All members of the appropriate age,
gender, and skill are required to participate in these important events.
gender, and skill are required to participate in these important events.
Childens - Folklore
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.
7. The theory of evolution has contributed in turn its own argument
that play and growth are essentially related, and has led to the great body
of rhetoric trying to show that when children play they develop some kind
of useful skills. Unfortunately, the biologists are not agreed about what spe-
cific functional values play serves in animals, even though the greater neu-
ral complexity of the high players, and the relative ineptness of those within
primate groups who cannot play, has led to the feeling that there must in-
deed be some functional connection between play and growth (Fagen 1980).
The emphasis that there must be such growth is, however, more clearly rheto-
ric than science. As mentioned, Western culture has often opted for the view
that play is useless rather than useful.
8. Modern psychology has added the empirical finding of relationships
between play and novelty, play and creativity (Berlyne 1960). Bateson (1972)
has proposed that all these elements of play history (play as irrational, as com-
petitive, as useless, as deceptive, as free, as growth, and as novel) can be rec-
onciled within a theory that sees play as basically a kind of communication
used by both animals and humans. It is neither good nor bad in its own right,
but serves primarily as a primitive and paradoxical form of expression and
communication in which both primary and secondary processes are united in
a way that is relatively safe for the participants and unites them in a social
community temporally transcending their ordinary ambivalences (Sutton-Smith
1985). Not surprisingly, many of the less civilized of human motives (irratio-
nality, risk, lust, aggression, deception, contest, antithesis in general) here find
acceptable expression. Not surprisingly either, this expression is often banned
by hegemonic culture and must mask itself and hide itself away in order for
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? ? this expression to be achieved. When it is achieved, a considerable degree of
license may ensue, as well as venturesome and novel combinations of thought
and behavior. It is important to emphasize here also the steadily increasing
solitarization of affluent children in their play over the past fifty years. Whether
one measures that play through children's increased time alone with toys,
through their increased time in private bedrooms, in single-child families, or
in front of the television set (consequently not on the streets) the predominant
fact about children's play in this century as compared with the last, is its soli-
tariness (Sutton-Smith 1985).
For overviews of the functional views of play in the psychological lit-
erature we suggest Bruner, Jolly and Sylva (1976), Herron and Sutton-Smith
(1971), Sutton-Smith (1979b), Smith (1984), Yawkey and Pellegrini (1984),
and Hellendorn, van der Kooij and Sutton-Smith (1994). In anthropology,
Helen Schwartzman's Transformations: The Anthropology of Children's Play
(1978) has become the classic. In biology, the classic is Robert Fagen's Ani-
mal Play Behavior (1980). Within folklore, the only scholarly works about
play are generally about speech play as in the Opies' Lore and Language of
Schoolchildren (1959), and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's Speech Play
(1976b). In recent years, probably as an indirect result of the feminist revolu-
tion in behalf of family history, a number of volumes have appeared on the
history of children's play. These are Dominick Cavallo's Muscles and Mor-
als (1981), Gary Goodman's Choosing Sides (1979), Bernard Mergen's Play
and Playthings (1982), David Nasaw's Children of the City (1985), and Brian
Sutton-Smith's History of Children's Play (1981a). Bernard Mergen's own
chapter in this Sourcebook covers these latter volumes. Perhaps the best sin-
gle source of information on play in recent years has been the publications
of the Association for the Anthropological Study of Play, whose annual vol-
umes since 1974 and more recent journals Play and Culture (Champaign,
Ill. : Human Kinetics Press) and Play Theory and Research (Champaign, Ill. :
Sagamore Press) have been the most comprehensive sources for students of
play. In the past several years, the book-length studies in play emerging from
the State University of New York Press have also been a major source.
In sum, we do not have any adequate definition of play, despite our
need for such precision in scientific advancement. Play is a fuzzy concept
and implies a changing family of concepts that include dreams, daydreams,
fantasy, imagination, solitary play, games, sports, festivals, carnivals, tele-
vision, video games, virtual reality, and so forth; the concepts change as we
shift from one culture to another, as some of the above references indicate.
Play is like the arts in being the name of a manifold colligation of human
activities. It is like sex also in being mainly a source of pleasure and perhaps
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? ? only occasionally a source of function. Undoubtedly there is some ultimate
neural wiring that differentiates this kind of species transformational pro-
cess from others, but at this point we are not very near to what seems to be
its distinctive conative and affective subjunctivity. In evolution, play is a more
primordial language than speech but like speech is neutral as to content, and
like speech can both be communicative or enactive in function. All we can
be sure of is that it suddenly catapults the survival of species from reflexive
behavior into enactive contemplation.
