Even today, a patronizing
attitude
sometimes shows in treat-
ing children's things.
ing children's things.
Childens - Folklore
net/2027/usu.
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hathitrust.
org/access_use#cc-by-nc-nd-3.
0
? ? I2 MATERIAL FOLK CULTURE
OF CHILDREN
Simon J. Bronner
"One of my favorite toys when I was four years old was a piece of stiff wire
roughly twelve inches long, bent into the shape of a double letter C. It must
have been the piece that holds a thermos bottle firmly in the lid of a metal
lunch box. I found it on the beach in southern California and named it
'gropper,' because, I think, the lower part of the C looked to me like the legs
of a grasshopper. The upper part looked something like the bill of a duck.
In the ensuing months I worked with my mother and grandmother to make
a large wardrobe of bright colored socks to pull over the ends of the wire
legs and a variety of wool, silk, and cotton tubes to slip over the bill and
cover its body. For several years, Gropper held an honored place among my
other toys-cars, Teddy Bear, blocks, and soldiers-but at some point I be-
came self-conscious and a bit embarrassed about my fantasy and discarded
Gropper, bag and baggage. If I had kept Gropper and donated him, together
with the rest of my playthings, to the Smithsonian, what would a curator
do with such a bizarre object? " (Mergen 1982, 121-22).
Children, when left to their own devices, can create elaborate things-
objects, indeed environments, suited to the spirit and imagination of youth.
Yet often such creativity eludes the watchful eye of the parent, no less the
curator or ethnographer. The child commonly keeps the creation private.
Why? Children may feel embarrassed about making playthings themselves
when toys supplied by Mom and Dad sit idly by, or they may be discour-
aged from strange (by adult standards, anyway) flights of fancy. Many par-
ents take the attitude that the child's world springs from adult hands and
tastes. Many folk toys, songs, and games for children, in fact, are really
crafted by adults. But children do think for themselves, and thought sparks
creativity-a small world of their own making.
This chapter offers a guide to basic issues, approaches, and sources
associated with the study of the many material worlds of children. First, I
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? ? offer a historical background to the study itself, and I follow with a survey
of some approaches used today. I make a case for the special study of folk
or traditional objects and processes as a special category of research into
material culture. In doing so, I realize that some distinctions between mass
and folk culture are necessary, although the two cannot easily be separated.
Because an important point of this survey is the way that the traditional
expressions of children vary, not only by regional or ethnic culture, but also
by their very maturation process, I particularly explore developmental ap-
proaches. I suggest ways to combine comparison of texts or objects with
contexts or processes across the life course, and I examine how ethnicity,
gender, region, and class have been especially evident in research on the
material folk culture of children.
I begin by offering an example of an object that is both a text and a
context and suggests the process by which small worlds are created. The
treehouse is an enclosed space that relies greatly on the child's imagination.
Usually built by children's hands, the rough exterior and makeshift furni-
ture inside become transformed. The height and cover of the tree offers chil-
dren, especially, it seems, boys, a certain independence. Engaging in the pro-
cess of gathering materials, construction, and occupation allows for partici-
pation in culture. It responds to, and also establishes, traditions. Children
are discovering their technical capabilities and something about aesthetics
and design. In the American setting, this design emphasizes a square or rect-
angular shape and social separation. Thomas Yukic, for example, recalled
his 1930s childhood in Niagara Falls for New York Folklore. A memory that
stood out was of the things his "gang" built: "Tommy Leshak built a com-
plete hut near the elm tree on the island, bringing every scrap of material
by boat to construct a small eight foot square building. It was a great place
for rainy days and card games. The hut was of corrugated tin roofing and
wood planks; Tom poured a cement floor from the left-over cement drip-
pings which were washed off daily by Empire Builders Supply Company
trucks near Sandocks" (Yukic 1975, 225).
Down in New York City, Fred Ferretti reported returning to the neigh-
borhood where he grew up, only to find that not as much had changed as
he thought. "The empty lot where we built huts out of wood scraps and dis-
carded refrigerator cartons, where we roasted 'Mickies'-the right way to
roast them was to dig a shallow hole in the dirt, line it with bricks, fill it
with wood, start a fire, and drop the raw potatoes into the flames; they were
cooked when their skins were reduced to jet-black powder. To my surprise,
the basketball backboard we built and nailed to the telephone pole a couple
of houses away from mine was still attached, although there was no hoop"
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? ? (Ferretti 1975, 13). He realized upon reflection that adults often believe that
their childhood labors were unique. But he found strong continuities between
the items made in his childhood and what he found when he returned. He
sensed traditions at work.
Manipulating resources and structures to shape things is an everyday
experience for youth (Adler 1981, 8-10; Bronner 1986b). Think back to your
childhood. I know that in mine play typically involved making things.
Stickball bats were made from broom handles, go-carts from skates and
boards, slingshots from clothes hangers. Wadded paper became ammunition
for jerry-built "spit-shooters" loaded with green pellets taken from wild
cherry trees. We made boats out of scrap wood to try out in the park pond.
Children on my block hunted down and altered all manner of smooth sur-
faces for sledding during the winter. We even had a hideout in an isolated
lot where we constructed makeshift shelters and tables. You probably also
recall long hours altering and using the box the Christmas present came in,
long after the gift's attraction passed.
Material folk culture is the term commonly used to describe such tra-
ditional, creative encounters with physical things. It is not simply the exist-
ence of individual items that is significant but their interconnection of con-
cept and design as well as their association with a social system. As to the
folk in material folk culture of children, when recording the traditional be-
havior of children, I look for informal ways children interact and learn. True,
they might consult a book or ask a teacher, but I find that informal, or folk,
learning through word of mouth, demonstration or imitation, and custom-
ary example are still the predominant means by which children acquire
knowledge of technique and form. Out on the beach, children begin digging;
later they consult one another or imitate models elsewhere in their view. As
they build their sand forts, they go through a folk process. To be sure, forms
exist that folklorists call folk because they stand up to the usual test of tra-
dition-whether they repeat and vary over time and space. String figures like
the cat's cradle, carved wooden chains, and, more recently, the "cootie
catcher" made of paper are examples (Boas 1938; Bronner 1981a; Samuelson
1980). Still, my study of "folk" is meant to shed light on the thought and
behavior of people; the lore is only a partial representation of the behavior
involved in creativity (Bronner 1986a). Especially when dealing with chil-
dren, I observe the processes of learning, communicating, and making-the
active and cognitive parts of traditional expression.
The material of material folk culture includes both construction and
decoration. In the study of children's material culture, primary attention has
been given to toys and other objects used in play (Schlereth 1990). Second
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? ? is art and craft (often also discussed as part of play), and occasionally body
ornamentation commonly applied to hair, nails, and face. Other subjects are
neglected, yet could easily be part of the study of children's folk culture.
Foodways, clothing, and ephemeral architecture (treehouses, for example),
indeed the connection between children's labor and play, still await studies
in depth. As material, the objects and environments under study provide
tangible evidence that especially suggests considerations of form and creative
process (see Bronner 1986a, 1986b). As evidence of shared tradition, the
material suggests social interaction and culture in process. Here I am con-
cerned with the ways that the tradition works at a given age, keeping in mind
that influencing factors of gender, ethnicity, and region, to name a few vari-
ables, have a bearing on cultural expression. In the following discussion, my
use of material culture centers on things made or altered by children for their
use.
