over long stretches of time and across immense geographical expanses that
have always captivated the folklorist and the folk.
have always captivated the folklorist and the folk.
Childens - Folklore
?
This model draws attention to five discrete moments in the process
of folklore transmission. The first moment, when child A encodes a mes-
sage, initiates a string of events culminating in the arrival of that message
to a third child, who then proceeds to decode it. Clearly, the boundaries of
this model are arbitrary, but we may nonetheless utilize it as a tool for iden-
tifying the basic structure of one finite instance of folklore transmission
among children.
STAGE ONE: CHILD A ENCODES A MESSAGE
In the initial formulation of the message, child A draws on previous experi-
ence in the world to produce a message containing the kinds of features we
identify as folkloric. While there is no consensus on this point, we can gen-
erally mention features such as provenience from a common store of com-
municative resources lying outside the official, institutional channels; pos-
sessing a formulaic quality, something I have referred to elsewhere as an ac-
cessible rhetoric (McDowell 1979); and in some way betraying a ground-
ing in the ethos of some finite, operative human community. In short, child
A produces an item of folklore.
The inspiration for this initial action need not proceed from a folk-
loric source. In many instances, children do draw on these folkloric resources,
the forms so richly documented by Opie and Opie (1959) and elsewhere.
Yet even the briefest exposure to children's folklore reveals the almost amoe-
bic ability of children to incorporate extraneous materials into their expres-
sive competencies. Along these lines, I would mention two particularly im-
portant tributaries: materials proceeding from the folkloric repertoires of
adults, yet suitable for child consumption (for example, fairy tales, riddles,
nursery rhymes, and lullabies); and materials proceeding from popular cul-
ture sources, of major importance in the expressive behavior of contempo-
rary children (Sutton-Smith 1971a).
When adult folklore or popular culture is assimilated into the realm
of children's folklore, changes take place that are most revealing of childish
attitudes and concerns. These extraneous materials undergo a sea change,
to eventually display the contours of perception and conception character-
istic of the child's mind. The distance between the original material and the
child's revamping of it thus stands as an indication of the difference between
the child's cosmology and that of the adult. Consider the following narra-
tive, produced by an eight-year-old child of Mexican descent:
Hey, you know that little girl, she had a, she had a mother but the
mother was witch, and the mother had said:
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? ? "Go get apples and don't give anybody one. "
So that lady had turned into a witch, and she went up there, and
she said:
"Can I have an apple? I haven't eaten for years and years. "
And she goes:
"OK. "
So that lady had eat it and turned into her mother again, and she
said:
"Didn't I tell you not to give anybody an apple? "
"Mom," she said, "she never eat for-"
Then her mother had killed her.
Then her little brother had pulled her hair:
"Brother, brother, don't pull my hair;
Mother had killed me for a single pear. "
And then he ran and go called her father. Then her father pulled her
hair, she said:
"Father, father don't pull my hair;
"Mother had killed me for one single pear. "
And her father killed that lady. 1
There is a strong sense of the presence of the Mairchen in this story.
The pattern of interdiction-violation, the poetic couplets, and the familiar
motive of the informing corpse, all testify to an origin in the adult fairy tale
corpus. Yet this is a rather odd performance by adult standards. The shift
from apples to pears is unsettling, and in general the plot is too skeletal, rush-
ing to the denouement without fully exploiting the available sources of ten-
sion and ambiguity.
Abandoning the adult perspective momentarily, the most remarkable
aspect of this story is its manifest assimilation to the world of the child. The
child is placed in the center of the action, the protagonist of a story devel-
oping a cruel and fatal conflict: Either the child denies food to a starving
person or the child transgresses the command of her mother, thus to pay the
ultimate price. The transformation of the mother into a witch is a telling,
indirect portrait of the ambivalence inherent in mother-daughter relation-
ships, as well as the ultimate extension of the nightmare wherein all famil-
iar things crumble before our eyes into strange and evil forces.
A similar adaptation of external materials to the consciousness of the
child can be observed in reference to popular culture. Consider the popular
ditty associated with the cartoon figure Popeye. The original text, so far as
I can recall, is as follows:
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? ? I'm Popeye the sailor man,
I'm Popeye the sailor man,
I'm strong to the finish
'Cause I eats me spinach,
I'm Popeye the sailor man.
Now consider the following two parodies of this ditty, the first ubiquitous
among North American schoolchildren, and the second found among chil-
dren of Mexican descent in Texas:2
I'm Popeye the sailor man,
I live in a garbage can,
I eat all the worms
And spit out the germs,
I'm Popeye the sailor man.
Popeye naci6 en Torre6n Popeye was born in Torreon
Encima de una sill6n, On top of a toilet seat,
Mat6 a su tfa He killed his aunt
Con una tortilla, With a tortilla
Popeye naci6 en Torre6n. Popeye was born in Torreon.
Two features are especially striking in these transformations. For one
thing, the content of the original message, an instance of exemplary behav-
ior in respect to eating habits, is radically altered to produce a message sub-
versive of standard, adult-imposed decorum. Each parody creates a fictive
world that stands as a miniature rite of rebellion, a vision of a counter-fac-
tual world inhabited by worm-eating garbage-can residents, and tortilla-
wielding aunt killers. The exemplary Popeye is converted into an anti-Popeye,
exhibiting filthy and murderous qualities obviously anathema to the con-
ventional etiquette.
The second feature of interest here is the scope given to the child's
poetic muse, which reverses the dominance relationship between phonologi-
cal and semantic elaboration obtaining in adult verbal creations (Sanches
and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1976). In these parodies, the semantic thread is
a bare one indeed, subservient to the phonological attraction of such lexi-
cal items as worms/germs, and tia/tortilla, Torre6n/sill6n. In reference to style
as well as to content, the parodies transform the original material into ves-
sels expressing the child's sensitivities.
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? ? STAGE Two: CHILD B DECODES THE MESSAGE
The communications we are concerned with are primarily lodged in the ver-
bal and kinesic media, and thus are perishable upon performance. The words
spoken by child A, or the folkloric activity performed, vanish rapidly as a
physical presence, leaving behind only a trace in the memory of those who
were witness to them. Under these conditions, the decoding of the message
must, of course, be a precipitous affair, without recourse to a permanent or
perduring record. As a result, there is no guarantee that the message encoded
by child A is the same message after decoding by child B. Imperfectly per-
ceived material, or material not familiar to the recipient, may be assimilated
into gestalts (frameworks) already present in the mind of child B.
In the section titled "Wear and Repair During Transmission," the
Opies (1959) provide a number of characteristic examples, including the
delightful recasting of the old hymn:
Can a woman's tender care
Cease towards the child she-bear?
A great many studies in folklore have shown how traditional materials adapt
in this fashion to their new environments, and, indeed, this is one of the
sources of "mutation" recognized in the theories of von Sydow (1971). In
the absence of a written record serving as a check to this process of muta-
tion, there exists in every instance of folklore transmission the possibility for
text modification due to spontaneous assimilative processes. The child's
world, so little affected by written constraints, offers an excellent field labo-
ratory in this respect.
STAGE THREE: CHILD B PROCESSES THE MESSAGE
In the model directing our discussion, there ensues a period, however brief
or protracted, dedicated to the activity of conceptual processing. The mes-
sage has been received and decoded by child B, perhaps already in modified
form due to the rigors of instantaneous registration of a perishing stimulus.
