Dan Ben-Amos (1934-2023)

Bibliographic Data

ID2803561
AuthorsAmy Horowitz (0000-0002-8696-0760, Indiana University Bloomington), Amy Shuman (The Ohio State University)
Year2024
Volume137
Issue543
Pages139-142
Publication date2024-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American Folklore (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8715 • E-ISSN: 1535-1882
PublisherUniversity of Illinois Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.5406/15351882.137.543.13
OpenAlexW4391991062
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited8

Dan Ben-Amos of blessed memory, folklorist, teacher, and dear friend, passed away on March 26, 2023. He is survived by his wife, Batsheva Ben-Amos, his children, and grandchildren. He is remembered as a daring and rigorous scholar, a generous teacher and mentor, a brilliant storyteller, an engaged colleague, and a twinkle-eyed trickster known for his wry humor.As we write this memorial testimony, we hear Dan's voice engaging us in dialogue and reminding us of what we know about the importance of genre and context. Rather than relying solely on familiar words to describe a distinguished scholar and knowledgeable teacher, his memory points us, instead, toward stories of surprises and wisdom found in unexpected places. We write within the context of being his former students, Amy Shuman in the 1970s, when Professor Ben-Amos had recently arrived at the University of Pennsylvania, and Amy Horowitz in the late 1980s–1990s.Ben-Amos was born on September 3, 1934, and grew up in the working-class town of Petah Tikvah in what was then Palestine. He attended the Hebrew University in Jerusalem as an undergraduate where he initially majored in biblical studies and English literature before turning to Hebrew literature, where he encountered Professor Dov Noy, who introduced him to folklore and encouraged him to undertake doctoral studies in folklore at Indiana University.In an interview with Amy Shuman at the Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society (AFS) in 2013, Ben-Amos recounted his time at Indiana University (IU) in the early 1960s as intellectually exhilarating (Shuman 2013). In addition to his work with Richard Dorson, Ben-Amos was particularly influenced by Professor David Bidney, an anthropologist and philosopher. Bidney's use of philosophical critique to test anthropological theory and his approaches to myth influenced Ben-Amos’ research and teaching. It was at IU that Ben-Amos first encountered structuralism, a school of thought he utilized in his dissertation, “Narrative Forms of the Haggadah: A Structural Analysis.” Ben-Amos was an innovative thinker and leader during these formative times and was a significant contributor to the development of Folklore Studies as an independent discipline.From his early study of Aggadic and Talmudic intergenerational wrestling with texts at Hebrew University, Ben-Amos embodied a style of research and teaching based on sustaining conversations and developing dialogues with others. One of his most influential essays, “Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context” (1971), emerged from and illustrates the dialogic practice he engaged in at IU with his classmates. Alexander Krappe's introduction to folklore in The Science of Folklore (1962), written in the 1930s, was the dominant text at the time. As Ben-Amos later shared, he and his fellow students found that it “did not hold our enthusiasm,” and so, re-defining the field occupied their conversations. Ben-Amos presented his ideas at the 1967 meeting of the American Folklore Society and later published the essay in the Journal of American Folklore. Since then, every folklore student has had to reckon with his definition of folklore, which, notably, did not include the word “tradition.” His recently published account of writing his important Journal of American Folklore article “A Definition of Folklore: A Personal Essay” (2020) enhances our understanding of this important work.For Ben-Amos, teaching was a lifelong passion. In 1967, after a brief sojourn at The University of California, Los Angeles, he began his 55 years at the University of Pennsylvania, first as an Assistant Professor, then as a tenured Professor (and at times chair) of Folklore and Folklife (1967–1999), and then as Professor of Folklore & Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (1999–2023). His pedagogical contributions were key to Penn's recognition as a world leader in the field. When the university administration closed the folklore department in 1999, Ben-Amos continued to keep folklore alive at Penn from his new home in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, where he found excellent colleagues and an opportunity to bring his folklore and Jewish studies worlds together. He continued teaching, advising students, and publishing until his death. While at Penn, he was a Guggenheim Fellow (1975–1976) and the recipient of grants from the American Council for Learned Societies (1972–1973) and The National Endowment for the Humanities (1980–1981), among other honors and awards. He was also rewarded when his students carried forward the work through their own publications and teaching positions.Ben-Amos’ work was foundational, daring, and rigorous. His concept of folklore was radical—part of an emerging paradigm shift in folklore scholarship with a focus on performance and the situated uses of folklore in particular cultural contexts. As a historian of folklore studies, he offered both critique and praise for his predecessors, and he was actively engaged in producing a critical legacy for the field. He recognized its romantic inheritance as both a burden and an opportunity to better understand the historical circumstances that produce and constrain ideas.Over the course of his career, he wrote many influential essays, including “Analytical Categories and Ethnic Genres” (1969), “The Seven Strands of Tradition: Varieties in Its Meaning in American Folklore Studies” (1984), and “‘Context’ in Context” (1993). He edited Folklore Genres (1976), and, with Liliane Weissberg, co-edited Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity (1999). His final