Alan Dundes Quotes

19 quotes in 384 categories

• 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…
• 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,…
• 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,…
• My academic identity is that of a folklorist, and for many years I have taught only folklore courses.
• Americans have a penchant for the future and tend to disregard the past.
• Americans often have trouble enjoying the present moment.
• I mentioned that one of the tripartite formulas in American worldview involves time: past, present, and future.
• Life, it seems, is nothing if not a series of initiations, transitions, and incorporations.
• 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…
• Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.
• Future orientation is combined with a notion and expectation of progress, and nothing is impossible.
• 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…
• In the light of our culture, these are not unreasonable questions and tactics, but if once again, we try to see the lens through which…
• Ancestor worship, or filial piety so characteristic of Asian cultures, for example, does not really resonate with Americans who favor children, not grandparents.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Americans do believe in progress and there is almost certainly a kernel of truth in the joke.

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