Alan Dundes (1934-2005): A Remembrance and an Appreciation
 
by Robert A. (Bob) Georges
(Specially prepared for the Western States Folklore Society)
 

Alan Dundes died on Wednesday, March 30, 2005. He collapsed while teaching a graduate folklore seminar at the University of California, Berkeley, apparently from a heart attack. Though paramedics tried for an hour, they could not resuscitate him.
 
 News of Alan’s death immediately spread nationally and internationally via e-mail, internet, and telephone. Major big-city newspapers—including the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times—printed lengthy and laudable obituaries within days of Alan’s passing. Family members, friends, colleagues, present and former students, and even strangers who knew of Alan or about his works or ideas were stunned and saddened by his sudden and unexpected death. Legends are supposed to live forever. Alan Dundes, a living legend, didn’t.
 
I grieve for Alan not just because we were fellow folklorists, but also because we were friends for nearly 45 years. We met in Bloomington in September of 1960, where we were both graduate students in the Indiana University Folklore Program, headed by Richard M. Dorson. Alan and wife Carolyn arrived on campus a year before my wife Mary and I did. There was good chemistry among the four of us from the start. Carolyn and Alan were the first people in Bloomington to invite Mary and me to dinner. During the next two years, Alan and I met frequently to discuss and debate ideas and issues. Together we wrote essays on riddle structure and minor obscene folklore genres, both of which were published (1962, 1963) in the then-prestigious Journal of American Folklore.
 
 In 1961 Mary and I attended the American Folklore Society annual meeting (our first) in Austin, Texas. At that gathering Kenneth Goldstein criticized his fellow folklorists for continuing to do nothing more than collect, publish, and index folklore texts. In an era in which sister disciplines were undergoing dynamic changes, he asserted, folklore study was stagnant. I rose to object, asserting that many new and exciting things were happening at Indiana University. I cited Alan Dundes’ in-progress dissertation on the structure of North American Indian folktales as an insightful and ground-breaking example. I mentioned other projects of Alan’s and papers he had written that were forthcoming in print. “He’s a rising star,” I, a lowly graduate student, proudly and loudly proclaimed to a room full of seasoned professionals. “Watch him shine!”
 
Alan completed his doctoral studies in 1962 and that fall joined the English Department faculty at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. He taught at KU for one year before accepting an appointment in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Berkeley. He began teaching there in the fall of 1963 and remained on the Berkeley faculty until his death. I succeeded him at Kansas (in large part, no doubt, because he strongly recommended me) and remained there for three years. In 1966 I accepted a position in the English Department and Folklore and Mythology Program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
 
Being in the same state enabled the Dundes and Georges families to get together periodically. Mary, our son Jonathan, and I visited Carolyn and Alan and their three children—Alison, Lauren, and David—in Berkeley, and they came south to see us. When Alan lectured and guest-taught at UCLA, Mary and I hosted gatherings in our home so faculty and students could meet and talk to him. Over the years, we four continued to get together in Berkeley or Los Angeles whenever we could. Our last meeting was in January of this year, when we lunched together in Pasadena. We planned to meet next in Berkeley, in August, if not before. Now, sadly, we’ll be a trio rather than a quartet when we get together.
 
Alan was a loving husband, father, grandfather, and friend. He was also an ever-curious, indefatigable reader and researcher, a precise, prolific writer, and a stimulating, energetic, and entertaining teacher and public speaker. Obituaries justifiably emphasized the astonishing number and impressive variety of his published works. Given their penchant for newsworthiness, the authors of those obituaries focused on Alan’s most controversial publications and ideas and dramatic reactions to them. But it is folklorists, not journalists, who are best qualified to consider Alan’s contributions to his chosen discipline. As a folklorist and his friend, I am pleased to have this opportunity to discuss reasons why Alan Dundes should be lauded and loudly applauded by his folklore colleagues.
 
Unlike many trained in his discipline, Alan always proudly identified himself—and expected others to identify him—as a folklorist. He believed deeply that folklore is a pervasive, integral, and significant aspect of social existence and that its documentation and study can provide important insights into the essence and dynamics of culture and human behavior. Professionally, what he said, did, wrote, and taught had as its objectives to make others aware of the nature and universality of folklore and what it could tell us about each other and ourselves. Throughout his career, he pursued those objectives with missionary-like zeal.
 
