No More Learning

Barrie Thorne's (1993) book on the ways children construct and deconstruct
gender in their play on school grounds provides several hypotheses which
folklorists might test for residential insitutions.
Folklorists will want to attend, as well, to the confounding effects of
other variables in addition to setting and gender. Do ethnicity or social class
matter? What of religion? One of my Boy Scout informants had worked as
a staff member in both a Boy Scout camp and a YMCA camp, and he was
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? ? sure there were differences in style and values attributable to the explicit
religious orientation of a Y camp (see also Tillery 1992). The comparative
approach also must include cross-cultural perspectives. We have the British/
American comparison on boarding schools and residential treatment cen-
ters, but what of camps and hospitals?
Finally, I want to comment briefly on what I see as the implications
of study in this area for what is known as "applied folklore. " First, for the
sake of getting folklorists into these institutional settings, we ought to train
staff members to be folklorists. A folklore education for continuing students
with jobs in residential institutions will simultaneously yield an increasing
body of ethnographic descriptions of the folk cultures of these institutions
and, in the bargain, make these staff members better caretakers. I mean "bet-
ter" in the sense that they will have a new cognitive respect for the expres-
sive culture of their wards; and better, too, in the sense that the very act of
collecting the lore becomes a mode of communication between caretaker and
ward. Savin-Williams (1980a) gathered his information thanks to his role
as program director for two groups of counselors-in-training, and there is
no reason that we cannot have an army of folklore fieldworkers living and
working in residential institutions and bringing their studies back to the class-
room. I see Outward Bound programs and special camps (public and pri-
vate) for "troubled teens," for example, as two fieldwork settings desper-
ately in need of the folklorist's perspectives.
There is also something the folklorist has to offer the adult caretaker,
even if that caretaker does not wish to "join up" and become a participant-
observer. On one level, the folklorist can offer his or her services as a paid
consultant, to come into a residential institution, study the folk cultures of
both staff and inmates, and make recommendations to the administrators
of the institution. Folklorists are doing this already for businesses and not-
for-profit organizations, so I see no reason why we cannot offer our exper-
tise to the organizations that have as their wards millions of American chil-
dren.
There are seductions to beware of here, and I want to be realistic
about this. Some folklorists will be ineffective because they will maintain too
romantic a notion that folkloristics can ameliorate the sometimes awful con-
ditions in these institutions. And some folklorists, no doubt, will be coopted
early and find themselves serving the manipulative, interventionist goals of
the bureaucratic managers. But I am counting on the good sense and good
sensibilities of the greater number of folklorists who apply their expertise
to these "practical" settings with a proper sense of what folkloristics can
and cannot do.
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? ? I began this chapter by saying that American children sometimes feel
like prisoners in the institutions controlled by adults. I declared that I pre-
fer the interpretive to the normative approach to socialization, and every-
thing I wrote thereafter betrays (no doubt) that my sympathies lie more with
the vibrant, resisting folk culture of the residents and inmates than with the
adult staff. But the staff often feel like prisoners, too, and this may be the
final truth of this chapter-that the nature of modern civilization is such that
we all feel like prisoners. I am not sure if it is uniquely folkloristic to side
with the oppressed, any more than I am certain this is a uniquely American
trait, but I do know that a large part of the exhilaration I get from studying
the expressive folk cultures of children in residential institutions is to see how
resilient are human beings in controlled settings. No matter how deeply we
folklorists probe into the most awful and alienating human situations, we
usually find those humans able to make an artistic performance out of the
little left to them. Children are neither the innocents nor the enemy within.
They are just human beings, like us, a fact we sometimes forget.
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? ?
