No More Learning

23. Folklore Archives, University of California, Berkeley. Collected by Susan
Rush from Penola Campbell in Oakland, California. The informant first heard this
legend in 1968 when she was living in Ireland; it was told to her by her husband, who
had lived all his life in Dublin.
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? ?
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? ? 3 THE TRANSMISSION
OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
John H. McDowell
The transmission of children's folklore naturally falls within the broader
question of the transmission of folklore in general. Every conceptualization
of folklore must contain a theory, whether explicit or implicit, regarding the
transmission of folklore, since folklore is universally recognized as an inher-
ently social phenomenon. While these issues have not always received the
attention they deserve, folkloristic theories of transmission nonetheless
abound in the literature. To gain a grasp on these theories, I suggest the fol-
lowing two categories: theories viewing folklore transmission as a
superorganic, mechanical process; and theories emphasizing its serendipitous
and emergent character.
Folklore transmission viewed as a mechanical process figures promi-
nently in those theories of folklore taking their inspiration from the philo-
logical roots of our discipline. Jakob Grimm, in his studies of Germanic and
Indo-European languages, identified systematic laws of phonological shift
that operate, for all intents and purposes, outside the immediate arena of
concrete speech events. The Grimm brothers considered folklore "only a
higher and freer speech of mankind," and hypothesized that laws similar to
sound shift laws could be discovered to account for the persistence of tradi-
tional items and their variants through time and space (see Crane 1918).
Their theories accounting for Mairchen as broken-down Indo-European
myths are perhaps the main fruit of this orientation. The realm defined by
their compelling aphorism, das Volk dichtet, "the people, as a whole, com-
poses poetry" (Kittredge and Sargent 1904), transcends the sphere of
grounded human interaction.
This superorganic orientation persists in the work of the historic-geo-
graphic folklore scholars. Kaarle Krohn (1971, 98) argues that "it is the
mechanical laws of thought and imagination that prevail in the rich varia-
tion of oral tradition. " In a sequence of chapters entitled "The Influence of
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? ? Faulty Memory," "The Impulse Toward Expansion," and "Laws of Trans-
formation," Krohn discusses a series of "laws of thought" capable of pro-
ducing the observed differences among variants of a migratory folklore item.
But these laws are strictly conjectural, founded on the examination of texts,
rather than on the examination of living folkloristic "cultures. " Folklore
transmission, in this frame of reference, becomes an impersonal process to
be inferred and reconstructed on the basis of exclusively philological evi-
dence. The status of these "laws of thought" is quite analogous to that of
Grimm's laws of consonant shift, founded on the impersonal forces of lan-
guage change.
Krohn sought to embody the "mechanical laws of thought and imagi-
nation" in two models, portraying the spread of folklore materials in the
manner of waves on the water emanating from a central source of distur-
bance, and in the manner of a stream welling forth in a certain direction.
C. W. von Sydow rejects these models, introducing elements of an alterna-
tive theory of folklore transmission. Retaining the same essential goals as
those held by Krohn, von Sydow introduces the concepts of active and pas-
sive bearers, mutation, and oicotypification. "The dissemination of a tale,"
von Sydow contends, "is desultory to a high degree. " "Only a very small
number of active bearers of tradition equipped with a good memory, vivid
imagination, and narrative powers do transmit the tales. It is only they who
tell them. Among their audience it is only a small percentage still who actu-
ally do so. Most of those who have heard a tale told and are able to remem-
ber it, remain passive carriers of tradition, whose importance for the con-
tinued life of the tale consists mainly in their interest in hearing it told again"
(von Sydow 1965 [1948], 231).
The commitment to folkloristics as a philological inquiry is evident
in the key construction here, "the life of the tale. " Yet at the same time,
von Sydow delves beyond the impersonal forces of language and culture
drift to enfranchise the individual performers and audience members in his
general theory of folklore transmission. Krohn had spoken of bilingual
border populations, and "temporary visits by hunters, fishermen, crafts-
men, merchants, sailors, soldiers, pilgrims, and other wanderers" (Krohn
1971, 59), but von Sydow's concept of active and passive bearers locates
folklore transmission directly in the immediate context of the folklore per-
formance.