A primary task taken up in some of the first studies of the material
folk culture of children was to describe through American history the vari-
ety of skills and crafts children have engaged in. In 1898, Alice Morse Earle
wrote a chronicle of Colonial everyday life that covered the rounds of
children's life. Looking through diaries and travelers' accounts she found that
demands were put on boys and girls to be "useful. " A young girl from
Colchester, Connecticut, wrote in her diary in 1775: "Fix'd two gowns for
Welsh's girls,-Carded two,-Spun linen,-Worked on Cheesebasket,-
Hatchel'd flax with Hannah, we did 51 lbs. apiece,-Pleated and ironed,-
Read a Sermon of Dodridge's,-Spooled apiece,-Milked the cows,-Spun
linen, did 50 knots,-Made a Broom of Guinea wheat straw,-Spun thread
to whiten,-Set a Red dye,-Had two Scholars from Mrs. Taylor's,-I carded
two pounds of whole wool and felt Nationly,-Spun harness twine,-
Scoured the pewter" (Earle 1898, 253). Beyond the chores of the house and
farm, girls were expected to indulge in decorative crafts such as embroidery,
paper cutting, and lace making. Many of these activities were taught to chil-
dren by adults. The private world that children made is often harder to un-
cover. Earle implied, however, that the association of children's material cul-
ture almost totally with play is a modern one. She spotlighted material cul-
ture as an important part of American social history of family and commu-
nity life.
The use of a historical outline to describe children's culture persists
to the present. Bernard Mergen's survey of play, for example, included a
chapter on the artifacts of play (see also Heininger 1984; Graff 1987; West
and Petrik 1992). His outline showed a movement from handmade toys
taken from nature to games and toys increasingly mass-produced. To cat-
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? ? egorize the early period, he quoted Dorothy Howard's turn-of-the-century
reminiscence: "A 'plaything'-a stick, for example-was not a stick but
(metaphorically) a horse to ride, a thermometer for playing doctor, a writ-
ing or drawing tool for marking on the ground, a log for building log cab-
ins, a boat to float down a rivulet from a spring shower, play candy, a shot-
gun for hunting, or another person. " "To the bounty of nature," Mergen
wrote, "the Industrial Revolution added a vast toy store of play objects:
washers, tires, clothespins, coat hangers, tin cans, ball point pens, paper
plates, bottle tops, rubber bands, and paper clips" (Mergen 1982, 104).
Modern toys, he claimed, are dominated by the mass culture; factory-made
toys by this reasoning have overshadowed folk toys in the twentieth cen-
tury. His linear model harks back to the notion that progress inevitably
marches forward and eliminates folk culture. It is problematic to assume that
folk culture does not adapt to changing surroundings, or that moderniza-
tion necessarily means that industry replaces the influence of the handmade
object. To be sure, more interaction takes place between folk processes and
mass-produced products today, but then again there has always been an in-
teraction between folk and popular culture. Modern toys have also attracted
more attention since maintaining childhood as a separate generation of lei-
sure through specialized products has been a recent commercial preoccupa-
tion of adults.
Research of artifacts greatly informs the social history of childhood,
but the prevailing scholarship tends to overrepresent popular toys and fur-
nishings associated with middle- and upper-class living because they have
remained in the historical record (Schlereth 1990; Carson 1989). An addi-
tional problem is the tendency to structure history in an exclusively linear
and progressive direction. Folk culture scholarship often portrays simulta-
neous trends toward tradition and change, and examines local worlds for
differences. For the subject of playthings through time, the child's hidden
folk technics and their interaction with popular culture demand a closer look.
A social-historical study by Miriam Formanek-Brunell, for instance, claims
that contemporary popular culture has obscured the traditions of doll play
in America enacted by both boys and girls during the nineteenth century,
before the toy industry commercialized doll play, and, in the author's view,
girlhood. A similar argument emerges from Karin Calvert's study of children's
furnishings and clothing from 1600 to 1900. Her book brings out the ma-
terial ways that a nurtured childhood as a separate stage of life developed.
As a context for children's creativity, the creation of the child's room, the
differentiation of rooms and furnishings by gender, and the dressing of chil-
dren to encourage special kinds of activities provide critical contexts for ways
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? ? that children make things and view their surroundings.
The resources of art history have promised to provide some fresh his-
torical perspectives on childhood. Recent studies by Anita Schorsch, and
Sandra Brant and Elissa Cullman, outline attitudes of adults toward chil-
dren by analyzing images of children and their surroundings in painting and
sculpture-by some folk, but mostly nonfolk artists. Children's attitudes were
more difficult to interpret, since scant evidence remains of children's wares.
To their credit, Brant and Cullman include more of this evidence-samplers,
drawings, and even hair wreaths made by children-in Small Folk than
Schorsch did in Images of Childhood. But Brant and Cullman stressed the
unusual aesthetic quality of the objects, rather than, as would have been
called for by folklorists, the typical folk objects of social and psychological
significance.
Many museums have aided historians and folklorists by preserving
children's folk artifacts and publishing catalogs and essays based on their
collections (Mergen 1980, 173-77; Hewitt and Roomet 1979). Some, like
the Children's Museum in Indianapolis and the Children's Museum of the
Brooklyn Museum, emphasize children's culture and collect folk toys and
artifacts. Others are general-history museums that include children's mate-
rial, although the folk artifacts are commonly not clearly identified. Included
in this category are the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C. , the
Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, and the Shelburne Museum
in Burlington, Vermont. America also boasts folk museums that collect his-
toric artifacts of childlife. Especially strong are the Farmer's Museum and
Fenimore House in Cooperstown, New York, Old Sturbridge Village in
Sturbridge, Massachusetts, and Conner Prairie Pioneer Settlement in
Noblesville, Indiana. Generally, such museums are concerned with describ-
ing children's toys and playthings as part of children's social life in the dis-
tant past (see Carson 1989; Heininger 1984).
Another historical approach, oral history, documents the more recent
past by recording childhood memories of the elderly. Among the most in-
formative and compassionate is folklorist Roger E. Mitchell's biography of
his Maine father, "I'm a Man That Works. " The childhood he describes in
Maine, as elsewhere, separated tasks appropriate to either boys or girls. Girls
worked inside, especially with fabric and food. Boys worked with wood; they
were outdoors. Mitchell recounts making sleds on the model of the bigger
bobsleds (Mitchell 1978, 27). Similarly, Thomas Yukic recalls boys build-
ing boats in Niagara Falls, New York (Yukic 1975, 211-28). This is what
boys did, after all, he says. But with modern social changes in sexual roles,
questions now arise about the actual persistence and variation of such pat-
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? ? terns. The memory that people recount becomes itself a kind of object to
be manipulated to fulfill an image of present selves. Material folk culture
of childhood is often remembered as an index of attitudes toward and ide-
als of sexual roles and symbols.
Having compiled the objects of childhood, many researchers opt to
compare their textual and formal qualities, much in the manner of literary
critics. In a groundbreaking folkloristic report on American children's ma-
terial culture, Fanny Bergen in 1895 published reports of children making
paints from plants. Pigweed gave a green liquid; bloodroot produced orange;
keel yielded red. She wanted to know the circulation of such customs. Play
fights with violets, for instance, she found in the United States, Canada, and
Japan. She saw some significance in the similarity among customs of soci-
eties around the world, and used the distribution of children's customs to
illustrate variation within the unity of culture.