Alan’s commitment to folkloristics was obvious from the start. From the very beginning of his career, he posed and answered questions that most folklorists either begged or felt had self-evident answers and therefore needed no discussion. In the opening pages of one of his earliest books, The Study of Folklore (1965), he asks, “What Is Folklore?” He addresses it by first discussing the meaning of folk. “There are still some folklorists who mistakenly identify the folk with peasant society or rural groups,” he boldly states. Accepting such a “narrow conception,” he asserts, would lead one to conclude “that city dwellers were not folk and hence city dwellers could not have folklore. An equally fallacious view,” he continues, “is that folklore was produced by a folk in the hoary past and that folklore still extant today consists solely of fragmentary survivals. According to this incorrect view,” he states, “the folk of today produce no new folklore; rather, contemporary folk are forgetting more and more folklore, and soon folklore will have died out completely.”
 
Alan counters this “narrow conception” with what he felt was a more defensible alternative. “The term ‘folk’,” he notes, “can refer to any group of people whatsoever who share at least one common factor. It does not matter what the linking factor is,” he asserts, noting that it could, for example, “be a common occupation, language, or religion.” But “what is important is that a group formed for whatever reason will have some traditions that it calls its own. In theory,” he continues, “a group must consist of at least two persons, but generally most groups consist of many individuals.” He gives as some examples of folk groups Jews, Negroes, lumberjacks, railroadmen, college students, military units, and families.
 
Having characterized his conception of who the folk are, Alan turns next to a consideration of their lore. Rather than defining that term, he presents instead “an itemized list of forms of folklore,” each of which, he writes, needs to be “individually defined.” By my count, his list consists of 66 forms, including such varied and seemingly disparate phenomena as myths, jokes, riddles, ballads, tongue-twisters, oaths, similes, quilt designs, nicknames, gestures, fence types, recipes, envelope sealers, oral epics, ball-bouncing rhymes, legends, and proverbs. “This list,” he asserts, “provides a sampling of the forms of folklore. It does not include all forms.”
 
In his introduction to another section of The Study of Folklore, Alan focuses on “the functions of folklore.” Noting that anthropologists, and not literary folklorists, have addressed this subject, he writes: “The important question [to them] is not what is folklore, nor where does folklore originate, nor how is it transmitted? The important question,” he states, “is what does folklore do for the folk?” He asserts that there are “many diverse functions of folklore, such as “aiding in the education of the young, promoting a group’s feeling of solidarity, providing socially sanctioned ways for individuals to act superior to or to censure other individuals, serving as a vehicle for social protest, offering an escape from reality, and converting dull work into play.” He continues: “One of the most important single functions of folklore is permitting action that is usually not approved. There are in every culture,” he writes, “words that should not be spoken and deeds that should not be done. However, the words and deeds appear in the folklore of these cultures.”
 
I quote at length from The Study of Folklore on this, the 40 th anniversary of its publication, because what Alan wrote in that work served as a blueprint for what he did the rest of his professional career. He studied and wrote about the folklore of such diverse groups as Northwest Coast Indians, Italians, football players, Turks, African Americans, college students, Jews, Germans, and Muslims; and he analyzed and published studies about virtually all the folklore forms on his unending 1965 list, including those that folklorists had earlier overlooked, slighted or ignored, such as mnemonic devices, latrinalia, graffiti, metaphors, clichés, insults, and symbols. In virtually all his publications, moreover, Alan invariably posed and addressed why questions. Why does folklore take the forms and content it does, and why do certain kinds and examples of folklore exist and persist sometimes universally and sometimes only in particular cultures? As his career evolved, such why questions preoccupied Alan and motivated him to seek answers in behaviorally-oriented studies and specifically in the writings of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.
 
What Alan Dundes wrote in The Study of Folklore he subsequently reiterated and elaborated upon again and again throughout his career. Furthermore, the questions he posed and answers he proposed first in The Study of Folklore also served as a clarion call to fellow folklorists, challenging them to assess their assumptions, broaden their conceptions, and expand the data base for folklore research. That increasing numbers of folklorists (not just in the United States) have heard that call and responded to it is evident in what increasing numbers of them have been doing during the four decades since The Study of Folklore was published. They focus on many different kinds of folk groups and on traditional phenomena of myriad forms, as Alan felt they should—and as he did. They feel free to document and study folklore that is transmitted and perpetuated not only orally, but also in writing, electronically, and materially, as Alan recommended they do—and as he did. They make discussions of the functions of folklore central to their inquiries, as Alan urged them to do—and as he did.
 
