Alan Dundes Quotes

• They do not merely collect texts; they must also gather data about the context and the informant and, above all, write an analysis of the items based upon the course readings and lecture material on folklore theory and method.

  Alan Dundes

• There is more to folklore research than fieldwork. This is why in all of my other upper-division courses I require a term paper involving original research.

  Alan Dundes

• Their term project consists of a fieldwork collection of folklore that they create by interviewing family members, friends, or anyone they can manage to persuade to serve as an informant.

  Alan Dundes

• The class has become over the years fairly large, running to three hundred or more, but I always insist upon reading all the student folklore collections myself. Although this is a tall order, I look forward to it because I learn so much from it.

  Alan Dundes

• Polls are frequently taken to try to tease out or determine likely directions and trends, but once taken, they belong to the past, requiring that new polls be taken.

  Alan Dundes

• My academic identity is that of a folklorist, and for many years I have taught only folklore courses.

  Alan Dundes

• Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

  Alan Dundes

• Life, it seems, is nothing if not a series of initiations, transitions, and incorporations.

  Alan Dundes

• In my introductory course, Anthropology 160, the Forms of Folklore, I try to show the students what the major and minor genres of folklore are, and how they can be analyzed.

  Alan Dundes

• I mentioned that one of the tripartite formulas in American worldview involves time: past, present, and future.

  Alan Dundes

• I have a great advantage over many of my colleagues inasmuch as my students bring with them to class their own personal knowledge of national, regional, religious, ethnic, occupational, and family folklore traditions.

  Alan Dundes

• Future orientation is combined with a notion and expectation of progress, and nothing is impossible.

  Alan Dundes

• Cities all over the world are getting bigger as more and more people move from rural to urban sites, but that has created enormous problems with respect to environmental pollution and the general quality of life.

  Alan Dundes

• Ancestor worship, or filial piety so characteristic of Asian cultures, for example, does not really resonate with Americans who favor children, not grandparents.

  Alan Dundes

• Americans have a penchant for the future and tend to disregard the past.

  Alan Dundes

• Americans do believe in progress and there is almost certainly a kernel of truth in the joke.

  Alan Dundes

• If a student takes the whole series of my folklore courses including the graduate seminars, he or she should learn something about fieldwork, something about bibliography, something about how to carry out library research, and something about how to publish that research.

  Alan Dundes

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Research, Learn, Should

Alan Dundes (17)

Birth:	8th September, 1934
Death:	30th March, 2005
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Folklorist

About

Alan Dundes was a folklorist at the University of California, Berkeley. His work was said to have been central to establishing the study of folklore as an academic discipline. He wrote 12 books, both academic and popular, and edited or co-wrote two dozen more. One of his most notable articles was called "Seeing is Believing" in which he indicated that Americans value the sense of sight more than the other senses.

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Today's Anniversary - 15th November

Births

• 1931 - Mwai Kibaki
• 1939 - Yaphet Kotto
• 1957 - Kevin Eubanks
• 1940 - Sam Waterston
• 1976 - Virginie LeDoyen

Deaths

• 1998 - Stokely Carmichael
• 1982 - Vinoba Bhave
• 1917 - Oswald J. Chambers
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• 1996 - Alger Hiss