At this point, the message as received must be digested, that is, broken down
into information units compatible with the child's concept of the world and
his or her aesthetic proclivities. The assimilative processes initiated at the
moment of message reception are accelerated, as the new information is
stored through association with familiar archetypes. Theories relating to this
stage have been quite celebrated in the history of folklore studies, and in-
clude such prominent constructs as Max Milller's disease of language, and
the irrepressible construct faulty memory, to be found in the writings of
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? ? Kaarle Krohn (1971), among others.
Alan Dundes (1969a) has noted, I think quite correctly, the degenera-
tive bias in most of these constructs. It is just as plausible to cite the creative,
generative dimensions of this message-processing stage. We have already seen,
in reference to materials received by children from outside sources such as adult
folklore and popular culture, that these assimilative processes refurbish the
materials received, endowing them with their inimitable fidelity to the out-
look and expressive preferences of the communities in which they circulate.
The exuberant and unbounded give-and-take of children's play ensures the
continuous reworking of traditional materials; yet strikingly, children have
shown themselves to be among the most dedicated supporters of tradition, as
folklorists have often noted. A theory of folklore transmission must allow for
each of these possibilities, the retention of traditional models, and the piecing
together of new models out of traditional materials.
STAGE FOUR: CHILD B REENCODES THE MESSAGE
Any theory of folklore transmission must at some point take into account
the moment of composition, generally occurring without the use of artifi-
cial aids to the memory such as scripted texts or plans. Folklorists have de-
veloped important perspectives, such as Albert Lord's theory of composition
during performance (1960), and Ruth Finnegan's alternative model of re-
hearsal and performance (1977), with its greater weight on memorization
as a factor in folklore transmission. The work of Parry and Lord and their
followers indicates that in many folklore traditions a type of spontaneous
poetic composition takes place, a process comparable to linguistic perfor-
mance (capable of creating an unlimited number of novel utterances on the
basis of internalized linguistic structures), but operating at a higher, extra-
sentential, poetic level.
Children's folklore performances amply exhibit the effects of both rote
memorization and improvisation on the basis of traditional models. In the
verbal genres capable of stimulating a field of discourse, that is, a sequence
of related items, the children frequently first exhaust their store of traditional
items, and then move on to novel items, spontaneously composed on the
model of familiar traditional items. The following sequence of interrogative
ludic routines, taken from a riddling session among middle-class North
American children, illustrates some facets of this process:
1. What did the big chimney say to the little chimney?
2. What did the Aggie say to the other Aggie?
3. What did the three Aggies say to the other four Aggies?
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? ? 4. What did the rug say to the floor?
5. What did the dead penguin say to the live penguin?
6. What did the rug say to the floor?
7. What did the ten Aggies say to the one Aggie?
8. What did the one Aggie say to the zero Aggie?
9. What did the blue whale say to the duck?
10. What did the whale shark say to the great white?
11. What did the live duck say to the other live duck?
12. What did the baby say to the cradle?
13. What did the blue whale say to the great white?
14. What did the (burping noise) say to the great white?
15. What did the uhhh say to the great white?
16. What did the burp say to the great white?
17. What did Spiderman say to Ironman?
18. What did the Martian say to the human?
19. What did the man say to the store? 3
The pace of this session was so rapid that the children did not pause to pro-
vide answers to the questions posed. The traditional items here are numbers
one, four, and six, and they establish the framework for the surrounding and
subsequent improvisations. These models provide the canonic form, What
did the X say to the Y? as well as the following set of rules for acceptable
formulations:
1. The question specifies two entities in conversation.
2. Neither of these entities is normally included in the category of speech
participants.
3. A motivation for dialogue must exist, either in the form of a shared
identity (little chimney, big chimney) or habitual proximity (rug and floor).
Using this traditional framework as a point of departure, the children col-
lectively undertake an excursion through the orders of their cosmology, com-
ing to rest on such improbable conversants as humanoids (the Aggies, numb-
skull figures in Texas popular culture), animals (penguins, whales, ducks),
inanimate objects (cradle, store), physical processes (the burps), and concep-
tual constructs (the zero Aggie). This riddling session can be viewed as a vir-
tual symposium on childish ontology, isolating as it does a set of entities
contrasting on the values material, objective, animate, human, age of rea-
son (McDowell 1979). This riddling excerpt not only demonstrates the im-
portant enculturative dimensions of children's folklore, but suggests as well
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? ? that scholars anchored to a perspective enfranchising only the transmission
of traditional texts may well be missing most of the point in regard to
children's folklore.
STAGE FIVE: CHILD C DECODES A MESSAGE
The small transmission circuit we have been concerned with here is com-
plete with the arrival of the message to the position of child C in the model.
The form and content of this message may remain unchanged throughout
the entire process, so that the message encountered at stage one is identical
to the message encountered at stage five. By the same token, one or more
of the transformational devices we have mentioned might intervene to cre-
ate a radically different message. Both results are possible; the text of the
message is emergent in the context of child-to-child communication. A large
number of factors, including the mood of the interaction, the capacities of
the performers, the form or genre of folklore involved, and the rhetorical
purposes of the performers must be taken into account in investigating the
relative stability or lack of stability of messages in the crucible of folklore
transmission.
The foregoing analysis would suggest that only by attending to the
appearance of folkloric routines in finite, particular situations can we ad-
equately project the destiny awaiting an item of folklore moving through
minimal transmission circuits. Some kinds of folklore, for example, what the
Opies (1959) refer to as the "Code of Oral Legislation," and children's
rhymes and ditties, are retained in standard versions as far as possible, since
they are valued by the children for their instrumental and aesthetic proper-
ties, respectively. The performative efficacy of phrases like "Finders keep-
ers, losers weepers," or "Sticks and stones will break my bones/but names
will never hurt me," depends in large measure on the verbatim repetition of
the formula at the appropriate moment. Yet even in respect to these forms,
children will produce free and fantastic parodies or recastings, as the spirit
moves them. In other genres, such as riddling, the juvenile peer group may
attach little value to the precise repetition of a traditional item, placing as
much or more importance on the ability to formulate spontaneous impro-
visations along the line of items conveyed through oral tradition.
In the realm of children's folklore, then, we must rethink the notion
of tradition, a concept much used but perhaps not fully understood in folk-
loristic discourse. In the first place, tradition must be conceived of as per-
sistence through time and space, without any a priori constraints on the
duration of the time involved, or on the extension of this physical space.
Children's folklore does produce those fabulous instances of repeatability
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? ?
over long stretches of time and across immense geographical expanses that
have always captivated the folklorist and the folk. Think, for example, of
the well-known hand-clapping rhyme, "Patty Cake, Patty Cake," attested
as far back as 1698 in D'urfey's comedy The Campaigners, which portrays
"the affected tattling nurse" speaking as follows to her sucking babe:
Ah Doddy blesse dat pitty face of mine Sylds,
and his pitty, pitty hands, and his pitty,
pitty foots, and all his pitty things, and
pat a cake, pat a cake baker's man, so I will
master as fast as I can, and prick it, and
prick it, and prick it, and prick it, and
throw't into the oven. (Opie and Opie 1952, 341)
The counting-out rhyme beginning with the line, "Eeny, meeny, miney, mo"
constitutes an even more striking example, since by and large it is children
alone who have been responsible for its perpetuation, and as Henry Bolton
(1888) has shown in his classic study, it is of great antiquity and widely dis-
tributed throughout the European diaspora.
