Alan Dundes Quotes

If a student takes the whole series of my folklore courses including the graduate seminars, he or she should learn something about fieldwork, something about bibliography, something about how to carry out library research, and something about how to publish that research.

There are so many ways to do research - even watching old Ealing comedies, watching people getting on and off buses in London, looking at household interiors.

The best research you can do is to talk to people.

I am a data hound and so I usually end up working on whatever things I can find good data on. The rise of Internet commerce completely altered the amount of information you could gather on company behavior so I naturally drifted toward it.

People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.

People aren't used to thinking of cultural forms spreading out across the full range of formal interactions - or what is called the 'text' in literary terms.

Traditional market researchers are cold and calculating and scientific.

I collect a lot of data. We all do.

Kinsey himself collected absolutely everything.

If there's ever a place where you can't argue that you can put the facts over here and the text over there and see if they fit, it is surely in anthropology.

With data collection, 'The sooner the better' is always the best answer.

Foreigners like me have no privacy rights whatsoever. Yet we keep using U.S.-based services all the time, making us a legal target for gathering and storing our private information. Other countries do surveillance as well. But nobody has the global visibility that United States does.

The way to do fieldwork is never to come up for air until it is all over.

I specialise in taking teams of designers, psychologists, usability experts, sociologists and ethnographers into the field. It's called 'corporate anthropology,' but personally I'm more comfortable with 'design research,' because I'm not an anthropologist by training.

I go to bars and restaurants, and I sit and I eavesdrop on people and I watch people in shopping centers and, you know, I read the newspapers and I talk to the Trenton cops, and I just get a lot of information that comes in that somehow turns into a book.

I grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head.

I don't have any focus groups on talent and programming. If I need five people in a mall to be paid $40 to tell me how to do my job, I shouldn't do my job.

I have interviewed face-to-face, sitting beside me, over 19,000 people.

I'm an artist, I'm not an academic folklorist.

I would rather not depend on sophisticated statistics to demonstrate behavior. I prefer to design experiments that will produce interocular effects—hit you between the eyes.

Why can’t we collect all the signals, all the time?

I view my job more almost as a field biologist or anthropologist, where I'm collecting practices. I'm collecting techniques.

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

You sit there, and you argue and you argue, and you sort of bully the hell out of the text until you're quite sure what it's revealing, and then you perform it.

I come from a specific tradition of sociology, which is urban ethnography.