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? ? CONCLUSION
THE PAST IN THE PRESENT
THEORETICAL DIRECTIONS FOR CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
Felicia R. McMahon and Brian Sutton-Smith
We believe that with this collection of articles the groundwork has been laid
for future studies of children's folklore. The articles themselves vary between
older or newer approaches to the discipline-in that respect they are fairly
representative of the field as it currently stands-and they also indicate the
areas in which more work needs to be done. In an attempt to advance the
field, we begin this final chapter by analyzing past scholarship before pre-
ceding with suggestions for future directions. Mechling, for example, is con-
fident that the "interpretive" trend will become the major force in children's
folklore; that we will have more studies like those of Beresin and Hughes
of specific children in specific places and in consequence a more multifari-
ous set of children's subcultures-and less children's folklore composed sim-
ply of collections or only of an historical kind. The authors in this
Sourcebook are split about evenly among traditional, ethnographic, perfor-
mance, and interpretive kinds of approach.
THE OLDER TRADITION
The field of folklore began with an interest in origins, with survivals, and
with history, and this interest will probably continue; many of the problems
of historical origins and historical change have not been solved. Iona and
Peter Opie, for example, present us with an interesting test case. They are
undoubtedly the world's most famous children's folklorists, and over the past
forty years they have turned out classic after classic on children's lore
(rhymes, poems, tales, sayings and games). Their latest book, The Singing
Game (1985), is a product of anecdotal collections from many informants
and historical sources using meticulous literary scholarship. In this work they
largely eschew theory and interpretation and provide instead a grand
colligation of items organized in an encyclopedic manner. Insofar as there
is a main theme, it is that human nature is constant and continuous and gives
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? ? forth in different eras similar expressions in play, game, and song. They sup-
port this theme by offering sporadic evidence of ancient games or songs per-
sisting into modern times. In their present collection of 133 games, however,
of which eighty-two are singing games-the others being clapping, chant-
ing, or dramatic games-no more than half of those listed have persisted
beyond World War II, and only a handful of those that have persisted ex-
hibit much vigor in modern play. The exceptions appear to be Big ship sails
(a modern and reduced version of the ancient Thread the needle), Oranges
and lemons, A duke a riding, Rosey apple, Sally water, wallflowers, old
Roger, Jenny Jones, Romans and English, Nuts in May, the Mulberry bush
and Dusty bluebells.
Despite their interest in origins, what the Opies actually give us is a
picture of historical change as much as a picture of historical continuity. In
general, modern children, being younger players at these games than their
forebears, prefer games of simpler organization: circles with central persons,
chain games rather than couple games, or contest games and processional
games, which were once played so frequently by what we would now call
teenagers. Most striking in their work, and not commented on by the Opies,
is the remarkable upsurge in post-television years of games of buffoonery,
impersonation, dance routines, and clapping. These are by and large the sim-
plest unison games with all players acting in concert, singing either nonsense
or topical songs, and with players taking turns in the center. While there are
historical forerunners to many of these games, what most strikes our atten-
tion is their fadlike character and their ephemerality. Children's folklore
appears in many games to have taken on the character of modern mass-me-
dia culture, with its cycles of fashion and popularity. Dance routines, in par-
ticular, come and go as quickly as the topical songs that stimulate them.
There is, in addition, a more explicit vulgarity and sexuality in many of these
than was the case in the singing games of the prior century (Sutton-Smith
1987, 239-40).
But the most interesting picture of change in these fascinating pages
of The Singing Game is that which takes place from the lusty Middle Ages
to the bowdlerized late nineteenth century. These singing games were origi-
nally for couples with marital interests (at the advanced ages of twelve to
fifteen), who, through wild and bawdy actions, could try out their choices.
But in the 1800s, after centuries of church and civil suppression, they came
finally to be the games of unsophisticated girls who could make their choices
among other girls largely without the presence of boys at all. The games
became an enacted fantasy of marriage without the prospect that one might
in fact find one's real partner in the course of the play. But then the same
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? ? kind of domestication occurred during the nineteenth century to nursery
rhymes, children's literature, and dangerous outdoor games. Children were
put into schools, and their recreation was increasingly organized and super-
vised to remove from it remnants of mediaeval excess. Although the Opies'
work on "survivals" is itself something of a theoretical survival in modern
folklore, the beauty of their work The Singing Game, with its songs and
games, reminds us that authentic description and systematic scholarship
within a field are often the greater gift. One can, for example, review Lady
A. B. Gomme's collections from the 1890s of the traditional games of the
British Isles, which are not in any way modern surveys, and still respond with
wonder at the unique accounts to be found therein.
