The idea for the second phase, which became the present work,
emerged one evening in 1980 at the annual Folklore Meeting.
emerged one evening in 1980 at the annual Folklore Meeting.
Childens - Folklore
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? ? CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
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? ?
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? ? CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
A SOURCE BOOK
EDITED BY
BRIAN SUTTON-SMITH
JAY MECHLING
THOMAS W. JOHNSON
FELICIA R. MCMAHON
UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Logan, Utah
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? ? Copyright (C) 1999 by Brian Sutton-Smith, Jay Mechling, Thomas W. Johnson,
and Felicia R. McMahon.
All rights reserved.
Cover photograph: Children outside tenements in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1895, by
Frances B. Johnston. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Cover design by Michelle Sellers.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Children's folklore : a source book / edited by Brian Sutton-Smith. . . [et al. ].
p. cm.
ISBN 0-87421-280-4
Originally published: New York : Garland, 1995, in series: Garland reference
library of social science; vol. 647.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Children -- Folklore. 2. Children and folklore. 3. Folklore --
Methodology. I. Sutton-Smith, Brian.
GR475. C49 1999
11769490
CIP
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? ? CONTENTS
ix CONTRIBUTORS
xi PREFACE
3 INTRODUCTION:
Brian Sutton-Smith
WHAT IS CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE?
Chapter i
II WHO ARE THE FOLKLORISTS OF CHILDHOOD?
Sylvia Ann Grider
SECTION I
19 OVERVIEW: HISTORY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
Brian Sutton-Smith
Chapter z
23 THE COMPLEXITY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
Rosemary Levy Zumwalt
Chapter 3
49 THE TRANSMISSION OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
John H. McDowell
SECTION II
63 OVERVIEW: METHODS IN CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
Brian Sutton-Smith
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? ? Chapter 4
75 DOUBLE DUTCH AND DOUBLE CAMERAS:
STUDYING THE TRANSMISSION OF CULTURE
IN AN URBAN SCHOOL YARD
Ann Richman Beresin
Chapter 5
93 CHILDREN'S GAMES AND GAMING
Linda A. Hughes
Chapter 6
Iz2I METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS OF COLLECTING
FOLKLORE FROM CHILDREN
Gary Alan Fine
SECTION III
141 OVERVIEW: CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE CONCERNS
Brian Sutton-Smith
Chapter 7
145 SONGS, POEMS, AND RHYMES
C. W Sullivan III
Chapter 8
161 RIDDLES
Danielle M. Roemer
Chapter 9
193 TALES AND LEGENDS
Elizabeth Tucker
Chapter Io
213 TEASES AND PRANKS
Marilyn Jorgensen
SECTION IV
225 OVERVIEW: SETTINGS AND ACTIVITIES
Brian Sutton-Smith
vi CONTENTS
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? ? Chapter ii
229 CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL AND PLAYGROUNDS
Bernard Mergen
Chapter 12
251 MATERIAL FOLK CULTURE OF CHILDREN
Simon J. Bronner
Chapter 13
273 CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE IN RESIDENTIAL INSTITUTIONS:
SUMMER CAMPS, BOARDING SCHOOLS, HOSPITALS,
AND CUSTODIAL FACILITIES
Jay Mechling
CONCLUSION
293 THE PAST IN THE PRESENT: THEORETICAL DIRECTIONS
FOR CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
Felicia R. McMahon and Brian Sutton-Smith
309 GLOSSARY: AN AID FOR SOURCE BOOK READERS
317 BIBLIOGRAPHY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
Thomas W Johnson (and Felicia R. McMahon)
37I INDEX
vii
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? ?
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? ? CONTRIBUTORS
SIMON J. BRONNER
American Studies and
Humanities
Pennsylvania State University,
Capitol Campus
Middletown
GARY ALAN FINE
Department of Sociology
University of Georgia
Athens
SYLVIA ANN GRIDER
Graduate College
Texas A & M University
College Station
LINDA A. HUGHES
Cochranville, PA
THOMAS W. JOHNSON
Liberal Studies
California State University
Chico
JOHN H. McDOWELL
Folklore Institute
Indiana University
Bloomington
FELICIA R. MCMAHON
Anthropology
Syracuse University
Syracuse, NY
JAY MECHLING
American Studies Program
University of California
Davis
BERNARD MERGEN
American Studies
George Washington
University
Washington, DC
ANN RICHMAN BERESIN
Philadelphia, PA
MARILYN JORGENSEN
Sacramento, CA
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? ? DANIELLE M. ROEMER
Department of Language and
Literature
Northern Kentucky University
Highland Heights
C. W. SULLIVAN III
Department of English
East Carolina University
Greenville, NC
ELIZABETH TUCKER
Department of English
State University of New York
Binghamton
ROSEMARY LgvY ZUMWALT
Department of Anthropology
and Sociology
Davidson College
Davidson, NC
BRIAN SUTTrON-SMITH
Sarasota, Florida
X CONTRIBUTORS
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? ? PREFACE
This book began when the late Sue Samuelson, my first teaching assistant
in 1977 for the children's folklore course at the University of Pennsylvania,
told me that it would not be possible to do a thesis in children's folklore
because there was absolutely no interest in children either at the American
Folklore Society (AFS) or in the Folklore Department at the university. What-
ever the truth of her indictment, it led me to approach Barbara Kirshenblatt-
Gimblett and Tom Burns (also of that department) with the proposal that
we begin a Children's Folklore Society within AFS. And we did just that.
