Are they in-
vigorating the tradition or removing the craft from tradition?
vigorating the tradition or removing the craft from tradition?
Childens - Folklore
They took Erector sets and communally figured
out ways to use the steel rods and bolts from the sets in their homemade
carts and boats. Such experiences emphasized their control, their personal-
izing of things around them. By allowing them to conceive, control, create,
or alter things informally, their things helped them identify more with the
object, and ultimately externalize their identity better.
The relation of object and action underlies what Brian Sutton-Smith
called "a developmental psychology of play and the arts. " His idea was to
"ask not whether play and art are serious or nonserious, real or unreal, but
to ask rather what sort of cultural adaptation they are" (Sutton-Smith 1971b,
8). Folk arts emerge as communication systems for various segments of so-
ciety. Using dramaturgical terminology, Sutton-Smith describes the sequence
of structures in play and art. The props used in performance become sym-
bolic; the dramatic patterns become expressive structures. In some cases, like
puppetry, the theatrical metaphor directly reveals "an existing understand-
ing of being on stage, having imaginary characters, changing affects, antici-
pations and dramatic properties" (Sutton-Smith 1971, 13). But also, in other
expressive encounters of creative play, the child enacts roles, conceptualizes
form, overlays meanings to representation, and unfolds situations (M. Jones
1980; Sutton-Smith 1979a). At around two years old, objects become sym-
bols; at three, toys become properties; from four to seven, such properties
are used freely in dramatic play. Children's folk play and art are not trivial,
therefore, but the central spine of learning and development.
Beyond the questions posed about specific situations and the condi-
tions for creativity are queries about humanistic continuities of children's art.
The word "childlike," used to describe pictures, triggers among most adults
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? ? similar ideas about relations of line, proportion, and color. Intuitively, at
least, a shared idea exists about the basic structures of children's expressions
of form. This problem has primarily sparked psychological discussion rather
than study of art history for most art historians generally see the artworld
as an adult concern. Yet the precedents in children's work demand atten-
tion for what they say about consistencies in artistic traditions. Rhoda
Kellogg ambitiously reduced the children's art of several societies to basic
pictorial motifs. She then suggested that distinct similarities of line and shape
found among children throughout the world lend support to the existence
of a limited number of designs. Compare all those children's drawings on
refrigerator doors, for instance, and you would come up with more of an
organized set of repeated forms than you think, she implied. Does the com-
bination of competence at a certain age and social contact thus produce
universal and culture-specific sets of folk forms upon which all art is based?
The debate over such a provocative question revolves around how
one conceives that structural concepts of folk forms are inherited. Do they
spring from a common response to growing up, or rather to the culturally
diverse situations of social interaction? Some Freudian advocates claim that
childlike forms emerge from anxiety-producing conflicts---especially sexual
ones (Kris 1962). Anton Ehrenzweig, for example, claimed that at age five,
"libidinous scribblings" surface just when Oedipal conflict typically occurs
in childhood (Ehrenzweig 1965, 169). Although tensions and conflicts com-
monly spark artistic expression, the production of children's art is more com-
monly explained as a development of creativity and identity through expres-
sion (Rank 1945, 276; Bronner 1981b, 65-83).
And what about children's consistent choice of bright or clashing
colors? The child generally feels less restricted by adult standards of con-
formity (which usually stress duller and darker shades) and is allowed more
freedom to combine clashing colors. As American children grow, for ex-
ample, so usually do their conformity to more conservative ideas of color
coordination and reliance on linear form. When I wear somethihg particu-
larly bright or outrageous, I am disparagingly accused of acting like a kid
(and couldn't that be another reason we often find ourselves denying or for-
getting the material culture of our childhood? ). Besides psychological de-
mands, then, persistent structural and aesthetic models present in the envi-
ronment and patterned socializing that takes place in childhood probably
lie at the foundation of children's consistent pictorial creations.
Yet with the rush to identify the collective child, we are in danger of
neglecting the individual who, in shape and vision, tells of a personal side
to creativity. Material is too often collected from a youth and ascribed to a
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? ? faceless category of "children," rather than to a real name and personality.
Why, after all, is the lore-that learning that includes technical skills and
creations-in the possession of that particular child? What happens to the
lore later in life? We are anxious to record Granddad before his memories
die with him, but we can also turn to the critical task of documenting our
children before early experiences fade from view.
The core of any approach is to arrive at meaning. Why do children
do what they do? Why does their world look the way it does? Why do they
become who they are, and will be? Objects provide tangible expressions of
ideas and feelings, and thus give a telling symbol of meaning dramatized in
three dimensions. In my work on chain carving, for instance, I observed eld-
erly men making chains out of a single block of wood (Bronner 1984). They
were men who grew up on farms but who now lived in Indiana factory
towns. As children they learned to use a pocketknife from a father, uncle,
or grandfather. To show their prowess and creativity, they made a chain-a
visual riddle-to impress other boys, even elders. They learned to use tools,
work with wood, and operate outside the home-all masculine values. They
adjusted to adulthood partly aided by the tension-relieving objects of folk
creativity. In adulthood they left the farm to work in nearby factories. Most
dropped their chain carving; yet upon retirement or a wife's death, they once
again took to carving. Carving once more helped them in a time of adjust-
ment. It enabled them to display their productivity and skill in a society that
celebrated youth. It reminded the men of their idyllic (in their minds, any-
way) boyhoods. The stroking and touching of wood alleviated tensions and
anxieties common to their situation. The objects they wanted to make anew
told of unspoken hopes, goals, experiences, and frustrations they shared.
Childhood can set patterns for later life, indeed for the society. Those
objects we made and used as children can carry great import for us later.
The skills we know, the aesthetics we develop, and the values we learn find
manifestation in the technics practiced as children and in the creations that
result. Turning to observations of children playing with wood, I found con-
tinuities over time. ' Despite changing societal attitudes toward proper
sexual roles, traditional masculine and feminine technical roles were still
being enacted in rural boys' play. Finding the meanings of such activity at
that moment of enactment and later in life for those particular boys and
girls requires the kind of folkloristic study still being awaited (Petersen
1972).
Analyzing creative processes and objects that represent the skills,
goals, tensions, values, and ideas of children and the society around them
leads to revelations about human expression. Indeed, children often cannot
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? ? articulate their hidden feelings in speech or gesture, but they do express them-
selves through things. Psychologists have used this idea to help abused chil-
dren. Children who cannot talk about their experience create paintings and
sculpture to dramatize their feelings. Working within certain traditional con-
ventions of form, line, and color, the child can project conflicts onto an ex-
ternal, nonthreatening outlet. This situation allows for inventiveness while
it also maintains a conservative attitude toward tradition and experience. 2
Once the range of objects made by and for children has been better
identified, it should be possible to build classifications based on an aware-
ness of "process" that help organize collecting and suggest interpretations.
Such classifications may help researchers get beyond the simple division of
"toys and games" and help add the constructions often left out of surveys
of children's objects (see Bronner 1988). For instance, I have found that
children's folk objects commonly fall into categories I call transformational,
synthetic (and syndetic), imitative, and inventive or manipulative.