It may well be as Susan Stewart has asserted in an insightful and pro-
vocative analysis that these written accounts of folkgames and children's
folklore in general are examples of what she terms "crimes of writing"
(1991a). Stewart convincingly argues that the recording of these folk mate-
rials helped to establish an academic orthodoxy about the way in which these
games should be perceived, and that that perception had very little to do with
the original conditions of their play, deceiving us about their folk original-
ity. The forces for the organization of children's play, including the venera-
tion of a few selected game and folk traditions, also had its source, how-
ever, in many other Enlightenment-derived pressures for the education of the
nineteenth-century child. We need to concede that these collected game
records (whatever their biases) are better than most other things collected
about the play of children in prior centuries. If this is indeed a crime of writ-
ing in the Foucaultian sense, it seems from our present distance to have been
better than no writing at all.
THE MODERN CONDITION
All of which is to argue that although we agree with Jay Mechling about
the current trend in children's folklore scholarship, the work of the Opies
and Gomme is an illustration both of an earlier viewpoint and of the neces-
sity of continuing scholarship on the nature of both origins and historical
change. Their work is also a commentary on the view that childhood as we
know it is disappearing. What we have just noted is the way in which much
of children's folklore has taken on the velocity of the fads and fashions of
the modern entertainment world. If modern mass entertainments are, as
Raymond Williams (1979) has opined, the spectator "culture" that goes with
modern industrial society, then children's imitation of these fads indicates
that their folklore is also shifting rather than disappearing. Given that mod-
ern work life is largely nonmanual and schooling is universal, we would also
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? ? expect much of children's folklore now to be increasingly more verbal or
symbolic rather than physical. We suspect that the emphasis on rhymes,
riddles, humor, tales, and verbal tricks in the chapters by McDowell, Roemer,
Sullivan and Tucker, is not just an outcome of their own sociolinguistic train-
ing but a response also to the greater importance of these kinds of materi-
als in modern childhood. One can't help but note that when one compares
the Opies' Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959) with their Children's
Games in Street and Playground (1969) and their Singing Game (1985), the
earlier collections consist of more traditional material than the later, which
have less to say about origins and more to say about current practices. Simi-
larly, the American equivalent, One Potato, Two Potato by Mary and
Herbert Knapp (1976), is about two-thirds given over to verbal play. More
than one half of the more recent book American Children's Folklore by
Simon Bronner (1988) is about speech play. This contrasts with the earlier
books by Newell (1883) and Gomme (1894), in which there is relatively little
mention of verbal play.
So childhood is not disappearing; it has perhaps become more ver-
bal and harder to locate in concrete behavioral space. That is always sup-
posing that this change between the books of earlier days and the books of
today does in fact correspond to a real change in children's behavior. In A
History of Children's Play (Sutton-Smith 1981a) based on comparing the
reminiscences of the elderly with the play of the young, such change certainly
seems to have occurred. Perhaps current childhood does indeed occupy more
verbal crevices and less obvious physical space than used to be the case. Play-
grounds were initially events in the cultural taming of rural childhood and
urban vagabonds, as Mergen makes clear. The idea of "the playground"
persists, however, in part as a romantic fantasy among adult playground
advocates who talk about the child's rights to play, while confining it in their
own select forms of physical space. We have tried to move in a contrary and
less domesticating direction by talking about the playground as a festival
(Sutton-Smith 1990b). The reality is, however, that in some places play-
grounds have been abandoned because of their imagined or real dangers and
have been replaced by physical-education lessons. It is possible that playing
verbally in the cracks of so much powerful adult organization is often the
only alternative left for some children. Which is to say, the shift from physical
to verbal play may reflect not only the general cultural changes in the world
of adult work, from manual to symbolic, but also changes in the actual free-
dom that children have to carry on their older traditions of play.