The society continues with admirable autonomy, now issuing its own jour-
nal, Children's Folklore Review, under the editorship of C. W. Sullivan III.
The idea for the second phase, which became the present work,
emerged one evening in 1980 at the annual Folklore Meeting. Jay Mechling,
Tom Johnson, and I decided that the next step in assisting children's
folklore to academic credibility would be the development of a handbook
for course use. It took about five years to find the authors and get the first
outlines of the present work on the table. For the next five years I used the
outline as a text in my children's folklore course and benefited immeasur-
ably from the student critiques of it. During those ten years the manuscript
wandered in and out of the University of Pennsylvania Press and the Smith-
sonian Press, finally coming to rest at Garland Publishing, owing to the zest
of Garland editor Marie Ellen Larcada. From 1990 to the present, we all
suffered the vicissitudes of trying to get all this material into the computer.
Ultimately we were saved by Felicia R. McMahon of Syracuse Uni-
versity, who undertook the prodigious work of scholarly editorship to bring
the work to fruition-as well as to add materials from her own research.
Along the way it was decided that our work was not comprehensive enough
to be a handbook, but that it was a step in that direction and a useful first
sourcebook. Her efforts were aided greatly by the assistance of Dr. Nancy
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? ? Shawcross of the University of Pennsylvania and Professor Susan Wadley of
Syracuse University.
For my part, all of this was originally made possible because Barbara
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett had once suggested that a course I had taught for ten
years at Teachers College, Columbia University, which I entitled "The Psy-
chology of Childlore," be called "Children's Folklore" and brought to the
University of Pennsylvania. I did that for a year and then joined the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania with appointments in both education and folklore, a
move made possible by the support of Kenneth Goldstein and Henry Glassie
of the Folklore Department and Dell Hymes and Erling Boe of the Educa-
tion School. I owe to all these people-and particularly to Barbara-a dis-
tinct debt of gratitude for the good life I've found and the interdisciplinary
flavor that became possible in my scholarship after that career change.
Brian Sutton-Smith
Xii PREFACE
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? ? CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
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? ?
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? ? INTRODUCTION
WHAT IS CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE?
Brian Sutton-Smith
Children's folklore is not easy to define. Folklore itself as a scholarly disci-
pline is in a process of transition. In earlier definitions, attention was given
predominantly to traditional stories, dances, proverbs, riddles, poetry, ma-
terial culture, and customs, passed on orally from generation to generation.
The emphasis was upon recording the "survivals" of an earlier way of life,
believed to be fading away. Attention, therefore, was on the antique, the
anonymous in origin, the collective in composition, and the simple in char-
acter (Ben-Amos 1971).
Today's definitions, by contrast, place more emphasis on the living char-
acter of these customs in peoples, whether tribal, ancient, ethnic, or modern.
Folklorists today are more concerned with the actual living performance of
these traditional materials (dance, song, tale) in their particular settings, with
their functional or aesthetic character in particular contexts. Unfortunately,
such "live" studies are more difficult to carry out than studies of collected
records or reports-and so we have very few of them. In the chapters that
follow, contributions range from attempts to catch contemporary children's
play and games (Zumwalt, McDowell, Beresin and Hughes) to surveys of col-
lected children's folklore (Sullivan, Roemer, Tucker, and Jorgensen). Most chap-
ters share some of both, the "contextual" and the "textual. "
THE RHETORICS OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
What these changes in the definition of folklore make clear is the relativity
of definitions of folklore to the scholarly rhetorics of a particular time and
place. Apparently, there is never going to be any final definition of children's
folklore (or of any other human subject matter). At any given time folklore
will be a cumulative subject, young scholars contending that their new per-
spectives are more valid than those of their predecessors. If we are lucky we
will have, as a result, an increasing number of excellent records to argue
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? ? about. What all children's folklorists seem to have in common, however, is
their interest in expressive rather than instrumental culture; in celebration
rather than work; and perhaps in humor rather than sobriety. There is also
the recurrent note of empathy that these folklorists appear to share with those
folk who are not in the mainstream of modern culture but who find them-
selves on its edge. Folklore is a "romantic" undertaking, still not divorced
from its antiquarian origins in the early 1800s. Whether or not current folk-
lorists are any more faithful to the "folk" than were the Brothers Grimm,
the identification lives on (Ellis 1983; Tatar 1992). For some of us childhood
itself is such an edge, and within its sometimes sullen joys we find also so-
lace for our idiosyncratic selves.
But children's folklore is primarily about children, and is therefore
heir to all the difficulties the concept of "childhood" has encountered in this
century. What seems remarkable about the chapters that follow is that the
children who appear in these pages are so different from the children who
appear almost everywhere else in twentieth-century social-science literature.