Transformational objects are commercial or adult things altered to
suit children's needs and images. Philadelphia's "half-ball," used for alley
stickball, is made by slicing a whole "pimple ball" bought from the corner
store. Openings cut into playground fences, according to children's prefer-
ences rather than the architect's design, are another example. In my child-
hood neighborhood, many transformational objects were made from
bottlecaps. Children weighted them down with a coin to make a Scully puck
or they used them for body decoration. Transformational objects usually take
away, relocate, or change the utility of factory-produced objects to arrive
at a new folk object, an object overlaid with one's handiwork and control.
Synthetic objects result from accretion. Things are combined or built
up from existing objects. At Halloween an effigy is commonly put on the
front porch by putting together stuffed sheets, pans, sticks, and old clothes
into the shape of a scary figure. Children enjoy piling rocks, dirt, or cans to
see larger shapes emerge from the small. Loose rubber bands are wrapped
together to form a ball that grows over time; the snowball packs a smaller
object from the larger environment. The most persistent example of children's
folk sculpture, the snowman, is a synthetic object that brings form from the
inviting blanket of snow. Children delight in feeling the figure grow, harden,
and take shape. Related to this feeling is what anthropologist Robert Plant
Armstrong calls "syndesis. " The object is put together, but not developed;
it grows from repetition of similar units. The ordinary spot in the woods
converted to a child's shrine and one's fingers used to make a steeple (whose
reverse is the people) take on a special, sometimes artistic or sacred quality
that is commonly attached to syndesis. The processes of synthesis and
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? ? syndesis learned in childhood constitute basic "modes in which the human
consciousness apprehends and enacts the world and the self" (R. Armstrong
1981, 13).
Imitative objects resemble larger artifacts in real world. A model hy-
droplane, for instance, abstractly made from clip-type clothespins and in-
cluded in the Knapps' collection (1976, 225) signified some Seattle boys'
preoccupation with the excitement and power of modern boats. Jonah's
clay boat, which I mentioned earlier, is also imitative. Children have sev-
eral versions of jet planes and helicopters made by folding paper. The
treehouse made from boards in a natural environment could be the ulti-
mate imitative object. Although a new and apparently original form, the
knowledge of making these structures was passed among the youthful cre-
ators informally. It is a prime example of folk process causing emergent
designs. The process of imitation blends fantasy and reality to create a
personal world that belongs to the child. Objects in the imitative category
represent youth's aping of, and through that interpretation of, adult ma-
terialism and technology.
The inventive or manipulative object is made from natural resources
into a new, more technical shape (Boas 1938). Sand sculpture on the beach
stands out as an example, but think too of string figures, carved chains, and
paints made from rock and plants. Then there is Brian Sutton-Smith's ex-
ample of his daughters' fashioning leaves and grass into clothes for their doll
(Sutton-Smith 1979d). Much of the fascination for children of objects in this
category comes from their ability to handle and control substances and cre-
ate apparently original shapes and lines. Clay remains popular, for instance,
because it is so easily manipulated and it lends itself quickly to working out
inventive ideas within traditional forms and formulas. Manipulation height-
ens the senses and lifts the ego. Handling string figures delights the eye and
hand because line and form become manipulable and complex by learned
movements.
This classificatory scheme is a limited excursion into the types of ob-
jects encountered in childhood. These are to them what constitutes atten-
tion-keeping activities. The inventive or manipulative objects are related to
the child's curiosity about details of nature. Yet the imitative object speaks
loudly about the modern child's fascination with glittering machinery. More-
over, the imitative object has usually been favored by boys. I have seen boys
attach shirt buttons to clay in imitation of knobs, and create imaginary gad-
gets. Nonetheless, the imitative object that glorifies technology has not elimi-
nated the inventive or transformational object. Indeed, the transformational
object often mocks and abuses technological design. In the synthetic object
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? ? is found a basic metaphor for the accumulation of experience and property,
for the child celebrates growth by increments. Children may prefer differ-
ent technical activities, but rarely to the exclusion of others. We often find
children delighting in miniaturizing some figures or exaggerating and enlarg-
ing others. As children who are developing concepts of self in relation to the
society, they are testing the limits of appropriateness socially and person-
ally by using design. They often gravitate toward the very big or the incred-
ibly small, or they experiment with the inner intricacy of realistic scale. They
are exploring the built and natural world by themselves, working at differ-
ent times with peers and parents, friends and neighbors. Play and creativ-
ity, commonly informal, are their frequent modes of discovery, release, and
testing of the many worlds they encounter.
Such classifications raise questions about the social implications of
the creative processes children learn in life. For example, with synthetic ob-
jects can researchers validate whether in a sample population, boys prefer
the hefty and rough textures of stones and boards and girls choose the softer
textures of fabric and vegetation? Variables which might suggest correspon-
dences could be activities stressing rhythm and repetition or strength and
cooperation. Whether correlated by style, age, sex, place, ethnicity, or class,
hypotheses based on statistical analysis need elaboration. Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, for example, asked children,
parents, and grandparents to identify objects with special meanings within
their homes (1981, 99). They created classes of meaning for the objects:
memories, associations, experiences, self, past, and present-future. Children
scored much higher on objects with meanings for self, for experiences, and
for present and future. Parents and grandparents rated higher than children
on objects with meanings for memories, for associations, and for the past.
Folk objects which are made, or objects used according to folk processes,
constitute another important body of data to evaluate. Folk objects are only
a slice of all children's objects, but they can be extremely useful because they
represent informal learning and communication. Researchers can, and
should, ask what folk objects and activities can tell of children's preferences.
In addition how do social changes affect the traditional toys, labors, and
environments of children? Indeed, how do changes in children's material folk
culture effect social change? What skills are especially prevalent in children's
material culture of different areas and backgrounds? Answering these ques-
tions involves far more than mere "child's play. "
Still lingering is the sticky problem of weighing the interplay between
folk and popular culture in children's creativity. Separating the two is often
difficult or misleading, since they commonly appear inexorably entwined.
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? ? Popular culture is more visible, but nonetheless suggests relations with the
private, often hidden realms of children. Children's magazines like Boy's Life,
for example, regularly suggest projects taken from folk crafts.
Are they in-
vigorating the tradition or removing the craft from tradition? Popular cul-
ture can reinforce or standardize folk culture, but more often it intertwines
with folklife. When I interviewed chain carvers, many reported learning from
both popular mechanical magazines and other boys. Some had extra incen-
tive to try their hand at carving, since in the 1930s radio hero Jack Armstrong
offered pocketknives to children on every show! Recently, I had another
example of the interrelationship of popular and folk culture when a student
in my class convincingly argued that the Boy Scout manual had influenced
the formation of boys' material folk culture. Among other artifacts and en-
vironments, Boy Scouts prepare small cars made from wood to run in a min-
iature derby. Over the years the boys have developed informal rules and tastes
for building and decorating the cars. Especially aware of folkloristic ap-
proaches, Jay Mechling has extensively reported in several articles on ob-
jects and environments fabricated by and for the Boy Scouts (Mechling
1984b, 1987, 1989).
Look closely at those objects children like to make. They are often
related to prevalent folk ideas and practices, or can reveal much about the
making of tradition. Take note of the behaviors surrounding the conception
and completion of forms for the thoughts they express.
