Alan Dundes (September 8, 1934 ā March 30, 2005) was an American folklorist whose four-decade tenure at the University of California, Berkeley helped define folkloristics as an academic discipline. Obituaries remembered him as the most renowned folklorist of his time and noted his authorship of 12 books, two dozen edited volumes, and more than 250 articles interpreting myth, proverb, and folk belief. Dundes advanced psychoanalytic and structural readings of folklore and urged colleagues to pair collection with theory in delineating the field. His willingness to probe national character and popular ritual, including a controversial 1980 address on German culture and a psychoanalytic study of American football, drew both acclaim and death threats.
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Alan Dundes in the context of Folklore studies
Folklore studies (also known as folkloristics and, in the United Kingdom, as tradition studies or folk life studies) is the interdisciplinary field within cultural anthropology that examines the creation, performance, and preservation of folklore.
The term folkloristics entered academic discourse in nineteenth-century Europe and, along with its English-language counterparts, gained currency in the 1950s as scholars differentiated the study of traditional culture from the artifacts themselves. In contemporary scholarship, the word Folkloristics is favored by Alan Dundes, and used in the title of his publication. Simon Bronner uses the term folklore studies to describe the discipline's intellectual history.
Alan Dundes in the context of Motif-Index of Folk-Literature
The Motif-Index of Folk-Literature is a six volume catalogue of motifs, granular elements of folklore, composed by American folklorist Stith Thompson (1932ā1936, revised and expanded 1955ā1958). Often referred to as Thompson's motif-index, the catalogue has been extensively used in folklore studies, where folklorists commonly use it in tandem with the AarneāThompsonāUther Index (ATU), an index used for folktale type analysis.
The motif-index and the ATU indices are regarded as standard tools in the study of folklore. For example, folklorist Mary Beth Stein said that, "Together with Thompson's six-volume Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, with which it is cross-indexed, The Types of Folktale constitutes the most important reference work and research tool for comparative folk-tale analysis.ā Alan Dundes, who was an outspoken critic, also said substantially the same thing, without confining the application to comparative studies: "[the indices] constitute two of the most valuable tools in the professional folklorist's arsenal of aids for analysis".