We can seek therefore to discover how the rhetoric of childhood in folklore
differs from that, for example, in psychology, where child development has
been a major subject. We must hurriedly add that there are many rhetorics
of childhood-a subject in the context of psychology we have dealt with else-
where (Sutton-Smith 1994). In the psychological literature, there is a rheto-
ric of children as relatively passive experimental subjects who become at-
tached to their parents, who begin to gain understanding of the world around
them, who progress through various steps in language development, in so-
cial development, and in moral development. They learn to relate to their
peers and to their teachers, and in due course they go through their physi-
cal, emotional, and intellectual growth and become adolescents. We hear
either of the extent to which their behavior is determined by patterns of child
rearing or sex-role stereotyping, or we hear about the inevitability of the
growth crises and growth sequences through which they pass.
What we do not hear about are the many ways in which they react
to or do not fit into these apparently normative schemes of socialization. It
is true that in this sober psychological literature the function of peer inter-
action and peer groups is said to be to socialize children into sex and ag-
gression. But we are not given any real sense of the antithetical character of
the events that such "socialization" might well and often does imply. It is
not that we are not given indications of extreme behavior such as child abuse,
infantile autism, and anorexia nervosa; it is just that these extremes are used,
if anything, to mark the regularity of normal and predictable patterns. By
emphasizing atypical extremes, the ordinary "extremities" of everyday life
4 INTRODUCTION
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? ? are overlooked in this psychological rhetoric. Given what Foucault has writ-
ten, even if perhaps exaggeratedly, about psychology and its use of clinical
and developmental information to empower its experts in the control of other
people's lives, it is hard to treat their doings as purely the science that they
think it is (Foucault 1973, 1987). It is hard not to agree that much of de-
velopmental and child psychology includes a set of political rhetorics about
childhood.
What the contents of this present Source Book seem to say, to the con-
trary of that psychological rhetoric of childhood, is that ordinary life is much
more marked by disruptive interest and reaction than the conventional psy-
chological or sociological story of child development usually brings to
our attention. Thus, the chapters that follow discuss the literature on ghosts,
verbal dueling, obscenity, graffiti, parties, levitation, slang, pranks, automo-
bile lore, autograph and yearbook verses, puns and parodies, special argots,
initiation rituals, folk speech, institutional legends, urine and excrement play,
toilet lore, panty raids, riots, fire play, food fights, recreational drug use,
jokes, insults, sex play, folk beliefs, skits, camp songs and verses, scoff lore,
hazing, rituals of separation and incorporation, school lore, types of play-
grounds, oral transmission, gaming rhetoric, forts, go-carts, toys, playthings,
empty lots, play equipment, oral legislation, wit and repartee, guile, riddles,
impropriety, nicknames, epithets, jeers and torments, half beliefs, calendrical
customs, fortune, partisanship, ambushes, telephone jokes, shockers, preju-
dice and scapegoating, fartlore, kissing games, superstitions, scaries, divina-
tion, mean play, Halloween and April Fool's Day, among many others. While
this miscellaneous list of items hardly adds up to an alternative rhetoric of
childhood, it does imply the need for a rhetoric that unites such Dionysian
or irrational elements with the Apollonian conventionalities of "normal"
childhood socialization theory (Spariosu 1989).
It is true that there are some modern psychologists who consider the
antithesis of the child and the aleatoric quality of life as important as the
predictability of growth and development, but they are by and large excep-
tional (Gergen 1982). Most social scientists of growth are caught into pre-
diction as the measure of their science, and therefore are not particularly
interested in, or tolerant of, the unpredictable waywardness of everyday child
behavior and the surreptitious antitheticality of child-instigated traditions
that are often the concern of the folklorist. What appears to have happened
is that the scientists of human development have taken an adult-centered view
of development within which they privilege the adult stages over the child-
hood ones. It is implicit in their writings that it is better to be at the moral
stage of conscience than at the earlier stage of fear of consequences; better
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? ? to have arrived at ego integrity than to be still concerned with ego autonomy;
better to be capable of adult genitality than of childhood latency. The "hero"
story they tell, however, is a story on behalf of adults. In its "scientific" char-
acter it does not acknowledge that this version of the classic Western "hero"
tale is a "vestige" of the theory of cultural evolution long rejected within
anthropology (see, for example, the chapter by Zumwalt in this volume).
It can be argued that the linear directionality in these theories of de-
velopment does disservice to our understanding of the gestaltlike character
and intrinsic qualities of each phase of child life. We constantly subsume
present activities to their utility for sober and sensible (hence conservative)
adult outcomes. By contrast, the present work pronounces so strongly that
what children find most enjoyable is often ecstatic or subversive: It is a rev-
elry of their own youthful actions that no longer seem profound or moving
to adults or it is an antithetical reaction to the institutional and everyday
hegemonies of the life about them.
RHETORICS OF PLAY
This brings us to the point where we acknowledge that children's folklore
is not only influenced by our underlying concepts of childhood, it is also
influenced by our underlying concepts of play, or some synthesis of the con-
cepts of childhood and those of play. More important, we must repeat that
we are not just dealing here with scientific concepts of two different kinds,
but rather with two rhetorics about how we should think about our schol-
arship. At this point it is useful to think of the possibility that large-scale,
historically derived attitudes and values can be seen as determiners of what
we think it is worthwhile to study and how we think we should go about
it. The rhetoric of developmental psychology, for example, seems to be the
familiar "rhetoric of progress" in the service of a conservative view of child
growth. It is a rhetoric highly influenced by the historical intellectual inher-
itance from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and from the theory
of evolution in the nineteenth century.