In her valuable inventory of childhood practices, Bergen also men-
tioned children who produced the figure of a baby or an old lady out of an
ox-eye daisy, made trombones of the prickly leaf-stalks of pumpkins, strung
horse-chestnuts on dogwood berries, and created boats out of peapods
(Bergen 1895c). To many, these practices reflect children's fascination with
the shape and life of the plant world. Often parents report that their chil-
dren notice details of the vegetation around them that the parents took for
granted. Bergen reported the practices as curiosities; to her, however, they
were surprising customs showing a combination of social tradition and primi-
tive creativity.
Even today, a patronizing attitude sometimes shows in treat-
ing children's things. But since those things train the youngster to consider
manipulating the environment, solving problems, and building symbols,
more than inventorying objects is necessary.
Many folklorists of the period encouraged comparing the types of the
objects after inventorying them. But collecting comparative data on objects
for the ultimate purpose of interpretation had pitfalls. Analyzing often ig-
nored the object's setting and cultural context. Looking back, folklorists now
realize that they should have been sure that sufficient background informa-
tion existed on the objects, so that mere conjectures on relations among
objects were avoided. The maker, locale, and setting of the objects needed
to be taken into account. After categories are drawn, researchers today check
more carefully whether objects assigned to the category are indeed compa-
rable.
Stewart Culin, a comparative folklorist of the period, looking closely
at material culture, claimed that similarities between American Indian games
and sacred rites were so close as to suggest an origin of children's gaming
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? ? objects in religious ceremonies (Culin 1898). One type was related to the
common practice of drawing lots-making or notching sticks to be pulled
from the hand. Culin reported, "The Pima employ three twigs with a finger
loop at one end, and among some of the tribes of Arizona and southern
California, where the game receives the Spanish name of peon, the lots are
attached to the wrist with a cord fastened to the middle. This is done to pre-
vent the players from changing them. The four bones, two male and two
female, like the sticks in the four-stick game, probably represent the bows
of the twin War Gods" (Culin 1907, 267). The critic today would ask if Culin
was too quick to assume cultural similarities among different tribal cultures.
Are the categories of play and religion comparable in these societies? Can
the conclusion really be extended to Western society because of some kind
of cultural evolution?
Although open to criticism, comparativists like Bergen and Culin were
successful in pointing out the importance of the object in affecting the be-
havior of people and reflecting their mores and values. Today, researchers
still compare objects in their studies, especially for archival collections, but
the claims for such analysis are more modest. Comparative study today
serves to highlight the continuity and vitality of local traditions (see
Abernethy 1989; Page and Smith 1993). Jan Harold Brunvand's recent guide
for Utah folklore collectors illustrates the use of textual collection among
children. He included as prominent examples of material folk culture two
reports of children's folk creations. The first is recounted from the memory
of an elderly woman, a doll made from hollyhocks, clothespins, and thread.
The second is from a college woman who remembered making gum-wrap-
per chains in junior high school. She recalled that a girl added to the chain
until it was the height of the boy she liked. Then if she set fire to one end
and it burned all the way up without going out "it meant that he liked you
too! " (Brunvand 1971, 102-3). Brunvand emphasized the need for docu-
menting the background and custom attached to folk technics as well as
noting the maker, locale, and setting of the object. The researcher outside
Utah can consult this material to confirm the circulation of the custom, and
to note differences and similarities in form and practice.
The attention to the local setting and people as a defining character-
istic of a unique culture is informed by many anthropologists who have ex-
amined differences in the childhood of aboriginal groups and "bounded"
societies as a result of cultural nurturing even more than biological nature.
The differences, and often the apparent exoticism, of customs are the result
of the different functions that such customs serve. The stories, rhymes, and
objects may serve the society by instilling values in children that will be im-
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? ? portant to them as adults and will help solidify the society as a bound com-
munity. Sister M. Inez Hilger, for example, studied Chippewa child life on
reservations in the upper Midwest of the United States during the 1930s.
When she observed children playing house, she noted that girls tended not
to emphasize possessiveness. "One-room 'houses' with walls of 1-inch-deep
ridges of soil were marked off on well-scraped ground in the yard," she
wrote. She continued, "These houses were equipped with household furni-
ture, such as is found in their own meagerly furnished homes, made of most
perfectly modeled clay forms-the gumbo soil in the area (western section)
being well adapted to modeling. Although models were only 2 or 3 inches
in length, tables had grooved legs and rounded corners; chairs had curved
or straight backs; rockers had runners; and sideboards, designs on doors!
None of the furnishings were considered precious enough to be saved for
the next day's house playing; new ones were made three successive days"
(Hilger 1951, 110).
The application of this functional attention to behavior and context
can frequently be found as well in the so-called "open" or "complex" in-
dustrialized settings of Europe, Australia, and America. Mary and Herbert
Knapp's book One Potato, Two Potato is comparative to an extent, but they
divided their collections primarily by what function the lore served. Does it
give prestige and power to the teller? Does it primarily serve to teach a skill
or value? Does it help organize and structure children's social interaction?
Two categories in the Knapps' book that feature material culture are "Cop-
ing with the Here and Now" and "Coping with the Unknown. " In the first
category are reactions to the troubling present that express hostility or al-
low a creative escape. The Knapps report on reflections of the violent times
in which we live, such as soda-straw blowguns for spitballs and elaborate
rubber band and bobby-pin slingshots. Rapid technological change becomes
evident now in children's making of rockets from the silver paper around
sticks of gum (Knapp and Knapp 1976, 225-31). Citing functions of lore,
however, does not explain origin or emergence, although finding the con-
scious and unconscious uses to which folklore is put sheds light on its per-
sistence, appeal, or transformation (Bronner 1979, 1988; Factor 1988).
"Coping with the Unknown" refers to the lore that predicts the fu-
ture, or present events out of view. The lore thus helps to alleviate fear or
give a sense of control lost by the unpredictable. The widespread gum-wrap-
per chain is an example of predicting a boyfriend's emotions. Another is a
fortune-telling device called by the Knapps a "wiggle-waggle," although I
have heard of it too as a type of "cootie catcher. " Paper is folded to allow
one to unveil predictions for the future. After a certain number or color is
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? ? read aloud to the beat of folding and unfolding movements, a flap is lifted
to reveal a crystal-gazing message. As a cootie catcher, the device can be used
to remove dreaded cooties-imaginary insects, disease, or ritual dirt mak-
ing some person or trait undesirable-from your body. Indeed, the obses-
sion of post-World War II children with cooties has spawned a host of ma-
terial folk preventatives and cures (Samuelson 1980).
The functional approach of the Knapps tends to lump together a va-
riety of settings under the rubric of "American. " Some critics have argued
that folk traditions respond more immediately to the physical environment
of the neighborhood, urban or rural. Further, they point out that many of
the traditions created in response to this environment are emergent and spon-
taneous, such as Bernard Mergen's fanciful "Gropper," which opened this
chapter. An enlightening survey of such response in New York City is found
in City Play by Amanda Dargan and Steven Zeitlin. "Play can happen on a
stoop, a box on the sidewalk, a small part of one block, on one street, in
one neighborhood, in one borough, in one city, at one point in history. Yet,
it is in this highly localized activity that our experience of the city is shaped,"
they write (Dargan and Zeitlin 1990, 2; see also Nasaw 1985). They explain
children's use of paper hats, go-carts, and makeshift clubhouses as a need
to create identities and skills for themselves from the resources in their en-
vironment. The results are varied and often individualized; the emergence
of tradition anew is emphasized rather than the lineage of texts.