By the same token, there can be little doubt that many of the folk-
loric traditions of children are much less long-lived, and at the other end of
the spectrum, could be better characterized as local and transitory. Within
a neighborhood gang, for example, forms of folklore may thrive for a time
but then perish as the children mature and their families move on to other
residences. The items of folklore performed in this context may not enter
the folklorist's most narrow construction of tradition, but they are certainly
perceived to be traditional by those who create and maintain them. The
world of children's folklore draws attention to the inherent relativity of the
concept denoted by the words "persistence through time and space. "
Further modification of the folkloristic construction of tradition cen-
ters on the notion of repeatability. When traditional items function prima-
rily to guide innovative folkloric production, as in the riddling session con-
sidered above, then we should speak of a traditional competence rather than
a set of traditional items. What persists through time and space, in these in-
stances, is the capacity to formulate appropriate folkloric items, as much as
the traditional items themselves. Longitudinal studies reveal the gradual ac-
quisition of competence in the traditional forms of children's folklore,
whereby narratives are given artistic shape and poignancy, and riddles even-
tually incorporate authentic kernels of linguistic or conceptual ambiguity
(McDowell 1975). Exposure to children's folklore tends to redirect the
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? ? folklorist's focus onto the persistence of traditional modes of self-expression,
and the transmission, not necessarily of traditional items, but of traditional
competencies.
The present discussion of the transmission of children's folklore has
served primarily to complicate the notion of "the transmission of folklore"
in general, and that may be its essential contribution to folkloristic dialogue.
The drift of the argument has been in the direction of discrediting the con-
ventional preoccupation with the transmission of particular folklore items.
Individual items of folklore do occasionally persist through time and space,
and therefore must in some sense be "transmitted" from one person to an-
other. But I would suggest that this result is one possibility among many,
and not really the privileged member of the set. It is just as likely that the
item of folklore will perish, either through neglect or through transforma-
tional processes operating at the various moments of encoding, decoding,
and reencoding of messages. The term introduced by von Sydow, mutation,
if taken seriously and carried to its logical conclusion, adequately captures
the character of these events.
Viewed in this perspective, the concept of "the transmission of folk-
lore" can be interpreted as a metaphorical instrument appropriate to a par-
ticular historical moment in the evolution of folkloristic theory. Its roots lie
in philology, perhaps most concretely in the mechanical process of produc-
ing a new manuscript by copying an earlier one. It conjures up images of a
superorganic process, a perpetuation of "items" with their peculiar "life his-
tories," quite external to the everyday communicative exchanges of ordinary
human beings. There is no question that this serviceable metaphor has use-
fully informed folklore studies, by enabling a systematic hermaneutics of that
one possibility it attends to, namely the preservation of a message intact, or
only moderately changed, as it filters through finite communicative networks.
But the robust world of children's folklore forces the folklorist to
confront the creative potential of every folkloric transaction, the capacity
for new forms and items to emerge from traditional competencies. These
creative factors are regenerative rather than degenerative, facilitating the
continuous emergence of folkloric materials freshly coined in response to the
experiences and needs of their hosts. It is this facet of folklore that lends the
materials we study their authenticity and vitality, as trenchant markers of
individual and community identity. The folkloric messages that persevere
intact over time are nonetheless revalidated with each performance as suit-
able vessels for the expression of local concerns. And of equal importance,
innovative messages are formulated, as traditional items and competencies
are adapted to these same requirements.
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? ? These considerations lead to the suggestion of a neutral term, perhaps
the activation of children's folklore, to refer to the processes set in motion
as traditional competencies enter into finite communicative settings among
children. Within this constellation, transmission intact or in recognizable
variants would remain as one possible outcome, but the folklorist would be
alert to the creative, transformative potential of all such encounters. A theory
regarding the activation of folklore is necessarily grounded in particular in-
stances of situated human intercourse, and retains an essential bias toward
emergence as its central paradigm. Two rather different sorts of children are
envisioned in the "transmission of children's folklore" and "the activation
of children's folklore. " In the former instance, the child (and, by extension,
every human being) serves primarily as a repository and conduit for the ex-
change of traditional items possessing a destiny all their own. The items are
literary, but there is no process of literary composition, save for the roman-
tic notion of "the people as a whole composes poetry. "
In a theory of the activation of children's folklore, the items recorded
may or may not evince significant literary value, but the child emerges as
the genius of composition, a complex cerebral and sentient locus of a seri-
ous effort at self-expression and communication. This latter perspective
drives folkloristics in the direction of an aesthetics of the ordinary, a
grounded theory of artistic composition engaged with the fundamental hu-
man requirement of self-realization through artistic performance. In the end,
the child (and by extension, the human being) projected by this paradigm is
a much more interesting figure, one immersed in real-life contingencies, and
not a mere cipher in a superorganic device.
NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE
1. I recorded this narrative in a peer-group setting, in Austin, Texas, during
the spring of 1974. The child who performed it had a large repertoire of Mirchen-
like stories drawn from traditional Mexican sources. For more details on this item and
the other children's folklore included in this paper, see McDowell 1975.
2. The English variation on the Popeye ditty was widely distributed among
Austin schoolchildren in the mid-1970s. Chicano children performed both the English
and Spanish parodies, setting them to the familiar Popeye tune.
3. This riddling session was recorded among Anglo-American school children
in Austin in 1974, as a part of the Texas Children's Folklore Project, supervised by
Professor Richard Bauman. Four children were present, two girls and two boys, all
aged six years. Interestingly, it was the girls who performed the three traditional items,
while the boys collaborated in producing the freshly coined items.
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? ? SECTION II
OVERVIEW
METHODS IN CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
Brian Sutton-Smith
In this section we begin our study of methods in children's folklore by pre-
senting two studies of children at play. The first is by Ann Richman Beresin,
who conducted extensive video fieldwork in a multiethnic urban playground.
The second, by Linda A. Hughes, is her report on several years of study of
a group of elementary-school girls playing the game of foursquare. Both are
unique insofar as these kinds of methods with children have seldom been
used, and yet they are also relatively "modern" investigations in their at-
tempt to capture as fully as possible the ongoing performance of being a child
player. Subsequently, we present an overview by Gary Alan Fine of the dif-
ferent kinds of methodology that can be used by workers in this field. He
announces several ethical principles that should be kept in mind in doing
child folklore research and then gives a number of examples that some will
find controversial.
But there are two other foci that are predominant in this section also.
The first two chapters not only use particular methods but in their content
they are about play and games, and for that reason alone could have been
placed in the following section on children's concerns. Again, as in chapter
2, they are both about the play of girls. And this in itself is somewhat un-
usual, there being very few studies exclusively about the play of girls (Sutton-
Smith 1979c). In this introduction then we will discuss, in order, some back-
ground considerations and references on play, on games, on girls, and on
methodology.