Von Sydow introduces the term mutation to refer to specific alter-
ations of narrative materials as storytellers constantly reinterpret a narra-
tive tradition. The language he uses here creates a juxtaposition between the
superorganic framework of folklore transmission, and a more situated, hu-
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? ? man-oriented approach: "An original motif may be superseded by a new
mutation, but a new mutation may also yield to the older form, being un-
able to assert itself at its expense. If a motif is particularly popular, this very
fact may induce various narrators to mutate it in different ways" (von Sydow
1971, 234). The process envisioned here is still somewhat mechanistic, yet
the term mutation admits an element of caprice, since the precise moment
and direction of a mutation cannot be foreseen with any certainty. The con-
cept of mutation presupposes recognition of the immense range of poten-
tial inherent in any act of folklore transmission.
One possible result of mutation in the folklore transmission process
is "a certain unification of the variants within one and the same linguistic
or cultural area on account of isolation from other areas," a result referred
to by von Sydow as oicotypification (von Sydow 1971, 238). He observes
that oicotypification might result "from the circumstance that one mutation
has prevailed over the rest so as to become the oicotype of the tale within
the area concerned" (von Sydow 1971, 238). In this manner, the demands
of scientific generalization are reconciled with recognition of the autonomy
of each individual instance: the individual cases, autonomous in themselves,
nonetheless are thought to pattern into configurations describable in terms
of scientific laws. In the end, von Sydow remains a voice of loyal opposi-
tion within the camp of philologically inspired folklorists.
In recent years, folklorists have developed approaches to folklore
transmission amenable to the groundwork laid in von Sydow's critique of
overly mechanistic models of transmission. The work of these scholars
readily incorporates von Sydow's notions of active and passive bearers, lo-
cating folklore transmission within finite communicative contexts, and mu-
tations, pointing to the unique, unpredictable quality of any given instance
of folklore transmission. Perhaps the key word is emergence, indicating a
fortuitous result achieved through the continuous interaction of all relevant
components in a given folklore performance. According to Richard
Bauman, "The concept of emergence is necessary to the study of perfor-
mance as a means towards comprehending the uniqueness of particular
performances within the context of performance as a generalized cultural
system in a community" (Bauman 1977a, 37). The theory of folklore trans-
mission residing in the performance-centered approach is one concerned
with "the interplay between communicative resources, individual compe-
tence, and the goals of the participants, within the context of particular
situations" (Bauman 1977a, 38).
In a theory centered on the creation and re-creation of folklore
through performance, the term transmission becomes extremely problem-
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? ? atic. The very notion of the "item" of folklore, with its demonstrable "life
history," is no longer entirely tenable. The folklore text, formerly thought
to embody the empirical foundation for folklore studies, becomes, in this
light, a pale and in many ways a misleading reflection of the performance it
purports to record (McDowell 1982).
If it is no longer possible to hold that folklore is "transmitted" in
the manner of a mechanical signal, then how are we to speak of that criti-
cal moment when folklore enters into an interactional format, finding ar-
ticulation in the speech or action of one individual, yet leaving a trace in
the short- or long-term memory of another, eventually to spring forth as a
performance that in some sense repeats the original? How are we to ac-
count for the persistence of form and content in folklore over time? And
what constraints, or patterns, can we identify in the extensive capacity of
performers to shape and reshape folkloric routines that have entered their
repertoires? These are the central issues in the construction of a modern
theory of folklore transmission, a theory intended to address the stable,
generalizable aspects of the process in question, as well as its more capri-
cious, serendipitous aspect.
The domain of children's folklore is a good place to begin formulat-
ing such a theory. The world of the child is in some sense more contained,
and thus more accessible to study, than the multifarious world of the adult.
In the child's realm, we can often specify with some precision the sources of
the routines we observe, and thereby gain a better handle on the processes
of transformation and preservation operative therein. In short, the child's
processing of folkloric materials can be taken as a microcosm of the pro-
cess of folklore transmission in general, and, as such, can provide some pro-
vocative clues of relevance both within and beyond the realm of children's
folklore.