The rhetoric of much of the chapters that follow with their celebra-
tion of childish culture, including childish protest, is as we have said, by
contrast, a rhetoric deriving from historical romanticism. We might call it a
rhetoric of play, as the imagination or as fancy. The faculty of the imagina-
tion, as Kant called it, however, has been tied too strongly to rationalistic
enterprises for explaining mental functions to be useful as a governing term.
We need some term that implies not only the creativity of the imagination
but also its irrational capacities. We are dealing not just with Shirley Temple
here, we are also dealing with Mad Magazine (Sutton-Smith 1988). Presum-
6 INTRODUCTION
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? ? ably some rhetorics of fancy underly not only folklore but are also influen-
tial throughout the arts and humanities in thought about play.
Elsewhere we have dealt with the two other rhetorics that seem to
share with these first two the larger part of the intellectual grasp of the world
of play; they have their impact in this volume also. These are the rhetoric
of power and the rhetoric of optimal experience. The first is a rhetoric of
play as power, contest, conflict, war, competition, hierarchy, hidden tran-
scripts, and so forth. It is a rhetoric that dominates the thinking about play
to be found in sport sociology, in mathematical game theory, and in anthro-
pology; in the present volume it is particularly apparent in the gaming analy-
ses of girls by Hughes. The second rhetoric is about the quality of optimal
experience (fun, flow, etc. ) in play; it is found in phenomenological writings
and in the leisure sciences. It has also become a popular way of thinking in
modern consumer culture where good experiences are said to be those that
allow for a choice, freedom, and fun, all of which are said to occur in play
(Sutton-Smith 1993).
The children in children's folklore as seen through the spectacles of
fancy or power are very different from children seen through the progress
rhetoric of psychology. In bringing them into view as we do in this work,
our own implicit rhetorical purpose is to ask our readers not to deny or re-
press this socially creative childhood that we have described. We ask them
to take fully the measure of the fact that if play is what is most important
to children, why is it we do so much to ignore that fact? Why is it we con-
tinue to combat in childhood that play that has become so central to the
childhood we have unwittingly created these past several hundred years?
This is not to say that the children's societies are not themselves of-
ten remarkably conservative, ritualistic, and governed by routine, as well as
manifesting moments of high fantasy and silly innovation (see McDowell,
below). Within their groups, children appear to be governed by a dialecti-
cal representation of the society of which they are a part (Zumwalt). They
capture its conservative organization and attitudes in their mimicry of moth-
ers and monsters, but at the same time they willfully caricature what they
thus represent. Both mimicry and mockery are the substance of child play
and children's folklore, at least as viewed through spectacles of a rhetoric
of fancy. Our rhetoric of children's folklore, then, is that it is a branch of
folklore characterized by that dialectical mimicry and mockery, performance
and parody, of which children seem to be especially capable, given their
adaptively neotonous and sociologically marginal characteristics.
Our rhetoric of children's folklore speaks also of their "own group
traditions," which raises the question, Just what are the folk groups to which
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? ? children belong? Folklorists have expanded considerably their definition of
the "folk group. " No longer reserving this term for isolated rural commu-
nity or urban enclave, most folklorists would agree with Alan Dundes's view
that a folk group consists of two or more people who share something in
common-language, occupation, religion, residence-and who share "tra-
ditions" that they consider important to their shared sense of identity
(Dundes 1965, 2). Folk groups should be small enough that each member
has, or could have, face-to-face interaction with every other member. That
means that folk groups could be fairly large, but the definition excludes
"groups" that are mere aggregations of individuals who share some element
but never interact so as to develop group traditions.
Children's folk groups, therefore, can be many and overlapping. The
smallest folk groups can be composed of playmates. These tiniest folk groups
often develop rich traditions of interaction (Oring 1986). The family sibling
group and the family itself are an important folk group, as folklorists are
coming to see (Sutton-Smith and Rosenberg 1970). Moving out in larger and
larger concentric circles, we see that the neighborhood, the street corner gang,
the play group, the school class, the Cub Scout den or Brownie troop, the
organized sports team, the "secret club," and so on are all likely folk groups
for the child and adolescent. And, as is true for adults, the child's constella-
tion of folk groups likely consists of a mix of the informal and the formal.
As several of the following chapters indicate, one feature of children's cul-
ture is the increasing organization of their folk groups and folk-group ac-
tivities by adults. And just as common is the child's resistance to that orga-
nization. The folklorist, for example, more readily assumes that he or she
will find a folk group at the "pickup" softball game at the neighborhood
sandlot than at the Little League stadium game. But, as Fine shows in his
work, the Little League team might constitute a folk group in spite of its
"artificial" formation by adults (1987). Indeed, kids often form folk groups
in such settings precisely because they want to assert their own group cul-
ture against the adults' definition of the group.
In other words, the apparent circularity of Dundes's definition-that
a folk group exists where there are folk traditions, and that folk traditions
are the expressive communications a group shares-is not meant to avoid
the need to define our domain. Rather, the circularity tells the folklorists that
a folk culture is a dialectical process, the group and traditions defining one
another, and that it is always an empirical question whether a given group
is a folk group. The folklorist must look at the group, observe their culture,
and decide whether this is a folk group. To paraphrase the old joke, If it looks
like a folk group, acts like a folk group, smells like a folk group, and tastes
8 INTRODUCTION
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? ? CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
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? ?