William Golding touched the hearts of readers when he wrote such
behaviors into his bitter allegory Lord of the Flies (19541. Children were
alone on an island after the adults had been killed in a plane crash. The chil-
dren created their own model of society with "littluns" and "biguns. " The
littluns "had built castles in the sand at the bar of the little river. These castles
were about one foot high and were decorated with shells, withered flowers,
and interesting stones. Round the castles was a complex of marks, tracks,
walls, railway lines, that were of significance only if inspected with the eye
at beach level. The littluns played here, if not happily, at least with absorbed
attention; and often as many as three of them would play the same game
together" (Golding 1954, 67). The biguns destroyed the castles, "kicking
them over, burying the flowers, scattering the chosen stones. " Yet they could
not discern or destroy "the particular marks" in which the littluns were ab-
sorbed. Our adult eyes need to be put at beach level, to discern the particu-
lar marks and their deep meanings for the children and for the society. Much
work in material folk culture still lies ahead, so that we can indeed know
the child's world, which is in fact our world.
270 MATERIAL FOLK CULTURE OF CHILDREN
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? ? NOTES TO CHAPTER TWELVE
1. These are covered in Bronner 1984. Since that study I also observed
children's play in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which is discussed in Bronner 1988 and
1990. I give grateful acknowledgment to my students in American Folklore: Culture
and Aging, at Penn State Harrisburg for additional data and thought-provoking dis-
cussion. Students in American Folklore at the University of California at Davis, whom
I taught as visiting distinguished professor in 1990, also contributed to the data pre-
sented here. I appreciate comments provided to me by colleagues Jay Mechling, David
Wilson, Patricia Turner, and Sue Samuelson.
2. The feature of childlore most prevalent in the literature is that children's
expressions are somehow simultaneously liberal and conservative toward cultural
change in traditions. Gary Alan Fine has called this feature "Newell's Paradox" after
nineteenth-century folklorist William Wells Newell, who studied the feature in
children's games. In Fine's important essay "Children and Their Culture: Exploring
Newell's Paradox," he explains the existence of this apparent paradox between inven-
tiveness and stability in childlore by examining the features of inventiveness in the
components of folklore itself: text, context, and performance. Although concerned
mostly with oral and customary lore, Fine's postulation of a stable text, changing con-
text, and both imaginative and conservative performance also applies to material cul-
ture.
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? ?
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? ? I3
CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
IN RESIDENTIAL INSTITUTIONS
SUMMER CAMPS, BOARDING SCHOOLS, HOSPITALS,
AND CUSTODIAL FACILITIES
Jay Mechling
Even when they are not literally so, young people in American culture some-
times feel like prisoners in the institutions controlled by adults. Their pri-
mary institutional experience during the course of a day is one of being in
"the custody of" adults, from parents to teachers to athletic coaches to Scout
leaders and beyond. To be sure, there are islands of autonomous children's
culture that offer refuge from adult supervision, islands located behind the
locked door of the child's bedroom, within the dark hideout of the school
bathroom, or in the open space of the vacant lot, fields, or woods. But, gen-
erally, our children are an underclass perpetually in the one-down power
position (Mechling 1986).
Nowhere is this more true than in the residential institutions estab-
lished for children. The home and family certainly are residential institutions
that can be the setting for the emergence of the expressive culture of chil-
dren, both as part of the family folk culture and possibly as a semiautono-
mous "sibling culture" interactive with the family culture. But this Source-
book chapter examines residential institutions other than the traditional
family, institutions that sometimes replace the family but more often are a
temporary residence away from the family. They include summer camps,
boarding schools, children's hospitals, and a range of custodial institutions
that make the young person a "ward" of the adult caretakers, either to pro-
tect the ward (as in the case of orphanages), to correct the ward's behavior
(as in juvenile detention facilities and group homes), or to protect society
from the ward's behavior (juvenile prisons, no matter what the euphemism).
Erving Goffman named "total institutions" those places of residence
and work "where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from
the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed,
formally administered round of life" (Goffman 1961a, xiii). A central ele-
ment present in total institutions is the breakdown of the barriers normally
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? ? separating the realms of sleep, work, and play in everyday life. Although
Goffman distinguishes five rough groupings of total institutions in Ameri-
can society, they all seem to share most, if not all, of the following attributes:
First, all aspects of life are conducted in the same place and under
the same single authority. Second, each phase of the member's daily activity
is carried on in the immediate company of a large number of others, all of
whom are treated alike and required to do the same things together. Third,
all phases of the day's activities are tightly scheduled, with one activity lead-
ing at a prearranged time to the next, the whole sequence of activities being
imposed from above by a system of explicit formal rulings and a body of
officials. Finally, the various enforced activities are brought together into a
single rational plan purportedly designed to fulfill the official aims of the
institution (Goffman 1961a, 6).
Goffman's analytic description of total institutions came out of his
fieldwork in a mental hospital, so his definition tends to emphasize the more
tightly controlled sort of total institution. The children's residential institu-
tions examined here vary considerably, representing something of a con-
tinuum of voluntariness, control, length of residence, degree of privacy, de-
gree to which the residents can help set the institution's agenda, and so on.
Yet, despite the stark contrast in our minds between a summer camp or ex-
clusive prep school and a juvenile prison, we ought not miss the point that
even the most benign of these settings shares some of the basic characteris-
tics of a total institution.
Residential institutions have a binary character, which is to say that
there really are two worlds where there seems to be only one. The basic di-
vision is between the residents (the campers, the students, the patients, the
"inmates" of Goffman's total institutions) and the staff. The staff have an
advantage over the resident children and adolescents to the extent that the
staff may participate in the institution only during, say, an eight-hour shift,
and even summer-camp counselors have "staff night out. " So for staff mem-
bers, their participation in the culture of a residential institution may be only
one among many experiences.
It might be better to speak of the "tertiary character" of the residen-
tial institution, because my view is that there really are three distinct realms
of cultural production the folklorist finds in these settings. Two of the realms
are those folk cultures created by the staff among themselves and by the resi-
dents among themselves. The cultural productions, performances, and genres
in these two realms are likely parallel, possibly even mirror images of one
another. At least they are complementary.
The third realm of cultural production is one Goffman recognizes but
274 CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE IN RESIDENTIAL INSTITUTIONS
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? ? most people working in this area overlook. This is the culture at "the bor-
der," the realm of interaction between the staff's world and the residents'
world. Goffman, for example, focuses upon the "institutional ceremonies"
through which staff and inmates come together, and it is not surprising that
Goffman acknowledges in a footnote (1961a, 7) that it was Bateson who
first alerted him to the staff/inmate dialectic. Indeed, Bateson's notion of
"schismogenesis," the creation of meaning out of the confrontation of dif-
ference, is precisely what happens when the staff and residents interact, and
it would have been interesting to have seen Goffman pursue Bateson's lead
by using the latter's concepts of complementary and reciprocal
schismogenesis to explore the staff/inmate dialectic (Bateson 1958 [1936];
Mechling 1983).
The folklorist must understand this perspective on the three cultures
of a total institution. Whereas "normative" social science adopts the view-
point of the dominant group, seeing socialization as the making of complete
persons (that is, adults) out of incomplete persons (that is, children), "in-
terpretive" social science "restores the interaction between adults and chil-
dren based on interpretive competences as the phenomenon of study"
(Mackay 1974, 183). Normative social science tends to favor the center of
a cultural system, while interpretive social science looks to the fringes, the
borders where differences meet and where people engage in creative actions
as they interpret the other and interpret themselves for others (MacCannell
1979).
