Art & Creativity Quote by Alan Dundes

Dundes is drawing a hard line against the tourist version of folklore studies: the student who goes out, scoops up a few colorful stories, and mistakes accumulation for understanding. The sentence is structured like a checklist that escalates in seriousness. “Collect texts” is framed as the bare minimum. Then comes the methodological spine: “data about the context and the informant.” In folklore, the tale is never just the tale; it’s a performance shaped by situation, audience, power dynamics, and the speaker’s social position. Dundes is insisting that the “who” and “where” aren’t optional footnotes but part of the object being studied.

The loaded phrase is “above all.” It tips the quote’s real agenda: interpretation disciplined by theory. Dundes isn’t championing freeform commentary; he’s demanding analysis “based upon the course readings and lecture material,” which quietly asserts institutional authority. This is pedagogy as gatekeeping in the best sense: a defense against romanticizing “the folk” and against treating tradition as a cabinet of curiosities. The subtext is ethical, too. If you don’t record context and informant data, you flatten a person into a content source; you extract without accountability.

Historically, this reflects Dundes’s push within 20th-century folkloristics toward rigorous method and away from antiquarian collecting. It’s also a reminder that folklore is not “old stuff” but living social evidence. The assignment is really training: learn to hear meaning, not just capture noise.