Don Yoder

Don Yoder (August 27, 1921 – August 11, 2015) was an American folklorist specializing in the study of Pennsylvania Dutch, Quaker, and Amish and other Anabaptist folklife in Pennsylvania who wrote at least 15 books on these subjects.[1] He was a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania.[2][3] He specialized in religious folklife and the study of belief. He is known for his teaching, collecting, field trips, recording, lectures, and books. He also co-founded a folk festival in Pennsylvania.[4]

Yoder was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania.[5] He graduated with a B.A. in history from Franklin and Marshall College in 1942. He received a Ph.D in American church history from the University of Chicago in 1947.

He taught at Union Theological Seminary, Muhlenberg College, and Franklin and Marshall College before joining the University of Pennsylvania faculty,[6] where his colleagues over the years included Dell Hymes, Henry Glassie, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, John Szwed, Roger Abrahams, Dan Ben-Amos, Kenneth S. Goldstein, Margaret Mills, and Regina Bendix in the Department of Folklore and Folklife, and Anthony F.C. Wallace and Ward Goodenough who were in the Department of Anthropology. He is a fellow and former president of the American Folklore Society.[6]

He has written about all aspects folklife studies, specializing in religion, religious music, Fraktur, foodways, costume, and other material culture. His books, especially American Folklife and Discovering American Folklife and his articles on folklife studies in the 1960s and 1970s are seminal texts in the field of folkloristics.[7] He co-founded the Pennsylvania Folklife Society in 1949.[1] He served as editor of the journal, Pennsylvania Folklife, for many years. In 1951 he was scheduled to lead a 46-day tour of Europe offered through Franklin and Marshall College.[8] He also regularly conducted research in Europe, especially Germany and Switzerland, the ancestral homelands of many Pennsylvania cultures.

An annual lecture at the American Folklore Society is named in his honor as well as a graduate award.[9]

The Folk Cultural Approach of study is associated with Yoder, who brought the idea from Europe where it is known as Volkskunde.[10] The University of North Carolina has a Don Yoder Collection of American Hymnody.[11] His art and ephemera collection is now housed in the library at Cabrini University.