To the Editor:

In the opening sentences of his review of my books on The British Folklorists [Books in Review, July] Robert Ackerman makes serious errors about the current state of folklore studies. He says that few folklorists are at work today, that the study of folklore seems to have run its course, and that it is back in the hands of amateur enthusiasts. This is totally wrong. Mr. Ackerman was probably misled into these generalizations by my own account of the British folklore movement, but the history of folklore studies in the United States and in Europe is very different from its history in England.

The vigorous development of folklore as a discipline in American universities is one of the remarkable stories of the present academic scene. In 1957, when I became chairman of the Folklore Program at Indiana University, six students were seeking M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s in folklore. Today, over one hundred graduate students are enrolled, and the undergraduate courses have risen from about fifty to over one thousand students. I have myself directed twenty-eight doctoral dissertations, and these Ph.D’s in folklore have joined faculties from the University of Maine to the University of California and at a number of foreign universities. They have in turn developed their own courses and programs. At the University of California, Berkeley, Alan Dundes has attracted up to seven hundred students in his folklore lectures, and introduced a master’s program in folklore. Other universities apart from Indiana and its Ph.D’s have also initiated folklore programs. The University of Pennsylvania has a graduate department of Folklore and Folklife with sixty higher-degree candidates. Proposals for doctoral programs are under way at the University of Texas and the University of California at Los Angeles. At Harvard, where thirty years ago I could find no specialist in folklore to direct my new-found interest, the first group of seniors concentrating in a new major in folklore and mythology has just graduated. One hundred and seventy American colleges and universities offer courses in folklore, and forty-five more are planning to do so. . . .

Publications also reveal the vitality of folklore studies. At Indiana University alone there have been edited or supported in the past five years the Journal of the Folklore Institute, the Folklore and Folk Music Archivist, Asian Folklore Studies, Indiana Folklore, and the Folklore Forum, the latter a journal issued by graduate students.

Behind all this activity is considerable intellectual ferment. In a recent paper I analyzed contemporary folklore theory according to comparative, functional, historical-reconstructionist, psychoanalytical, structural, oral-formulaic, ideological, hemispheric, folk-cultural, mass-cultural, cross-cultural, and contextual schools. But to describe properly the American folklore scene today would require a book as long as The British Folklorists.

Richard M. Dorson
Folklore Institute
Indiana University
Bloomington, Indiana

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