PLAY
While games have been a regular subject matter within children's folklore
since Newell and Gomme, informal play has not. In general play as a sub-
ject matter has more often been the concern of psychologists and to a lesser
extent of anthropologists and biologists, as a number of surveys and gen-
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? ? eral studies attest. It is fundamental to realize that despite the record of his-
tory and anthropology, showing that play has often been thought of as a
devilish or useless pursuit, the cultural attitude to play in this century has
been predominantly positive, even idealized. Scholars vie with each other to
proclaim the functional values of this or that kind of play, paying little at-
tention to the abundant evidence that play and games are sometimes dys-
functional and dangerous to life, limb, and integrity (Fagen 1980). The pref-
erence for the romanticized view of play as voluntary, intrinsically motivated,
and fun (Rubin, Fein, and Vandenburg 1983) over the antithetical view of
play found in this volume as rebellious, hierarchical, and passionate is a dis-
tinction in general between the psychological view of play and the folklore
view of play. Clearly there is at present no general widespread acceptance
of any particular definition of play, so that it behooves us to pay attention
to the multiple meaning the phenomenon has attracted throughout its his-
tory. Any adequate definition, for example, would need to take into account
the following dimensions.
1. That play is often associated with irrational, impulsive, and ran-
dom behaviors is clear from mankind's addiction to games of chance and
gambling and children's practices of many kinds, involving risk taking or
"deep play" (Geertz 1973). More money is spent on games of chance or
gambling than on any other kind of play. Many contemporary play theo-
rists try to manage this anomaly simply by repudiating the idea that games
of chance are forms of play. They may allow that play involves risks, physi-
cal risks, loss of victory, and loss of face but not loss of money. Other will
agree with R. Caillois (1961) that chance is a fundamental form of play, not
to be ignored when play is being defined. If that premise is granted, chance
becomes a form of play unlike many others where the players are not in con-
trol of their fate and where the outcomes can have a material importance
to their welfare. Much the same could be said of professional sports, al-
though admittedly the player's own mastery plays a greater role.
2. The leading culturally acceptable kinds of play from the Greeks
to the modern Olympics have been some kind of physical or intellectual con-
test (Huizinga 1955 [1950]). Chance and contest are, therefore, mankind's
two major play obsessions. Any play theory that does not begin with these
empirical monsters is probably making some kind of special pleading for a
select group (for example, children) or a select connotation (for example, a
twentieth-century notion of optimal experience).
3. The dominant Western epistemologies since Plato have emphasized
philosophy, logic, and science as the sources of knowledge and have discred-
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? ? ited the arts, literature, and play as such sources. Play, in consequence, has
had in Western society a two-thousand-year history as trivial or useless, or
as acceptable only when imitative of the more substantial forms of know-
ing (Spariosu 1989). In many cultures, on the contrary, play is often seen as
a sacral, not a profane or unimportant matter (Turner 1974; Schechner
1988).
4. Some forms of play are associated with trickery and deception as
their major modality as in games of strategy and in the many kinds of teases,
riddles, and pranks that are recorded in the pages that follow. Such kinds
of deception and flexibility seem critical to many kinds of play (Sutton-Smith
and Kelly-Byrne 1984).
5. What is missing in much modern play theorizing is the highly re-
petitive, ritualized, even compulsive character of much play. This is true both
of animal and human play. The players seem driven from within by impulse
or from without by the motifs of the game. The emphasis on free choice in
modern theorizing, if ever appropriate, seems to have more to do with the
original decision to begin playing in some situations of contemporary lei-
sure than with what happens thereafter. Most tribal play games are obliga-
tory, not voluntary (V. Turner 1974a). All members of the appropriate age,
gender, and skill are required to participate in these important events. Even
in modern, solitary play, one can argue that individuals are drawn into their
play by important internal compulsions. What is important is not so much
their choice of the play as their being driven by the passionate idiosyncratic
pleasure to themselves of those choices. It is not the voluntarism but the
compulsion or desire that tells us most about the play.
6. The modern view of play as voluntary, free, intrinsic, and imagina-
tive borrows its major connotations from the Romantic movement of the nine-
teenth century, from which the subject matter of children's folklore also has
its source. It was at that time that the faculty of the imagination was concep-
tualized as a critical human function intervening between rational thought and
sensory experience. It was said that the play of imagination was essential
to human freedom, delivering mankind from the compulsions of both logic
and experience (Spariosu 1989). The modern consumer psychology of
freedom as a form of choice probably also plays a part in this rhetoric. The
most famous expression of this idealized view of play is that presented by
Huizinga in the work Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture
(1955 [1950]), a work on play that has had probably more influence on
interdisciplinary scholarship than any other in this century. Huizinga states
that the "essentials" for play are that it be a free activity, quite consciously
outside "ordinary" life, "not serious," but at the same time absorbing the
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? ? player intensely and utterly. It must be an activity connected with no mate-
rial interest, from which no profit can be gained. It must proceed within its
own proper boundaries of time and space, according to fixed rules and in
an orderly manner. It must promote the formation of social groupings that
tend to surround themselves with secrecy. And players must stress their dif-
ferences from the common world by disguise or other means (1950, 13).
While the notion that such a set of "essential" and static characteris-
tics has been much criticized in the play literature as owing more to the his-
tory of philosophical idealism and to the sociology of the doctrine of "Ama-
teurism" than any universal state of mankind (Gruneau 1980; Duncan 1988),
it is also devastated by the empirical subtleties and intricacies delivered here
in the chapter by Hughes on the game of foursquare. The relationships be-
tween the real and the irreal that she reveals are so complex that this
Huizinga set of qualitative abstractions of the irreal appears to have a quite
limited validity. Even if the message is that the game she studies, foursquare,
is play, Hughes says, that is only the beginning of the entanglements and real
contingencies and consequences that then emerge. In her account, many of
Huizinga's characteristics are at best only a "mask" for what is actually go-
ing on underneath. The players are as much constrained by each other and
by the social contingencies of their group life as they are free. The struggle
for one's group or one's position in the hierarchy that tries to dominate the
game is a very ordinary and yet a quite serious form of social life. The girls
are most intense about their dedication to the supremacy of their own claque.
The profit of their participation is social acceptance and prestige. As she says:
"Their actions in the game had clear social consequences outside its bounds. "
The boundaries of time and space, fixed rules, and orderly manners are not
as definite as Huizinga implies but are as mutable as anything else going on.
Nothing is beyond the gaming manipulations of the players. The play does
maintain and promote social groupings, as Huizinga contends. This is its
main cooperative thrust and motive, according to Hughes. When secrecy and
disguise occur here it is within the game, rather than in its external relation-
ships.
Perhaps Huizinga would respond to these criticisms of his components
of play's formal definition by saying that Hughes's girls are not really playing
because they do not play the game for the game's sake and Hughes doesn't
analyze the game for the game's sake. Instead, the girls seem to manage the
play of the game entirely for the advantage of their own social group. Alter-
natively, Huizinga might say that Hughes is talking about social matters, not
really about games at all, and that these social matters can occur anywhere,
not just in games. He might also argue that females aren't much interested
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? ? in games in any case, so that all we see here is a case of game sabotage. Now
it is true, paradoxically enough, that Hughes does not much talk about the
acts of the game itself. For example, although she talks about the play ac-
tion of "slams" at great length she doesn't talk ludically about "slams"; she
talks rather about the social control of or subversion of "slams. " I think
Hughes would then respond that, on the contrary, she could show that the
same kind of behavior is quite typical in all kinds of play, including the ex-
ample she gives from adult ice hockey. What is clear is that from now on
any definition of play has to measure up to her informal characteristics as
well as those formal ones offered by Huizinga. His formal characteristics can
certainly be found to illuminate some play and games here and there, but
these characteristics come and go along with many others, and we will prob-
ably never be able to ice down and factor these changing clusters of vari-
ables until we have many more concrete studies of the kind given us here
by Hughes.
of folklore transmission. The first moment, when child A encodes a mes-
sage, initiates a string of events culminating in the arrival of that message
to a third child, who then proceeds to decode it. Clearly, the boundaries of
this model are arbitrary, but we may nonetheless utilize it as a tool for iden-
tifying the basic structure of one finite instance of folklore transmission
among children.
