Two book reviews about this book for your reference.
1.
Asian Folklore Studies, April 2001 v60 i1 p149
International Folkloristics: Classic Contributions by the Founders of Folklore. (Review) HIEN THI NGUYEN.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2001 Asian Folklore Studies
DUNDES, ALAN, Editor. International Folkloristics: Classic Contributions by the Founders of Folklore. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999. xiii + 255 pages. Suggestions for further reading, index. Cloth US$85.00; ISBN 0-8476-9514-X. Paper US$22.95; ISBN 0-8476-9515-8.
Folklore has had a long history since the term \"Folk-lore\" was coined by William Thorns in 1846, and this book edited by Alan Dundes confirms that international folkloristics has become an independent, worldwide, and world-class academic discipline. This anthology under review gives historical views on the evolution of the study of folklore from Jacob Grimm (the beginning of the nineteenth century) to Kenneth Goldstein (the second half of the twentieth century). The book covers fieldwork methods and the theoretical approaches of structuralism, psychoanalysis, and performance to various genres of folklore such as narratives, folksongs, rituals, customs, and superstitions.
Dundes chooses letters and articles by \"full-fledged folklorists,\" as well as amateur folklorists such as Yeats (poet), Freud (psychoanalyst), Gramsci (Marxist philosopher of political protest), whose contributions to folklore study have been evaluated highly. The other scholars--ones whose works should be known by every serious student of folklore in Western countries--are Jacob Grimm, William Thoms, Max Muller, Kaarle Krohn, Axel Olrik, Arnold van Gennep, Vladimir Propp, and Carl Wilhelm von Sydow. Dundes presents their essays in chronological order to give some sense of the evolution of international folkloristics. The first article, \"Circular Concerning the Collecting of Folk Poetry,\" (1815) by Jacob Grimm pleads with people to accurately record various folksongs and rhymes, legends in prose, children\'s tales, humorous trickster tales and jests, festivals, customs, usages, games, superstitions, and so on. The book closes with an article entitled \"Strategy in Counting Out: An Ethnographic Folklore Field St udy\" (1971) by Kenneth S. Goldstein on ethnographic field methods for collecting data in natural and induced natural contexts, followed first by nondirected and then by directed interviewing. The circular by Jacob Grimm emphasizes the collecting of different items and the writing of notes of a narrator\'s place and community, but Goldstein\'s essay demonstrates that folklore has to be analyzed as it is actually performed, for the art of any folklore genre is in its performance.
Dundes states that he is a library fieldworker. What he does as an editor is to select letters and essays and give them extensive headnotes, which include brief biographies of writers and references to their works and secondary readings, and which sometimes are much longer than the items themselves. The headnotes provide exceptionally useful information, including comprehensive information about the contributors, their works, and the contexts in which their essays were written. Probably only a very few editors would have spent the necessary time doing library research to provide all this information for the reader.
The book includes twenty essays reprinted from other sources, more than half of which were not originally written in English. (Five essays were translated from French and German especially for this anthology.) To give the reader an overall history of the development of international folkloristics, Dundes selects essays written mostly by European scholars, some of whom are from small countries such as Ireland, Estonia, Latvia, and Finland. According to Dundes, smaller countries have often feared the loss of their national identity, and nationalistic and patriotic scholars have felt the need to preserve as much of their heritage as possible.
Dundes\'s anthology is a great reference source, especially for folklorists in countries such as Vietnam. With the support of Ford Foundation, the Vietnam Folklore Institute is making an effort to translate a number of important essays by international folklorists on the theories and methods of folklore from various languages into Vietnamese for folklore students, researchers, and faculty at Vietnamese educational and research institutions. When we finally get competent translations of those essays, which can be used as reference works, interested scholars will be able to better analyze Vietnamese folklore material, and will be able to write a standard course book for undergraduate and graduate folklore students. So far, Vietnamese researchers have been influenced by Marxist dogma and scholars of the former Soviet Union. But they lack the necessary reference works on folklore written in Western countries such as Germany, France, England, Denmark, Finland, and Hungary.
This anthology is also a good source for people who intend to write books on international folklore in their own languages. Anyone planning such a project will find suggestions for further reading in the history of folkloristics at the end of Dundes\'s book.
What we do not see in the anthology (except for an article by Kenneth Goldstein) are essays by American folklorists on oral-formulaic composition and theoretical issues of folklore as a performance; nor are there essays on festivals, material folklore, and mythology. Dundes\'s intention, however, was not to make an exhaustive anthology, but what he has presented us with is a book that can be used as a practical reference for the teaching and studying of theories, fields, and genres of folklore.