In the meantime, today's more symbolically mobile children are some-
times more likely to be found in their own bedrooms or in front of a televi-
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? ? sion set or at a home computer than in the streets or the playgrounds. But
they are also more directly exploitable by the marketplace, which has steadily
developed them as a consumer resource over the past two decades. Much
of the disquiet of modern parents has to do with this increasing and direct
availability of their children to the marketplace through television. Three
hundred years of the bourgeoisie's sloughing off the parochial folk controls
over children through the culture of traditional neighborhood games has been
called into question by this sudden susceptibility of modern children to com-
mercial infringement.
But children's sharing of this vicarious media world with their par-
ents doesn't mean that they are no longer children. Most parents deny that
they simply bow to what television suggests for their children (Sutton-Smith
1986), and those other special arrangements for children's domestication
(schools, books, toys, and recreation programs) continue apace. Whatever
may be happening to their parents in the occupational world, it is still the
fate of children to be put in their own separate zoos run by adult educators
and other supervisors of children. This fundamental segregation is not al-
tered because there is this new development of shared symbolic television
space. Nor is there much indication of any modification on the American
scene of the desire by most educated parents to shelter real children from
real violence, grossness, vulgarity, or sex, no matter what may be happen-
ing on the television screen or in dysfunctional families. In short, childhood
continues but we often have so little adequate descriptive research about it
that we cannot tell how it is different or how it is the same as in times past.
THE DISJUNCTION OF CHILD AND ADULT
The basic underlying condition of modern childhood seems to be its disjunc-
tion from adulthood. Modern enculturation is founded on this discontinu-
ity. In folklore terms this means that as long as the two groups, adult and
child, differ in power and life space, then the interaction between them will
lead to the kinds of tensions from which the lore of each group about the
other will usually arise. The more unique their separate needs and their op-
position, the greater the folklore and the development of group lore calcu-
lated to respond to them. On the one hand, there are the parents, the teach-
ers, and the psychological experts banding together for the preservation of
their own values about childhood; on the other, there are dyads, cliques, and
gangs of children developing their own business of life and often using tra-
ditional materials to do so.
Mechling asks whether there can be a theory that makes all the ma-
terial of this work hang together, that unites the irrational with the ratio-
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? ? nal, the spirit of childlore with the socialization of adults. Perhaps to expect
the two to be brought together is a "rational" kind of view, "an enlighten-
ment view" that is simply not what children's folklore is about and presum-
ably not what folklore scholars should be about (Spariosu 1989). The very
danger of this sourcebook is that it provides more means for some adults
to supervise children more carefully in order to get rid of their folklore. What
Tatar aptly writes about adult revisions of fairytales for children stands for
their approach to children's play in general: There is "the idea that a litera-
ture targeted for them must stand in the service of pragmatic instrumental-
ity rather than foster an unproductive form of playful pleasure" (1992, xxv).
Bauman, the erstwhile director of the largest funded project on children's
folklore and education, expresses concern that researchers themselves con-
tinue to place too much emphasis on the didactic uses of children's folklore
and neglect in consequence the study of "the aggressive, obscene, scatologi-
cal, antiauthoritarian, and inversive elements. . , that any student of childen's
folklore knows well to be a central part of the expressive culture of child-
hood" (1982, 173). Here Bauman is referring to children's folklore that very
few folklorists have cared to publish, such as the article "High Kybo Floater:
Food and Feces in the Speech Play at a Boy Scout Camp" (Mechling 1984b).
Perhaps some of the adults reading this book will acknowledge the memo-
ries of childhood being evoked here that they have hitherto refused to ac-
knowledge; in consequence, they may make more provision for this rueful
joyfulness to take place in childhood. After all, a conclusion about play, by
all those who work in play therapy at least, is that a major meaning of play
in childhood is that it is a pretense of society and self of a vigorous and life-
restoring kind (Erikson 1950).
Play's promise may lie in human optimism
and commitment to life, rather than those other incidental correlates of prob-
lem solving, creativity, and imagination that have taken on a vogue in re-
cent psychology and education.