GAMES
Both Beresin and Hughes offer us small-group methodology involving vari-
ous kinds of observations and interviews. More important, however, is the
radical shift that Beresin and Hughes announce in the study of games. Build-
ing on the work of Kenneth Goldstein and Erving Goffman, these young
scholars show that most earlier research has been too limited because it was
largely confined to surface descriptions of the action in games, a descrip-
tion confined to the official rules or the idealized statements of the players.
Their critique is largely true if leveled at the work in folkgames, though it is
less true of game studies in anthropology and psychology, where a much
greater sensitivity to the hidden agendas of games is more manifest. An ex-
ample is Firth's account of the dart game in Tikopia (1930) or in Redl, Gump,
and Sutton-Smith's extensive work with the game playing of disturbed chil-
dren. (Avedon and Sutton-Smith 1971, chapters 18 and 19). Furthermore,
without disparaging Hughes's general position in favor of contextualized
studies, the quite abstract game categories of Roberts, Arth, and Bush
(1959)-those of chance, strategy and physical skill defined in terms of the
attribute determining the game outcome (randomness, intellectual decision,
or physical skill)-have nevertheless been amazingly revelatory of cultural
game patterns throughout the world. Despite the obvious differences in the
way in which these games are played in different societies, each has statisti-
cally significant relationships with other cultural variables: chance with re-
sponsibility training, nomadism, and economic uncertainty; strategy with
obedience training; and social complexity and physical skill with achieve-
ment training. These findings have contributed enormously to bringing games
into serious consideration in modern scholarship within structural-function-
alist theoretical rhetorics.
Like Zumwalt in chapter two, Hughes argues that the child players
are much more complex than has been assumed in prior folklore study. By
not being concerned with the living context of particular games, but of games
in general, earlier researchers tended toward a more separatist view of games
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? ? than appears in the Hughes record, where games are embedded in everyday
social interaction. Other recent researchers who have been similarly con-
cerned with the social interaction actually occurring in the midst of games
and its similarity to everyday life are Denzin (1977), Schwartzman (1978),
Garvey (1977), Von Glascoe (1980), and Goodwin (1985). Goodwin's ap-
proach in particular raises the contrast between the treatment of games as
frames set apart from ordinary experience and transcending that ordinary
experience, and the treatment of games as illustrating the social interaction
and communication norms of ordinary experience. The danger of either
polarity is that at one extreme we may get the philosophically "essential-
ist" view of games as illustrated by Huizinga above (Gruneau 1983); at the
other, the games are reduced to an epiphenomenon of sociolinguistics
(Goodwin 1985). Games need to be accounted for both as continuous and
as discontinuous with everyday experience. There is a real sense in which
games are a quite "different" experience from everyday life, being where one
can safely engage in all kinds of actions that would not be allowed elsewhere;
at the same time it is true that the social interaction, the rule systems, and
the players' temperaments are also continuous with everyday life.
Furthermore, while on the one hand we can say with Bateson (1972)
that the play in a game is "the nip that means the bite but not what the bite
means," on the other hand general success and esteem in play count enor-
mously in childhood success. Not to be able to play is to fail childhood. Play
and games are not separate from life but are interwoven within it in mul-
tiple ways, which are now beginning to be approached by workers such as
Beresin, Hughes, and Goodwin. What may be of ironical interest is the pos-
sible coincidence between a typical male researcher's focus upon the actions
in the games that men play (discontinuity) and female researchers' interest
in the etiquette by which the games women play are sustained (continuity).
In female researchers it is as if the game might be an incident in a prolonged
conversation, whereas in the studies of males it is as if a conversation may
be an interruption of an ongoing gaming activity. It has taken the largely
female investigators mentioned here to bring these differences to light
(Mechling 1985).
For general reviews of prior research and thought on games we can
recommend Avedon and Sutton-Smith (1971), Caillois (1961), Goffman
(1961b), Huizinga (1950), Jones and Hawes (1972), and Sutton-Smith
(1972).
