Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Milli Folklor, cilt.136, ss.25-36, 2022 (AHCI)
© 2022, Milli Folklor Dergisi. All rights reserved.Various essays of American folklorist Alan Dundes, which he wrote between the 1960s and 2000s and had limited access as they were published in foreign journals and special issues, were collected by Simon J. Bronner posthumously in The Meaning of Folklore (2007). The aim of this essay is to present two main approaches that Dundes used to analyze the folkloric material and to get the meaning, aim and function of folklore. Dundes uses structuralism according to the Russian structuralists, especially Vladimir Propp’s morphology, Czech structuralists and Claude Lévi-Strauss’ analysis of myth. Also, he not only uses the signifier plane as has been defined by Ferdinand de Saussure but he also uses psychoanalysis on the signified plane, in other words, while analyzing the meaning and context of folklore. Therefore, in this essay Dundes’ distinctive approach on structuralism and psychoanalysis and their relations will be presented. In structural analysis Dundes uses mo-tifeme which he adapted from Kenneth Pike for the smallest unit that is described by Propp as function, the sequential and stable structures, and he analyses these units by using emic units, specific to culture, and Claude Lévi-Strauss’ binary opposition theory. In psychoanalytic analysis he adapts Freudian concepts like ‘repression’ and uses ‘projective inversion.’ He reaches symbolic meanings through sexual identity and analyses the males’ feminising their opponents to prove their masculinity, and the social and cultural repressed fears and anxieties in the collective fantasy like the sense of ‘the other’ through symbolic meanings. Hence, Dundes suggests ‘iden-tification’ and ‘interpretation’ steps by combining structural and psychoanalytical analyses in folklore analysis. In identification he identifies the material by using structuralism; in interpretation he gets the latent meaning along with the manifest meaning by using psychoanalysis. In this context, in this essay Dundes’ structural analysis of the competitive structure of male games which have male-female binary opposition through cockfight in identification step; his interpretation through psychoanalysis in interpretation step; in interpretation his analysis of symbolic meanings of symbolic equivalences that emerged in identification will be demonstrated. Dun-des’ contribution to folklore is that he does not limit himself with Propp’s folktale and Lévi-Strauss’ myth by evaluating the folkloric material as social and cultural expression that is both the verbal and non-verbal genres in both structural and psychoanalytical approaches. Dundes gets symbolic meanings and forms symbolic equivalences among the genres through cross-genre analysis by conducting his structural and psychoanalytical analyses with the major genres, myth, proverb, riddle, folktales, folk song and the minor genres, folk dance, children games, customs, gestures, puzzle, slang, prayer, toast and superstition.