THEORY FOR CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
Perhaps there is something we can do for Mechling's theoretical call with-
out falling into the usual rationalistic traps. If we begin by not accepting the
usual romantic disjunction of childhood and adulthood but instead apply
to children the same kind of theories we apply to adults in distinctive cul-
tural groups, we might make some progress. It is, for example, the promise
of children's folklore that it can bring a sense of the same cultural relativity
to our view of childhood that we generally apply to other groups. Thus, al-
though the "savages" and the "women" may have escaped from the unilinear
theory of cultural evolution (of which Zumwalt speaks), the children are still
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? ? not free. By and large in official academic and educational quarters their life
is thought of as a series of steps and stages to higher forms of adult matu-
rity. Whereas just as cultural relativity implies that each human group fash-
ions its own forms of human adaptation and expression and that each has
its wonder and beauty (as well as disasters), so with childhood there is an
aesthetic for each age, which may be celebrated (or cursed) by adults, rather
than simply glossed as an inevitably inferior step on the way to the "won-
ders" of adults' civilization, reason, and morality.
Importantly, because children are members of the most politically
powerless group, their folklore is usually favored for purposes that are not
especially those of the children. It is seldom possible to be rationally in fa-
vor of children without interfering with much that they do that is not very
rational. For this reason, we see the study of children's folklore as a very
special territory in which groundbreaking research can still be accomplished,
that is, if we pay it the tribute of considering it in terms of various contem-
porary cultural theories that are taken very seriously on the adult level but
seldom applied to children. Thus we may argue that the whole field of
children's folklore can take new directions by incorporating the recent cul-
tural ideas about power as expressed among heteronomous groups of schol-
ars like James C. Scott, Roger M. Keesing, Joan N. Radner, and Susan S.
Lanser. Our first step is to recognize that their theories allow us to look be-
neath the superficially placid surface of children's play to understand how
important are the power-related aspects of children's folklore and its forma-
tion. It would not be false to argue that although there are multiple inter-
pretations of children's folklore in the foregoing pages, the dominant theme
throughout is that of the power the children exercise over each other, and
the power they seek in their relationship to adults, mythical or real. There
is also throughout these chapters a diffuse and seldom fully explicated rheto-
rics of progress at work. When one considers that 99 percent of the books
about or for children have progress as their explicit or hidden agenda, the
child-power-oriented contents of this book constitutes a massive denial of
the validity of those adultcentric orientations.
PERFORMANCE STUDIES IN CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
Before we proceed further with the power analysis, however, we need also
mention what might be regarded as an equally valid contemporary concern
in current adult folklore with tradition as a series of cultural perfor-
mances. This focus manifests itself in a concern with the microanalytics of
the ways in which the children themselves maintain and present their own
traditional folk culture to each other in behavior, speech, gestures, rules,
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? ? codes, and secrets (Sutton-Smith 1989a). We need not spend time on dem-
onstrating what this means in this conclusion, because it is very well shown
by a number of the articles in this Sourcebook, particularly those by Beresin
and the authors in Section III. This approach, which privileges aesthetic per-
formance issues, is refreshingly alive compared with the older concern with
collecting texts only or making formal accounts children's activities. Still,
along with the rhetoric of progress, the rhetoric of fancy, of which perfor-
mance theory is a manifestation, leads to an idealization of childhood life,
and pleasant and nostalgic as that is for us elders, it can be called into ques-
tion (Sutton-Smith, in press). Power theorists, for example, tend to downplay
performance theory's implicit avoidance or perpetuation of the inequalities
of race, gender, social class, sexuality, and nationality, which are present in
the world of folklore (Briggs 1993). In defense of performance, however, we
could argue that these performance-oriented studies nicely demonstrate that
despite the importance of the power context of the folklore which we are
about to discuss, the lore itself, whatever its rhetorical usage, is sustained
primarily by the very universal interest of players in the enjoyment they get
through their own activation of these playforms. There is an inherent and
probably built-in neurological logic to play that is the first cause of all of
these phenomena, no matter what other important causes may also come
to be served within the larger culture. There is nothing that will allow us to
say that the children's own drive for aesthetic enjoyment is not as impor-
tant as their drive for empowerment. What we can say is that both of these
rhetorics so well evidenced in this work contrast mightily with all other books
about and for childhood in which the rhetoric of progress is dominant. This
book is a powerful manifesto against what has been taken for granted
throughout the culture throughout the past two hundred years, that the busi-
ness of childhood is to grow up and shut up.
CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE AS A MANIFESTATION OF POWER RELATIONSHIPS
The material of children's folklore permits us to look at it as a power phe-
nomenon in a number of ways:
1. An earlier way was to describe the various transformations of
power that are mirrored by the play structures themselves (Sutton-Smith
1954). Thus, if games are ordered in terms of their increasing complexity
with age, one can sketch out the sequence of power transformations that
playing children participate in with age. Structurally, using the writings of
either Propp or Levi-Strauss, one can generate the binary character and or-
der of power relationships as thus mirrored in child development. Younger
children deal in central person power relationships ("it" games) and these
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? ? are transformed with age so that the power originally centered on the cen-
tral person is increasingly shared with or shifted to the hands of the group
of others (sports). The games very neatly model the crucial nature of power
achieved or lost in the interaction between opposing characters or groups.
The games constitute a simple grammar of the nature of political power in
which all children participate insofar as they play games of any sort. The
research of Roberts and Sutton-Smith (Sutton-Smith 1972a) also established
on an anthropological (and not just psychological) level that cross-cultur-
ally the triad of games of chance, strategy, and physical skill mirrored par-
allel processes in the larger societies of which they were a part. Both of these
kinds of research on types and levels of power had their heyday in the intel-
lectual climate of "structuralism. "
2. With the increasing vogue for ethnographic and performance stud-
ies in folklore, it became clear that when particular groups playing particu-
lar games were studied in their own context many complications were ob-
served that greatly modified the picture of power relationships sketched in
the above fairly abstract ways. The chapter by Hughes in the present vol-
ume is a groundbreaking example of such research. It turns out that quite
apart from the larger abstract structural account of power relationships de-
scribed above, there are many other power manipulations also taking place
on a more covert level. The rules of the games state one power relationship;
the actual gaming of those rules reveals differences in the various ways in
which every group attempts to manipulate those rules in their own favor.
3. In addition, however, to the machinations of the players within their
own games or folklore from which various power relationships and systems
can be inferred, what Scott et al. make clear is that folklore also contains
echoes of the way in which the players are also relating to the adult culture
of which they are a part when these games are played. Traditionally, play
has been seen as largely a mimetic phenomenon, an interpretation which
privileges the adult world as the model. What is apparent, however, is that
much of play is a mockery of that adult world at the same time as it is a
mimicry. So what we wish to sketch in the rest of this conclusion is not only
the way in which play models and manifests power relationships, but also
the way in which play expresses power and powerlessness by being sub-
versive of the normative culture of which it is a part. But it is important to
stress here that the play is generally both dialectically normative and sub-
versive at the same time in varying degrees (Sutton-Smith 1978a). By sub-
versive we mean all those multifaceted expressions of the child groups that
undermine the authority of the dominant culture, well illustrated in this vol-
ume in the chapters by Jorgensen, McDowell, Mechling, Sullivan, and
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? ? Zumwalt. It is at the privileged site of clandestine folklore that the subver-
sive thrives. Scott (1990) has argued that a partly sanitized, ambiguous and
coded version of this subversive "hidden transcript" is always present some-
where in the public discourse of subordinate groups, and further: "The dia-
lectic of disguise and surveillance that pervades relations between the weak
and the strong will help us, I think, to understand the cultural patterns of
domination and subordination. The theatrical imperatives that normally
prevail in situations of domination produce a public transcript in close con-
formity with how the dominant group would work to have things appear.
The dominant never control the stage absolutely, but their wishes normally
prevail. In the short run, it is in the interest of the subordinate to produce a
more or less credible performance" (1990, 40).