As we shall see, a serious problem with most of the scholarship on
residential institutions for children and adolescents is that it takes the per-
spective of normative, rather than interpretive, social science. Much of the
literature is by, about, and for the adult managers, helpers, and "child sav-
ers" (Platt 1969) who run the residential institutions. A chief goal of this
chapter is to reverse this trend, to redirect scholarship on residential insti-
tutions toward the interpretive approach.
This chapter has four main sections. The first is a discussion of the
cultural productions of the residents' world and of the staff world. This is a
discussion of genres of "cultural performances" (Geertz 1973) prominent
in the two worlds and does not substitute for more extensive treatments of
genres in other chapters of this Source Book and in other standard folklore
textbooks, such as Dorson's (1972, 1983) or Brunvand's (1978). The second
section examines those "institutional ceremonies" through which the staff
and residents come together to make the public, interactive culture of the
institution. I discuss there Goffman's seven ceremonies and add some more
I think are relevant. The third section surveys existing literature on the spe-
275
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? ? cial features of each of the four categories of residential institutions for chil-
dren and adolescents. The final section identifies special issues or problems
that ought to concern folklorists as they embark on the research this chap-
ter outlines.
CULTURAL PERFORMANCES AMONG RESIDENTS AND STAFF
I am adopting here Geertz's term (1973, 113) "cultural performances" to
denominate that large class of cultural productions that interest the folklor-
ist. "Ritual" and "play" are two of the most important sorts of cultural per-
formance, and some of the best work available to folklorists comes to deal,
one way or another, with these two and the relation between them. Rituals
tend to be the traditionalizing productions meant to confer legitimation and
order upon cultural ideas (Moore and Myerhoff 1977). Rituals serve to fix
public meanings, the objects and other symbols in the ritual aiding in the
process of making "visible and stable the categories of culture" (Douglas and
Isherwood 1979). Ritual and its symbolic adjuncts are both "models of" and
"models for" larger cultural patterns (Geertz 1973, 93).
Play, and all the cultural performances that are playful, are also es-
pecially framed realities, but in the case of play the function of the frame is
as often as not to cast doubt upon everyday life. Where ritual confirms, play
doubts (Handelman 1977, 1980). Play, Sutton-Smith reminds us, tends to
be antithetical, and play frames permit "transformations" of status, experi-
ment with otherwise terrifying objects or ideas, and a safe territory for try-
ing out alternative solutions to everyday problems (Schwartzman 1978). Our
goal is to be able to describe not only the structures and functions of these
framed experiences but to capture something of the "style" these children
and adolescents bring to their cultural performances (Hebdige 1979).
Having said this much about ritual and play as two possible frames
for cultural performances, we might identify some genres of performance
we would expect to find in the residents' culture. Many of these will be what
Goffman calls "secondary adjustments," that is to say, "practices that do
not directly challenge staff but allow inmates to obtain forbidden satisfac-
tions or to obtain permitted ones by forbidden means" (Goffman 1961a, 54).
Put differently, many of the cultural performances we find among the resi-
dential children are strategies of resistance, folk offensives in the political
struggle over "whose institution is this, anyway? "
We expect, for example, that the residents of one of these institutions
will develop a range of folk speech, an "institutional lingo" including nick-
names, special words for places, a special folk speech referring to the insti-
tutional food, and so on (Jackson 1965, 326-27). Lambert and Millham's
276 CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE IN RESIDENTIAL INSTITUTIONS
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? ? 1968 study of boys' and coeducational boarding schools in England and
Wales is full of the specialized folk speech of those institutions, and the great
virtue of their collection is that they used the diaries and other writings of
nearly seventeen hundred pupils. The authors found that these children cre-
ated their own private languages either by translating ordinary vocabulary
into a private one (for example, by adding "-mble" to all possible words,
so "grim" becomes "grimble" and "yes" becomes "yemble") or by bestow-
ing upon an existing word "a special meaning which, by and large, only the
underworld fully comprehends and savours. " Giallombardo (1974) found
that each of the three institutions for juvenile delinquents had complex sets
of "campus names," nicknames that were sometimes personal, sometimes
linked the young woman to one of the fictitious campus families that con-
stituted the prison social system, and sometimes distinguished those occu-
pying male and female roles. A whole complex of prison folk speech sus-
tains the social system of these incarcerated adolescent females, including
use of the masculine pronouns to refer to those assuming a male identity.
Thus, in a Midwestern prison the inmates' typology is of "studs, pimps and
foxes" (where a "popcorn" is an inmate who switches roles), and in a west-
ern prison the typologies contrast "fems and butches," "finks and snitchers,"
"squares and straights. " A young woman in the western institution also may
have a number of nicknames, "chick terms" (Giallombardo 1974, 212-22).
Total institutions sometimes attempt to control communications be-
tween the adolescent inmates, so there arise genres of folk speech both to
refer to illicit communications and to communicate illicitly. Again, prisons
seem to have the most developed versions of these codes. In the East Coast
institution Giallombardo studies, inmates communicated by letter (an "is-
sue") and developed an elaborate set of abbreviations and numbers to be
used in the margins, at the end of an "issue," or on the corner of the enve-
lope. TDDUP, for example, meant "Til Death Do Us Part," and H. n. W. A.
meant "Husband and Wife Always. " The numerical code "110" (pro-
nounced one-ten) meant "I Love You," and Giallombardo found that the
inmates sometimes increased the sentiment by doubling (220), tripling (330),
and so on. The number "225" meant a relationship as being terminated,
"333" meant a kiss, "711" a marriage, and "117" a divorce (Giallombardo
1974, 154-67).
Other genres of oral performance, including insults, jokes, toasts, and
similar shorter narratives, help create solidarity and hierarchy among the
residents. Polsky (1962) found ritual insults, "ranking," to be an important
form of communication in his study of a residential program for delinquent
boys, and I certainly found considerable "ranking" and joking among the
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? ? Boy Scouts I studied at their summer encampments (Mechling 1980a, 1981).
Residents are likely to have longer narratives as well, stories about
legendary happenings, colorful characters, and the like. Some may be per-
sonal history narratives, some cautionary tales. Single-sex camps have their
stories about the camper who "made it" to the other side of the lake to
"make it" with opposite-sex campers, and custodial institutions have rich
traditions of stories about escapes and captures. Jackson found in his prison
research a clear code among the inmates: "Don't inform, don't meddle, don't
bring heat-says the code. . . . A Folklore repertory accompanies the Code-
stories illustrating it in action or the dire retributions visited upon violators"
(Jackson 1965, 320). A sociologist employed by the California Youth Au-
thority tells me that supervisors have found handwritten lists of rules lay-
ing out just such a code.
Residential institutions are also likely to have legends and ghost sto-
ries, two genres that depend the most upon children and adolescents for their
survival and diffusion. Leary (1973) traces the history of one legend through
three decades in one Boy Scout troop and across several groups, making the
point that "Swamp Man" legends allow the adult leaders to exercise indi-
rect control over campers' behavior. Ellis (1981b, 1982) makes the same
point in his analysis of the contextual uses of legends by the staff members
of a camp serving potentially unruly, "underprivileged" children from ur-
ban Cleveland. Bronner (1988, 152-54; 315-16) discusses camp legends (see
his discursive footnotes in the fully annotated edition of his volume) and
Wells (1988) recounts the uses of the Girl Scout camp legend, "Red Eyes. "
Residential institutions may also have "humorous anti-legends" (Vlach 1971;
Bronner 1988, 154-59).
