Alan Dundes macht sich - gleich im Vorwort und besonders im Hinblick auf eine zukünftige Studentenschaft-zum Anwalt einer dezidiert freudianisch orientierten Volkskunde, welcher (so der Tenor des ...ersten Beitrags The Psychological Study of Folklore in the United States, p. l -24) in Amerikas akademischen Kreisen zu allen Zeiten feindlich begegnet worden sei. Traditional Male Combat: From Game to War (25-45), das titelgebende Herzstück des Bandes, analysiert drei Spielarten ausdrücklich männlichen Kampfs: Mann gegen Mann (Fechten, Boxen, Ringen, Tennis, Badminton, Tischtennis, Schach, Dame etc.), Mann gegen Tier (Stierkampf, Jagen und Fischen) und Tier gegen Tier (Hahnenkampf). The Floodas Male Myth ofCreation (78-91) ist für Dundes ein klarer, schnell gelöster Fall: "flood myths are an example of males seeking to imitate female creativity" (82).
Examples relating to the Holocaust, political diplomatic incidents, and domestic violence are swamped by references to sexual scandal (especially the Clinton-Lewinski case), homosexuality in military ...and clerical life, paedophilia, child abuse, incest, and sexual violence. ... almost any other field where scholars seek to make sense of the dynamics of oppression and violence will offer fruitful avenues for the analytic exploration of silence and denial (for example, disability studies, queer theory, black studies, women's studies, indigenous studies, postcolonial theory, anarchist theory, among others).
Through four case studies of translated Märchen collections-Edgar Taylor's German Popular Stories (1823), Thomas Crofton Croker's Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825), Edward ...Lane's Arabian Nights (1839-1841), and George Webbe Dasent's Popular Tales from the Norse (1857)-Schacker sets up a complex and fascinating argument regarding relationships among folklore, nationalism and national identity, and The Other in nineteenthcentury England. While each translation and act of reading is in itself a performance of national identity, National Dreams shows that folkloristics has, from its inception and even prior to its professionalization, been a transnational field, "not because the national frame of reference has been transcended or surpassed but because the books' status as displaced, representative now both of foreign orality and domestic literacy, gave them a new meaning" (4).
The Study of Warfare Kang, Bong Won
American Anthropologist,
December 2001, Volume:
103, Issue:
4
Book Review, Journal Article
Peer reviewed
"From Game to War and Other Psychoanalytic Essays on Folklore" by Alan Dundes, "Indoctrinability, Ideology, and Warfare: Evolutionary Perspectives" edited by Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt and Frank Kemp ...Salter, "Troubled Times: Violence and Warfare in the Past" edited by Debra L. Martin and David W. Frayer and "Waorani: The Contexts of Violence and War" by Clayton Robarchek and Carole Robarchek are reviewed.
Identification and Interpretation (1965), Re-situating Folklore does not merely rework older theories, but aims to break new ground in at least two ways-by adding a third step to Dundes' ...identification and interpretation schema, which will have us look also at conceptions of how folklore fits into culture and to consider how these conceptions have influenced and determined the re-situating of folklore into purely literary contexts (15) and by expanding the purview of folklore/literature studies to include the visual arts in addition to fiction, poetry, and drama. The extent to which these studies "demonstrate the range of literary re-situation of folk texts and folk contexts" (21) during the period in question is also debatable, given the book's regional emphasis: more than half the numbered chapters deal wholly or in part with the role of folklore in the work of Louisiana novelists, playwrights, poets, cartoonists, and photographers.