While these are the principal ways Alan Dundes affected and directed folkloristics during his lifetime, they are not the only ones. A gifted instructor, he regularly taught undergraduate introductory folklore courses with enrollments in the multiple hundreds. He created, headed, administered, and offered the core courses in the Master of Arts Degree Program in Folklore at the University of California, Berkeley, and chaired or served on the committees of all its students. He obtained funding to invite a folklorist from another American university or foreign institution to teach for the Berkeley folklore program one term each year, enabling visitors and students to meet and learn from each other. He regularly and systematically perused the pages of Dissertation Abstracts for folklore theses, read those that he found most interesting, and arranged for the publication, in a series he edited, of those he judged to be of greatest professional interest. Because of his enthusiastic teaching and professional example, he motivated many of his graduate students to continue their folklore study at Ph. D.-degree-granting institutions. Many became college or university professors and established folklore courses or programs at their institutions, perpetuating in their own ways their mentor’s legacy.
 
Alan contributed significantly as well to internationalization of folkloristics by finding out who the leading folklorists in foreign countries were, corresponding and meeting with them, reading their works, and familiarizing American folklore students and scholars with their ideas and concerns. Many Berkeley visiting faculty were from abroad. While they taught at Berkeley, Alan arranged for them to attend national and regional folklore meetings and introduced them and American folklorists to each other. He participated in myriad folklore conferences abroad and frequently lectured in foreign countries, facilitating intercultural contacts, understanding, and cooperation among folklorists worldwide.
 
Two of Alan’s accomplishments had less of an impact on folkloristics than I expected. One was his excitement about structural analysis as perhaps the most promising means of discerning the underlying nature of and patterning in folklore and hence as possibly the best way to define folklore forms. He demonstrated the potential in his dissertation, published as The Morphology of North American Indian Folktales (Folklore Fellows Communications No. 195, Helsinki, 1964), and in essays he wrote on the structures of proverbs, superstitions, games, and (with me) riddles. Early reactions to these works were positive, enthusiastic, and universal; but few scholars answered Alan’s call for them to conduct structural studies of other folklore genres.
 
The second accomplishment that had less influence on his colleagues than I had expected was his insistence that folklore has meanings that its communicators and perpetuators are unaware of. The key to determining meaning, he contended, could be found in the hypotheses, concepts, and constructs evolved by psychoanalysts­ and specifically by Sigmund Freud. He vigorously advocated and defended a Freudian approach to folklore and repeatedly demonstrated what he himself had learned by doing so. Unfortunately, his enthusiasm for, and repeated reference to, Freud and his ideas alienated more fellow folklorists than they stimulated. Some seem to resent Alan’s (or, perhaps more accurately, Freud’s) preoccupation with sexual and scatological interpretations; others feel that imputing meaning should not be one of a folklorist’s charges. Whatever the reason, few have responded, in any serious or systematic way, to Alan’s plea for inquiry into the meaning of folklore. The waning of excitement about structural studies of folklore, which Alan initiated in the United States, and the aversion to psychoanalytically-oriented interpretations of folklore, which he so vigorously championed and defended, are disappointing. Nevertheless, the volume and quality of Alan’s structural and psychoanalytical studies of folklore will stand forever as pioneering and monumental achievements and contributions to his chosen field of study.
 
For the most part, Alan was able to accomplish what he did, and impact his discipline the ways he did, because he was brilliant, curious, organized, self-directed, determined, energetic, daring, uninhibited, astute, and jovial. But he didn’t do it alone and could not have done it without the selfless help and loving support of his wife, Carolyn. She shouldered the burden of satisfying Alan’s (and their three children’s) every daily need, giving him (and them) the time required to pursue their interests and attend to their projects. She kept the household books and saw to it that home and garden were always in good shape and repair. Carolyn was Alan’s greatest supporter, most avid fan, most honest and forthright critic, and best friend. She nursed him when he was ill and comforted him when he was unhappy or disappointed. She cheered him when he succeeded and consoled him when he didn’t. She ran his errands and served as his chauffeur. She welcomed his students to the Dundes’ home and hosted events for them and colleagues and visitors. She called Alan’s attention to things he might have missed or overlooked (including, recently, the Shabbat elevator) and challenged him to investigate them. She listened patiently to his stories and chided him when she felt the jokes he told were offensive or inappropriate. Paradoxically, Carolyn’s and Alan’s unique identities were ­and always will be lovingly and inextricably intertwined.
 
Copyright April 10, 2005 by Robert A. Georges.