STAGE ONE: CHILD A ENCODES A MESSAGE
In the initial formulation of the message, child A draws on previous experi-
ence in the world to produce a message containing the kinds of features we
identify as folkloric. While there is no consensus on this point, we can gen-
erally mention features such as provenience from a common store of com-
municative resources lying outside the official, institutional channels; pos-
sessing a formulaic quality, something I have referred to elsewhere as an ac-
cessible rhetoric (McDowell 1979); and in some way betraying a ground-
ing in the ethos of some finite, operative human community. In short, child
A produces an item of folklore.
The inspiration for this initial action need not proceed from a folk-
loric source. In many instances, children do draw on these folkloric resources,
the forms so richly documented by Opie and Opie (1959) and elsewhere.
Yet even the briefest exposure to children's folklore reveals the almost amoe-
bic ability of children to incorporate extraneous materials into their expres-
sive competencies. Along these lines, I would mention two particularly im-
portant tributaries: materials proceeding from the folkloric repertoires of
adults, yet suitable for child consumption (for example, fairy tales, riddles,
nursery rhymes, and lullabies); and materials proceeding from popular cul-
ture sources, of major importance in the expressive behavior of contempo-
rary children (Sutton-Smith 1971a).
When adult folklore or popular culture is assimilated into the realm
of children's folklore, changes take place that are most revealing of childish
attitudes and concerns. These extraneous materials undergo a sea change,
to eventually display the contours of perception and conception character-
istic of the child's mind. The distance between the original material and the
child's revamping of it thus stands as an indication of the difference between
the child's cosmology and that of the adult. Consider the following narra-
tive, produced by an eight-year-old child of Mexican descent:
Hey, you know that little girl, she had a, she had a mother but the
mother was witch, and the mother had said:
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? ? "Go get apples and don't give anybody one. "
So that lady had turned into a witch, and she went up there, and
she said:
"Can I have an apple? I haven't eaten for years and years. "
And she goes:
"OK. "
So that lady had eat it and turned into her mother again, and she
said:
"Didn't I tell you not to give anybody an apple? "
"Mom," she said, "she never eat for-"
Then her mother had killed her.
Then her little brother had pulled her hair:
"Brother, brother, don't pull my hair;
Mother had killed me for a single pear. "
And then he ran and go called her father. Then her father pulled her
hair, she said:
"Father, father don't pull my hair;
"Mother had killed me for one single pear. "
And her father killed that lady. 1
There is a strong sense of the presence of the Mairchen in this story.
The pattern of interdiction-violation, the poetic couplets, and the familiar
motive of the informing corpse, all testify to an origin in the adult fairy tale
corpus. Yet this is a rather odd performance by adult standards. The shift
from apples to pears is unsettling, and in general the plot is too skeletal, rush-
ing to the denouement without fully exploiting the available sources of ten-
sion and ambiguity.
Abandoning the adult perspective momentarily, the most remarkable
aspect of this story is its manifest assimilation to the world of the child. The
child is placed in the center of the action, the protagonist of a story devel-
oping a cruel and fatal conflict: Either the child denies food to a starving
person or the child transgresses the command of her mother, thus to pay the
ultimate price. The transformation of the mother into a witch is a telling,
indirect portrait of the ambivalence inherent in mother-daughter relation-
ships, as well as the ultimate extension of the nightmare wherein all famil-
iar things crumble before our eyes into strange and evil forces.
A similar adaptation of external materials to the consciousness of the
child can be observed in reference to popular culture. Consider the popular
ditty associated with the cartoon figure Popeye. The original text, so far as
I can recall, is as follows:
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? ? I'm Popeye the sailor man,
I'm Popeye the sailor man,
I'm strong to the finish
'Cause I eats me spinach,
I'm Popeye the sailor man.
Now consider the following two parodies of this ditty, the first ubiquitous
among North American schoolchildren, and the second found among chil-
dren of Mexican descent in Texas:2
I'm Popeye the sailor man,
I live in a garbage can,
I eat all the worms
And spit out the germs,
I'm Popeye the sailor man.
Popeye naci6 en Torre6n Popeye was born in Torreon
Encima de una sill6n, On top of a toilet seat,
Mat6 a su tfa He killed his aunt
Con una tortilla, With a tortilla
Popeye naci6 en Torre6n. Popeye was born in Torreon.
Two features are especially striking in these transformations. For one
thing, the content of the original message, an instance of exemplary behav-
ior in respect to eating habits, is radically altered to produce a message sub-
versive of standard, adult-imposed decorum. Each parody creates a fictive
world that stands as a miniature rite of rebellion, a vision of a counter-fac-
tual world inhabited by worm-eating garbage-can residents, and tortilla-
wielding aunt killers. The exemplary Popeye is converted into an anti-Popeye,
exhibiting filthy and murderous qualities obviously anathema to the con-
ventional etiquette.
The second feature of interest here is the scope given to the child's
poetic muse, which reverses the dominance relationship between phonologi-
cal and semantic elaboration obtaining in adult verbal creations (Sanches
and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1976). In these parodies, the semantic thread is
a bare one indeed, subservient to the phonological attraction of such lexi-
cal items as worms/germs, and tia/tortilla, Torre6n/sill6n. In reference to style
as well as to content, the parodies transform the original material into ves-
sels expressing the child's sensitivities.
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? ? STAGE Two: CHILD B DECODES THE MESSAGE
The communications we are concerned with are primarily lodged in the ver-
bal and kinesic media, and thus are perishable upon performance. The words
spoken by child A, or the folkloric activity performed, vanish rapidly as a
physical presence, leaving behind only a trace in the memory of those who
were witness to them. Under these conditions, the decoding of the message
must, of course, be a precipitous affair, without recourse to a permanent or
perduring record. As a result, there is no guarantee that the message encoded
by child A is the same message after decoding by child B. Imperfectly per-
ceived material, or material not familiar to the recipient, may be assimilated
into gestalts (frameworks) already present in the mind of child B.
In the section titled "Wear and Repair During Transmission," the
Opies (1959) provide a number of characteristic examples, including the
delightful recasting of the old hymn:
Can a woman's tender care
Cease towards the child she-bear?
A great many studies in folklore have shown how traditional materials adapt
in this fashion to their new environments, and, indeed, this is one of the
sources of "mutation" recognized in the theories of von Sydow (1971). In
the absence of a written record serving as a check to this process of muta-
tion, there exists in every instance of folklore transmission the possibility for
text modification due to spontaneous assimilative processes. The child's
world, so little affected by written constraints, offers an excellent field labo-
ratory in this respect.
STAGE THREE: CHILD B PROCESSES THE MESSAGE
In the model directing our discussion, there ensues a period, however brief
or protracted, dedicated to the activity of conceptual processing. The mes-
sage has been received and decoded by child B, perhaps already in modified
form due to the rigors of instantaneous registration of a perishing stimulus.