GIRLS
Play and games have throughout Western history been largely the preserve
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? ? of men and boys. The variety of games available to boys yesterday and of toys
today far exceeds in complexity and range those available to girls. Some writers
have even suggested that recreation has simply not been central to the life of
women and girls in Western society (Wimbush and Talbot 1988). Others
have argued that the play of women and girls is much less obvious because
it tends to be verbal and private rather than physical and public (Schwartz-
man 1978). This would parallel cross-cultural sex differences in the display
of humor, where men more generally have access to public and women to
private forms of such expression (Apte 1985). The historical sex-role shift
within children's folklore, however, is that although the nineteenth century
might show more folk gaming activity by boys, the contrary would be the
case today. With their greater access to sports organizations, the playground
play of boys has become increasingly homogenized throughout the century
and increasingly under the sway of modern adult interests in coaching and
sports. The relative neglect of girls, particularly girls in lower socioeconomic
orders and minority races, has left them as the legatee of children's folklore.
Thus jump rope, hopscotch, and jacks continue to flourish with girls, while
marbles, momley peg, and prisoner's base are seldom seen in boys' folkplay
any longer. When girls' games are contrasted with those of boys (team sports)
their games appear to be much less complex, less active, less intrusive, more
confined, less competitive (Sutton-Smith 1979b). Some have written that, as
a result, girls may not develop the large group collaborative and competi-
tive skills that are essential to their success in modern organizations (Lever
1976). The papers by Zumwalt and particularly those by Beresin and Hughes
raise questions about that line of interpretation. The complexity of the girls'
game organization is a complexity in the meta levels of the play. Several so-
cial functions are being accomplished at the same time. It is as if the girls
are using the game to reaffirm their small group ties and to maintain their
collaborative networks in the midst of competitive activity. They do play the
game and abide by its rules, and yet they are also "gaming" the game in terms
of their own social rules of nice versus nasty, and further interpenetrating
these rules with the preexisting coalitions to preserve their favorites. There
is a subtlety here that is ignored in most attempts to compare the role of
games in the lives of boys and girls, men and women. Lever's notion (1976)
that girls break up their games in the presence of argumentation, whereas
boys go on arguing with each other until they finally resume the game again
is countered by this evidence of girls' persisting collaboration by Hughes and
collateral evidence from Goodwin and Von Glascoe (1980). Given Gilligan's
(1982) position of women having a "different voice," a concern, as much
with collaboration as competition, there is evidence here of just that con-
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? ? cern in the method of play. Still, we need to have care here. Hughes's girls
were studied in a Quaker school that had its own particular ethos of coop-
eration, exercised, one presumes, more coercively than in most places. It
could be that some of the differences now appearing between the findings
about girls by Hughes and Goodwin and those of Lever might be due to the
location of the study and the relative familiarity of the girls with each other.
Still, the general fear that girls are underprivileged in their school playground
life continues and it is increasingly suggested that this has a lot to do with
the way in which the rough and tumbling boys dominate the playground
space in a physical way, thus disadvantaging the girls (Thorne 1993).
METHODS
Again in the Beresin and the Hughes studies we have quite intensive inves-
tigations of one particular focus. These studies and those of the prior sec-
tion contrast methodologically with the questionnaire and interview tech-
niques carried out with large numbers of students, more typical in earlier
work in children's folklore. Hughes gives some indications of the step-by-
step process by which she proceeded from observations to interviews. In these
kinds of exploratory studies the investigator cannot know beforehand just
what is to be studied, and must remain open to all kinds of possibilities if
the ultimate outcome is to be of any potential worth. Going beyond Hughes's
assertion that the "gaming of the game is as important as the game," Beresin
suggests that in a variety of ways the larger community also affects what
occurs in the game (for example, commercials, school recess rules). Beresin's
use of video and audio recording reveals a host of contingencies beyond the
text that are relevant to the life of the game in an urban elementary-school
playground. In short, Beresin's study demonstrates the intricate ways in
which a game functions in the context of playground space and the players'
age, gender, and ethnic grouping, and how the commercial world and the
school's rules enter from the outside, thus having their own influence on what
goes on. Once again games are not so separate from life as has often been
suggested.
What is remarkable about Fine's overview is first his enunciation of
a series of principles of ethical procedure (informed consent, credit to in-
formants, lack of deception, lack of harm to subjects) and then his pursuit
of examples, many of which some readers will find controversial. With an
admirable openness Fine details his own ad hoc responses on a number of
difficult questions, and we are left with a clear impression that when one is
attempting to gather the often arcane and antithetical lore of children, the
phenomena of racism, obscenity, cruelty, gifts, and gender can arise and leave
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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.