Most of the research to this point has been done on the way in which
subordinate colonial, racial, ethnic, or gender groups use their own folklore.
McMahon has shown, for example, the daring ways that women undermine
their more powerful spouses while in their very presence using coded and
apparently joking statements that the women know will be incorrectly per-
ceived by their husbands. These "flaunted" hidden transcripts are clandes-
tinely and gleefully understood by the other women present (McMahon
1993). Likewise, as children compose the most powerless subaltern group,
we should expect them to have multiple and complex ways of subverting
authority-behaviors that must be taken into account by researchers.
Sutton-Smith (1990a) has presented a typology for identifying the stra-
tegic ways that children create the folklore that subverts adults and em-
powers children. His provisional schemata consists of disorder, failure, and
antithesis. We can rephrase these categories and further develop them in terms
of the literature in the adult field of resistance as follows: Disorder and fail-
ure are similar to Radner's and Lanser's "appropriation" and "incompetence,"
which are categories in their typology for the identification of women's
strategic codes (1993). The latter, Sutton-Smith's antithesis, is like the logic
of opposition in Keesing's discussion of "contestation" (1992) because it is a
way that empowers and subverts under the noses of those who wield power.
To illustrate the material for a further analysis of children's folklore as a docu-
mentation of power relationships, consider the following details:
Disorder. Here we deal with the delight that children have in creat-
ing disorder out of order. On the child level this is reflected in unisons of
shoutings and noise-making, knocking down blocks and sand castles, laugh-
ing hysterically at deviations in adult behavior (as in cartoons, Charlie
Chaplin, Three Stooges, Batley) rolling about on the ground, falling down
on purpose, phonological and repetitive babble, telling stories full of mixed
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? ? disasters such as being lost, stolen, angry, dead, stepped on, hurt, burned,
killed, crashed, and so forth (Sutton-Smith 1981b). Remembering that adults
also take joy in carnivals, festivals, roller coasters, clowns, rock concerts,
and contact sports, where disorder is also a central characteristic, it is pos-
sible to argue that this impulse for disorderly play is a universal character-
istic, perhaps itself not unrelated to such human disorderly fatefulness as war,
catastrophe, hurricanes, death, and riots. Bakhtin's emphasis upon laugh-
ter as the basic and universal human reaction against fate through its disor-
dering impact, further suggests a certain universality in the phenomenon. We
remember his accounts of the orgiastic peasant festivals described by Rabelais
as such a deep and universal reaction to endless suppression. As a character
in Paul Willis's more modern Learning to Labour says about the battle that
some adolescent British boys put up against their schooling, "I think that
fuckin laffing is the most important thing in fuckin everything. Nothing ever
stops me laffing . . . I don't know why I want to laff, I dunno why it's so
fuckin important. It just is. . . . I think it's just a good gift, that's all, because
you can get out of any situation. If you can laff, if you can make yourself
laff, I mean really convincingly, it can get you out of millions of things. . . .
You'd go fuckin berserk if you didn't have a laff occasionally" (Willis 1977,
29). What this and some of the earlier examples show is that no matter what
dimensions of universality laughter and disorder may have, much of this
apparently irrational playfulness is in childhood directed against adult sup-
pression and interference and order. Other examples in this volume are the
pranks examined by Mechling and Jorgensen as well as Fine's mention of
his data on children's fartlore. What we have in this material on closer view
is a demystification of the structure of the dominant adult culture that dem-
onstrates its ephemeral control. Sluckin, for example, discusses what is called
a "taxi" ritual by some British schoolboys in which when one denies to the
teacher that he has passed wind, then the whole class passes wind (1981,
32). Many a schoolteacher has been unraveled simply by being laughed at
by the whole class either openly or surreptitiously. Such behavior is so com-
mon that "taunting the teacher" may actually constitute a genre in its own
right (Oxrieder 1976). As it has been explained elsewhere, however, much
of the disorder of children's play is an assertion of control within that play
itself, rather than being directed at the adult culture (Sutton-Smith 1977).