Ghost stories constitute a special case of legends at residential insti-
tutions.
out ways to use the steel rods and bolts from the sets in their homemade
carts and boats. Such experiences emphasized their control, their personal-
izing of things around them. By allowing them to conceive, control, create,
or alter things informally, their things helped them identify more with the
object, and ultimately externalize their identity better.
The relation of object and action underlies what Brian Sutton-Smith
called "a developmental psychology of play and the arts. " His idea was to
"ask not whether play and art are serious or nonserious, real or unreal, but
to ask rather what sort of cultural adaptation they are" (Sutton-Smith 1971b,
8). Folk arts emerge as communication systems for various segments of so-
ciety. Using dramaturgical terminology, Sutton-Smith describes the sequence
of structures in play and art. The props used in performance become sym-
bolic; the dramatic patterns become expressive structures. In some cases, like
puppetry, the theatrical metaphor directly reveals "an existing understand-
ing of being on stage, having imaginary characters, changing affects, antici-
pations and dramatic properties" (Sutton-Smith 1971, 13). But also, in other
expressive encounters of creative play, the child enacts roles, conceptualizes
form, overlays meanings to representation, and unfolds situations (M. Jones
1980; Sutton-Smith 1979a). At around two years old, objects become sym-
bols; at three, toys become properties; from four to seven, such properties
are used freely in dramatic play. Children's folk play and art are not trivial,
therefore, but the central spine of learning and development.
Beyond the questions posed about specific situations and the condi-
tions for creativity are queries about humanistic continuities of children's art.
The word "childlike," used to describe pictures, triggers among most adults
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? ? similar ideas about relations of line, proportion, and color. Intuitively, at
least, a shared idea exists about the basic structures of children's expressions
of form. This problem has primarily sparked psychological discussion rather
than study of art history for most art historians generally see the artworld
as an adult concern. Yet the precedents in children's work demand atten-
tion for what they say about consistencies in artistic traditions. Rhoda
Kellogg ambitiously reduced the children's art of several societies to basic
pictorial motifs. She then suggested that distinct similarities of line and shape
found among children throughout the world lend support to the existence
of a limited number of designs. Compare all those children's drawings on
refrigerator doors, for instance, and you would come up with more of an
organized set of repeated forms than you think, she implied. Does the com-
bination of competence at a certain age and social contact thus produce
universal and culture-specific sets of folk forms upon which all art is based?
The debate over such a provocative question revolves around how
one conceives that structural concepts of folk forms are inherited. Do they
spring from a common response to growing up, or rather to the culturally
diverse situations of social interaction? Some Freudian advocates claim that
childlike forms emerge from anxiety-producing conflicts---especially sexual
ones (Kris 1962). Anton Ehrenzweig, for example, claimed that at age five,
"libidinous scribblings" surface just when Oedipal conflict typically occurs
in childhood (Ehrenzweig 1965, 169). Although tensions and conflicts com-
monly spark artistic expression, the production of children's art is more com-
monly explained as a development of creativity and identity through expres-
sion (Rank 1945, 276; Bronner 1981b, 65-83).
And what about children's consistent choice of bright or clashing
colors? The child generally feels less restricted by adult standards of con-
formity (which usually stress duller and darker shades) and is allowed more
freedom to combine clashing colors. As American children grow, for ex-
ample, so usually do their conformity to more conservative ideas of color
coordination and reliance on linear form. When I wear somethihg particu-
larly bright or outrageous, I am disparagingly accused of acting like a kid
(and couldn't that be another reason we often find ourselves denying or for-
getting the material culture of our childhood? ). Besides psychological de-
mands, then, persistent structural and aesthetic models present in the envi-
ronment and patterned socializing that takes place in childhood probably
lie at the foundation of children's consistent pictorial creations.
Yet with the rush to identify the collective child, we are in danger of
neglecting the individual who, in shape and vision, tells of a personal side
to creativity. Material is too often collected from a youth and ascribed to a
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? ? faceless category of "children," rather than to a real name and personality.
Why, after all, is the lore-that learning that includes technical skills and
creations-in the possession of that particular child? What happens to the
lore later in life? We are anxious to record Granddad before his memories
die with him, but we can also turn to the critical task of documenting our
children before early experiences fade from view.
The core of any approach is to arrive at meaning. Why do children
do what they do? Why does their world look the way it does? Why do they
become who they are, and will be? Objects provide tangible expressions of
ideas and feelings, and thus give a telling symbol of meaning dramatized in
three dimensions. In my work on chain carving, for instance, I observed eld-
erly men making chains out of a single block of wood (Bronner 1984). They
were men who grew up on farms but who now lived in Indiana factory
towns. As children they learned to use a pocketknife from a father, uncle,
or grandfather. To show their prowess and creativity, they made a chain-a
visual riddle-to impress other boys, even elders. They learned to use tools,
work with wood, and operate outside the home-all masculine values. They
adjusted to adulthood partly aided by the tension-relieving objects of folk
creativity. In adulthood they left the farm to work in nearby factories. Most
dropped their chain carving; yet upon retirement or a wife's death, they once
again took to carving. Carving once more helped them in a time of adjust-
ment. It enabled them to display their productivity and skill in a society that
celebrated youth. It reminded the men of their idyllic (in their minds, any-
way) boyhoods. The stroking and touching of wood alleviated tensions and
anxieties common to their situation. The objects they wanted to make anew
told of unspoken hopes, goals, experiences, and frustrations they shared.
Childhood can set patterns for later life, indeed for the society. Those
objects we made and used as children can carry great import for us later.
The skills we know, the aesthetics we develop, and the values we learn find
manifestation in the technics practiced as children and in the creations that
result. Turning to observations of children playing with wood, I found con-
tinuities over time. ' Despite changing societal attitudes toward proper
sexual roles, traditional masculine and feminine technical roles were still
being enacted in rural boys' play. Finding the meanings of such activity at
that moment of enactment and later in life for those particular boys and
girls requires the kind of folkloristic study still being awaited (Petersen
1972).
Analyzing creative processes and objects that represent the skills,
goals, tensions, values, and ideas of children and the society around them
leads to revelations about human expression. Indeed, children often cannot
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? ? articulate their hidden feelings in speech or gesture, but they do express them-
selves through things. Psychologists have used this idea to help abused chil-
dren. Children who cannot talk about their experience create paintings and
sculpture to dramatize their feelings. Working within certain traditional con-
ventions of form, line, and color, the child can project conflicts onto an ex-
ternal, nonthreatening outlet. This situation allows for inventiveness while
it also maintains a conservative attitude toward tradition and experience. 2
Once the range of objects made by and for children has been better
identified, it should be possible to build classifications based on an aware-
ness of "process" that help organize collecting and suggest interpretations.
Such classifications may help researchers get beyond the simple division of
"toys and games" and help add the constructions often left out of surveys
of children's objects (see Bronner 1988). For instance, I have found that
children's folk objects commonly fall into categories I call transformational,
synthetic (and syndetic), imitative, and inventive or manipulative.
Transformational objects are commercial or adult things altered to
suit children's needs and images. Philadelphia's "half-ball," used for alley
stickball, is made by slicing a whole "pimple ball" bought from the corner
store. Openings cut into playground fences, according to children's prefer-
ences rather than the architect's design, are another example. In my child-
hood neighborhood, many transformational objects were made from
bottlecaps. Children weighted them down with a coin to make a Scully puck
or they used them for body decoration. Transformational objects usually take
away, relocate, or change the utility of factory-produced objects to arrive
at a new folk object, an object overlaid with one's handiwork and control.
