Meaning of Folklore: The Analytical Essays of Alan Dundes

by Alan Dundes, Simon J. Bronner (Editor)

The essays of Alan Dundes virtually created the meaning of folklore as an American academic discipline. Yet many of them went quickly out of print after their initial publication in far-flung journals. Brought together for the first time in this volume compiled and edited by Simon Bronner,  the selection surveys Dundes's major ideas and emphases, and is introduced by Bronner with a thorough analysis of Dundes's long career, his interpretations, and his inestimable contribution to folklore studies.

Runner-up, the Wayland Hand Award for Folklore and History, 2009

Genres: Folklore, Fairy Tales, Mythology

580 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

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]

I don’t agree entirely with the psychoanalytic school of folklore but regardless this is an amazing collection of articles and Dundes is a giant in the field. Is there a Jack out there who can climb this academic beanstalk and slay the giant? And if so, what would Dundes have to say about such an epic tale? I see much of academic and also psychoanalytical meaning as an attempt at control or steering using the esoteric or hidden meaning, i.e. the meaning “outside the awareness of self” or consciousness. (p. 4) For Freudians this ‘esoteric’ truth generally boils down to 3 categories it seems: sex, death or excrement. Strangely with such fundamental coding, the goal here is very modern, “that this knowledge may be applied to address social problems in the world.” (p. 5) So right away the editor Simon Bronner sets up the contest between consciousness (or ‘the individual’ aka ‘the folk’) and society. We don’t like to talk about the 3 Freudian fundamental categories, so we have a few euphemisms. This reality is undeniable. However, folklore as a “release from reality” is not enough for Dundes, but must be aimed back at the world it seems. (p. 3) Dundes is not content that the “rationale for the irrational” could be merely entertainment. (p. 3) Here I think he falls short in understanding his true subject, the folk, who if nothing else demand to be entertained, regardless of any hidden meaning. Entertainment one could say is the real reason that most of these stories survive. However for Dundes, the paradox here is deeply buried (treasure!) and must be exhumed by experts! “To grasp why folklore is needed as an expressive outlet, one therefore needs to know the cultural values, taboos, anxieties, and beliefs of the society in which individual tradition-bearers operate in everyday life.” (p. 3) So if all this tradition is in fact expressed as folklore, we are left with a tautology—one must know folklore to know folklore. According to systems theory, such tautologies are at the heart of the modern operations of all autopoietic systems, such as ‘the law is what the law says it is’ or ‘what is not art is not art’. So we can see here how, if left to its own ‘dividere’ (devises, devices, or autopoietic differentiation I mean!) as (GASP!) *mere* ‘entertainment’, traditional folklore could stand in opposition to modern subsystems such as the academic subsystem, which must function through its control or analysis of the material here. Dundes apparently distinguishes folklore from “popular” materials such as film or literature. (p. 22) I would agree that much of modern media could be seen as oicotypes of pre-modern folklore within literate society. You could compare Dundes’s description of basic folklore structure with most movie plots and not be too far, far away. All stories are ultimately what we can call ‘lost & found’. “Dundes posited that a story basically proceeds from a lack (something missing) to liquidation of that lack (something found or rescued).” (p. 68) Another way of saying this is to say life is a story of salvation. Yes my personal spin, and Dundes might object to my insertion of ‘Western bias’. The other basic elements of folktales, interdiction (warning) and violation (trespass), can be viewed as the possibility of damnation, or the flip side of ‘lost & found’. Lost can be one side of violation. Found can be the other side, i.e. escape from this violation of interdiction, or as they say -escape from damnation. But why use the term ‘motifeme’ in place of the more intuitive term ‘function’? I would just say motifs can serve a variety of functions within a narrative. Right? Like many academics Dundes wants to make it more complex than it needs to be perhaps, but this is job security. The idea of “autopoiesis” he approaches with his article on ‘structuralism’ and the “superorganic” or “‘folkless’ theory”. (p. 130) Dundes finds fault with the study of folklore “as though it has little or nothing to do with people.” (p. 130) So in a sense Dundes might