Apparently life as well as adults generate this response in us all.
Failure. Modern childen grow up in an achievement society where
they are graded endlessly on their accomplishments. A kind of disorder, there-
fore, which they especially seem to cherish is the disorder of failure, though
unlike many of the earlier physical disorders this one apparently doesn't
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? ? make its appearance until school days. Perhaps the most spectacular ex-
amples are the moron jokes, where stupidity is most celebrated. But folly
and stupidity is revered also in riddles (You go to the bathroom American.
You come out of the bathroom American. What are you in the bathroom?
European). There are Mary Jane jokes (Mary Jane went to the doctor and
he told her she was going to have twins. She laughed and laughed because
she knew she hadn't done it twice), cruel mummy jokes, elephant jokes, dead
baby jokes, Helen Keller jokes, Dolly Parton jokes, Christa McCauliffe jokes,
grosser than gross jokes, and so forth. In many of these there is fictional-
ized failure at the expense of some conventional attitude or authority or
nicety or decency. The teller achieves a magical distance in telling the tale
of the failures of life-not in some way unlike the adult gambler whose
mastery is in choosing how and where to lose, or a golf player whose mas-
tery is much of the time in choosing to play badly for the rest of his or her
life, but at least to keep playing. It is not hard to see much of the folklore
of childhood, or adulthood for that matter, as a lore of empowerment, of
fictional mastery over the presented fates.
The general undercurrent of an interest in playful disorder or failures
becomes public on those occasions when it is suddenly used directly against
authority, as when a class clown is applauded by his or her peers for sabo-
taging a teacher's efforts in the classroom with his or her nonsense or "tra-
ditional" inappropriate answers. These particular occasions justify us in say-
ing that much of children's folklore exists in an interstitial world between
fantasy and reality. This is like most of the subcultures that Scott discusses,
where there are multiple traditions of antagonism but these are muted and
indirect and fantasied until a moment when particular hostilities bring them
to the surface. But they do nevertheless exist as an ongoing culture of self-
regard and group confirmation. This is as true of the adult underclass as it
is of the child underclass.
Antithesis. Disorder is at base a fairly undirected primordial chaos.
Failure directs the blame at the persons who are stupid or without power.
The implication that more powerful persons are responsible is not directly
drawn. But with antithesis the fictional attack upon the mighty is rendered
more clearly. Antithesis is an expressive behavior that presupposes an op-
positional tension and demystifies the dominant culture through parody,
mirroring, or inversion. Sullivan cites the work of the Knapps, who recorded
the following song parody: "My Bonnie lies over the ocean; my Bonnie lies
over the sea. My daddy lies over my mommy, and that's how they got little
me (Knapp and Knapp 1976, 172, 185). So, too, Bronner recorded several
song parodies such as "Row, row row your boat; gently down the stream.
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? ? Throw your teacher overboard, and listen to her scream" (1988, 101).
Other kinds of antithesis suggested by the writings of Radner and
Lanser include such concepts as that of trivialization, in which subversive
expressions play off dominant culture expectations about what is trivial.
When Butler (1989, 94) asked a young Dutch girl to recite her favorite
jump-rope rhyme, the child responded with this verse (which rhymes in
Dutch): "A dog made a poopoo/Under a tree/A Frenchman came along/And
ate it. " Although the child's mother and grandmother were present, there
was little that could be said about the child responding to a request to re-
cite a "mere" jump-rope rhyme. Then there is indirection, which Radner and
Lanser (1993) define as hedging or leaving out key words that members of
the group know are also part of the text. Reinterpreting their category for
women's strategy coding, we include here what Dundes (1967) terms the
"evasive answer," which is one of his thirteen genres of children's folklore.
Indirection can also occur with tongue twisters that are disguised so as to ap-
pear innocent: "I slit a sheet, a sheet I slit. Upon this slitted sheet I sit" (Dundes
1967; Galvin 1990, 168). Also, adults may be familiar with only one ver-
sion of a text, such as: "Jeff and Mary sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. First
comes love, then comes marriage.