Synthetic objects result from accretion. Things are combined or built
up from existing objects. At Halloween an effigy is commonly put on the
front porch by putting together stuffed sheets, pans, sticks, and old clothes
into the shape of a scary figure. Children enjoy piling rocks, dirt, or cans to
see larger shapes emerge from the small. Loose rubber bands are wrapped
together to form a ball that grows over time; the snowball packs a smaller
object from the larger environment. The most persistent example of children's
folk sculpture, the snowman, is a synthetic object that brings form from the
inviting blanket of snow. Children delight in feeling the figure grow, harden,
and take shape. Related to this feeling is what anthropologist Robert Plant
Armstrong calls "syndesis. " The object is put together, but not developed;
it grows from repetition of similar units. The ordinary spot in the woods
converted to a child's shrine and one's fingers used to make a steeple (whose
reverse is the people) take on a special, sometimes artistic or sacred quality
that is commonly attached to syndesis. The processes of synthesis and
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? ? syndesis learned in childhood constitute basic "modes in which the human
consciousness apprehends and enacts the world and the self" (R. Armstrong
1981, 13).
Imitative objects resemble larger artifacts in real world. A model hy-
droplane, for instance, abstractly made from clip-type clothespins and in-
cluded in the Knapps' collection (1976, 225) signified some Seattle boys'
preoccupation with the excitement and power of modern boats. Jonah's
clay boat, which I mentioned earlier, is also imitative. Children have sev-
eral versions of jet planes and helicopters made by folding paper. The
treehouse made from boards in a natural environment could be the ulti-
mate imitative object. Although a new and apparently original form, the
knowledge of making these structures was passed among the youthful cre-
ators informally. It is a prime example of folk process causing emergent
designs. The process of imitation blends fantasy and reality to create a
personal world that belongs to the child. Objects in the imitative category
represent youth's aping of, and through that interpretation of, adult ma-
terialism and technology.
The inventive or manipulative object is made from natural resources
into a new, more technical shape (Boas 1938). Sand sculpture on the beach
stands out as an example, but think too of string figures, carved chains, and
paints made from rock and plants. Then there is Brian Sutton-Smith's ex-
ample of his daughters' fashioning leaves and grass into clothes for their doll
(Sutton-Smith 1979d). Much of the fascination for children of objects in this
category comes from their ability to handle and control substances and cre-
ate apparently original shapes and lines. Clay remains popular, for instance,
because it is so easily manipulated and it lends itself quickly to working out
inventive ideas within traditional forms and formulas. Manipulation height-
ens the senses and lifts the ego. Handling string figures delights the eye and
hand because line and form become manipulable and complex by learned
movements.
This classificatory scheme is a limited excursion into the types of ob-
jects encountered in childhood. These are to them what constitutes atten-
tion-keeping activities. The inventive or manipulative objects are related to
the child's curiosity about details of nature. Yet the imitative object speaks
loudly about the modern child's fascination with glittering machinery. More-
over, the imitative object has usually been favored by boys. I have seen boys
attach shirt buttons to clay in imitation of knobs, and create imaginary gad-
gets. Nonetheless, the imitative object that glorifies technology has not elimi-
nated the inventive or transformational object. Indeed, the transformational
object often mocks and abuses technological design. In the synthetic object
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? ? is found a basic metaphor for the accumulation of experience and property,
for the child celebrates growth by increments. Children may prefer differ-
ent technical activities, but rarely to the exclusion of others. We often find
children delighting in miniaturizing some figures or exaggerating and enlarg-
ing others. As children who are developing concepts of self in relation to the
society, they are testing the limits of appropriateness socially and person-
ally by using design. They often gravitate toward the very big or the incred-
ibly small, or they experiment with the inner intricacy of realistic scale. They
are exploring the built and natural world by themselves, working at differ-
ent times with peers and parents, friends and neighbors. Play and creativ-
ity, commonly informal, are their frequent modes of discovery, release, and
testing of the many worlds they encounter.
Such classifications raise questions about the social implications of
the creative processes children learn in life. For example, with synthetic ob-
jects can researchers validate whether in a sample population, boys prefer
the hefty and rough textures of stones and boards and girls choose the softer
textures of fabric and vegetation? Variables which might suggest correspon-
dences could be activities stressing rhythm and repetition or strength and
cooperation. Whether correlated by style, age, sex, place, ethnicity, or class,
hypotheses based on statistical analysis need elaboration. Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, for example, asked children,
parents, and grandparents to identify objects with special meanings within
their homes (1981, 99). They created classes of meaning for the objects:
memories, associations, experiences, self, past, and present-future. Children
scored much higher on objects with meanings for self, for experiences, and
for present and future. Parents and grandparents rated higher than children
on objects with meanings for memories, for associations, and for the past.
Folk objects which are made, or objects used according to folk processes,
constitute another important body of data to evaluate. Folk objects are only
a slice of all children's objects, but they can be extremely useful because they
represent informal learning and communication. Researchers can, and
should, ask what folk objects and activities can tell of children's preferences.
In addition how do social changes affect the traditional toys, labors, and
environments of children? Indeed, how do changes in children's material folk
culture effect social change? What skills are especially prevalent in children's
material culture of different areas and backgrounds? Answering these ques-
tions involves far more than mere "child's play. "
Still lingering is the sticky problem of weighing the interplay between
folk and popular culture in children's creativity. Separating the two is often
difficult or misleading, since they commonly appear inexorably entwined.
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? ? Popular culture is more visible, but nonetheless suggests relations with the
private, often hidden realms of children. Children's magazines like Boy's Life,
for example, regularly suggest projects taken from folk crafts.
Are they in-
vigorating the tradition or removing the craft from tradition? Popular cul-
ture can reinforce or standardize folk culture, but more often it intertwines
with folklife. When I interviewed chain carvers, many reported learning from
both popular mechanical magazines and other boys. Some had extra incen-
tive to try their hand at carving, since in the 1930s radio hero Jack Armstrong
offered pocketknives to children on every show! Recently, I had another
example of the interrelationship of popular and folk culture when a student
in my class convincingly argued that the Boy Scout manual had influenced
the formation of boys' material folk culture. Among other artifacts and en-
vironments, Boy Scouts prepare small cars made from wood to run in a min-
iature derby. Over the years the boys have developed informal rules and tastes
for building and decorating the cars. Especially aware of folkloristic ap-
proaches, Jay Mechling has extensively reported in several articles on ob-
jects and environments fabricated by and for the Boy Scouts (Mechling
1984b, 1987, 1989).
Look closely at those objects children like to make. They are often
related to prevalent folk ideas and practices, or can reveal much about the
making of tradition. Take note of the behaviors surrounding the conception
and completion of forms for the thoughts they express.
