Dan Ben-Amos (1934–2023)

Abstract

Dan Ben-Amos, a giant of folkloristics as an international academic discipline, died on 26 March 2023 at the age of eighty-eight. Despite his advancing age and illness, he was actively teaching, writing, and working at the University of Pennsylvania (USA) weeks before his death. In fact, I talked to him in the hospital days before he died and he dispensed instructions to me of projects he wanted my help to finish, along with his boast that he would be back in the classroom. When I replied that he needed to concentrate on his health, he recited in Hebrew the proverb, ‘From your mouth to God’s ear’. Over his long career, Dan Ben-Amos established himself as a leader in a number of folkloristic fields: narrative, humour, proverb, historiography, African studies, and Jewish studies. He was instrumental in the performance studies movement in folkloristics arising during the 1960s and his name is inexorably linked to the keyword of ‘context’. Every student of folklore knows his foundational 1971 essay ‘Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context’ in which he famously declared, ‘folklore is artistic communication in small groups’. According to Dan, the scholarly analysis of context is at its core about the functioning of society. Nonetheless, as a scholar of literature he appreciated and studied texts, and annotated them masterfully, as evidenced in his monumental tomes that formed the Folktales of the Jews series (2006, 2007, 2011). He privately shared with me that this series, of which he published three of the projected five volumes, each topping a thousand pages, would be his parting scholarly gift. Dan’s book of ground-breaking essays in the performance turn of folkloristics, Folklore in Context (1982), contains headings for research directions that he pursued throughout his career. Understandably leading the list is ‘Context’, followed by ‘Genre’, ‘Jewish Humor’, and ‘Folklore in Africa’. I could add to this list expertise he shared in publications and presentations on European folktale, structuralism, collective memory, folk speech, religion, translation and textualization, motif analysis and classification, history of folklore studies and the relationship of history to folklore, Jewish literature and Biblical studies, and psychological and sociolinguistic approaches. Towards the end of his career, Dan’s theoretical contributions beyond performance were gathered by Henry Glassie and Elliott Oring in Folklore Concepts: Histories and Critiques (2020) for Indiana University Press.