At this point, the message as received must be digested, that is, broken down
into information units compatible with the child's concept of the world and
his or her aesthetic proclivities. The assimilative processes initiated at the
moment of message reception are accelerated, as the new information is
stored through association with familiar archetypes. Theories relating to this
stage have been quite celebrated in the history of folklore studies, and in-
clude such prominent constructs as Max Milller's disease of language, and
the irrepressible construct faulty memory, to be found in the writings of
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? ? Kaarle Krohn (1971), among others.
Alan Dundes (1969a) has noted, I think quite correctly, the degenera-
tive bias in most of these constructs. It is just as plausible to cite the creative,
generative dimensions of this message-processing stage. We have already seen,
in reference to materials received by children from outside sources such as adult
folklore and popular culture, that these assimilative processes refurbish the
materials received, endowing them with their inimitable fidelity to the out-
look and expressive preferences of the communities in which they circulate.
The exuberant and unbounded give-and-take of children's play ensures the
continuous reworking of traditional materials; yet strikingly, children have
shown themselves to be among the most dedicated supporters of tradition, as
folklorists have often noted. A theory of folklore transmission must allow for
each of these possibilities, the retention of traditional models, and the piecing
together of new models out of traditional materials.
STAGE FOUR: CHILD B REENCODES THE MESSAGE
Any theory of folklore transmission must at some point take into account
the moment of composition, generally occurring without the use of artifi-
cial aids to the memory such as scripted texts or plans. Folklorists have de-
veloped important perspectives, such as Albert Lord's theory of composition
during performance (1960), and Ruth Finnegan's alternative model of re-
hearsal and performance (1977), with its greater weight on memorization
as a factor in folklore transmission. The work of Parry and Lord and their
followers indicates that in many folklore traditions a type of spontaneous
poetic composition takes place, a process comparable to linguistic perfor-
mance (capable of creating an unlimited number of novel utterances on the
basis of internalized linguistic structures), but operating at a higher, extra-
sentential, poetic level.
Children's folklore performances amply exhibit the effects of both rote
memorization and improvisation on the basis of traditional models. In the
verbal genres capable of stimulating a field of discourse, that is, a sequence
of related items, the children frequently first exhaust their store of traditional
items, and then move on to novel items, spontaneously composed on the
model of familiar traditional items. The following sequence of interrogative
ludic routines, taken from a riddling session among middle-class North
American children, illustrates some facets of this process:
1. What did the big chimney say to the little chimney?
2. What did the Aggie say to the other Aggie?
3. What did the three Aggies say to the other four Aggies?
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? ? 4. What did the rug say to the floor?
5. What did the dead penguin say to the live penguin?
6. What did the rug say to the floor?
7. What did the ten Aggies say to the one Aggie?
8. What did the one Aggie say to the zero Aggie?
9. What did the blue whale say to the duck?
10. What did the whale shark say to the great white?
11. What did the live duck say to the other live duck?
12. What did the baby say to the cradle?
13. What did the blue whale say to the great white?
14. What did the (burping noise) say to the great white?
15. What did the uhhh say to the great white?
16. What did the burp say to the great white?
17. What did Spiderman say to Ironman?
18. What did the Martian say to the human?
19. What did the man say to the store? 3
The pace of this session was so rapid that the children did not pause to pro-
vide answers to the questions posed. The traditional items here are numbers
one, four, and six, and they establish the framework for the surrounding and
subsequent improvisations. These models provide the canonic form, What
did the X say to the Y? as well as the following set of rules for acceptable
formulations:
1. The question specifies two entities in conversation.
2. Neither of these entities is normally included in the category of speech
participants.
3. A motivation for dialogue must exist, either in the form of a shared
identity (little chimney, big chimney) or habitual proximity (rug and floor).
Using this traditional framework as a point of departure, the children col-
lectively undertake an excursion through the orders of their cosmology, com-
ing to rest on such improbable conversants as humanoids (the Aggies, numb-
skull figures in Texas popular culture), animals (penguins, whales, ducks),
inanimate objects (cradle, store), physical processes (the burps), and concep-
tual constructs (the zero Aggie). This riddling session can be viewed as a vir-
tual symposium on childish ontology, isolating as it does a set of entities
contrasting on the values material, objective, animate, human, age of rea-
son (McDowell 1979). This riddling excerpt not only demonstrates the im-
portant enculturative dimensions of children's folklore, but suggests as well
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? ? that scholars anchored to a perspective enfranchising only the transmission
of traditional texts may well be missing most of the point in regard to
children's folklore.
STAGE FIVE: CHILD C DECODES A MESSAGE
The small transmission circuit we have been concerned with here is com-
plete with the arrival of the message to the position of child C in the model.
The form and content of this message may remain unchanged throughout
the entire process, so that the message encountered at stage one is identical
to the message encountered at stage five. By the same token, one or more
of the transformational devices we have mentioned might intervene to cre-
ate a radically different message. Both results are possible; the text of the
message is emergent in the context of child-to-child communication. A large
number of factors, including the mood of the interaction, the capacities of
the performers, the form or genre of folklore involved, and the rhetorical
purposes of the performers must be taken into account in investigating the
relative stability or lack of stability of messages in the crucible of folklore
transmission.
The foregoing analysis would suggest that only by attending to the
appearance of folkloric routines in finite, particular situations can we ad-
equately project the destiny awaiting an item of folklore moving through
minimal transmission circuits. Some kinds of folklore, for example, what the
Opies (1959) refer to as the "Code of Oral Legislation," and children's
rhymes and ditties, are retained in standard versions as far as possible, since
they are valued by the children for their instrumental and aesthetic proper-
ties, respectively. The performative efficacy of phrases like "Finders keep-
ers, losers weepers," or "Sticks and stones will break my bones/but names
will never hurt me," depends in large measure on the verbatim repetition of
the formula at the appropriate moment. Yet even in respect to these forms,
children will produce free and fantastic parodies or recastings, as the spirit
moves them. In other genres, such as riddling, the juvenile peer group may
attach little value to the precise repetition of a traditional item, placing as
much or more importance on the ability to formulate spontaneous impro-
visations along the line of items conveyed through oral tradition.
In the realm of children's folklore, then, we must rethink the notion
of tradition, a concept much used but perhaps not fully understood in folk-
loristic discourse. In the first place, tradition must be conceived of as per-
sistence through time and space, without any a priori constraints on the
duration of the time involved, or on the extension of this physical space.
Children's folklore does produce those fabulous instances of repeatability
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? ?
over long stretches of time and across immense geographical expanses that
have always captivated the folklorist and the folk. Think, for example, of
the well-known hand-clapping rhyme, "Patty Cake, Patty Cake," attested
as far back as 1698 in D'urfey's comedy The Campaigners, which portrays
"the affected tattling nurse" speaking as follows to her sucking babe:
Ah Doddy blesse dat pitty face of mine Sylds,
and his pitty, pitty hands, and his pitty,
pitty foots, and all his pitty things, and
pat a cake, pat a cake baker's man, so I will
master as fast as I can, and prick it, and
prick it, and prick it, and prick it, and
throw't into the oven. (Opie and Opie 1952, 341)
The counting-out rhyme beginning with the line, "Eeny, meeny, miney, mo"
constitutes an even more striking example, since by and large it is children
alone who have been responsible for its perpetuation, and as Henry Bolton
(1888) has shown in his classic study, it is of great antiquity and widely dis-
tributed throughout the European diaspora.