What is it, then, that happens when one child performs a folkloric
routine in the presence of another child, or group of children? Speech act
theory, with its emphasis on perlocutionary effect (Austin 1962), would sug-
gest isolating one complete interactional node as the focus of our analysis,
but we must go one better, to incorporate the arrival of a "repeatable" mes-
sage to the position of a third individual:
child A child B child C
1 (encodes a message) 2 (decodes the message) 5 (decodes a message)
3 (processes the message)
4 (reencodes the message)
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? ? This model draws attention to five discrete moments in the process
of folklore transmission. The first moment, when child A encodes a mes-
sage, initiates a string of events culminating in the arrival of that message
to a third child, who then proceeds to decode it. Clearly, the boundaries of
this model are arbitrary, but we may nonetheless utilize it as a tool for iden-
tifying the basic structure of one finite instance of folklore transmission
among children.
STAGE ONE: CHILD A ENCODES A MESSAGE
In the initial formulation of the message, child A draws on previous experi-
ence in the world to produce a message containing the kinds of features we
identify as folkloric. While there is no consensus on this point, we can gen-
erally mention features such as provenience from a common store of com-
municative resources lying outside the official, institutional channels; pos-
sessing a formulaic quality, something I have referred to elsewhere as an ac-
cessible rhetoric (McDowell 1979); and in some way betraying a ground-
ing in the ethos of some finite, operative human community. In short, child
A produces an item of folklore.
The inspiration for this initial action need not proceed from a folk-
loric source. In many instances, children do draw on these folkloric resources,
the forms so richly documented by Opie and Opie (1959) and elsewhere.
Yet even the briefest exposure to children's folklore reveals the almost amoe-
bic ability of children to incorporate extraneous materials into their expres-
sive competencies. Along these lines, I would mention two particularly im-
portant tributaries: materials proceeding from the folkloric repertoires of
adults, yet suitable for child consumption (for example, fairy tales, riddles,
nursery rhymes, and lullabies); and materials proceeding from popular cul-
ture sources, of major importance in the expressive behavior of contempo-
rary children (Sutton-Smith 1971a).
When adult folklore or popular culture is assimilated into the realm
of children's folklore, changes take place that are most revealing of childish
attitudes and concerns. These extraneous materials undergo a sea change,
to eventually display the contours of perception and conception character-
istic of the child's mind. The distance between the original material and the
child's revamping of it thus stands as an indication of the difference between
the child's cosmology and that of the adult. Consider the following narra-
tive, produced by an eight-year-old child of Mexican descent:
Hey, you know that little girl, she had a, she had a mother but the
mother was witch, and the mother had said:
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? ? "Go get apples and don't give anybody one. "
So that lady had turned into a witch, and she went up there, and
she said:
"Can I have an apple? I haven't eaten for years and years. "
And she goes:
"OK. "
So that lady had eat it and turned into her mother again, and she
said:
"Didn't I tell you not to give anybody an apple? "
"Mom," she said, "she never eat for-"
Then her mother had killed her.
Then her little brother had pulled her hair:
"Brother, brother, don't pull my hair;
Mother had killed me for a single pear. "
And then he ran and go called her father. Then her father pulled her
hair, she said:
"Father, father don't pull my hair;
"Mother had killed me for one single pear. "
And her father killed that lady. 1
There is a strong sense of the presence of the Mairchen in this story.
The pattern of interdiction-violation, the poetic couplets, and the familiar
motive of the informing corpse, all testify to an origin in the adult fairy tale
corpus. Yet this is a rather odd performance by adult standards. The shift
from apples to pears is unsettling, and in general the plot is too skeletal, rush-
ing to the denouement without fully exploiting the available sources of ten-
sion and ambiguity.
Abandoning the adult perspective momentarily, the most remarkable
aspect of this story is its manifest assimilation to the world of the child. The
child is placed in the center of the action, the protagonist of a story devel-
oping a cruel and fatal conflict: Either the child denies food to a starving
person or the child transgresses the command of her mother, thus to pay the
ultimate price. The transformation of the mother into a witch is a telling,
indirect portrait of the ambivalence inherent in mother-daughter relation-
ships, as well as the ultimate extension of the nightmare wherein all famil-
iar things crumble before our eyes into strange and evil forces.
A similar adaptation of external materials to the consciousness of the
child can be observed in reference to popular culture. Consider the popular
ditty associated with the cartoon figure Popeye. The original text, so far as
I can recall, is as follows:
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? ? I'm Popeye the sailor man,
I'm Popeye the sailor man,
I'm strong to the finish
'Cause I eats me spinach,
I'm Popeye the sailor man.