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? ? CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
A SOURCE BOOK
EDITED BY
BRIAN SUTTON-SMITH
JAY MECHLING
THOMAS W. JOHNSON
FELICIA R. MCMAHON
UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Logan, Utah
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? ? Copyright (C) 1999 by Brian Sutton-Smith, Jay Mechling, Thomas W. Johnson,
and Felicia R. McMahon.
All rights reserved.
Cover photograph: Children outside tenements in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1895, by
Frances B. Johnston. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Cover design by Michelle Sellers.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Children's folklore : a source book / edited by Brian Sutton-Smith. . . [et al. ].
p. cm.
ISBN 0-87421-280-4
Originally published: New York : Garland, 1995, in series: Garland reference
library of social science; vol. 647.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Children -- Folklore. 2. Children and folklore. 3. Folklore --
Methodology. I. Sutton-Smith, Brian.
GR475. C49 1999
11769490
CIP
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? ? CONTENTS
ix CONTRIBUTORS
xi PREFACE
3 INTRODUCTION:
Brian Sutton-Smith
WHAT IS CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE?
Chapter i
II WHO ARE THE FOLKLORISTS OF CHILDHOOD?
Sylvia Ann Grider
SECTION I
19 OVERVIEW: HISTORY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
Brian Sutton-Smith
Chapter z
23 THE COMPLEXITY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
Rosemary Levy Zumwalt
Chapter 3
49 THE TRANSMISSION OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
John H. McDowell
SECTION II
63 OVERVIEW: METHODS IN CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
Brian Sutton-Smith
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? ? Chapter 4
75 DOUBLE DUTCH AND DOUBLE CAMERAS:
STUDYING THE TRANSMISSION OF CULTURE
IN AN URBAN SCHOOL YARD
Ann Richman Beresin
Chapter 5
93 CHILDREN'S GAMES AND GAMING
Linda A. Hughes
Chapter 6
Iz2I METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS OF COLLECTING
FOLKLORE FROM CHILDREN
Gary Alan Fine
SECTION III
141 OVERVIEW: CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE CONCERNS
Brian Sutton-Smith
Chapter 7
145 SONGS, POEMS, AND RHYMES
C. W Sullivan III
Chapter 8
161 RIDDLES
Danielle M. Roemer
Chapter 9
193 TALES AND LEGENDS
Elizabeth Tucker
Chapter Io
213 TEASES AND PRANKS
Marilyn Jorgensen
SECTION IV
225 OVERVIEW: SETTINGS AND ACTIVITIES
Brian Sutton-Smith
vi CONTENTS
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? ? Chapter ii
229 CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL AND PLAYGROUNDS
Bernard Mergen
Chapter 12
251 MATERIAL FOLK CULTURE OF CHILDREN
Simon J. Bronner
Chapter 13
273 CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE IN RESIDENTIAL INSTITUTIONS:
SUMMER CAMPS, BOARDING SCHOOLS, HOSPITALS,
AND CUSTODIAL FACILITIES
Jay Mechling
CONCLUSION
293 THE PAST IN THE PRESENT: THEORETICAL DIRECTIONS
FOR CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
Felicia R. McMahon and Brian Sutton-Smith
309 GLOSSARY: AN AID FOR SOURCE BOOK READERS
317 BIBLIOGRAPHY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
Thomas W Johnson (and Felicia R. McMahon)
37I INDEX
vii
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? ?
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? ? CONTRIBUTORS
SIMON J. BRONNER
American Studies and
Humanities
Pennsylvania State University,
Capitol Campus
Middletown
GARY ALAN FINE
Department of Sociology
University of Georgia
Athens
SYLVIA ANN GRIDER
Graduate College
Texas A & M University
College Station
LINDA A. HUGHES
Cochranville, PA
THOMAS W. JOHNSON
Liberal Studies
California State University
Chico
JOHN H. McDOWELL
Folklore Institute
Indiana University
Bloomington
FELICIA R. MCMAHON
Anthropology
Syracuse University
Syracuse, NY
JAY MECHLING
American Studies Program
University of California
Davis
BERNARD MERGEN
American Studies
George Washington
University
Washington, DC
ANN RICHMAN BERESIN
Philadelphia, PA
MARILYN JORGENSEN
Sacramento, CA
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? ? DANIELLE M. ROEMER
Department of Language and
Literature
Northern Kentucky University
Highland Heights
C. W. SULLIVAN III
Department of English
East Carolina University
Greenville, NC
ELIZABETH TUCKER
Department of English
State University of New York
Binghamton
ROSEMARY LgvY ZUMWALT
Department of Anthropology
and Sociology
Davidson College
Davidson, NC
BRIAN SUTTrON-SMITH
Sarasota, Florida
X CONTRIBUTORS
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? ? PREFACE
This book began when the late Sue Samuelson, my first teaching assistant
in 1977 for the children's folklore course at the University of Pennsylvania,
told me that it would not be possible to do a thesis in children's folklore
because there was absolutely no interest in children either at the American
Folklore Society (AFS) or in the Folklore Department at the university. What-
ever the truth of her indictment, it led me to approach Barbara Kirshenblatt-
Gimblett and Tom Burns (also of that department) with the proposal that
we begin a Children's Folklore Society within AFS. And we did just that.