In many past studies of material folk culture, a tendency existed to
celebrate the old in childlore. Items and informants need not be old to be
folk, but researchers often sought to find lore they could trace back in his-
tory, instead of noting the emergent culture. Much of today's material cul-
ture research calls for getting in there with children to see and illuminate
processes as well as grasp objects. Keen eyes and a quick hand are neces-
sary to note and preserve creative events. More so than the tape recorder
so precious to the scholar of oral traditions, the camera and notepad become
primary aids. Of course, the words and gestures must be recorded as well.
Research on the material folk culture of children lags behind work
done on children's language, belief, and narrative. This dearth of research
stems historically from the largely verbal orientation of folklorists and his-
torians in their studies of adults and children alike. In addition, things made
by children for their own use are commonly private and ephemeral; they are
regularly discarded, forgotten, or hidden. Further, adults are generally easier
for the adult researcher to talk to. Indeed, much of our knowledge of
childlore comes from the memories of the elderly. When children are ap-
proached, they are commonly "interviewed" rather than observed. The re-
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? ? searchers didn't know what to ask about material culture, because they typi-
cally were not aware of it.
Revisionist approaches to the material folk culture of childhood are
based on the uses and perceptions, rather than the mere appearances, of
objects. Objects are considered part of human thought and behavior. Newer
folkloristic approaches offer an interdisciplinary mix of cultural perspectives
drawn from anthropology, social psychological methods and ideas, and the
legacy of analyzing traditions informed by the history of folklore studies.
Whether the object is traditional is of less concern than whether the use is
informally shared by others. Although varied situations are observed, so that
a comparative method might be suggested, usually it is the differences, rather
than similarities, of style and behavior observed in natural contexts that are
stressed.
Let's begin with the developing child. As the child develops, he or she
can do more; on the other hand, adults often can't do what they could as
children. By looking at creative behavior with objects across the lifespan,
one can organize study developmentally. Such behavior can reveal cultural
beliefs about aging. Many may "analytically" assume that the organization
of development proceeds according to age, but Hilger, in her study of
Chippewa child life, found that "culturally" children's growth was not
counted in years. Childhood among the Chippewa began with birth and
ended with puberty, and it was divided into two periods. She writes, "Be-
fore it reached the dawn of reason, it might be described as having been 'just
old enough to remember,' or 'before it had any sense. ' Children between the
age of reason and puberty were designated as having been 'so high'-a ges-
ture of the hand indicating the height" (Hilger 1951, ix).
An "analytical" rather than "cultural" approach to organizing devel-
opment has often been borrowed from the observations of Jean Piaget, who
made the argument that at the outset of life, the child's awareness is of a
singular, central object-the child's own body. This argument moves away
from the common assumption of children's society as a unified culture and
suggests instead that childhood exists as part of a changing system of rela-
tions. A decentering process gradually occurs whereby the child becomes
aware of other objects and spatiotemporal relations. The development of that
awareness and a sense of tradition become related. In the early stage of life,
children's own actions dominate their perception. Within eighteen months,
children learn of actions outside their own, and of causal relations between
other actions, such as a bottle being brought and their own feeding. Touch
is important in the early going, as the child cognitively grasps the three di-
mensionality of the environment and seeks the comfort and meaning of
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? ? physical and social contact (Bronner 1982, 1986b). Children's objects in-
vite movement and stress texture.
Two behavioral scientists, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene
Rochberg-Halton have pointed out that children's objects require some physi-
cal manipulation to release their meaning, whereas adult things like art and
books stress contemplation (1981, 96-97). They added, "The importance
of objects of action in the early years is a reminder of the powerful need
children have to internalize actions and to define the limits of their selves
through direct kinetic control" (p. 100). As cultural critics, they are con-
cerned with objects, because the "most basic information about ourselves
as human beings-the fact that we are human-has been traditionally con-
veyed to us by the use of artifacts" (page 92).
The infant learns to recognize people as a category separate from
things. The child indeed then notices differences in the form and feeling of
individuals and their surroundings. From this springboard comes the idea
that a personal environment can be shaped. You can have "your" things and
have the space be consequentially "yours. " You can even manipulate the
things to control the space, to form an identity. A couple with a one-year-
old recently reported to me that their baby would no longer just find a place
on the floor to play. The infant's sense of place and surroundings emerged-
in the crib. There he would experiment with different arrangements of ob-
jects in relation to his own position. When unhappy, he called for his own
space and things. The child made meanings take shape.
The shape of the space is in many ways a social aesthetic that the child
inherits. The early spaces in the Western child's experience are rectangular-
the crib, the room, the house. Straight lines and sharp angles become stan-
dards of balance, proportion, and order (Toelken 1979, 227-28). Indeed,
some argue, the plan of the child's surroundings largely mirrors the shape
of the body, with its paired and symmetrical design (Bronner 1983; Glassie
1972). Later the child develops an identity based on the space he or she
knows or alters. Play space, for example, can be formally defined by play-
grounds and parks, but is mentally drawn, too, in public streets, buildings,
parts of the house, and lots, according to the perception of what is appro-
priate and aesthetically pleasing to the play group (R. Hart 1979; Mergen
1982, 85-90).
Around the child's second year, Piaget claimed, the child shows be-
haviors that imply creativity-the formation of, or reference to, objects and
events not already present. Aware of a social aesthetic, the child nonethe-
less develops more personal designs by altering and rearranging physical
materials. The loss of control from decentering is being compensated for by
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? ? a technical control over operative things. The child takes something apart
to see what is inside or how it works, and the child rearranges the line and
color. Often, children create things for the thrill of creating itself (like the
sand mound on the beach); they delight in the power to change shapes and
to build anew. The achievement of a product offers its own reward. Moth-
ers like to tell me, for instance, of the amazing things children do with their
food-mashed potato mountains and string bean designs. This is not to say
that children's creations are not purposeful. With concept in mind, the child
rigs together an object for his personal world: the wooden boat, the stickball
bat, or the clover chain. Jonah is a boy I know, for example, who shaped a
boat out of clay. It didn't fit into any pattern his mother could recognize,
but Jonah worked and reworked the boat according to a blueprint he had
in his head. His sisters shared the excitement he felt over the creation, and
gave advice. Playing along the nearby river days later, they piled variously
shaped rocks to make elaborate sculptures jutting out of the shallow water.
Each child worked on an individual design, yet they carefully consulted one
another on the form and function of the sculptures and ultimately the sculp-
tures resembled one another. The children used the creations to express their
ideas in material form.
Beyond the interaction between the child's unique mind and his cre-
ation are the influences of region, ethnicity, and class. Differences also exist
between the experiences of rural, suburban, and urban children. How much,
for example, can be inferred from folklorist Henry Glassie's observation: "Of
the flotsam of the streets and back alleys, Philadelphia boys construct a va-
riety of traditional weapons: bows and arrows, 'top shooters,' bolas, sling-
shots with subtypes for bobby pins or rocks, spears, whips, slings, and-
when they are a little older-zip guns. A coat hanger after a little bending
becomes a 'key' with which simple locks can be jimmied" (Glassie 1968,
217-18). Befitting the intellectual image of cities as ugly, decadent places,
material culture research has overstated the importance of objects represent-
ing the seedier side of urban life. In contrast, Americans are accustomed to
romanticized accounts of harmless whittling and dollmaking among rural
children.
