Folklore Matters

by Alan Dundes

Dundes, Alan

Genres: Folklore, Anthropology

172 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1989

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

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

Picked this up for free in the anthropology department of my university.
This collection of essays is far more informative than it is engaging, but the topics are nonetheless fascinating. Dundes’ prose is rather dry and he does not translate quotes in other languages when using them, but his coherent arguments and interesting points save him. I will be researching more on this topic.

[Mark Isaak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dundes collects some of his old articles on a wide variety of folklore topics. Not all were of the highest scholarship. Dundes himself says his remarks on the pecking birds toys are based on an insufficient sample, and his article on psychoanalyic interpretations of folklore will not withstand the discrediting of psychoanalysis. In other essays, though, he brings a dose of common sense -- for example, noting that "fakelore" is still often folklore, and that arguments about the place of origin of a folk song are not as important as its meaning. Many articles on folklore I read have a scope not much larger than one community; Dundes writes about things of general applicability.