Now consider the following two parodies of this ditty, the first ubiquitous
among North American schoolchildren, and the second found among chil-
dren of Mexican descent in Texas:2
I'm Popeye the sailor man,
I live in a garbage can,
I eat all the worms
And spit out the germs,
I'm Popeye the sailor man.
Popeye naci6 en Torre6n Popeye was born in Torreon
Encima de una sill6n, On top of a toilet seat,
Mat6 a su tfa He killed his aunt
Con una tortilla, With a tortilla
Popeye naci6 en Torre6n. Popeye was born in Torreon.
Two features are especially striking in these transformations. For one
thing, the content of the original message, an instance of exemplary behav-
ior in respect to eating habits, is radically altered to produce a message sub-
versive of standard, adult-imposed decorum. Each parody creates a fictive
world that stands as a miniature rite of rebellion, a vision of a counter-fac-
tual world inhabited by worm-eating garbage-can residents, and tortilla-
wielding aunt killers. The exemplary Popeye is converted into an anti-Popeye,
exhibiting filthy and murderous qualities obviously anathema to the con-
ventional etiquette.
The second feature of interest here is the scope given to the child's
poetic muse, which reverses the dominance relationship between phonologi-
cal and semantic elaboration obtaining in adult verbal creations (Sanches
and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1976). In these parodies, the semantic thread is
a bare one indeed, subservient to the phonological attraction of such lexi-
cal items as worms/germs, and tia/tortilla, Torre6n/sill6n. In reference to style
as well as to content, the parodies transform the original material into ves-
sels expressing the child's sensitivities.
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? ? STAGE Two: CHILD B DECODES THE MESSAGE
The communications we are concerned with are primarily lodged in the ver-
bal and kinesic media, and thus are perishable upon performance. The words
spoken by child A, or the folkloric activity performed, vanish rapidly as a
physical presence, leaving behind only a trace in the memory of those who
were witness to them. Under these conditions, the decoding of the message
must, of course, be a precipitous affair, without recourse to a permanent or
perduring record. As a result, there is no guarantee that the message encoded
by child A is the same message after decoding by child B. Imperfectly per-
ceived material, or material not familiar to the recipient, may be assimilated
into gestalts (frameworks) already present in the mind of child B.
In the section titled "Wear and Repair During Transmission," the
Opies (1959) provide a number of characteristic examples, including the
delightful recasting of the old hymn:
Can a woman's tender care
Cease towards the child she-bear?
A great many studies in folklore have shown how traditional materials adapt
in this fashion to their new environments, and, indeed, this is one of the
sources of "mutation" recognized in the theories of von Sydow (1971). In
the absence of a written record serving as a check to this process of muta-
tion, there exists in every instance of folklore transmission the possibility for
text modification due to spontaneous assimilative processes.
The child's
world, so little affected by written constraints, offers an excellent field labo-
ratory in this respect.
STAGE THREE: CHILD B PROCESSES THE MESSAGE
In the model directing our discussion, there ensues a period, however brief
or protracted, dedicated to the activity of conceptual processing. The mes-
sage has been received and decoded by child B, perhaps already in modified
form due to the rigors of instantaneous registration of a perishing stimulus.
At this point, the message as received must be digested, that is, broken down
into information units compatible with the child's concept of the world and
his or her aesthetic proclivities. The assimilative processes initiated at the
moment of message reception are accelerated, as the new information is
stored through association with familiar archetypes. Theories relating to this
stage have been quite celebrated in the history of folklore studies, and in-
clude such prominent constructs as Max Milller's disease of language, and
the irrepressible construct faulty memory, to be found in the writings of
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? ? Kaarle Krohn (1971), among others.
Alan Dundes (1969a) has noted, I think quite correctly, the degenera-
tive bias in most of these constructs. It is just as plausible to cite the creative,
generative dimensions of this message-processing stage. We have already seen,
in reference to materials received by children from outside sources such as adult
folklore and popular culture, that these assimilative processes refurbish the
materials received, endowing them with their inimitable fidelity to the out-
look and expressive preferences of the communities in which they circulate.