The society continues with admirable autonomy, now issuing its own jour-
nal, Children's Folklore Review, under the editorship of C. W. Sullivan III.
The idea for the second phase, which became the present work,
emerged one evening in 1980 at the annual Folklore Meeting. Jay Mechling,
Tom Johnson, and I decided that the next step in assisting children's
folklore to academic credibility would be the development of a handbook
for course use. It took about five years to find the authors and get the first
outlines of the present work on the table. For the next five years I used the
outline as a text in my children's folklore course and benefited immeasur-
ably from the student critiques of it. During those ten years the manuscript
wandered in and out of the University of Pennsylvania Press and the Smith-
sonian Press, finally coming to rest at Garland Publishing, owing to the zest
of Garland editor Marie Ellen Larcada. From 1990 to the present, we all
suffered the vicissitudes of trying to get all this material into the computer.
Ultimately we were saved by Felicia R. McMahon of Syracuse Uni-
versity, who undertook the prodigious work of scholarly editorship to bring
the work to fruition-as well as to add materials from her own research.
Along the way it was decided that our work was not comprehensive enough
to be a handbook, but that it was a step in that direction and a useful first
sourcebook. Her efforts were aided greatly by the assistance of Dr. Nancy
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? ? Shawcross of the University of Pennsylvania and Professor Susan Wadley of
Syracuse University.
For my part, all of this was originally made possible because Barbara
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett had once suggested that a course I had taught for ten
years at Teachers College, Columbia University, which I entitled "The Psy-
chology of Childlore," be called "Children's Folklore" and brought to the
University of Pennsylvania. I did that for a year and then joined the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania with appointments in both education and folklore, a
move made possible by the support of Kenneth Goldstein and Henry Glassie
of the Folklore Department and Dell Hymes and Erling Boe of the Educa-
tion School. I owe to all these people-and particularly to Barbara-a dis-
tinct debt of gratitude for the good life I've found and the interdisciplinary
flavor that became possible in my scholarship after that career change.
Brian Sutton-Smith
Xii PREFACE
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? ? CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
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? ?
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? ? INTRODUCTION
WHAT IS CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE?
Brian Sutton-Smith
Children's folklore is not easy to define. Folklore itself as a scholarly disci-
pline is in a process of transition. In earlier definitions, attention was given
predominantly to traditional stories, dances, proverbs, riddles, poetry, ma-
terial culture, and customs, passed on orally from generation to generation.
The emphasis was upon recording the "survivals" of an earlier way of life,
believed to be fading away. Attention, therefore, was on the antique, the
anonymous in origin, the collective in composition, and the simple in char-
acter (Ben-Amos 1971).
Today's definitions, by contrast, place more emphasis on the living char-
acter of these customs in peoples, whether tribal, ancient, ethnic, or modern.
Folklorists today are more concerned with the actual living performance of
these traditional materials (dance, song, tale) in their particular settings, with
their functional or aesthetic character in particular contexts. Unfortunately,
such "live" studies are more difficult to carry out than studies of collected
records or reports-and so we have very few of them. In the chapters that
follow, contributions range from attempts to catch contemporary children's
play and games (Zumwalt, McDowell, Beresin and Hughes) to surveys of col-
lected children's folklore (Sullivan, Roemer, Tucker, and Jorgensen). Most chap-
ters share some of both, the "contextual" and the "textual. "
THE RHETORICS OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
What these changes in the definition of folklore make clear is the relativity
of definitions of folklore to the scholarly rhetorics of a particular time and
place. Apparently, there is never going to be any final definition of children's
folklore (or of any other human subject matter). At any given time folklore
will be a cumulative subject, young scholars contending that their new per-
spectives are more valid than those of their predecessors. If we are lucky we
will have, as a result, an increasing number of excellent records to argue
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? ? about. What all children's folklorists seem to have in common, however, is
their interest in expressive rather than instrumental culture; in celebration
rather than work; and perhaps in humor rather than sobriety. There is also
the recurrent note of empathy that these folklorists appear to share with those
folk who are not in the mainstream of modern culture but who find them-
selves on its edge. Folklore is a "romantic" undertaking, still not divorced
from its antiquarian origins in the early 1800s. Whether or not current folk-
lorists are any more faithful to the "folk" than were the Brothers Grimm,
the identification lives on (Ellis 1983; Tatar 1992). For some of us childhood
itself is such an edge, and within its sometimes sullen joys we find also so-
lace for our idiosyncratic selves.
But children's folklore is primarily about children, and is therefore
heir to all the difficulties the concept of "childhood" has encountered in this
century. What seems remarkable about the chapters that follow is that the
children who appear in these pages are so different from the children who
appear almost everywhere else in twentieth-century social-science literature.
We can seek therefore to discover how the rhetoric of childhood in folklore
differs from that, for example, in psychology, where child development has
been a major subject. We must hurriedly add that there are many rhetorics
of childhood-a subject in the context of psychology we have dealt with else-
where (Sutton-Smith 1994). In the psychological literature, there is a rheto-
ric of children as relatively passive experimental subjects who become at-
tached to their parents, who begin to gain understanding of the world around
them, who progress through various steps in language development, in so-
cial development, and in moral development. They learn to relate to their
peers and to their teachers, and in due course they go through their physi-
cal, emotional, and intellectual growth and become adolescents. We hear
either of the extent to which their behavior is determined by patterns of child
rearing or sex-role stereotyping, or we hear about the inevitability of the
growth crises and growth sequences through which they pass.