7. The theory of evolution has contributed in turn its own argument
that play and growth are essentially related, and has led to the great body
of rhetoric trying to show that when children play they develop some kind
of useful skills. Unfortunately, the biologists are not agreed about what spe-
cific functional values play serves in animals, even though the greater neu-
ral complexity of the high players, and the relative ineptness of those within
primate groups who cannot play, has led to the feeling that there must in-
deed be some functional connection between play and growth (Fagen 1980).
The emphasis that there must be such growth is, however, more clearly rheto-
ric than science. As mentioned, Western culture has often opted for the view
that play is useless rather than useful.
8. Modern psychology has added the empirical finding of relationships
between play and novelty, play and creativity (Berlyne 1960). Bateson (1972)
has proposed that all these elements of play history (play as irrational, as com-
petitive, as useless, as deceptive, as free, as growth, and as novel) can be rec-
onciled within a theory that sees play as basically a kind of communication
used by both animals and humans. It is neither good nor bad in its own right,
but serves primarily as a primitive and paradoxical form of expression and
communication in which both primary and secondary processes are united in
a way that is relatively safe for the participants and unites them in a social
community temporally transcending their ordinary ambivalences (Sutton-Smith
1985). Not surprisingly, many of the less civilized of human motives (irratio-
nality, risk, lust, aggression, deception, contest, antithesis in general) here find
acceptable expression. Not surprisingly either, this expression is often banned
by hegemonic culture and must mask itself and hide itself away in order for
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? ? this expression to be achieved. When it is achieved, a considerable degree of
license may ensue, as well as venturesome and novel combinations of thought
and behavior. It is important to emphasize here also the steadily increasing
solitarization of affluent children in their play over the past fifty years. Whether
one measures that play through children's increased time alone with toys,
through their increased time in private bedrooms, in single-child families, or
in front of the television set (consequently not on the streets) the predominant
fact about children's play in this century as compared with the last, is its soli-
tariness (Sutton-Smith 1985).
For overviews of the functional views of play in the psychological lit-
erature we suggest Bruner, Jolly and Sylva (1976), Herron and Sutton-Smith
(1971), Sutton-Smith (1979b), Smith (1984), Yawkey and Pellegrini (1984),
and Hellendorn, van der Kooij and Sutton-Smith (1994). In anthropology,
Helen Schwartzman's Transformations: The Anthropology of Children's Play
(1978) has become the classic. In biology, the classic is Robert Fagen's Ani-
mal Play Behavior (1980). Within folklore, the only scholarly works about
play are generally about speech play as in the Opies' Lore and Language of
Schoolchildren (1959), and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's Speech Play
(1976b). In recent years, probably as an indirect result of the feminist revolu-
tion in behalf of family history, a number of volumes have appeared on the
history of children's play. These are Dominick Cavallo's Muscles and Mor-
als (1981), Gary Goodman's Choosing Sides (1979), Bernard Mergen's Play
and Playthings (1982), David Nasaw's Children of the City (1985), and Brian
Sutton-Smith's History of Children's Play (1981a). Bernard Mergen's own
chapter in this Sourcebook covers these latter volumes. Perhaps the best sin-
gle source of information on play in recent years has been the publications
of the Association for the Anthropological Study of Play, whose annual vol-
umes since 1974 and more recent journals Play and Culture (Champaign,
Ill. : Human Kinetics Press) and Play Theory and Research (Champaign, Ill. :
Sagamore Press) have been the most comprehensive sources for students of
play. In the past several years, the book-length studies in play emerging from
the State University of New York Press have also been a major source.
In sum, we do not have any adequate definition of play, despite our
need for such precision in scientific advancement. Play is a fuzzy concept
and implies a changing family of concepts that include dreams, daydreams,
fantasy, imagination, solitary play, games, sports, festivals, carnivals, tele-
vision, video games, virtual reality, and so forth; the concepts change as we
shift from one culture to another, as some of the above references indicate.
Play is like the arts in being the name of a manifold colligation of human
activities. It is like sex also in being mainly a source of pleasure and perhaps
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? ? only occasionally a source of function. Undoubtedly there is some ultimate
neural wiring that differentiates this kind of species transformational pro-
cess from others, but at this point we are not very near to what seems to be
its distinctive conative and affective subjunctivity. In evolution, play is a more
primordial language than speech but like speech is neutral as to content, and
like speech can both be communicative or enactive in function. All we can
be sure of is that it suddenly catapults the survival of species from reflexive
behavior into enactive contemplation.