The exuberant and unbounded give-and-take of children's play ensures the
continuous reworking of traditional materials; yet strikingly, children have
shown themselves to be among the most dedicated supporters of tradition, as
folklorists have often noted. A theory of folklore transmission must allow for
each of these possibilities, the retention of traditional models, and the piecing
together of new models out of traditional materials.
STAGE FOUR: CHILD B REENCODES THE MESSAGE
Any theory of folklore transmission must at some point take into account
the moment of composition, generally occurring without the use of artifi-
cial aids to the memory such as scripted texts or plans. Folklorists have de-
veloped important perspectives, such as Albert Lord's theory of composition
during performance (1960), and Ruth Finnegan's alternative model of re-
hearsal and performance (1977), with its greater weight on memorization
as a factor in folklore transmission. The work of Parry and Lord and their
followers indicates that in many folklore traditions a type of spontaneous
poetic composition takes place, a process comparable to linguistic perfor-
mance (capable of creating an unlimited number of novel utterances on the
basis of internalized linguistic structures), but operating at a higher, extra-
sentential, poetic level.
Children's folklore performances amply exhibit the effects of both rote
memorization and improvisation on the basis of traditional models. In the
verbal genres capable of stimulating a field of discourse, that is, a sequence
of related items, the children frequently first exhaust their store of traditional
items, and then move on to novel items, spontaneously composed on the
model of familiar traditional items. The following sequence of interrogative
ludic routines, taken from a riddling session among middle-class North
American children, illustrates some facets of this process:
1. What did the big chimney say to the little chimney?
2. What did the Aggie say to the other Aggie?
3. What did the three Aggies say to the other four Aggies?
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? ? 4. What did the rug say to the floor?
5. What did the dead penguin say to the live penguin?
6. What did the rug say to the floor?
7. What did the ten Aggies say to the one Aggie?
8. What did the one Aggie say to the zero Aggie?
9. What did the blue whale say to the duck?
10. What did the whale shark say to the great white?
11. What did the live duck say to the other live duck?
12. What did the baby say to the cradle?
13. What did the blue whale say to the great white?
14. What did the (burping noise) say to the great white?
15. What did the uhhh say to the great white?
16. What did the burp say to the great white?
17. What did Spiderman say to Ironman?
18. What did the Martian say to the human?
19. What did the man say to the store? 3
The pace of this session was so rapid that the children did not pause to pro-
vide answers to the questions posed. The traditional items here are numbers
one, four, and six, and they establish the framework for the surrounding and
subsequent improvisations. These models provide the canonic form, What
did the X say to the Y? as well as the following set of rules for acceptable
formulations:
1. The question specifies two entities in conversation.
2. Neither of these entities is normally included in the category of speech
participants.
3. A motivation for dialogue must exist, either in the form of a shared
identity (little chimney, big chimney) or habitual proximity (rug and floor).
Using this traditional framework as a point of departure, the children col-
lectively undertake an excursion through the orders of their cosmology, com-
ing to rest on such improbable conversants as humanoids (the Aggies, numb-
skull figures in Texas popular culture), animals (penguins, whales, ducks),
inanimate objects (cradle, store), physical processes (the burps), and concep-
tual constructs (the zero Aggie). This riddling session can be viewed as a vir-
tual symposium on childish ontology, isolating as it does a set of entities
contrasting on the values material, objective, animate, human, age of rea-
son (McDowell 1979). This riddling excerpt not only demonstrates the im-
portant enculturative dimensions of children's folklore, but suggests as well
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? ? that scholars anchored to a perspective enfranchising only the transmission
of traditional texts may well be missing most of the point in regard to
children's folklore.
STAGE FIVE: CHILD C DECODES A MESSAGE
The small transmission circuit we have been concerned with here is com-
plete with the arrival of the message to the position of child C in the model.
The form and content of this message may remain unchanged throughout
the entire process, so that the message encountered at stage one is identical
to the message encountered at stage five. By the same token, one or more
of the transformational devices we have mentioned might intervene to cre-
ate a radically different message. Both results are possible; the text of the
message is emergent in the context of child-to-child communication. A large
number of factors, including the mood of the interaction, the capacities of
the performers, the form or genre of folklore involved, and the rhetorical
purposes of the performers must be taken into account in investigating the
relative stability or lack of stability of messages in the crucible of folklore
transmission.