? ? I2 MATERIAL FOLK CULTURE
OF CHILDREN
Simon J. Bronner
"One of my favorite toys when I was four years old was a piece of stiff wire
roughly twelve inches long, bent into the shape of a double letter C. It must
have been the piece that holds a thermos bottle firmly in the lid of a metal
lunch box. I found it on the beach in southern California and named it
'gropper,' because, I think, the lower part of the C looked to me like the legs
of a grasshopper. The upper part looked something like the bill of a duck.
In the ensuing months I worked with my mother and grandmother to make
a large wardrobe of bright colored socks to pull over the ends of the wire
legs and a variety of wool, silk, and cotton tubes to slip over the bill and
cover its body. For several years, Gropper held an honored place among my
other toys-cars, Teddy Bear, blocks, and soldiers-but at some point I be-
came self-conscious and a bit embarrassed about my fantasy and discarded
Gropper, bag and baggage. If I had kept Gropper and donated him, together
with the rest of my playthings, to the Smithsonian, what would a curator
do with such a bizarre object? " (Mergen 1982, 121-22).
Children, when left to their own devices, can create elaborate things-
objects, indeed environments, suited to the spirit and imagination of youth.
Yet often such creativity eludes the watchful eye of the parent, no less the
curator or ethnographer. The child commonly keeps the creation private.
Why? Children may feel embarrassed about making playthings themselves
when toys supplied by Mom and Dad sit idly by, or they may be discour-
aged from strange (by adult standards, anyway) flights of fancy. Many par-
ents take the attitude that the child's world springs from adult hands and
tastes. Many folk toys, songs, and games for children, in fact, are really
crafted by adults. But children do think for themselves, and thought sparks
creativity-a small world of their own making.
This chapter offers a guide to basic issues, approaches, and sources
associated with the study of the many material worlds of children. First, I
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? ? offer a historical background to the study itself, and I follow with a survey
of some approaches used today. I make a case for the special study of folk
or traditional objects and processes as a special category of research into
material culture. In doing so, I realize that some distinctions between mass
and folk culture are necessary, although the two cannot easily be separated.
Because an important point of this survey is the way that the traditional
expressions of children vary, not only by regional or ethnic culture, but also
by their very maturation process, I particularly explore developmental ap-
proaches. I suggest ways to combine comparison of texts or objects with
contexts or processes across the life course, and I examine how ethnicity,
gender, region, and class have been especially evident in research on the
material folk culture of children.
I begin by offering an example of an object that is both a text and a
context and suggests the process by which small worlds are created. The
treehouse is an enclosed space that relies greatly on the child's imagination.
Usually built by children's hands, the rough exterior and makeshift furni-
ture inside become transformed. The height and cover of the tree offers chil-
dren, especially, it seems, boys, a certain independence. Engaging in the pro-
cess of gathering materials, construction, and occupation allows for partici-
pation in culture. It responds to, and also establishes, traditions. Children
are discovering their technical capabilities and something about aesthetics
and design. In the American setting, this design emphasizes a square or rect-
angular shape and social separation. Thomas Yukic, for example, recalled
his 1930s childhood in Niagara Falls for New York Folklore. A memory that
stood out was of the things his "gang" built: "Tommy Leshak built a com-
plete hut near the elm tree on the island, bringing every scrap of material
by boat to construct a small eight foot square building. It was a great place
for rainy days and card games. The hut was of corrugated tin roofing and
wood planks; Tom poured a cement floor from the left-over cement drip-
pings which were washed off daily by Empire Builders Supply Company
trucks near Sandocks" (Yukic 1975, 225).
Down in New York City, Fred Ferretti reported returning to the neigh-
borhood where he grew up, only to find that not as much had changed as
he thought. "The empty lot where we built huts out of wood scraps and dis-
carded refrigerator cartons, where we roasted 'Mickies'-the right way to
roast them was to dig a shallow hole in the dirt, line it with bricks, fill it
with wood, start a fire, and drop the raw potatoes into the flames; they were
cooked when their skins were reduced to jet-black powder. To my surprise,
the basketball backboard we built and nailed to the telephone pole a couple
of houses away from mine was still attached, although there was no hoop"
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? ? (Ferretti 1975, 13). He realized upon reflection that adults often believe that
their childhood labors were unique. But he found strong continuities between
the items made in his childhood and what he found when he returned. He
sensed traditions at work.
Manipulating resources and structures to shape things is an everyday
experience for youth (Adler 1981, 8-10; Bronner 1986b). Think back to your
childhood. I know that in mine play typically involved making things.
Stickball bats were made from broom handles, go-carts from skates and
boards, slingshots from clothes hangers. Wadded paper became ammunition
for jerry-built "spit-shooters" loaded with green pellets taken from wild
cherry trees. We made boats out of scrap wood to try out in the park pond.
Children on my block hunted down and altered all manner of smooth sur-
faces for sledding during the winter. We even had a hideout in an isolated
lot where we constructed makeshift shelters and tables. You probably also
recall long hours altering and using the box the Christmas present came in,
long after the gift's attraction passed.
Material folk culture is the term commonly used to describe such tra-
ditional, creative encounters with physical things. It is not simply the exist-
ence of individual items that is significant but their interconnection of con-
cept and design as well as their association with a social system. As to the
folk in material folk culture of children, when recording the traditional be-
havior of children, I look for informal ways children interact and learn. True,
they might consult a book or ask a teacher, but I find that informal, or folk,
learning through word of mouth, demonstration or imitation, and custom-
ary example are still the predominant means by which children acquire
knowledge of technique and form. Out on the beach, children begin digging;
later they consult one another or imitate models elsewhere in their view. As
they build their sand forts, they go through a folk process. To be sure, forms
exist that folklorists call folk because they stand up to the usual test of tra-
dition-whether they repeat and vary over time and space. String figures like
the cat's cradle, carved wooden chains, and, more recently, the "cootie
catcher" made of paper are examples (Boas 1938; Bronner 1981a; Samuelson
1980). Still, my study of "folk" is meant to shed light on the thought and
behavior of people; the lore is only a partial representation of the behavior
involved in creativity (Bronner 1986a). Especially when dealing with chil-
dren, I observe the processes of learning, communicating, and making-the
active and cognitive parts of traditional expression.
The material of material folk culture includes both construction and
decoration. In the study of children's material culture, primary attention has
been given to toys and other objects used in play (Schlereth 1990). Second
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? ? is art and craft (often also discussed as part of play), and occasionally body
ornamentation commonly applied to hair, nails, and face. Other subjects are
neglected, yet could easily be part of the study of children's folk culture.
Foodways, clothing, and ephemeral architecture (treehouses, for example),
indeed the connection between children's labor and play, still await studies
in depth. As material, the objects and environments under study provide
tangible evidence that especially suggests considerations of form and creative
process (see Bronner 1986a, 1986b). As evidence of shared tradition, the
material suggests social interaction and culture in process. Here I am con-
cerned with the ways that the tradition works at a given age, keeping in mind
that influencing factors of gender, ethnicity, and region, to name a few vari-
ables, have a bearing on cultural expression. In the following discussion, my
use of material culture centers on things made or altered by children for their
use.
