Politics & Power Quote by Alan Dundes

Dundes is quietly flexing, but the boast has teeth: his “great advantage” isn’t a bigger library or a better theory, it’s the fact that folklore is already walking into the room. The sentence pivots on an institutional reversal. In most academic settings, students arrive as empty containers to be filled with canon. Dundes treats them as carriers of living archives - not just anecdotes, but “national, regional, religious, ethnic, occupational, and family” systems of meaning.

That long inventory is doing rhetorical work. It widens “folklore” beyond quaint tales and folk songs into the messy, overlapping identities that structure everyday life. He’s also signaling method: folklore isn’t extracted from “the field” like a resource; it’s embedded in ordinary people, including the ones paying tuition. The subtext is a critique of colleagues who study culture as if it only exists at a safe distance - in texts, in villages, in other people’s lives. Dundes is staking a claim for the classroom as field site.

Context matters: Dundes helped professionalize American folkloristics in the late 20th century, when universities were expanding and “multiculturalism” was becoming both a promise and a battleground. His line anticipates today’s debates about whose knowledge counts. It’s inclusive, but not sentimental: students’ “personal knowledge” is framed as data, evidence, material to be analyzed. The advantage is pedagogical and political. He’s arguing that scholarship gets sharper when it admits the obvious - that everyone is already saturated in tradition, and education should start by taking that seriously.