essay “Between Intangible Cultural Heritage and Folklore” was published shortly after his death in both the Turkish journal Arasında Folklor/Edebiyat (Ben-Amos 2023) and in the Journal of Folklore and History (Ben-Amos [2019] 2023).In addition to his theoretical work, he published three volumes of Folktales of the Jews (2006–2011), which won a National Jewish Book Award. Through his insightful analyses of collections of tales, proverbs, riddles, and jokes, Ben-Amos contributed to what he described as the “unabashedly eclectic” field of Jewish folklore (1991:17). His research and analyses in this area informed and benefitted the development of folklore generally in areas such as orality, literacy and tradition, and transformation and popularization. As part of this work, his refinement and critique of Dorson's now classic discussions of “fakelore” provided a more nuanced, historicized understanding of the role of popular collections in periods of modernization (1991:31).As described in his Sweet Words: Storytelling Events in Benin (1975), Ben-Amos’ interactions with storytellers had a profound influence on his theoretical understanding of folklore. In a recent essay, returning to his work in Benin, he emphasized his long-held view that close ethnographic research is essential for understanding texts (“Two Benin Storytellers” in Folklore Concepts, 2020). He wanted to immerse himself in places and to experience performative texts firsthand.Ben-Amos incorporated these ideas into his teaching. As students in his classes, we were often struck by his storytelling skills. His delivery of complicated theoretical and methodological concepts, punctuated by relevant jokes and proverbs, helped his pedagogy survive across decades. In one of his classes in the 1990s, Amy Horowitz recorded his recounting of an exchange with Jacob Egharevba, a historian and author of A Short History of Benin (1962). According to Ben-Amos, Mr. Egharevba asked: “What did you come here for, my son?” Ben-Amos replied, “I came to study the history of the stories of Benin,” acknowledging that the local term “Okpobhie” refers to both history and story. Mr. Egharevba responded: “You came to the right place, and you need not go any farther. I know everything! I know what is true and what is wrong. You stay here and I'll tell you.” Ben-Amos continued to explain to Mr. Egharevba, “I want to know not only what is true but also what is not true. . . . I want to be in the places where Benin people tell stories and sing songs—not just to listen to your stories, but to be IN the cultural context.” Reflecting on this exchange to his folktale class, Ben-Amos would say, “I must admit that sometimes I didn't know what I had in front of me and what kinds of questions I could ask in a particular situation.”His classes—whether on folklore theory and history, Jewish folklore, African folklore, folk legend, prose narrative, proverb, riddle and speech metaphor, theories of myth, or structural analysis—emphasized process and inquiry. As we prepared this account of his impressive legacy, we noted that in every class, interview, conference paper, and publication, he invariably acknowledged the legacies that he had inherited and the colleagues who had influenced him.Ben-Amos’ prolific scholarship includes not only his articles and the significant volumes he edited but also the comprehensive, paradigm-shaping introductions he wrote. His introduction to Folklore Genres (1981) remains significant to both folklore scholarship and to narrative research more generally. His desk was filled with notes, books, and papers that he drew on to create his characteristic, thorough historical framing replete with sharp and incisive theoretical insights. Two of his most recent introductions—Introduction to the Special Issue for “The Challenge of Folklore to the Humanities” in Humanities (2021) and the edited volume The Diary: The Epic of Everyday Life (2020) (co-edited with his wife, Dr. Batsheva Ben-Amos) are wonderful examples of this process.Ben-Amos was generous with his students, his colleagues, and the field as a whole. Among his many contributions to the field of folklore, he served on the Executive Board of the American Folklore Society (AFS) from 1977 to 1980, and he was an active member of the Fellows of the AFS, where he promoted the inclusion of more international scholars. He was an associate editor from 1981 to 1984 and book review editor for the Journal of American Folklore from 1988 to 1990, and he served as the general editor of the Indiana University Press series, Translations in Folklore Studies, and as the editor of the Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology from 1996–2023 at Wayne State University Press.In recent years, scholars have gathered to consider Ben-Amos’ vast and significant contributions to the field. Ben-Amos was awarded a Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award in 2014 from the American Folklore Society for his groundbreaking, field-defining work. In 2017, students and colleagues came together to discuss his work in Jewish folklore at “Dan Ben-Amos: Fifty Years of Jewish Folklore at Penn,” and in 2019, colleagues presented him with a Festschrift titled Contexts of Folklore: Festschrift for Dan Ben-Amos on this Eighty-Fifth Birthday (Bronner and Mieder 2019). A review essay of his scholarship was published in the Journal of Folklore and History shortly after his death ([2019] 2023). When notice of his death appeared, dozens of folklorists posted stories and notes of gratitude in response to the news—illustrating his impact as a scholar, teacher, and friend. He played a huge role in many people's careers, including ours.The act of writing an obituary is both a public performance of healing for those grieving and the creation of a trail of inquiry for future folklorists, kindred spirits, and unexpected readers. We have only touched on some of Dan Ben-Amos’ accomplishments and impact; may future generations find inspiration in the relentless curiosity of the boy from Petah Tikvah

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Philosophy · Study and Philosophy of Religion

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