A primary task taken up in some of the first studies of the material
folk culture of children was to describe through American history the vari-
ety of skills and crafts children have engaged in. In 1898, Alice Morse Earle
wrote a chronicle of Colonial everyday life that covered the rounds of
children's life. Looking through diaries and travelers' accounts she found that
demands were put on boys and girls to be "useful. " A young girl from
Colchester, Connecticut, wrote in her diary in 1775: "Fix'd two gowns for
Welsh's girls,-Carded two,-Spun linen,-Worked on Cheesebasket,-
Hatchel'd flax with Hannah, we did 51 lbs. apiece,-Pleated and ironed,-
Read a Sermon of Dodridge's,-Spooled apiece,-Milked the cows,-Spun
linen, did 50 knots,-Made a Broom of Guinea wheat straw,-Spun thread
to whiten,-Set a Red dye,-Had two Scholars from Mrs. Taylor's,-I carded
two pounds of whole wool and felt Nationly,-Spun harness twine,-
Scoured the pewter" (Earle 1898, 253). Beyond the chores of the house and
farm, girls were expected to indulge in decorative crafts such as embroidery,
paper cutting, and lace making. Many of these activities were taught to chil-
dren by adults. The private world that children made is often harder to un-
cover. Earle implied, however, that the association of children's material cul-
ture almost totally with play is a modern one. She spotlighted material cul-
ture as an important part of American social history of family and commu-
nity life.
The use of a historical outline to describe children's culture persists
to the present. Bernard Mergen's survey of play, for example, included a
chapter on the artifacts of play (see also Heininger 1984; Graff 1987; West
and Petrik 1992). His outline showed a movement from handmade toys
taken from nature to games and toys increasingly mass-produced. To cat-
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? ? egorize the early period, he quoted Dorothy Howard's turn-of-the-century
reminiscence: "A 'plaything'-a stick, for example-was not a stick but
(metaphorically) a horse to ride, a thermometer for playing doctor, a writ-
ing or drawing tool for marking on the ground, a log for building log cab-
ins, a boat to float down a rivulet from a spring shower, play candy, a shot-
gun for hunting, or another person. " "To the bounty of nature," Mergen
wrote, "the Industrial Revolution added a vast toy store of play objects:
washers, tires, clothespins, coat hangers, tin cans, ball point pens, paper
plates, bottle tops, rubber bands, and paper clips" (Mergen 1982, 104).
Modern toys, he claimed, are dominated by the mass culture; factory-made
toys by this reasoning have overshadowed folk toys in the twentieth cen-
tury. His linear model harks back to the notion that progress inevitably
marches forward and eliminates folk culture. It is problematic to assume that
folk culture does not adapt to changing surroundings, or that moderniza-
tion necessarily means that industry replaces the influence of the handmade
object. To be sure, more interaction takes place between folk processes and
mass-produced products today, but then again there has always been an in-
teraction between folk and popular culture. Modern toys have also attracted
more attention since maintaining childhood as a separate generation of lei-
sure through specialized products has been a recent commercial preoccupa-
tion of adults.
Research of artifacts greatly informs the social history of childhood,
but the prevailing scholarship tends to overrepresent popular toys and fur-
nishings associated with middle- and upper-class living because they have
remained in the historical record (Schlereth 1990; Carson 1989). An addi-
tional problem is the tendency to structure history in an exclusively linear
and progressive direction. Folk culture scholarship often portrays simulta-
neous trends toward tradition and change, and examines local worlds for
differences. For the subject of playthings through time, the child's hidden
folk technics and their interaction with popular culture demand a closer look.
A social-historical study by Miriam Formanek-Brunell, for instance, claims
that contemporary popular culture has obscured the traditions of doll play
in America enacted by both boys and girls during the nineteenth century,
before the toy industry commercialized doll play, and, in the author's view,
girlhood. A similar argument emerges from Karin Calvert's study of children's
furnishings and clothing from 1600 to 1900. Her book brings out the ma-
terial ways that a nurtured childhood as a separate stage of life developed.
As a context for children's creativity, the creation of the child's room, the
differentiation of rooms and furnishings by gender, and the dressing of chil-
dren to encourage special kinds of activities provide critical contexts for ways
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? ? that children make things and view their surroundings.
The resources of art history have promised to provide some fresh his-
torical perspectives on childhood. Recent studies by Anita Schorsch, and
Sandra Brant and Elissa Cullman, outline attitudes of adults toward chil-
dren by analyzing images of children and their surroundings in painting and
sculpture-by some folk, but mostly nonfolk artists. Children's attitudes were
more difficult to interpret, since scant evidence remains of children's wares.
To their credit, Brant and Cullman include more of this evidence-samplers,
drawings, and even hair wreaths made by children-in Small Folk than
Schorsch did in Images of Childhood. But Brant and Cullman stressed the
unusual aesthetic quality of the objects, rather than, as would have been
called for by folklorists, the typical folk objects of social and psychological
significance.
Many museums have aided historians and folklorists by preserving
children's folk artifacts and publishing catalogs and essays based on their
collections (Mergen 1980, 173-77; Hewitt and Roomet 1979). Some, like
the Children's Museum in Indianapolis and the Children's Museum of the
Brooklyn Museum, emphasize children's culture and collect folk toys and
artifacts. Others are general-history museums that include children's mate-
rial, although the folk artifacts are commonly not clearly identified. Included
in this category are the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C. , the
Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, and the Shelburne Museum
in Burlington, Vermont. America also boasts folk museums that collect his-
toric artifacts of childlife. Especially strong are the Farmer's Museum and
Fenimore House in Cooperstown, New York, Old Sturbridge Village in
Sturbridge, Massachusetts, and Conner Prairie Pioneer Settlement in
Noblesville, Indiana. Generally, such museums are concerned with describ-
ing children's toys and playthings as part of children's social life in the dis-
tant past (see Carson 1989; Heininger 1984).
Another historical approach, oral history, documents the more recent
past by recording childhood memories of the elderly. Among the most in-
formative and compassionate is folklorist Roger E. Mitchell's biography of
his Maine father, "I'm a Man That Works. " The childhood he describes in
Maine, as elsewhere, separated tasks appropriate to either boys or girls. Girls
worked inside, especially with fabric and food. Boys worked with wood; they
were outdoors. Mitchell recounts making sleds on the model of the bigger
bobsleds (Mitchell 1978, 27). Similarly, Thomas Yukic recalls boys build-
ing boats in Niagara Falls, New York (Yukic 1975, 211-28). This is what
boys did, after all, he says. But with modern social changes in sexual roles,
questions now arise about the actual persistence and variation of such pat-
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? ? terns. The memory that people recount becomes itself a kind of object to
be manipulated to fulfill an image of present selves. Material folk culture
of childhood is often remembered as an index of attitudes toward and ide-
als of sexual roles and symbols.
Having compiled the objects of childhood, many researchers opt to
compare their textual and formal qualities, much in the manner of literary
critics. In a groundbreaking folkloristic report on American children's ma-
terial culture, Fanny Bergen in 1895 published reports of children making
paints from plants. Pigweed gave a green liquid; bloodroot produced orange;
keel yielded red. She wanted to know the circulation of such customs. Play
fights with violets, for instance, she found in the United States, Canada, and
Japan. She saw some significance in the similarity among customs of soci-
eties around the world, and used the distribution of children's customs to
illustrate variation within the unity of culture.
