the official Air Force report on the Roswell incident, dismissing conspiracy theories about Roswell as “folklore” on page 1 (well on page iii actually in the first sentence to the report entitled The Roswell Report with Case Closed slapped on the cover) [Available at:
https://media.defense.gov/2010/Oct/27... ] Nonetheless, unfortunately for the Air Force and other social institutions of gravitas, like much of communication/society, folklore appears to have a life of its own…

[Anthony Buccitelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite the fact that it is now 40 years old, this book is still probably the single best introduction to the history, theory and methodology of folklore. Its age makes it out-dated in terms of recent developments (especially the 1971 perforative and 1980's linguitsic shifts) but it is still a great intodutory text.

[Paul Cowdell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is /the/ place to start for an introduction to texts in the history and theoretical development of folklore as a discipline. A lot's happened since it was published, but this is one of the essential collections of earlier material.

[Joy]

It is a great reading motivation with the wonderful collections.