Named Works: International Folkloristics: Classic Contributions by the Founders of Folklore (Book)
2. Folklore, April 2001 v112 i1 p114
International Folkloristics, Classic Contributions by the Founders of Folklore. (Review)_(book review) Christie Davies.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2001 Folklore Society
International Folkloristics, Classic Contributions by the Founders of Folklore. Edited by Alan Dundes. Lanham, MD and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. $22-95 (pbk), $52-50 (hbk). ISBN 00-8476-9515-8 (pbk), 00-8476-9541-X (hbk)
Alan Dundes has edited an important book, which will solidly confirm the significance of international folkloristics as an independent, worldwide, scholarly academic discipline. It also places the theoretical highlights of the evolution of folklore in a proper historical context; indeed, Alan Dundes\'s editorial and biographical notes on each of the essayists are sometimes as long as, and sometimes more interesting and informative than, the original essayists, who range from W. B. Yeats and James Delargy to Max Mtiller and James Frazer, from Arnold Gennep and Kenneth S. Goldstein, to Gramsci and Sigmund Freud, from Reinhold Kohler and Kaarle Krohn to Alex Olrik and Vladimir Propp. It is an essential book for anyone who wants to teach folkloristics.
Throughout Dundes stresses that \"the single most important characteristic of international folkloristics is its unswerving commitment to a comparative perspective\" (p. 25), with the aim of identifying similarities or distinguishing differences across cultures. Dundes notably praises Reinhold Kohler and Kaarle Krohn as pioneers of this approach but also exposes some of the serious weaknesses in Krohn\'s method.
Many classic essays have been brought together in Dundes book, such as Axel Olrik\'s \"Epic Laws of Folk Narrative,\" which may have dated, but is certain to outlast our fading memories of structuralism. \"Das Gesetz der Dreizahl\" (the rule of three) continues to distinguish folk narrative from literature and from reality and thus incidentally proves that jokes beginning \"an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman\" are folk narratives.
Alan Dundes throws much light on the splendid contribution to scholarship of the French writer Arnold van Gennep, and not only to folkloristics but to anthropology and sociology, by revealing that he was the bastard son of a Dutch woman whose name he took. Marriage ceremonies are after all the classic rite de passage and we can now see what drew him to this subject. It is distressing to learn from Dundes that the exclusiveness of the equally distinguished Emil Durkheim and his coterie should have kept van Gennep out of French academic life. However good a clique is (and unlike most French academic cliques, Durkheim\'s was a good clique), when it behaves like this it behaves destructively. Posterity has recognised the merits both of Durkheim and van Gennep.
Dundes is to be congratulated on his choice of essayists and on his clear exposition of their key ideas placed in an illuminating historical and autobiographical context. There are, however, two surprising entries from thinkers better known for their ideological influence, namely Gramsci and Freud. The extract from Gramsci, \"Observations on Folklore,\" does not in any way do justice to the sheer tedium and obsessiveness of the Italian Marxist\'s work that is conveyed by the endless use of the terms \"hegemony\" and \"subaltern\" by his followers, a point indirectly to be inferred from Dundes\'s wry account. The inclusion of Freud\'s \"Symbolism in Dreams\" is also puzzling, given some of Freud\'s bizarre comments on folklore such as \"the sacred number three is symbolic of the whole male genitalia.\" Only someone completely ignorant of mathematics and of theological controversy could make such a mess of two plus one.
Dundes is willing to admit to some extent the point made by Freud\'s critics that his psychotherapeutic method simply does not work (Freud\'s patients got better no faster than if nothing had been done for them), but is unwilling to concede that this undermines Freud\'s intellectual position. Yet, as with Marxism, if the material basis of the ideas which was stressed by the ideologues themselves as the underpinning of their truth is false, why should we accept that this particular interpretation of symbolism is better than any of the alternatives? A cigar is the symbol of an addictive personality, as we can see from both Freud and William Jefferson Clinton.
Freud\'s importance rather lies in the folklorists he has inspired, Such as Alan Dundes himself or Elliott Oring. It would have been better if Dundes had included a section from his own Freud-influenced masterpiece, \"Two Tales of Crow and Sparrow,\" even if this might have seemed a little presumptuous. Presumption and Dundes would have been better than Freud and modesty, and indeed better than the selection quoted by Dundes from Geza Ruheim.
In some ways, the most interesting of the essays quoted is that of Kenneth S. Goldstein on \"Strategy in Counting Out: An Ethnographic Folklore Field Study,\" which well illustrates the \"potential risks in studying folklore texts alone.\" Goldstein\'s demonstration that children believe that counting-out games are a democratic, equal-chance means of selection, but that they are also able to use manipulative strategies to produce particular outcomes, is a model of human behaviour that goes far beyond children\'s games. Reality is not just a text; it is real. At the same time, it has to be admitted that attempts to study jokes in their social, or at least interpersonal, context have produced results that can only be described as trivial, whereas a comparison of texts between societies has yielded important generalisations. Goldstein\'s method works best where it is easy to identify direct winners and losers among the participants; usually it is very difficult to do this and observers are tempted to identify those who have won and those who have lost by guesswork and by generalising from a few small and diverse instances.
Alan Dundes\'s collection is a delight in its variety and yet it is well held together by the erudition and skilled commentaries of the editor. It is an excellent introduction to folklore and folkloristics and their history, which in an age when English has become the dominant, indeed sole, international language will have an appeal in all the many countries from which Dundes has drawn his folklore texts. It is truly a work of international folkloristics.
Christie Davies, University of Reading, UK
Named Works: International Folkloristics, Classic Contributions by the Founders of Folklore (Book)
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