Alan Dundes (1934-2005)

In October 2004, Alan Dundes participated for the first time in many years in the American Folklore Society Meetings. Approached whether he would give the Invited Presidential Plenary Address, Dundes took up the challenge and delivered one of his rousing, funny, critical, controversial, irreverent, yet erudite papers in the rapid-fire pace in which he tended to lecture—pausing only for an insight, a joke, or an analytic statement to sink in—only to pick up the pace again with more. His address ruffled some feathers, as many of his presentations and publications tended to do; it made the usual demands for rigorous scholarship founded on multilingual bibliographic research and voiced a commitment to an internationally housed discipline; it challenged, politely but firmly, the fieldwork practices of major scholars in the field; it astonished and purportedly even shocked some younger members of the audience.

Before he began, however, Dundes looked out into the audience and asked, "Just how many of you have taken coursework with me?" More than a third of the six hundred present raised their hands—an eloquent testimony to just how many students he had reached over more than four decades working as a one-person folklore program at the University of California, Berkeley. His vigorous voice would accompany them into careers of all kinds, into folklore Ph.D. programs as well as in many other fields in which folklore scholarship could be applied. Dundes remembered and supported former students to an extraordinary degree, and in the days following his unexpected death, past and present students, as well as colleagues from around the world who were motivated by his scholarship, and even more so by his lecturing and personal interest in their folklore pursuits, have voiced their admiration and gratefulness to this extraordinary teacher and scholar on a virtual memorial page created by the Department of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley (http://anthropology.berkeley.edu/dundes_remembered.html). The variety of tributes, ranging from students who took just one class from him and felt their lives changed, to department chairs honoring a phenomenal colleague, is as moving as it is (and perhaps ought to be) unique in the realm of academic memorials. In their reverence, tenderness and affection, admiration and awe, as well as frustration, anxiety, and memory of being challenged, the contributions from around the globe testify to a man without peer as teacher and mentor, a generous scholar, an individual of boisterous humor, sharp intellect, and personal humility.

An obituary does not provide sufficient opportunity to do justice to Dundes's prolific publication record. Folklore Interpreted: Essays in Honor of Alan Dundes (edited by Regina Bendix and Rosemary Zumwalt, 1995) contains a list of his publications up to the beginning of 1995. In the ten years since, he edited or coedited several additional casebooks (on the vampire, the walled-up wife, and on Oedipus) as well as International Folkloristics: Classic Contributions by the Founders of Folkloristics (1999), which gave him particular pleasure, in light of his emphasis on knowing the intellectual forebears of the field. He also wrote two more collections of xeroxlore and four substantive, book-length studies on folklore in the Bible and the Qur'an, and interpretations of Indian narrative as well as Orthodox Jewish customs. He published additional collections of his psychoanalytic essays on folklore, wrote many more articles as well as introductions and afterwords to collections and studies by numerous other scholars—and at the time of his death, there were surely many more manuscripts still lying on his table awaiting publication, some of which will likely appear posthumously.

Throughout his professional life, Dundes made it his task to ease and foster folkloristic study and research by editing and coediting collections of important essays both in the history and theory of folklore study and of particular topics, starting with Cinderella and ranging from the proverb to the Wandering Jew, the Blood Libel legend, and folk law. The "folklore casebook," as a Dundesian invention, pays tribute to intellectually diverse, even conflicting, points of view. They were a showcase for his scholarly finds yet were intended to give others a chance...