William Golding touched the hearts of readers when he wrote such
behaviors into his bitter allegory Lord of the Flies (19541. Children were
alone on an island after the adults had been killed in a plane crash. The chil-
dren created their own model of society with "littluns" and "biguns. " The
littluns "had built castles in the sand at the bar of the little river. These castles
were about one foot high and were decorated with shells, withered flowers,
and interesting stones. Round the castles was a complex of marks, tracks,
walls, railway lines, that were of significance only if inspected with the eye
at beach level. The littluns played here, if not happily, at least with absorbed
attention; and often as many as three of them would play the same game
together" (Golding 1954, 67). The biguns destroyed the castles, "kicking
them over, burying the flowers, scattering the chosen stones. " Yet they could
not discern or destroy "the particular marks" in which the littluns were ab-
sorbed. Our adult eyes need to be put at beach level, to discern the particu-
lar marks and their deep meanings for the children and for the society. Much
work in material folk culture still lies ahead, so that we can indeed know
the child's world, which is in fact our world.
270 MATERIAL FOLK CULTURE OF CHILDREN
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? ? NOTES TO CHAPTER TWELVE
1. These are covered in Bronner 1984. Since that study I also observed
children's play in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which is discussed in Bronner 1988 and
1990. I give grateful acknowledgment to my students in American Folklore: Culture
and Aging, at Penn State Harrisburg for additional data and thought-provoking dis-
cussion. Students in American Folklore at the University of California at Davis, whom
I taught as visiting distinguished professor in 1990, also contributed to the data pre-
sented here. I appreciate comments provided to me by colleagues Jay Mechling, David
Wilson, Patricia Turner, and Sue Samuelson.
2. The feature of childlore most prevalent in the literature is that children's
expressions are somehow simultaneously liberal and conservative toward cultural
change in traditions. Gary Alan Fine has called this feature "Newell's Paradox" after
nineteenth-century folklorist William Wells Newell, who studied the feature in
children's games. In Fine's important essay "Children and Their Culture: Exploring
Newell's Paradox," he explains the existence of this apparent paradox between inven-
tiveness and stability in childlore by examining the features of inventiveness in the
components of folklore itself: text, context, and performance. Although concerned
mostly with oral and customary lore, Fine's postulation of a stable text, changing con-
text, and both imaginative and conservative performance also applies to material cul-
ture.
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? ?
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? ? I3
CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
IN RESIDENTIAL INSTITUTIONS
SUMMER CAMPS, BOARDING SCHOOLS, HOSPITALS,
AND CUSTODIAL FACILITIES
Jay Mechling
Even when they are not literally so, young people in American culture some-
times feel like prisoners in the institutions controlled by adults. Their pri-
mary institutional experience during the course of a day is one of being in
"the custody of" adults, from parents to teachers to athletic coaches to Scout
leaders and beyond. To be sure, there are islands of autonomous children's
culture that offer refuge from adult supervision, islands located behind the
locked door of the child's bedroom, within the dark hideout of the school
bathroom, or in the open space of the vacant lot, fields, or woods. But, gen-
erally, our children are an underclass perpetually in the one-down power
position (Mechling 1986).
Nowhere is this more true than in the residential institutions estab-
lished for children. The home and family certainly are residential institutions
that can be the setting for the emergence of the expressive culture of chil-
dren, both as part of the family folk culture and possibly as a semiautono-
mous "sibling culture" interactive with the family culture. But this Source-
book chapter examines residential institutions other than the traditional
family, institutions that sometimes replace the family but more often are a
temporary residence away from the family. They include summer camps,
boarding schools, children's hospitals, and a range of custodial institutions
that make the young person a "ward" of the adult caretakers, either to pro-
tect the ward (as in the case of orphanages), to correct the ward's behavior
(as in juvenile detention facilities and group homes), or to protect society
from the ward's behavior (juvenile prisons, no matter what the euphemism).
Erving Goffman named "total institutions" those places of residence
and work "where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from
the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed,
formally administered round of life" (Goffman 1961a, xiii). A central ele-
ment present in total institutions is the breakdown of the barriers normally
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? ? separating the realms of sleep, work, and play in everyday life. Although
Goffman distinguishes five rough groupings of total institutions in Ameri-
can society, they all seem to share most, if not all, of the following attributes:
First, all aspects of life are conducted in the same place and under
the same single authority. Second, each phase of the member's daily activity
is carried on in the immediate company of a large number of others, all of
whom are treated alike and required to do the same things together. Third,
all phases of the day's activities are tightly scheduled, with one activity lead-
ing at a prearranged time to the next, the whole sequence of activities being
imposed from above by a system of explicit formal rulings and a body of
officials. Finally, the various enforced activities are brought together into a
single rational plan purportedly designed to fulfill the official aims of the
institution (Goffman 1961a, 6).
Goffman's analytic description of total institutions came out of his
fieldwork in a mental hospital, so his definition tends to emphasize the more
tightly controlled sort of total institution. The children's residential institu-
tions examined here vary considerably, representing something of a con-
tinuum of voluntariness, control, length of residence, degree of privacy, de-
gree to which the residents can help set the institution's agenda, and so on.
Yet, despite the stark contrast in our minds between a summer camp or ex-
clusive prep school and a juvenile prison, we ought not miss the point that
even the most benign of these settings shares some of the basic characteris-
tics of a total institution.
Residential institutions have a binary character, which is to say that
there really are two worlds where there seems to be only one. The basic di-
vision is between the residents (the campers, the students, the patients, the
"inmates" of Goffman's total institutions) and the staff. The staff have an
advantage over the resident children and adolescents to the extent that the
staff may participate in the institution only during, say, an eight-hour shift,
and even summer-camp counselors have "staff night out. " So for staff mem-
bers, their participation in the culture of a residential institution may be only
one among many experiences.
It might be better to speak of the "tertiary character" of the residen-
tial institution, because my view is that there really are three distinct realms
of cultural production the folklorist finds in these settings. Two of the realms
are those folk cultures created by the staff among themselves and by the resi-
dents among themselves. The cultural productions, performances, and genres
in these two realms are likely parallel, possibly even mirror images of one
another. At least they are complementary.
The third realm of cultural production is one Goffman recognizes but
274 CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE IN RESIDENTIAL INSTITUTIONS
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? ? most people working in this area overlook. This is the culture at "the bor-
der," the realm of interaction between the staff's world and the residents'
world. Goffman, for example, focuses upon the "institutional ceremonies"
through which staff and inmates come together, and it is not surprising that
Goffman acknowledges in a footnote (1961a, 7) that it was Bateson who
first alerted him to the staff/inmate dialectic. Indeed, Bateson's notion of
"schismogenesis," the creation of meaning out of the confrontation of dif-
ference, is precisely what happens when the staff and residents interact, and
it would have been interesting to have seen Goffman pursue Bateson's lead
by using the latter's concepts of complementary and reciprocal
schismogenesis to explore the staff/inmate dialectic (Bateson 1958 [1936];
Mechling 1983).
The folklorist must understand this perspective on the three cultures
of a total institution. Whereas "normative" social science adopts the view-
point of the dominant group, seeing socialization as the making of complete
persons (that is, adults) out of incomplete persons (that is, children), "in-
terpretive" social science "restores the interaction between adults and chil-
dren based on interpretive competences as the phenomenon of study"
(Mackay 1974, 183). Normative social science tends to favor the center of
a cultural system, while interpretive social science looks to the fringes, the
borders where differences meet and where people engage in creative actions
as they interpret the other and interpret themselves for others (MacCannell
1979).
