Dundes’s article on folk is informative, although I must say it was not really what I was expecting to read. I thought there would be “wee folk” in there, but instead it is about the meaning of folk, as a word, a term of definition and a “type” of peoples. I was impressed with the chronological order of the facts, this showing the development of how folk came to be used as a noun to describe groupings of people. Dundes uses considerable research that has been published over the years to show how others too observed the development of the term “folk.”
I was particularly interested in the section on page 4, were Dundes does a good job of describing how folks exist in a society. In particular, who are “folk”? The folk, or peasant, were understood to be illiterate, rural and lower on the stratum of society (Dundes 4). And yet, what is more intriguing is that for any society to exist folk have to make up the other have of the civilized/elite portion of the state; they must have a “symbolic spatial temporal relationship to the more complex system,” this being the civilized/elite people (Dundes 6). To put it into simple language, “in order to have a winner in a race, someone has to lose.”
Dundes also does a fairly decent job of identifying what folklore is; that being jokes, songs, anecdotes, legends, superstitions and speech. This is what keeps the mystery and fantasy of the folk people alive and well.
Finally, I was also interested in how he noted that North American “Indians” are not considered to be a part of the folk definition. This is an interesting fact and one I would have liked to see more discussion of. This is primarily because in making connections to other world indigenous populations and their histories of folk, the question I am left with is why not First Nations’ peoples of Turtle Island. Who knows it is only folklore anyway!
Works Cited
Dundes, Alan. “Who Are the Folk.” Interpreting Folklore, Indiana University Press, 1980, pp. 1-19.