In her valuable inventory of childhood practices, Bergen also men-
tioned children who produced the figure of a baby or an old lady out of an
ox-eye daisy, made trombones of the prickly leaf-stalks of pumpkins, strung
horse-chestnuts on dogwood berries, and created boats out of peapods
(Bergen 1895c). To many, these practices reflect children's fascination with
the shape and life of the plant world. Often parents report that their chil-
dren notice details of the vegetation around them that the parents took for
granted. Bergen reported the practices as curiosities; to her, however, they
were surprising customs showing a combination of social tradition and primi-
tive creativity.
Even today, a patronizing attitude sometimes shows in treat-
ing children's things. But since those things train the youngster to consider
manipulating the environment, solving problems, and building symbols,
more than inventorying objects is necessary.
Many folklorists of the period encouraged comparing the types of the
objects after inventorying them. But collecting comparative data on objects
for the ultimate purpose of interpretation had pitfalls. Analyzing often ig-
nored the object's setting and cultural context. Looking back, folklorists now
realize that they should have been sure that sufficient background informa-
tion existed on the objects, so that mere conjectures on relations among
objects were avoided. The maker, locale, and setting of the objects needed
to be taken into account. After categories are drawn, researchers today check
more carefully whether objects assigned to the category are indeed compa-
rable.
Stewart Culin, a comparative folklorist of the period, looking closely
at material culture, claimed that similarities between American Indian games
and sacred rites were so close as to suggest an origin of children's gaming
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? ? objects in religious ceremonies (Culin 1898). One type was related to the
common practice of drawing lots-making or notching sticks to be pulled
from the hand. Culin reported, "The Pima employ three twigs with a finger
loop at one end, and among some of the tribes of Arizona and southern
California, where the game receives the Spanish name of peon, the lots are
attached to the wrist with a cord fastened to the middle. This is done to pre-
vent the players from changing them. The four bones, two male and two
female, like the sticks in the four-stick game, probably represent the bows
of the twin War Gods" (Culin 1907, 267). The critic today would ask if Culin
was too quick to assume cultural similarities among different tribal cultures.
Are the categories of play and religion comparable in these societies? Can
the conclusion really be extended to Western society because of some kind
of cultural evolution?
Although open to criticism, comparativists like Bergen and Culin were
successful in pointing out the importance of the object in affecting the be-
havior of people and reflecting their mores and values. Today, researchers
still compare objects in their studies, especially for archival collections, but
the claims for such analysis are more modest. Comparative study today
serves to highlight the continuity and vitality of local traditions (see
Abernethy 1989; Page and Smith 1993). Jan Harold Brunvand's recent guide
for Utah folklore collectors illustrates the use of textual collection among
children. He included as prominent examples of material folk culture two
reports of children's folk creations. The first is recounted from the memory
of an elderly woman, a doll made from hollyhocks, clothespins, and thread.
The second is from a college woman who remembered making gum-wrap-
per chains in junior high school. She recalled that a girl added to the chain
until it was the height of the boy she liked. Then if she set fire to one end
and it burned all the way up without going out "it meant that he liked you
too! " (Brunvand 1971, 102-3). Brunvand emphasized the need for docu-
menting the background and custom attached to folk technics as well as
noting the maker, locale, and setting of the object. The researcher outside
Utah can consult this material to confirm the circulation of the custom, and
to note differences and similarities in form and practice.
The attention to the local setting and people as a defining character-
istic of a unique culture is informed by many anthropologists who have ex-
amined differences in the childhood of aboriginal groups and "bounded"
societies as a result of cultural nurturing even more than biological nature.
The differences, and often the apparent exoticism, of customs are the result
of the different functions that such customs serve. The stories, rhymes, and
objects may serve the society by instilling values in children that will be im-
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? ? portant to them as adults and will help solidify the society as a bound com-
munity. Sister M. Inez Hilger, for example, studied Chippewa child life on
reservations in the upper Midwest of the United States during the 1930s.
When she observed children playing house, she noted that girls tended not
to emphasize possessiveness. "One-room 'houses' with walls of 1-inch-deep
ridges of soil were marked off on well-scraped ground in the yard," she
wrote. She continued, "These houses were equipped with household furni-
ture, such as is found in their own meagerly furnished homes, made of most
perfectly modeled clay forms-the gumbo soil in the area (western section)
being well adapted to modeling. Although models were only 2 or 3 inches
in length, tables had grooved legs and rounded corners; chairs had curved
or straight backs; rockers had runners; and sideboards, designs on doors!
None of the furnishings were considered precious enough to be saved for
the next day's house playing; new ones were made three successive days"
(Hilger 1951, 110).
The application of this functional attention to behavior and context
can frequently be found as well in the so-called "open" or "complex" in-
dustrialized settings of Europe, Australia, and America. Mary and Herbert
Knapp's book One Potato, Two Potato is comparative to an extent, but they
divided their collections primarily by what function the lore served. Does it
give prestige and power to the teller? Does it primarily serve to teach a skill
or value? Does it help organize and structure children's social interaction?
Two categories in the Knapps' book that feature material culture are "Cop-
ing with the Here and Now" and "Coping with the Unknown. " In the first
category are reactions to the troubling present that express hostility or al-
low a creative escape. The Knapps report on reflections of the violent times
in which we live, such as soda-straw blowguns for spitballs and elaborate
rubber band and bobby-pin slingshots. Rapid technological change becomes
evident now in children's making of rockets from the silver paper around
sticks of gum (Knapp and Knapp 1976, 225-31). Citing functions of lore,
however, does not explain origin or emergence, although finding the con-
scious and unconscious uses to which folklore is put sheds light on its per-
sistence, appeal, or transformation (Bronner 1979, 1988; Factor 1988).
"Coping with the Unknown" refers to the lore that predicts the fu-
ture, or present events out of view. The lore thus helps to alleviate fear or
give a sense of control lost by the unpredictable. The widespread gum-wrap-
per chain is an example of predicting a boyfriend's emotions. Another is a
fortune-telling device called by the Knapps a "wiggle-waggle," although I
have heard of it too as a type of "cootie catcher. " Paper is folded to allow
one to unveil predictions for the future. After a certain number or color is
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? ? read aloud to the beat of folding and unfolding movements, a flap is lifted
to reveal a crystal-gazing message. As a cootie catcher, the device can be used
to remove dreaded cooties-imaginary insects, disease, or ritual dirt mak-
ing some person or trait undesirable-from your body. Indeed, the obses-
sion of post-World War II children with cooties has spawned a host of ma-
terial folk preventatives and cures (Samuelson 1980).
The functional approach of the Knapps tends to lump together a va-
riety of settings under the rubric of "American. " Some critics have argued
that folk traditions respond more immediately to the physical environment
of the neighborhood, urban or rural. Further, they point out that many of
the traditions created in response to this environment are emergent and spon-
taneous, such as Bernard Mergen's fanciful "Gropper," which opened this
chapter. An enlightening survey of such response in New York City is found
in City Play by Amanda Dargan and Steven Zeitlin. "Play can happen on a
stoop, a box on the sidewalk, a small part of one block, on one street, in
one neighborhood, in one borough, in one city, at one point in history. Yet,
it is in this highly localized activity that our experience of the city is shaped,"
they write (Dargan and Zeitlin 1990, 2; see also Nasaw 1985). They explain
children's use of paper hats, go-carts, and makeshift clubhouses as a need
to create identities and skills for themselves from the resources in their en-
vironment. The results are varied and often individualized; the emergence
of tradition anew is emphasized rather than the lineage of texts.