What we do not hear about are the many ways in which they react
to or do not fit into these apparently normative schemes of socialization. It
is true that in this sober psychological literature the function of peer inter-
action and peer groups is said to be to socialize children into sex and ag-
gression. But we are not given any real sense of the antithetical character of
the events that such "socialization" might well and often does imply. It is
not that we are not given indications of extreme behavior such as child abuse,
infantile autism, and anorexia nervosa; it is just that these extremes are used,
if anything, to mark the regularity of normal and predictable patterns. By
emphasizing atypical extremes, the ordinary "extremities" of everyday life
4 INTRODUCTION
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? ? are overlooked in this psychological rhetoric. Given what Foucault has writ-
ten, even if perhaps exaggeratedly, about psychology and its use of clinical
and developmental information to empower its experts in the control of other
people's lives, it is hard to treat their doings as purely the science that they
think it is (Foucault 1973, 1987). It is hard not to agree that much of de-
velopmental and child psychology includes a set of political rhetorics about
childhood.
What the contents of this present Source Book seem to say, to the con-
trary of that psychological rhetoric of childhood, is that ordinary life is much
more marked by disruptive interest and reaction than the conventional psy-
chological or sociological story of child development usually brings to
our attention. Thus, the chapters that follow discuss the literature on ghosts,
verbal dueling, obscenity, graffiti, parties, levitation, slang, pranks, automo-
bile lore, autograph and yearbook verses, puns and parodies, special argots,
initiation rituals, folk speech, institutional legends, urine and excrement play,
toilet lore, panty raids, riots, fire play, food fights, recreational drug use,
jokes, insults, sex play, folk beliefs, skits, camp songs and verses, scoff lore,
hazing, rituals of separation and incorporation, school lore, types of play-
grounds, oral transmission, gaming rhetoric, forts, go-carts, toys, playthings,
empty lots, play equipment, oral legislation, wit and repartee, guile, riddles,
impropriety, nicknames, epithets, jeers and torments, half beliefs, calendrical
customs, fortune, partisanship, ambushes, telephone jokes, shockers, preju-
dice and scapegoating, fartlore, kissing games, superstitions, scaries, divina-
tion, mean play, Halloween and April Fool's Day, among many others. While
this miscellaneous list of items hardly adds up to an alternative rhetoric of
childhood, it does imply the need for a rhetoric that unites such Dionysian
or irrational elements with the Apollonian conventionalities of "normal"
childhood socialization theory (Spariosu 1989).
It is true that there are some modern psychologists who consider the
antithesis of the child and the aleatoric quality of life as important as the
predictability of growth and development, but they are by and large excep-
tional (Gergen 1982). Most social scientists of growth are caught into pre-
diction as the measure of their science, and therefore are not particularly
interested in, or tolerant of, the unpredictable waywardness of everyday child
behavior and the surreptitious antitheticality of child-instigated traditions
that are often the concern of the folklorist. What appears to have happened
is that the scientists of human development have taken an adult-centered view
of development within which they privilege the adult stages over the child-
hood ones. It is implicit in their writings that it is better to be at the moral
stage of conscience than at the earlier stage of fear of consequences; better
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? ? to have arrived at ego integrity than to be still concerned with ego autonomy;
better to be capable of adult genitality than of childhood latency. The "hero"
story they tell, however, is a story on behalf of adults. In its "scientific" char-
acter it does not acknowledge that this version of the classic Western "hero"
tale is a "vestige" of the theory of cultural evolution long rejected within
anthropology (see, for example, the chapter by Zumwalt in this volume).
It can be argued that the linear directionality in these theories of de-
velopment does disservice to our understanding of the gestaltlike character
and intrinsic qualities of each phase of child life. We constantly subsume
present activities to their utility for sober and sensible (hence conservative)
adult outcomes. By contrast, the present work pronounces so strongly that
what children find most enjoyable is often ecstatic or subversive: It is a rev-
elry of their own youthful actions that no longer seem profound or moving
to adults or it is an antithetical reaction to the institutional and everyday
hegemonies of the life about them.
RHETORICS OF PLAY
This brings us to the point where we acknowledge that children's folklore
is not only influenced by our underlying concepts of childhood, it is also
influenced by our underlying concepts of play, or some synthesis of the con-
cepts of childhood and those of play. More important, we must repeat that
we are not just dealing here with scientific concepts of two different kinds,
but rather with two rhetorics about how we should think about our schol-
arship. At this point it is useful to think of the possibility that large-scale,
historically derived attitudes and values can be seen as determiners of what
we think it is worthwhile to study and how we think we should go about
it. The rhetoric of developmental psychology, for example, seems to be the
familiar "rhetoric of progress" in the service of a conservative view of child
growth. It is a rhetoric highly influenced by the historical intellectual inher-
itance from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and from the theory
of evolution in the nineteenth century.