As we shall see, a serious problem with most of the scholarship on
residential institutions for children and adolescents is that it takes the per-
spective of normative, rather than interpretive, social science. Much of the
literature is by, about, and for the adult managers, helpers, and "child sav-
ers" (Platt 1969) who run the residential institutions. A chief goal of this
chapter is to reverse this trend, to redirect scholarship on residential insti-
tutions toward the interpretive approach.
This chapter has four main sections. The first is a discussion of the
cultural productions of the residents' world and of the staff world. This is a
discussion of genres of "cultural performances" (Geertz 1973) prominent
in the two worlds and does not substitute for more extensive treatments of
genres in other chapters of this Source Book and in other standard folklore
textbooks, such as Dorson's (1972, 1983) or Brunvand's (1978). The second
section examines those "institutional ceremonies" through which the staff
and residents come together to make the public, interactive culture of the
institution. I discuss there Goffman's seven ceremonies and add some more
I think are relevant. The third section surveys existing literature on the spe-
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? ? cial features of each of the four categories of residential institutions for chil-
dren and adolescents. The final section identifies special issues or problems
that ought to concern folklorists as they embark on the research this chap-
ter outlines.
CULTURAL PERFORMANCES AMONG RESIDENTS AND STAFF
I am adopting here Geertz's term (1973, 113) "cultural performances" to
denominate that large class of cultural productions that interest the folklor-
ist. "Ritual" and "play" are two of the most important sorts of cultural per-
formance, and some of the best work available to folklorists comes to deal,
one way or another, with these two and the relation between them. Rituals
tend to be the traditionalizing productions meant to confer legitimation and
order upon cultural ideas (Moore and Myerhoff 1977). Rituals serve to fix
public meanings, the objects and other symbols in the ritual aiding in the
process of making "visible and stable the categories of culture" (Douglas and
Isherwood 1979). Ritual and its symbolic adjuncts are both "models of" and
"models for" larger cultural patterns (Geertz 1973, 93).
Play, and all the cultural performances that are playful, are also es-
pecially framed realities, but in the case of play the function of the frame is
as often as not to cast doubt upon everyday life. Where ritual confirms, play
doubts (Handelman 1977, 1980). Play, Sutton-Smith reminds us, tends to
be antithetical, and play frames permit "transformations" of status, experi-
ment with otherwise terrifying objects or ideas, and a safe territory for try-
ing out alternative solutions to everyday problems (Schwartzman 1978). Our
goal is to be able to describe not only the structures and functions of these
framed experiences but to capture something of the "style" these children
and adolescents bring to their cultural performances (Hebdige 1979).
Having said this much about ritual and play as two possible frames
for cultural performances, we might identify some genres of performance
we would expect to find in the residents' culture. Many of these will be what
Goffman calls "secondary adjustments," that is to say, "practices that do
not directly challenge staff but allow inmates to obtain forbidden satisfac-
tions or to obtain permitted ones by forbidden means" (Goffman 1961a, 54).
Put differently, many of the cultural performances we find among the resi-
dential children are strategies of resistance, folk offensives in the political
struggle over "whose institution is this, anyway? "
We expect, for example, that the residents of one of these institutions
will develop a range of folk speech, an "institutional lingo" including nick-
names, special words for places, a special folk speech referring to the insti-
tutional food, and so on (Jackson 1965, 326-27). Lambert and Millham's
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? ? 1968 study of boys' and coeducational boarding schools in England and
Wales is full of the specialized folk speech of those institutions, and the great
virtue of their collection is that they used the diaries and other writings of
nearly seventeen hundred pupils. The authors found that these children cre-
ated their own private languages either by translating ordinary vocabulary
into a private one (for example, by adding "-mble" to all possible words,
so "grim" becomes "grimble" and "yes" becomes "yemble") or by bestow-
ing upon an existing word "a special meaning which, by and large, only the
underworld fully comprehends and savours. " Giallombardo (1974) found
that each of the three institutions for juvenile delinquents had complex sets
of "campus names," nicknames that were sometimes personal, sometimes
linked the young woman to one of the fictitious campus families that con-
stituted the prison social system, and sometimes distinguished those occu-
pying male and female roles. A whole complex of prison folk speech sus-
tains the social system of these incarcerated adolescent females, including
use of the masculine pronouns to refer to those assuming a male identity.
Thus, in a Midwestern prison the inmates' typology is of "studs, pimps and
foxes" (where a "popcorn" is an inmate who switches roles), and in a west-
ern prison the typologies contrast "fems and butches," "finks and snitchers,"
"squares and straights. " A young woman in the western institution also may
have a number of nicknames, "chick terms" (Giallombardo 1974, 212-22).
Total institutions sometimes attempt to control communications be-
tween the adolescent inmates, so there arise genres of folk speech both to
refer to illicit communications and to communicate illicitly. Again, prisons
seem to have the most developed versions of these codes. In the East Coast
institution Giallombardo studies, inmates communicated by letter (an "is-
sue") and developed an elaborate set of abbreviations and numbers to be
used in the margins, at the end of an "issue," or on the corner of the enve-
lope. TDDUP, for example, meant "Til Death Do Us Part," and H. n. W. A.
meant "Husband and Wife Always. " The numerical code "110" (pro-
nounced one-ten) meant "I Love You," and Giallombardo found that the
inmates sometimes increased the sentiment by doubling (220), tripling (330),
and so on. The number "225" meant a relationship as being terminated,
"333" meant a kiss, "711" a marriage, and "117" a divorce (Giallombardo
1974, 154-67).
Other genres of oral performance, including insults, jokes, toasts, and
similar shorter narratives, help create solidarity and hierarchy among the
residents. Polsky (1962) found ritual insults, "ranking," to be an important
form of communication in his study of a residential program for delinquent
boys, and I certainly found considerable "ranking" and joking among the
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? ? Boy Scouts I studied at their summer encampments (Mechling 1980a, 1981).
Residents are likely to have longer narratives as well, stories about
legendary happenings, colorful characters, and the like. Some may be per-
sonal history narratives, some cautionary tales. Single-sex camps have their
stories about the camper who "made it" to the other side of the lake to
"make it" with opposite-sex campers, and custodial institutions have rich
traditions of stories about escapes and captures. Jackson found in his prison
research a clear code among the inmates: "Don't inform, don't meddle, don't
bring heat-says the code. . . . A Folklore repertory accompanies the Code-
stories illustrating it in action or the dire retributions visited upon violators"
(Jackson 1965, 320). A sociologist employed by the California Youth Au-
thority tells me that supervisors have found handwritten lists of rules lay-
ing out just such a code.
Residential institutions are also likely to have legends and ghost sto-
ries, two genres that depend the most upon children and adolescents for their
survival and diffusion. Leary (1973) traces the history of one legend through
three decades in one Boy Scout troop and across several groups, making the
point that "Swamp Man" legends allow the adult leaders to exercise indi-
rect control over campers' behavior. Ellis (1981b, 1982) makes the same
point in his analysis of the contextual uses of legends by the staff members
of a camp serving potentially unruly, "underprivileged" children from ur-
ban Cleveland. Bronner (1988, 152-54; 315-16) discusses camp legends (see
his discursive footnotes in the fully annotated edition of his volume) and
Wells (1988) recounts the uses of the Girl Scout camp legend, "Red Eyes. "
Residential institutions may also have "humorous anti-legends" (Vlach 1971;
Bronner 1988, 154-59).
Ghost stories constitute a special case of legends at residential insti-
tutions.
