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ANALYTIC ESSAYS IN FOLKLORE Studies in Folklore 2 GENERAL EDITOR Richard M. Dorson MOUTON PUBLISHERS • THE HAGUE • PARIS • NEW YORK ALAN DUNDES University of California Berkely, California Analytic Essays in Folklore MOUTON PUBLISHERS • THE HAGUE PARIS • NEW YORK ISBN: 90 279 3231 X © 1975, Mouton Publishers, The Hague, The Netherlands First editic:i, Second printing 1979 No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers. Printed in The Netherlands To my wife Carolyn who shared the excitement of researching and writing these essays ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For permission to reprint the essays in this volume, I wish to thank the follow- ing publishers and societies: American Anthropological Association, American Folklore Society, The University of California Press, The Catholic University of America Press, the Folklore Institute of Indiana University, The Edward C. Hegeler Foundation, the Kroeber Anthropological Society, Eleanor and Leonard Manheim, the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, Inc., The University of New Mexico Press, the New York Folklore Society, Prentice-Hall, Inc., the Tennessee Folklore Society, and Dr. George B.Wilbur. FOREWORD "Why collect folklore?" is a question the folklorist repeatedly encounters from puzzled and not necessarily unsympathetic colleagues in established disciplines. They wonder aloud what contribution of import will result from this ceaseless accumulation of texts and their identification with hieroglyphic letters and num- bers. No better response can be made to this bafflement than to place in an in- quisitor's hands the present selection of his essays by Alan Dundes, who obtained his doctorate in folklore at Indiana University in 1962 and became a full professor at the University of California in Berkeley in the anthropology department at the age of thirty-three. For Dundes is first and foremost a theorist, an analyst, a bold speculator about the meaning of the materials of folklore to their human con- veyors. While in my classes in folklore I insisted on the student documenting each textual item of folklore with informant data, Dundes, once a student in those classes, went one better on becoming the instructor and required that his student collectors in addition interpret the meaning of the recorded text. His quest for meanings has led him to seek context along with text, metafolklore as well as folklore, and thereby to reorient the conception of fieldwork; interpretations of tradition bearers should carry at least as much weight as those of investigators. The special achievement of Dundes, who has already contributed so substantially to folklore studies in the twelve years of his professional career to date, becomes clearer when seen against other folklore scholarship. Characteristically the monu- ments in our discipline have taken the forms of handbooks, indexes, monographs, collections, dictionaries, encyclopedias, bibliographies. Compilation, codification, annotation are the watchwords. What is often lacking in the mountainous literature of folkloristics is the play of the inquiring mind over the materials. Andrew Lang had the gift, but we can think of few volumes to place alongside those provocative essays he pooled into Custom and Myth in 1884. Alan Dundes also possesses the gift for creative scrutiny of the folklore genres. He pulls them apart structurally, probes into them psychologically, extends them culturally to such matters as el- ephant jokes and bathroom inscriptions. To the lexicon of the folklorist he has added linguistic terms such as "etic" and "emic" units, morphological concepts such as "lack" and "lack liquidated", typologies of collectors such as "anal re- tentive" and "anal ejective". His examinations of familiar folklore sayings, be- liefs, and daily habits have revealed the present anxieties and future aspirations of Americans caught in the system, and their tendency to divide all life's activi- ties into three parts. In one scintillating article after another he has shown, or suggested, the ways in which folklore reflects our conscious and unconscious thoughts. The success of a discipline depends upon the quality of the minds it attracts. In attracting Alan Dundes, a brilliant speaker, teacher, and scholar, folklore has again proved its mettle. Richard M. Dorson Indiana University