GAMES
Both Beresin and Hughes offer us small-group methodology involving vari-
ous kinds of observations and interviews. More important, however, is the
radical shift that Beresin and Hughes announce in the study of games. Build-
ing on the work of Kenneth Goldstein and Erving Goffman, these young
scholars show that most earlier research has been too limited because it was
largely confined to surface descriptions of the action in games, a descrip-
tion confined to the official rules or the idealized statements of the players.
Their critique is largely true if leveled at the work in folkgames, though it is
less true of game studies in anthropology and psychology, where a much
greater sensitivity to the hidden agendas of games is more manifest. An ex-
ample is Firth's account of the dart game in Tikopia (1930) or in Redl, Gump,
and Sutton-Smith's extensive work with the game playing of disturbed chil-
dren. (Avedon and Sutton-Smith 1971, chapters 18 and 19). Furthermore,
without disparaging Hughes's general position in favor of contextualized
studies, the quite abstract game categories of Roberts, Arth, and Bush
(1959)-those of chance, strategy and physical skill defined in terms of the
attribute determining the game outcome (randomness, intellectual decision,
or physical skill)-have nevertheless been amazingly revelatory of cultural
game patterns throughout the world. Despite the obvious differences in the
way in which these games are played in different societies, each has statisti-
cally significant relationships with other cultural variables: chance with re-
sponsibility training, nomadism, and economic uncertainty; strategy with
obedience training; and social complexity and physical skill with achieve-
ment training. These findings have contributed enormously to bringing games
into serious consideration in modern scholarship within structural-function-
alist theoretical rhetorics.
Like Zumwalt in chapter two, Hughes argues that the child players
are much more complex than has been assumed in prior folklore study. By
not being concerned with the living context of particular games, but of games
in general, earlier researchers tended toward a more separatist view of games
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? ? than appears in the Hughes record, where games are embedded in everyday
social interaction. Other recent researchers who have been similarly con-
cerned with the social interaction actually occurring in the midst of games
and its similarity to everyday life are Denzin (1977), Schwartzman (1978),
Garvey (1977), Von Glascoe (1980), and Goodwin (1985). Goodwin's ap-
proach in particular raises the contrast between the treatment of games as
frames set apart from ordinary experience and transcending that ordinary
experience, and the treatment of games as illustrating the social interaction
and communication norms of ordinary experience. The danger of either
polarity is that at one extreme we may get the philosophically "essential-
ist" view of games as illustrated by Huizinga above (Gruneau 1983); at the
other, the games are reduced to an epiphenomenon of sociolinguistics
(Goodwin 1985). Games need to be accounted for both as continuous and
as discontinuous with everyday experience. There is a real sense in which
games are a quite "different" experience from everyday life, being where one
can safely engage in all kinds of actions that would not be allowed elsewhere;
at the same time it is true that the social interaction, the rule systems, and
the players' temperaments are also continuous with everyday life.
Furthermore, while on the one hand we can say with Bateson (1972)
that the play in a game is "the nip that means the bite but not what the bite
means," on the other hand general success and esteem in play count enor-
mously in childhood success. Not to be able to play is to fail childhood. Play
and games are not separate from life but are interwoven within it in mul-
tiple ways, which are now beginning to be approached by workers such as
Beresin, Hughes, and Goodwin. What may be of ironical interest is the pos-
sible coincidence between a typical male researcher's focus upon the actions
in the games that men play (discontinuity) and female researchers' interest
in the etiquette by which the games women play are sustained (continuity).
In female researchers it is as if the game might be an incident in a prolonged
conversation, whereas in the studies of males it is as if a conversation may
be an interruption of an ongoing gaming activity. It has taken the largely
female investigators mentioned here to bring these differences to light
(Mechling 1985).
For general reviews of prior research and thought on games we can
recommend Avedon and Sutton-Smith (1971), Caillois (1961), Goffman
(1961b), Huizinga (1950), Jones and Hawes (1972), and Sutton-Smith
(1972).
