Alan Dundes

Folklore, August, 2005 by Timothy R. Tangherlini

Alan Dundes died at the University of California, Berkeley, on 30 March 2005, doing what he loved--teaching folklore theory and methods to a group of advanced folklore students. He was widely recognised as one of the most important folklorists of all time. He did not limit himself to a single aspect of folkloristic enquiry--indeed, Wolfgang Mieder noted "there is no folklore genre that [Dundes] has not studied" (Mieder 1994, 3). Professor Dundes's studies of fairy tales, legends, jokes, songs, folk belief, gesture, obscenity, folk expressions, rhymes, ritual, riddles, games, Xerox-lore and national character, and the history and theory of the discipline, are all well known and often cited. He is also remembered as the most eloquent champion of psychoanalytic approaches to the study of folklore.

Alan Dundes was born in New York, the son of a lawyer and a music teacher. He attended Yale University, graduating with both a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in English, where he also studied music. After receiving his bachelor's degree, he served in the Navy aboard the USS Mississinewa, which was stationed in Italy. This early contact with Italy was renewed in his classic study, with Alessandro Falassi, of the Palio of Siena (Dundes and Falassi 1975).

During his early graduate work, Professor Dundes found himself drawn to the stories--the myths, the folk tales, the legends--behind the literature. Realising that he wanted to explore folklore rather than literature, he left Yale, and went to study at Indiana University, under the tutelage of Richard Dorson, in the early 1960 s. Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folk Tale had just been published in English translation, and Professor Dundes was quick to realise the importance of structural study for all genres of folklore. He finished his graduate work in three years, and after a one-year appointment in the English department at the University of Kansas, joined the anthropology faculty at the University of California, Berkeley in 1963. In 1965, along with his colleagues William Bascom, Wolfram Eberhard, Bertrand Bronson and Joseph Fontenrose, he founded the MA program in Folklore at Berkeley.

Professor Dundes's first book, The Morphology of the North American Indian Folktales (1964), is a structuralist tour de force that has had a lasting impact in the field. By the time the book appeared he had already published over thirty of his two hundred and fifty or so books and articles, and had begun laying the groundwork for his important structural and psychoanalytic contributions in the analysis of folkloric expression. In his mind, it was imperative that, if folkloristics were to advance as a science, folklorists had to formulate "accurate definitions of the materials of folklore, definitions based upon formal morphological features" (Dundes 1964, 112). Based in part on the syntagmatic structuralism of Vladimir Propp, and drawing on Kenneth Pike's work on the concepts of emic and etic, his morphology proposed several important advances in the structural study of folk expression, among them the concepts of the allomotif and the motifeme. Professor Dundes was interested both in the mechanics of variation and the possible explanations for those variations. These explanations were rooted in an understanding of individual psychology, and cultural and performative contexts.

Many of Professor Dundes's studies engaged the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud. Perhaps best known of these studies are his considerations of the Earth-diver myth (Dundes 1962), the Bullroarer (Dundes 1976), and Little Red Riding Hood (Dundes 1988). His compendium of essays, Parsing through Customs: Essays by a Freudian Folklorist (Dundes 1987a), provides an excellent overview of his work in this area, while essays such as "The Psychoanalytic Study of Folklore" (Dundes 1985a) and edited volumes such as Oedipus: A Folklore Casebook (Dundes and Edmunds 1984) present the complexities of this critical approach to folklore. Perhaps his most contentious article in this regard, at least in the United States, was a paper he published in Western Folklore, in which he analysed American Football as a form of "unconscious homosexual struggle for supremacy," an analysis he later applied both to warfare and the informal schoolyard game known as "Smear the Queer" (Dundes 1985b). His analysis of American Football was widely reported in the American media, and garnered him a great many admirers and a number of death threats.

Professor Dundes is also well known for his studies of humour. In a series of books that he co-edited with Carl R. Pagter (Dundes and Pagter 1982, 1987, 1991, 1996, 1999), he explored aspects of informal culture in the workplace, including pranks, fictitious memos, cartoons and photocopied jokes, prefiguring the contemporary proliferation of e-lore. Professor Dundes also produced studies of political jokes in Romania (Dundes and Banc 1986) and in Eastern Europe (Dundes and Banc 1990), along with a larger study of sick jokes and stereotypes (Dundes 1987b). His exploration of German national character, Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder (Dundes 1984), was critically received, and brought Professor Dundes both accolades and approbation.