The rhetoric of much of the chapters that follow with their celebra-
tion of childish culture, including childish protest, is as we have said, by
contrast, a rhetoric deriving from historical romanticism. We might call it a
rhetoric of play, as the imagination or as fancy. The faculty of the imagina-
tion, as Kant called it, however, has been tied too strongly to rationalistic
enterprises for explaining mental functions to be useful as a governing term.
We need some term that implies not only the creativity of the imagination
but also its irrational capacities. We are dealing not just with Shirley Temple
here, we are also dealing with Mad Magazine (Sutton-Smith 1988). Presum-
6 INTRODUCTION
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? ? ably some rhetorics of fancy underly not only folklore but are also influen-
tial throughout the arts and humanities in thought about play.
Elsewhere we have dealt with the two other rhetorics that seem to
share with these first two the larger part of the intellectual grasp of the world
of play; they have their impact in this volume also. These are the rhetoric
of power and the rhetoric of optimal experience. The first is a rhetoric of
play as power, contest, conflict, war, competition, hierarchy, hidden tran-
scripts, and so forth. It is a rhetoric that dominates the thinking about play
to be found in sport sociology, in mathematical game theory, and in anthro-
pology; in the present volume it is particularly apparent in the gaming analy-
ses of girls by Hughes. The second rhetoric is about the quality of optimal
experience (fun, flow, etc. ) in play; it is found in phenomenological writings
and in the leisure sciences. It has also become a popular way of thinking in
modern consumer culture where good experiences are said to be those that
allow for a choice, freedom, and fun, all of which are said to occur in play
(Sutton-Smith 1993).
The children in children's folklore as seen through the spectacles of
fancy or power are very different from children seen through the progress
rhetoric of psychology. In bringing them into view as we do in this work,
our own implicit rhetorical purpose is to ask our readers not to deny or re-
press this socially creative childhood that we have described. We ask them
to take fully the measure of the fact that if play is what is most important
to children, why is it we do so much to ignore that fact? Why is it we con-
tinue to combat in childhood that play that has become so central to the
childhood we have unwittingly created these past several hundred years?
This is not to say that the children's societies are not themselves of-
ten remarkably conservative, ritualistic, and governed by routine, as well as
manifesting moments of high fantasy and silly innovation (see McDowell,
below). Within their groups, children appear to be governed by a dialecti-
cal representation of the society of which they are a part (Zumwalt). They
capture its conservative organization and attitudes in their mimicry of moth-
ers and monsters, but at the same time they willfully caricature what they
thus represent. Both mimicry and mockery are the substance of child play
and children's folklore, at least as viewed through spectacles of a rhetoric
of fancy. Our rhetoric of children's folklore, then, is that it is a branch of
folklore characterized by that dialectical mimicry and mockery, performance
and parody, of which children seem to be especially capable, given their
adaptively neotonous and sociologically marginal characteristics.
Our rhetoric of children's folklore speaks also of their "own group
traditions," which raises the question, Just what are the folk groups to which
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? ? children belong? Folklorists have expanded considerably their definition of
the "folk group. " No longer reserving this term for isolated rural commu-
nity or urban enclave, most folklorists would agree with Alan Dundes's view
that a folk group consists of two or more people who share something in
common-language, occupation, religion, residence-and who share "tra-
ditions" that they consider important to their shared sense of identity
(Dundes 1965, 2). Folk groups should be small enough that each member
has, or could have, face-to-face interaction with every other member. That
means that folk groups could be fairly large, but the definition excludes
"groups" that are mere aggregations of individuals who share some element
but never interact so as to develop group traditions.
Children's folk groups, therefore, can be many and overlapping. The
smallest folk groups can be composed of playmates. These tiniest folk groups
often develop rich traditions of interaction (Oring 1986). The family sibling
group and the family itself are an important folk group, as folklorists are
coming to see (Sutton-Smith and Rosenberg 1970). Moving out in larger and
larger concentric circles, we see that the neighborhood, the street corner gang,
the play group, the school class, the Cub Scout den or Brownie troop, the
organized sports team, the "secret club," and so on are all likely folk groups
for the child and adolescent. And, as is true for adults, the child's constella-
tion of folk groups likely consists of a mix of the informal and the formal.
As several of the following chapters indicate, one feature of children's cul-
ture is the increasing organization of their folk groups and folk-group ac-
tivities by adults. And just as common is the child's resistance to that orga-
nization. The folklorist, for example, more readily assumes that he or she
will find a folk group at the "pickup" softball game at the neighborhood
sandlot than at the Little League stadium game. But, as Fine shows in his
work, the Little League team might constitute a folk group in spite of its
"artificial" formation by adults (1987). Indeed, kids often form folk groups
in such settings precisely because they want to assert their own group cul-
ture against the adults' definition of the group.
In other words, the apparent circularity of Dundes's definition-that
a folk group exists where there are folk traditions, and that folk traditions
are the expressive communications a group shares-is not meant to avoid
the need to define our domain. Rather, the circularity tells the folklorists that
a folk culture is a dialectical process, the group and traditions defining one
another, and that it is always an empirical question whether a given group
is a folk group. The folklorist must look at the group, observe their culture,
and decide whether this is a folk group. To paraphrase the old joke, If it looks
like a folk group, acts like a folk group, smells like a folk group, and tastes
8 INTRODUCTION
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