By the same token, there can be little doubt that many of the folk-
loric traditions of children are much less long-lived, and at the other end of
the spectrum, could be better characterized as local and transitory. Within
a neighborhood gang, for example, forms of folklore may thrive for a time
but then perish as the children mature and their families move on to other
residences. The items of folklore performed in this context may not enter
the folklorist's most narrow construction of tradition, but they are certainly
perceived to be traditional by those who create and maintain them. The
world of children's folklore draws attention to the inherent relativity of the
concept denoted by the words "persistence through time and space. "
Further modification of the folkloristic construction of tradition cen-
ters on the notion of repeatability. When traditional items function prima-
rily to guide innovative folkloric production, as in the riddling session con-
sidered above, then we should speak of a traditional competence rather than
a set of traditional items. What persists through time and space, in these in-
stances, is the capacity to formulate appropriate folkloric items, as much as
the traditional items themselves. Longitudinal studies reveal the gradual ac-
quisition of competence in the traditional forms of children's folklore,
whereby narratives are given artistic shape and poignancy, and riddles even-
tually incorporate authentic kernels of linguistic or conceptual ambiguity
(McDowell 1975). Exposure to children's folklore tends to redirect the
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? ? folklorist's focus onto the persistence of traditional modes of self-expression,
and the transmission, not necessarily of traditional items, but of traditional
competencies.
The present discussion of the transmission of children's folklore has
served primarily to complicate the notion of "the transmission of folklore"
in general, and that may be its essential contribution to folkloristic dialogue.
The drift of the argument has been in the direction of discrediting the con-
ventional preoccupation with the transmission of particular folklore items.
Individual items of folklore do occasionally persist through time and space,
and therefore must in some sense be "transmitted" from one person to an-
other. But I would suggest that this result is one possibility among many,
and not really the privileged member of the set. It is just as likely that the
item of folklore will perish, either through neglect or through transforma-
tional processes operating at the various moments of encoding, decoding,
and reencoding of messages. The term introduced by von Sydow, mutation,
if taken seriously and carried to its logical conclusion, adequately captures
the character of these events.
Viewed in this perspective, the concept of "the transmission of folk-
lore" can be interpreted as a metaphorical instrument appropriate to a par-
ticular historical moment in the evolution of folkloristic theory. Its roots lie
in philology, perhaps most concretely in the mechanical process of produc-
ing a new manuscript by copying an earlier one. It conjures up images of a
superorganic process, a perpetuation of "items" with their peculiar "life his-
tories," quite external to the everyday communicative exchanges of ordinary
human beings. There is no question that this serviceable metaphor has use-
fully informed folklore studies, by enabling a systematic hermaneutics of that
one possibility it attends to, namely the preservation of a message intact, or
only moderately changed, as it filters through finite communicative networks.
But the robust world of children's folklore forces the folklorist to
confront the creative potential of every folkloric transaction, the capacity
for new forms and items to emerge from traditional competencies. These
creative factors are regenerative rather than degenerative, facilitating the
continuous emergence of folkloric materials freshly coined in response to the
experiences and needs of their hosts. It is this facet of folklore that lends the
materials we study their authenticity and vitality, as trenchant markers of
individual and community identity. The folkloric messages that persevere
intact over time are nonetheless revalidated with each performance as suit-
able vessels for the expression of local concerns. And of equal importance,
innovative messages are formulated, as traditional items and competencies
are adapted to these same requirements.
61
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? ? These considerations lead to the suggestion of a neutral term, perhaps
the activation of children's folklore, to refer to the processes set in motion
as traditional competencies enter into finite communicative settings among
children. Within this constellation, transmission intact or in recognizable
variants would remain as one possible outcome, but the folklorist would be
alert to the creative, transformative potential of all such encounters. A theory
regarding the activation of folklore is necessarily grounded in particular in-
stances of situated human intercourse, and retains an essential bias toward
emergence as its central paradigm. Two rather different sorts of children are
envisioned in the "transmission of children's folklore" and "the activation
of children's folklore. " In the former instance, the child (and, by extension,
every human being) serves primarily as a repository and conduit for the ex-
change of traditional items possessing a destiny all their own. The items are
literary, but there is no process of literary composition, save for the roman-
tic notion of "the people as a whole composes poetry. "
In a theory of the activation of children's folklore, the items recorded
may or may not evince significant literary value, but the child emerges as
the genius of composition, a complex cerebral and sentient locus of a seri-
ous effort at self-expression and communication. This latter perspective
drives folkloristics in the direction of an aesthetics of the ordinary, a
grounded theory of artistic composition engaged with the fundamental hu-
man requirement of self-realization through artistic performance. In the end,
the child (and by extension, the human being) projected by this paradigm is
a much more interesting figure, one immersed in real-life contingencies, and
not a mere cipher in a superorganic device.
NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE
1. I recorded this narrative in a peer-group setting, in Austin, Texas, during
the spring of 1974. The child who performed it had a large repertoire of Mirchen-
like stories drawn from traditional Mexican sources. For more details on this item and
the other children's folklore included in this paper, see McDowell 1975.
2. The English variation on the Popeye ditty was widely distributed among
Austin schoolchildren in the mid-1970s. Chicano children performed both the English
and Spanish parodies, setting them to the familiar Popeye tune.
3. This riddling session was recorded among Anglo-American school children
in Austin in 1974, as a part of the Texas Children's Folklore Project, supervised by
Professor Richard Bauman. Four children were present, two girls and two boys, all
aged six years. Interestingly, it was the girls who performed the three traditional items,
while the boys collaborated in producing the freshly coined items.
6z THE TRANSMISSION OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
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? ? SECTION II
OVERVIEW
METHODS IN CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
Brian Sutton-Smith
In this section we begin our study of methods in children's folklore by pre-
senting two studies of children at play. The first is by Ann Richman Beresin,
who conducted extensive video fieldwork in a multiethnic urban playground.
The second, by Linda A. Hughes, is her report on several years of study of
a group of elementary-school girls playing the game of foursquare. Both are
unique insofar as these kinds of methods with children have seldom been
used, and yet they are also relatively "modern" investigations in their at-
tempt to capture as fully as possible the ongoing performance of being a child
player. Subsequently, we present an overview by Gary Alan Fine of the dif-
ferent kinds of methodology that can be used by workers in this field. He
announces several ethical principles that should be kept in mind in doing
child folklore research and then gives a number of examples that some will
find controversial.
But there are two other foci that are predominant in this section also.
The first two chapters not only use particular methods but in their content
they are about play and games, and for that reason alone could have been
placed in the following section on children's concerns. Again, as in chapter
2, they are both about the play of girls. And this in itself is somewhat un-
usual, there being very few studies exclusively about the play of girls (Sutton-
Smith 1979c). In this introduction then we will discuss, in order, some back-
ground considerations and references on play, on games, on girls, and on
methodology.