The foregoing analysis would suggest that only by attending to the
appearance of folkloric routines in finite, particular situations can we ad-
equately project the destiny awaiting an item of folklore moving through
minimal transmission circuits. Some kinds of folklore, for example, what the
Opies (1959) refer to as the "Code of Oral Legislation," and children's
rhymes and ditties, are retained in standard versions as far as possible, since
they are valued by the children for their instrumental and aesthetic proper-
ties, respectively. The performative efficacy of phrases like "Finders keep-
ers, losers weepers," or "Sticks and stones will break my bones/but names
will never hurt me," depends in large measure on the verbatim repetition of
the formula at the appropriate moment. Yet even in respect to these forms,
children will produce free and fantastic parodies or recastings, as the spirit
moves them. In other genres, such as riddling, the juvenile peer group may
attach little value to the precise repetition of a traditional item, placing as
much or more importance on the ability to formulate spontaneous impro-
visations along the line of items conveyed through oral tradition.
In the realm of children's folklore, then, we must rethink the notion
of tradition, a concept much used but perhaps not fully understood in folk-
loristic discourse. In the first place, tradition must be conceived of as per-
sistence through time and space, without any a priori constraints on the
duration of the time involved, or on the extension of this physical space.
Children's folklore does produce those fabulous instances of repeatability
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? ? over long stretches of time and across immense geographical expanses that
have always captivated the folklorist and the folk. Think, for example, of
the well-known hand-clapping rhyme, "Patty Cake, Patty Cake," attested
as far back as 1698 in D'urfey's comedy The Campaigners, which portrays
"the affected tattling nurse" speaking as follows to her sucking babe:
Ah Doddy blesse dat pitty face of mine Sylds,
and his pitty, pitty hands, and his pitty,
pitty foots, and all his pitty things, and
pat a cake, pat a cake baker's man, so I will
master as fast as I can, and prick it, and
prick it, and prick it, and prick it, and
throw't into the oven. (Opie and Opie 1952, 341)
The counting-out rhyme beginning with the line, "Eeny, meeny, miney, mo"
constitutes an even more striking example, since by and large it is children
alone who have been responsible for its perpetuation, and as Henry Bolton
(1888) has shown in his classic study, it is of great antiquity and widely dis-
tributed throughout the European diaspora.
By the same token, there can be little doubt that many of the folk-
loric traditions of children are much less long-lived, and at the other end of
the spectrum, could be better characterized as local and transitory. Within
a neighborhood gang, for example, forms of folklore may thrive for a time
but then perish as the children mature and their families move on to other
residences. The items of folklore performed in this context may not enter
the folklorist's most narrow construction of tradition, but they are certainly
perceived to be traditional by those who create and maintain them. The
world of children's folklore draws attention to the inherent relativity of the
concept denoted by the words "persistence through time and space. "
Further modification of the folkloristic construction of tradition cen-
ters on the notion of repeatability. When traditional items function prima-
rily to guide innovative folkloric production, as in the riddling session con-
sidered above, then we should speak of a traditional competence rather than
a set of traditional items. What persists through time and space, in these in-
stances, is the capacity to formulate appropriate folkloric items, as much as
the traditional items themselves. Longitudinal studies reveal the gradual ac-
quisition of competence in the traditional forms of children's folklore,
whereby narratives are given artistic shape and poignancy, and riddles even-
tually incorporate authentic kernels of linguistic or conceptual ambiguity
(McDowell 1975). Exposure to children's folklore tends to redirect the
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? ? folklorist's focus onto the persistence of traditional modes of self-expression,
and the transmission, not necessarily of traditional items, but of traditional
competencies.
The present discussion of the transmission of children's folklore has
served primarily to complicate the notion of "the transmission of folklore"
in general, and that may be its essential contribution to folkloristic dialogue.
The drift of the argument has been in the direction of discrediting the con-
ventional preoccupation with the transmission of particular folklore items.
Individual items of folklore do occasionally persist through time and space,
and therefore must in some sense be "transmitted" from one person to an-
other. But I would suggest that this result is one possibility among many,
and not really the privileged member of the set. It is just as likely that the
item of folklore will perish, either through neglect or through transforma-
tional processes operating at the various moments of encoding, decoding,
and reencoding of messages. The term introduced by von Sydow, mutation,
if taken seriously and carried to its logical conclusion, adequately captures
the character of these events.
