Leadership Quote by Alan Dundes

Folklore here isn’t a dusty archive; it’s a social negotiation. Alan Dundes frames the term project as “fieldwork” and “collection,” borrowing the authority of anthropology, then undercuts any fantasy of pristine data with a wry admission: students will interview “anyone they can manage to persuade.” That last clause is doing a lot. It signals that folklore doesn’t simply sit there waiting to be harvested; it emerges from relationships, access, and a little hustle. The informant is not a neutral vending machine of tradition but a person with reasons to talk, to perform, to edit.

Dundes’s intent is pedagogical and quietly radical. He’s training students to treat everyday speech, stories, sayings, and rituals as worthy of study, while also forcing them to confront method: what you get depends on who you ask, how you ask, and what they think you want. The project’s “creation” of a collection acknowledges the researcher’s hand in shaping the record. Even the word “informant,” now often replaced by “consultant” or “interlocutor,” places the student in a position of power - and Dundes seems aware of that tension, slipping in persuasion as a reminder that consent and rapport are part of the data.

Context matters: Dundes helped legitimize folklore studies in modern academia, pushing it away from quaint nationalism and toward living, vernacular culture. This assignment turns theory into practice by making the student’s own world the field site, collapsing the distance between “us” and “them” that once defined ethnographic work. The subtext: folklore isn’t elsewhere. It’s at dinner tables, group chats, inside jokes - and it’s never captured without the messiness of human exchange.