PLAY
While games have been a regular subject matter within children's folklore
since Newell and Gomme, informal play has not. In general play as a sub-
ject matter has more often been the concern of psychologists and to a lesser
extent of anthropologists and biologists, as a number of surveys and gen-
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? ? eral studies attest. It is fundamental to realize that despite the record of his-
tory and anthropology, showing that play has often been thought of as a
devilish or useless pursuit, the cultural attitude to play in this century has
been predominantly positive, even idealized. Scholars vie with each other to
proclaim the functional values of this or that kind of play, paying little at-
tention to the abundant evidence that play and games are sometimes dys-
functional and dangerous to life, limb, and integrity (Fagen 1980). The pref-
erence for the romanticized view of play as voluntary, intrinsically motivated,
and fun (Rubin, Fein, and Vandenburg 1983) over the antithetical view of
play found in this volume as rebellious, hierarchical, and passionate is a dis-
tinction in general between the psychological view of play and the folklore
view of play. Clearly there is at present no general widespread acceptance
of any particular definition of play, so that it behooves us to pay attention
to the multiple meaning the phenomenon has attracted throughout its his-
tory. Any adequate definition, for example, would need to take into account
the following dimensions.
1. That play is often associated with irrational, impulsive, and ran-
dom behaviors is clear from mankind's addiction to games of chance and
gambling and children's practices of many kinds, involving risk taking or
"deep play" (Geertz 1973). More money is spent on games of chance or
gambling than on any other kind of play. Many contemporary play theo-
rists try to manage this anomaly simply by repudiating the idea that games
of chance are forms of play. They may allow that play involves risks, physi-
cal risks, loss of victory, and loss of face but not loss of money. Other will
agree with R. Caillois (1961) that chance is a fundamental form of play, not
to be ignored when play is being defined. If that premise is granted, chance
becomes a form of play unlike many others where the players are not in con-
trol of their fate and where the outcomes can have a material importance
to their welfare. Much the same could be said of professional sports, al-
though admittedly the player's own mastery plays a greater role.
2. The leading culturally acceptable kinds of play from the Greeks
to the modern Olympics have been some kind of physical or intellectual con-
test (Huizinga 1955 [1950]). Chance and contest are, therefore, mankind's
two major play obsessions. Any play theory that does not begin with these
empirical monsters is probably making some kind of special pleading for a
select group (for example, children) or a select connotation (for example, a
twentieth-century notion of optimal experience).
3. The dominant Western epistemologies since Plato have emphasized
philosophy, logic, and science as the sources of knowledge and have discred-
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? ? ited the arts, literature, and play as such sources. Play, in consequence, has
had in Western society a two-thousand-year history as trivial or useless, or
as acceptable only when imitative of the more substantial forms of know-
ing (Spariosu 1989). In many cultures, on the contrary, play is often seen as
a sacral, not a profane or unimportant matter (Turner 1974; Schechner
1988).
4. Some forms of play are associated with trickery and deception as
their major modality as in games of strategy and in the many kinds of teases,
riddles, and pranks that are recorded in the pages that follow. Such kinds
of deception and flexibility seem critical to many kinds of play (Sutton-Smith
and Kelly-Byrne 1984).
5. What is missing in much modern play theorizing is the highly re-
petitive, ritualized, even compulsive character of much play. This is true both
of animal and human play. The players seem driven from within by impulse
or from without by the motifs of the game. The emphasis on free choice in
modern theorizing, if ever appropriate, seems to have more to do with the
original decision to begin playing in some situations of contemporary lei-
sure than with what happens thereafter. Most tribal play games are obliga-
tory, not voluntary (V. Turner 1974a). All members of the appropriate age,
gender, and skill are required to participate in these important events. Even
in modern, solitary play, one can argue that individuals are drawn into their
play by important internal compulsions. What is important is not so much
their choice of the play as their being driven by the passionate idiosyncratic
pleasure to themselves of those choices. It is not the voluntarism but the
compulsion or desire that tells us most about the play.
6. The modern view of play as voluntary, free, intrinsic, and imagina-
tive borrows its major connotations from the Romantic movement of the nine-
teenth century, from which the subject matter of children's folklore also has
its source. It was at that time that the faculty of the imagination was concep-
tualized as a critical human function intervening between rational thought and
sensory experience. It was said that the play of imagination was essential
to human freedom, delivering mankind from the compulsions of both logic
and experience (Spariosu 1989). The modern consumer psychology of
freedom as a form of choice probably also plays a part in this rhetoric. The
most famous expression of this idealized view of play is that presented by
Huizinga in the work Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture
(1955 [1950]), a work on play that has had probably more influence on
interdisciplinary scholarship than any other in this century. Huizinga states
that the "essentials" for play are that it be a free activity, quite consciously
outside "ordinary" life, "not serious," but at the same time absorbing the
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? ? player intensely and utterly. It must be an activity connected with no mate-
rial interest, from which no profit can be gained. It must proceed within its
own proper boundaries of time and space, according to fixed rules and in
an orderly manner. It must promote the formation of social groupings that
tend to surround themselves with secrecy. And players must stress their dif-
ferences from the common world by disguise or other means (1950, 13).
While the notion that such a set of "essential" and static characteris-
tics has been much criticized in the play literature as owing more to the his-
tory of philosophical idealism and to the sociology of the doctrine of "Ama-
teurism" than any universal state of mankind (Gruneau 1980; Duncan 1988),
it is also devastated by the empirical subtleties and intricacies delivered here
in the chapter by Hughes on the game of foursquare. The relationships be-
tween the real and the irreal that she reveals are so complex that this
Huizinga set of qualitative abstractions of the irreal appears to have a quite
limited validity. Even if the message is that the game she studies, foursquare,
is play, Hughes says, that is only the beginning of the entanglements and real
contingencies and consequences that then emerge. In her account, many of
Huizinga's characteristics are at best only a "mask" for what is actually go-
ing on underneath. The players are as much constrained by each other and
by the social contingencies of their group life as they are free. The struggle
for one's group or one's position in the hierarchy that tries to dominate the
game is a very ordinary and yet a quite serious form of social life. The girls
are most intense about their dedication to the supremacy of their own claque.
The profit of their participation is social acceptance and prestige. As she says:
"Their actions in the game had clear social consequences outside its bounds. "
The boundaries of time and space, fixed rules, and orderly manners are not
as definite as Huizinga implies but are as mutable as anything else going on.
Nothing is beyond the gaming manipulations of the players. The play does
maintain and promote social groupings, as Huizinga contends. This is its
main cooperative thrust and motive, according to Hughes. When secrecy and
disguise occur here it is within the game, rather than in its external relation-
ships.
Perhaps Huizinga would respond to these criticisms of his components
of play's formal definition by saying that Hughes's girls are not really playing
because they do not play the game for the game's sake and Hughes doesn't
analyze the game for the game's sake. Instead, the girls seem to manage the
play of the game entirely for the advantage of their own social group. Alter-
natively, Huizinga might say that Hughes is talking about social matters, not
really about games at all, and that these social matters can occur anywhere,
not just in games. He might also argue that females aren't much interested
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? ? in games in any case, so that all we see here is a case of game sabotage. Now
it is true, paradoxically enough, that Hughes does not much talk about the
acts of the game itself. For example, although she talks about the play ac-
tion of "slams" at great length she doesn't talk ludically about "slams"; she
talks rather about the social control of or subversion of "slams. " I think
Hughes would then respond that, on the contrary, she could show that the
same kind of behavior is quite typical in all kinds of play, including the ex-
ample she gives from adult ice hockey. What is clear is that from now on
any definition of play has to measure up to her informal characteristics as
well as those formal ones offered by Huizinga. His formal characteristics can
certainly be found to illuminate some play and games here and there, but
these characteristics come and go along with many others, and we will prob-
ably never be able to ice down and factor these changing clusters of vari-
ables until we have many more concrete studies of the kind given us here
by Hughes.