In many past studies of material folk culture, a tendency existed to
celebrate the old in childlore. Items and informants need not be old to be
folk, but researchers often sought to find lore they could trace back in his-
tory, instead of noting the emergent culture. Much of today's material cul-
ture research calls for getting in there with children to see and illuminate
processes as well as grasp objects. Keen eyes and a quick hand are neces-
sary to note and preserve creative events. More so than the tape recorder
so precious to the scholar of oral traditions, the camera and notepad become
primary aids. Of course, the words and gestures must be recorded as well.
Research on the material folk culture of children lags behind work
done on children's language, belief, and narrative. This dearth of research
stems historically from the largely verbal orientation of folklorists and his-
torians in their studies of adults and children alike. In addition, things made
by children for their own use are commonly private and ephemeral; they are
regularly discarded, forgotten, or hidden. Further, adults are generally easier
for the adult researcher to talk to. Indeed, much of our knowledge of
childlore comes from the memories of the elderly. When children are ap-
proached, they are commonly "interviewed" rather than observed. The re-
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? ? searchers didn't know what to ask about material culture, because they typi-
cally were not aware of it.
Revisionist approaches to the material folk culture of childhood are
based on the uses and perceptions, rather than the mere appearances, of
objects. Objects are considered part of human thought and behavior. Newer
folkloristic approaches offer an interdisciplinary mix of cultural perspectives
drawn from anthropology, social psychological methods and ideas, and the
legacy of analyzing traditions informed by the history of folklore studies.
Whether the object is traditional is of less concern than whether the use is
informally shared by others. Although varied situations are observed, so that
a comparative method might be suggested, usually it is the differences, rather
than similarities, of style and behavior observed in natural contexts that are
stressed.
Let's begin with the developing child. As the child develops, he or she
can do more; on the other hand, adults often can't do what they could as
children. By looking at creative behavior with objects across the lifespan,
one can organize study developmentally. Such behavior can reveal cultural
beliefs about aging. Many may "analytically" assume that the organization
of development proceeds according to age, but Hilger, in her study of
Chippewa child life, found that "culturally" children's growth was not
counted in years. Childhood among the Chippewa began with birth and
ended with puberty, and it was divided into two periods. She writes, "Be-
fore it reached the dawn of reason, it might be described as having been 'just
old enough to remember,' or 'before it had any sense. ' Children between the
age of reason and puberty were designated as having been 'so high'-a ges-
ture of the hand indicating the height" (Hilger 1951, ix).
An "analytical" rather than "cultural" approach to organizing devel-
opment has often been borrowed from the observations of Jean Piaget, who
made the argument that at the outset of life, the child's awareness is of a
singular, central object-the child's own body. This argument moves away
from the common assumption of children's society as a unified culture and
suggests instead that childhood exists as part of a changing system of rela-
tions. A decentering process gradually occurs whereby the child becomes
aware of other objects and spatiotemporal relations. The development of that
awareness and a sense of tradition become related. In the early stage of life,
children's own actions dominate their perception. Within eighteen months,
children learn of actions outside their own, and of causal relations between
other actions, such as a bottle being brought and their own feeding. Touch
is important in the early going, as the child cognitively grasps the three di-
mensionality of the environment and seeks the comfort and meaning of
2. 61
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? ? physical and social contact (Bronner 1982, 1986b). Children's objects in-
vite movement and stress texture.
Two behavioral scientists, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene
Rochberg-Halton have pointed out that children's objects require some physi-
cal manipulation to release their meaning, whereas adult things like art and
books stress contemplation (1981, 96-97). They added, "The importance
of objects of action in the early years is a reminder of the powerful need
children have to internalize actions and to define the limits of their selves
through direct kinetic control" (p. 100). As cultural critics, they are con-
cerned with objects, because the "most basic information about ourselves
as human beings-the fact that we are human-has been traditionally con-
veyed to us by the use of artifacts" (page 92).
The infant learns to recognize people as a category separate from
things. The child indeed then notices differences in the form and feeling of
individuals and their surroundings. From this springboard comes the idea
that a personal environment can be shaped. You can have "your" things and
have the space be consequentially "yours. " You can even manipulate the
things to control the space, to form an identity. A couple with a one-year-
old recently reported to me that their baby would no longer just find a place
on the floor to play. The infant's sense of place and surroundings emerged-
in the crib. There he would experiment with different arrangements of ob-
jects in relation to his own position. When unhappy, he called for his own
space and things. The child made meanings take shape.
The shape of the space is in many ways a social aesthetic that the child
inherits. The early spaces in the Western child's experience are rectangular-
the crib, the room, the house. Straight lines and sharp angles become stan-
dards of balance, proportion, and order (Toelken 1979, 227-28). Indeed,
some argue, the plan of the child's surroundings largely mirrors the shape
of the body, with its paired and symmetrical design (Bronner 1983; Glassie
1972). Later the child develops an identity based on the space he or she
knows or alters. Play space, for example, can be formally defined by play-
grounds and parks, but is mentally drawn, too, in public streets, buildings,
parts of the house, and lots, according to the perception of what is appro-
priate and aesthetically pleasing to the play group (R. Hart 1979; Mergen
1982, 85-90).
Around the child's second year, Piaget claimed, the child shows be-
haviors that imply creativity-the formation of, or reference to, objects and
events not already present. Aware of a social aesthetic, the child nonethe-
less develops more personal designs by altering and rearranging physical
materials. The loss of control from decentering is being compensated for by
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? ? a technical control over operative things. The child takes something apart
to see what is inside or how it works, and the child rearranges the line and
color. Often, children create things for the thrill of creating itself (like the
sand mound on the beach); they delight in the power to change shapes and
to build anew. The achievement of a product offers its own reward. Moth-
ers like to tell me, for instance, of the amazing things children do with their
food-mashed potato mountains and string bean designs. This is not to say
that children's creations are not purposeful. With concept in mind, the child
rigs together an object for his personal world: the wooden boat, the stickball
bat, or the clover chain. Jonah is a boy I know, for example, who shaped a
boat out of clay. It didn't fit into any pattern his mother could recognize,
but Jonah worked and reworked the boat according to a blueprint he had
in his head. His sisters shared the excitement he felt over the creation, and
gave advice. Playing along the nearby river days later, they piled variously
shaped rocks to make elaborate sculptures jutting out of the shallow water.
Each child worked on an individual design, yet they carefully consulted one
another on the form and function of the sculptures and ultimately the sculp-
tures resembled one another. The children used the creations to express their
ideas in material form.
Beyond the interaction between the child's unique mind and his cre-
ation are the influences of region, ethnicity, and class. Differences also exist
between the experiences of rural, suburban, and urban children. How much,
for example, can be inferred from folklorist Henry Glassie's observation: "Of
the flotsam of the streets and back alleys, Philadelphia boys construct a va-
riety of traditional weapons: bows and arrows, 'top shooters,' bolas, sling-
shots with subtypes for bobby pins or rocks, spears, whips, slings, and-
when they are a little older-zip guns. A coat hanger after a little bending
becomes a 'key' with which simple locks can be jimmied" (Glassie 1968,
217-18). Befitting the intellectual image of cities as ugly, decadent places,
material culture research has overstated the importance of objects represent-
ing the seedier side of urban life. In contrast, Americans are accustomed to
romanticized accounts of harmless whittling and dollmaking among rural
children.