GIRLS
Play and games have throughout Western history been largely the preserve
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? ? of men and boys. The variety of games available to boys yesterday and of toys
today far exceeds in complexity and range those available to girls. Some writers
have even suggested that recreation has simply not been central to the life of
women and girls in Western society (Wimbush and Talbot 1988). Others
have argued that the play of women and girls is much less obvious because
it tends to be verbal and private rather than physical and public (Schwartz-
man 1978). This would parallel cross-cultural sex differences in the display
of humor, where men more generally have access to public and women to
private forms of such expression (Apte 1985). The historical sex-role shift
within children's folklore, however, is that although the nineteenth century
might show more folk gaming activity by boys, the contrary would be the
case today. With their greater access to sports organizations, the playground
play of boys has become increasingly homogenized throughout the century
and increasingly under the sway of modern adult interests in coaching and
sports. The relative neglect of girls, particularly girls in lower socioeconomic
orders and minority races, has left them as the legatee of children's folklore.
Thus jump rope, hopscotch, and jacks continue to flourish with girls, while
marbles, momley peg, and prisoner's base are seldom seen in boys' folkplay
any longer. When girls' games are contrasted with those of boys (team sports)
their games appear to be much less complex, less active, less intrusive, more
confined, less competitive (Sutton-Smith 1979b). Some have written that, as
a result, girls may not develop the large group collaborative and competi-
tive skills that are essential to their success in modern organizations (Lever
1976). The papers by Zumwalt and particularly those by Beresin and Hughes
raise questions about that line of interpretation. The complexity of the girls'
game organization is a complexity in the meta levels of the play. Several so-
cial functions are being accomplished at the same time. It is as if the girls
are using the game to reaffirm their small group ties and to maintain their
collaborative networks in the midst of competitive activity. They do play the
game and abide by its rules, and yet they are also "gaming" the game in terms
of their own social rules of nice versus nasty, and further interpenetrating
these rules with the preexisting coalitions to preserve their favorites. There
is a subtlety here that is ignored in most attempts to compare the role of
games in the lives of boys and girls, men and women. Lever's notion (1976)
that girls break up their games in the presence of argumentation, whereas
boys go on arguing with each other until they finally resume the game again
is countered by this evidence of girls' persisting collaboration by Hughes and
collateral evidence from Goodwin and Von Glascoe (1980). Given Gilligan's
(1982) position of women having a "different voice," a concern, as much
with collaboration as competition, there is evidence here of just that con-
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? ? cern in the method of play. Still, we need to have care here. Hughes's girls
were studied in a Quaker school that had its own particular ethos of coop-
eration, exercised, one presumes, more coercively than in most places. It
could be that some of the differences now appearing between the findings
about girls by Hughes and Goodwin and those of Lever might be due to the
location of the study and the relative familiarity of the girls with each other.
Still, the general fear that girls are underprivileged in their school playground
life continues and it is increasingly suggested that this has a lot to do with
the way in which the rough and tumbling boys dominate the playground
space in a physical way, thus disadvantaging the girls (Thorne 1993).
METHODS
Again in the Beresin and the Hughes studies we have quite intensive inves-
tigations of one particular focus. These studies and those of the prior sec-
tion contrast methodologically with the questionnaire and interview tech-
niques carried out with large numbers of students, more typical in earlier
work in children's folklore. Hughes gives some indications of the step-by-
step process by which she proceeded from observations to interviews. In these
kinds of exploratory studies the investigator cannot know beforehand just
what is to be studied, and must remain open to all kinds of possibilities if
the ultimate outcome is to be of any potential worth. Going beyond Hughes's
assertion that the "gaming of the game is as important as the game," Beresin
suggests that in a variety of ways the larger community also affects what
occurs in the game (for example, commercials, school recess rules). Beresin's
use of video and audio recording reveals a host of contingencies beyond the
text that are relevant to the life of the game in an urban elementary-school
playground. In short, Beresin's study demonstrates the intricate ways in
which a game functions in the context of playground space and the players'
age, gender, and ethnic grouping, and how the commercial world and the
school's rules enter from the outside, thus having their own influence on what
goes on. Once again games are not so separate from life as has often been
suggested.
What is remarkable about Fine's overview is first his enunciation of
a series of principles of ethical procedure (informed consent, credit to in-
formants, lack of deception, lack of harm to subjects) and then his pursuit
of examples, many of which some readers will find controversial. With an
admirable openness Fine details his own ad hoc responses on a number of
difficult questions, and we are left with a clear impression that when one is
attempting to gather the often arcane and antithetical lore of children, the
phenomena of racism, obscenity, cruelty, gifts, and gender can arise and leave
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