The Meaning of Folklore

Utah State University Press

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments...................................................................................................................viiIntroduction: The Analytics of Alan Dundes....................................................................................................1References....................................................................................................................................361. Folklore as a Mirror of Culture............................................................................................................532. The Study of Folklore in Literature and Culture: Identification and Interpretation.........................................................673. Metafolklore and Oral Literary Criticism...................................................................................................774. From Etic to Emic Units in the Structural Study of Folktales...............................................................................88(Postscript) The Motif-Index and the Tale Type Index: A Critique..............................................................................1015. How Indic Parallels to the Ballad of the "Walled-Up Wife" Reveal the Pitfalls of Parochial Nationalistic Folkloristics.....................1076. Structuralism and Folklore.................................................................................................................123(Postscript) Binary Opposition in Myth: The Propp/Lvi-Strauss Debate in Retrospect...........................................................1457. On Game Morphology: A Study of the Structure of Non-Verbal Folklore........................................................................1548. The Devolutionary Premise in Folklore Theory...............................................................................................1649. Folk Ideas as Units of Worldview...........................................................................................................179(Postscript) Worldview in Folk Narrative......................................................................................................19310. As the Crow Flies: A Straightforward Study of Lineal Worldview in American Folk Speech....................................................19611. Much Ado About "Sweet Bugger All": Getting to the Bottom of a Puzzle in British Folk Speech...............................................21112. Grouping Lore: Scientists and Musicians...................................................................................................229(A) Science in Folklore? Folklore in Science?.................................................................................................232(B) Viola Jokes: A Study of Second String Humor...............................................................................................23713. Medical Speech and Professional Identity..................................................................................................249(A) The Gomer: A Figure of American Hospital Folk Speech......................................................................................252(B) "When You Hear Hoofbeats, Think Horses, Not Zebras": A Folk Medical Diagnostic Proverb....................................................26414. Getting the Folk and the Lore Together....................................................................................................27315. Gallus as Phallus: A Psychoanalytic Cross-Cultural Consideration of the Cockfight as Fowl Play............................................28516. The Symbolic Equivalence of Allomotifs: Towards a Method of Analyzing Folktales...........................................................31917. Earth-Diver: Creation of the Mythopoeic Male..............................................................................................327(Postscript) Madness in Method Plus a Plea for Projective Inversion in Myth...................................................................34318. Theses on Feces: Scatological Analysis....................................................................................................352(A) The Folklore of Wishing Wells.............................................................................................................355(B) Here I Sit: A Study of American Latrinalia................................................................................................360(C) The Kushmaker.............................................................................................................................37519. The Ritual Murder or Blood Libel Legend: A Study of Anti-Semitic Victimization through Projective Inversion...............................38220. On the Psychology of Collecting Folklore..................................................................................................410(Postscript) Chain Letter: A Folk Geometric Progression.......................................................................................422Index.........................................................................................................................................427

Chapter One

Introduction

Alan Dundes was considered a master teacher as well as a scholar. His study of folklore offers insight into instruction, since folklore is an essential way that cultural knowledge and wisdom is passed down from generation to generation and from peer to peer. He practiced what he preached, for in 1994 he received a distinguished teaching award from the University of California at Berkeley, an accolade he greatly cherished. In his own education, he received a graduate degree in teaching of English from Yale University in 1955. In this 1969 essay, originally appearing in an English education journal, he urged K-12 teachers to use folklore as an instructional tool to develop tolerance, and to use the students' own cultural traditions to enhance learning. Unlike many educational approaches encouraging adults to concoct, and often sanitize, literary materials for children to digest, he called on teachers to rely on raw oral lore "performed by children for other children." He was famous, in fact, for requiring his own college students to collect fifty items of folklore that they would then describe and interpret. In this essay, he provided sociopsychological perspectives that can be used to decipher folk material.

Dundes pointed to children's folklore, not as something to be repressed, but rather to be brought out into the open. As he showed, it reflects, as only folklore can, issues of sibling rivalry, puberty, and parent/child relations. He distinguished folklore-as evidence-from the use of other materials, because it is "autobiographical ethnography, a people's own description of themselves." He evaluated what children typically relate in folklore to "areas of special concern," or anxieties that are expressed more readily in folklore than in everyday conversation.

Dundes's concern for the plight of African Americans and Vietnamese was voiced in his writings during the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War. He referred to the presence of the Cold War in relating alternative answers to the riddle joke of "what's black and white and red all over?" Other conflicts mentioned in the essay have outlasted the Cold War, such as ethnic...