Viewed in this perspective, the concept of "the transmission of folk-
lore" can be interpreted as a metaphorical instrument appropriate to a par-
ticular historical moment in the evolution of folkloristic theory. Its roots lie
in philology, perhaps most concretely in the mechanical process of produc-
ing a new manuscript by copying an earlier one. It conjures up images of a
superorganic process, a perpetuation of "items" with their peculiar "life his-
tories," quite external to the everyday communicative exchanges of ordinary
human beings. There is no question that this serviceable metaphor has use-
fully informed folklore studies, by enabling a systematic hermaneutics of that
one possibility it attends to, namely the preservation of a message intact, or
only moderately changed, as it filters through finite communicative networks.
But the robust world of children's folklore forces the folklorist to
confront the creative potential of every folkloric transaction, the capacity
for new forms and items to emerge from traditional competencies. These
creative factors are regenerative rather than degenerative, facilitating the
continuous emergence of folkloric materials freshly coined in response to the
experiences and needs of their hosts. It is this facet of folklore that lends the
materials we study their authenticity and vitality, as trenchant markers of
individual and community identity. The folkloric messages that persevere
intact over time are nonetheless revalidated with each performance as suit-
able vessels for the expression of local concerns. And of equal importance,
innovative messages are formulated, as traditional items and competencies
are adapted to these same requirements.
61
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? ? These considerations lead to the suggestion of a neutral term, perhaps
the activation of children's folklore, to refer to the processes set in motion
as traditional competencies enter into finite communicative settings among
children. Within this constellation, transmission intact or in recognizable
variants would remain as one possible outcome, but the folklorist would be
alert to the creative, transformative potential of all such encounters. A theory
regarding the activation of folklore is necessarily grounded in particular in-
stances of situated human intercourse, and retains an essential bias toward
emergence as its central paradigm. Two rather different sorts of children are
envisioned in the "transmission of children's folklore" and "the activation
of children's folklore. " In the former instance, the child (and, by extension,
every human being) serves primarily as a repository and conduit for the ex-
change of traditional items possessing a destiny all their own. The items are
literary, but there is no process of literary composition, save for the roman-
tic notion of "the people as a whole composes poetry. "
In a theory of the activation of children's folklore, the items recorded
may or may not evince significant literary value, but the child emerges as
the genius of composition, a complex cerebral and sentient locus of a seri-
ous effort at self-expression and communication. This latter perspective
drives folkloristics in the direction of an aesthetics of the ordinary, a
grounded theory of artistic composition engaged with the fundamental hu-
man requirement of self-realization through artistic performance. In the end,
the child (and by extension, the human being) projected by this paradigm is
a much more interesting figure, one immersed in real-life contingencies, and
not a mere cipher in a superorganic device.
NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE
1. I recorded this narrative in a peer-group setting, in Austin, Texas, during
the spring of 1974. The child who performed it had a large repertoire of Mirchen-
like stories drawn from traditional Mexican sources. For more details on this item and
the other children's folklore included in this paper, see McDowell 1975.
2. The English variation on the Popeye ditty was widely distributed among
Austin schoolchildren in the mid-1970s. Chicano children performed both the English
and Spanish parodies, setting them to the familiar Popeye tune.
3. This riddling session was recorded among Anglo-American school children
in Austin in 1974, as a part of the Texas Children's Folklore Project, supervised by
Professor Richard Bauman. Four children were present, two girls and two boys, all
aged six years. Interestingly, it was the girls who performed the three traditional items,
while the boys collaborated in producing the freshly coined items.
6z THE TRANSMISSION OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
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? ? SECTION II
OVERVIEW
METHODS IN CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
Brian Sutton-Smith
In this section we begin our study of methods in children's folklore by pre-
senting two studies of children at play. The first is by Ann Richman Beresin,
who conducted extensive video fieldwork in a multiethnic urban playground.
The second, by Linda A. Hughes, is her report on several years of study of
a group of elementary-school girls playing the game of foursquare. Both are
unique insofar as these kinds of methods with children have seldom been
used, and yet they are also relatively "modern" investigations in their at-
tempt to capture as fully as possible the ongoing performance of being a child
player. Subsequently, we present an overview by Gary Alan Fine of the dif-
ferent kinds of methodology that can be used by workers in this field.