agree with Luhmann that social systems theory is like analyzing folklore without the folk or society without humans. Dundes is also convincing in his discussion about binary opposition as a universal, and kills Levi-Strauss with the same stone. (pp. 145-51) So, given the ‘unity of the paradox’ on display, I wonder how Luhmann managed to ignore folklore almost completely. But more importantly, in Dundes’s article about ‘linearity’ of American thought, why did Dundes forget to mention the Johnny Cash song “I Walk the Line”? I’m veering off track (line) here but perhaps you can see where I’m going, which is back to where I began (a circle!), the paradox (circular thought? tautological idea?!) that academic analysis, whether applied to folklore or what Luhmann would call ‘society’s most important’ systems, cannot help but somehow aim at steering or control. Even Luhmann, despite his own contrarian protestations, has ended up mostly as the tool of business scholars who are really interested in selling better management techniques. Perhaps the story remains sacred no matter how we analyze, no matter how many rocks we bring back from the moon, no matter how many motifs we collect in our killing jar, for as Dundes argues “. . . the Moon could be ‘violated’ only once.” (p. 236) As Dundes admits, and similar if not identical to Luhmann’s ideas about autopoiesis, folklore is living - “the myth-making process is . . . ongoing”. In our high-speed global society today, how can we analyze fast enough to describe “present-day culture” when the present is already past? (p. 329) One can say for example the story of a family forced to strap a dead grandmother to the roof of their car (p. 280) is retold more or less in National Lampoon’s Vacation, but the film is from the 1980s. Today, the speed of meme is approaching the speed of light. Dundes agrees to the extent that ‘meaning’ or “‘the precise and beautiful correspondence to the theme of a given culture at a given time’ . . . is virtually unattainable or rather unreconstructible.” (p. 329, quoting Margaret Mead) Perhaps Dundes approaches the idea of global society when he states that “the majority of myths are found widely distributed throughout the world.” For Dundes then, only “naive scholars [insist on analyzing] a specific culture by analyzing myths which are found in a great many cultures.” (p. 329) Is Dundes in some way admitting that a modern global society obviates the need to accurately analyze subcultures? Obviously not, but only that “the hypothesis of a limited number of organic human universals suggests some sort of similar, if not identical, meaning. . . . The formula e = mc2 is nonetheless valid for its being reductionistic.” (p. 330) If the wise scholar must be careful, I wonder though about the ‘fool-detective’ character type. Is this just the scholar in disguise? A hapless detective on the trail of breadcrumbs as culture? The trail leads Dundes to some entertaining places, including a chapter on excrement myths. “Few myths dealing with excretory processes find their way into print.” (p. 333) Psychoanalytic-based theorists cannot resist and I agree it is telling that some languages call gold “the excrement of the gods”. (p. 334) Similarly the risqué chapter on phrases like ‘bug off’ has a good joke for anglophiles. (p. 225) Still is this entertainment or analysis? You can see how folklore can become not much more than a listing of puns. Why must we fret so over the Freudian implications of bathroom graffiti? “What we want to know is why it exists and what function it serves.” (p. 373) I confess that after awhile these collections of cultural minutiae start to seem like the little balls of feces joked about in bathroom verses. “The essential question of what a given item of folklore might mean is typically ignored.” (p. 375) What is the meaning of bathroom graffiti then? We need better psychological testing of the stall scribblers he tells us. I am oversimplifying here - as the Dundes article on blood libel attests, legends can influence the operations of the legal, religious and political subsystems, and folklore can cause as many problems as it solves. Read his articles in the section on cockfighting (notice the cover of this book) and you will never again be able to watch that movie where they shout ‘there can be only one!’ without thinking about the phallocentric implications of decapitation, but are we getting closer to meaning?

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of Dundes articles from his long career. It mainly focuses on his work in structure of folklore performance and in psychoanalytical approach to the meaning of folklore.

[Chandrica · Rating 3 out of 5]

some really exciting essays on folklore, however was not that great a help for my 'folklore and social conditioning' project. :-(