It was also
progressive
in terms of its representation of
human potential, that moving toward increasing complexity.
human potential, that moving toward increasing complexity.
Childens - Folklore
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0
? ? SECTION I
OVERVIEW
HISTORY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
Brian Sutton-Smith
This section continues to be centrally concerned with who the children in
children's folklore are. It approaches that question through two reviews of
the field of children's folklore. The first, by Zumwalt, is about the history
of the concept of the child; the second, by McDowell, is about the way in
which folklore gets transmitted.
In order to set these chapters in context some further remarks on the
history of childhood are needed. In recent scholarship the notion has become
widespread that childhood is a modern and invented concept. This brilliant
idea, attributed to Philippe Aries, has had a powerful impact on the recogni-
tion of how relative many of our current twentieth-century ideas about child-
hood are, although many historians have been dubious about the simplicity
of the picture that Aries has drawn (Wilson 1980). What does seem worth
stressing is that, with the industrial revolution, children became increasingly
separated from the work world and gradually accrued more and more mark-
ers as a distinctive subcultural group. Their acquisition of special clothes,
special literatures, and special toys, particularly in the late seventeenth cen-
tury, is taken by some historians as evidence of a change toward a special
status (L. J. Stone 1977). Over the next two hundred years a series of steps
brought this group into coordination with the rest of the sociopolitical sys-
tem. Universal schooling was introduced, and, in our own century, the ever-
increasing organization of children's recreational time, at first through games
and sports and subsequently through television and the mass marketing of
toys. Through these two hundred years children also organized themselves,
within a variety of subcultures of street and playground and neighborhood
(see chapters by Mechling, Mergen, and Beresin). As they became free from
apprenticeships in village and town, they roamed their neighborhoods and
streets, both exploring and engaging in the traditional pastimes, once shared
by all ages, related to the seasons and the festivals that characterized life in
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? ? the Middle Ages. Thus the children in children's folklore were a group dis-
enfranchised from the economic machine by the events of the industrial revo-
lution; they then reconstituted themselves as a distinct subculture, associat-
ing themselves with such leisure activities as had already been prevalent in
their own societies. They took upon themselves the traditional leisure-time
customs that they could reconstitute according to their own more elemen-
tary capacities, gradually honing them down to the kind of dimensions with
which we are now familiar. Complex adult sports, such as Prisoner's Base,
which is said to have been a popular adult game of the 1100s, were aban-
doned for the simpler versions, such as King on the Mountain; the more com-
plex linear forms of Nuts and May were given up for the simpler circular
pleasures of Farmer and the Dell (Sutton-Smith 1959b). For some hundred
or so years these traditions have persisted in childhood, while the adults of
modern society have gradually adopted the spectator activities and mass-
participation forms that have become the leisure culture of modern society
(R. Williams 1979). Children, still a distinctive group in most respects, de-
spite some claims to the contrary (Postman 1982) have increasingly found
an antithesis in mass cultural phenomena (parodies of commercials, distinc-
tive play with Barbie dolls, topical graffiti, rhymes, etc. ) and in persisting
earlier elements from adult expressive behavior (e. g. , hopscotch).
This brief description is a considerable over-simplification of the great
changes that have taken place in Western civilization and the distinctive role
of children in those changes. It may serve, however, as a corrective to the
notion that children's folklore has always been the same and is of a univer-
sal character. That is unqualifiedly not the case. The concept of childhood
varies not only historically but also anthropologically, and, as children's sta-
tus varies within different groups, so does their distinctive subcultural tra-
ditions. In most respects child subculture is not different from any other sub-
culture. A group that senses itself to be distinct usually develops character-
istic customs and ceremonies, many of which express opposition to those
of the hegemonious surrounding culture. In these terms children's folklore
is the product of a kind of generational subculture instigated by a society
that requires quasi-dependence and quasi-independence in the young.
But whatever the larger economic and sociological processes, philo-
sophical reactions to this process have led to many other and often contrary
descriptions of this novel subculture. Some descriptions attribute subordi-
nate qualities to the child group, such as primitive, prelogical, synaesthetic,
atavistic, irrational, and disenfranchised; these are characteristics that until
recently have been thought to be shared with savages and women. The same
condition has been romanticized by those who have spoken of "noble say-
2. 0 OVERVIEW: HISTORY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
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? ? ages" and childhood as especially imaginative, idyllic, and innocent. Some-
times this innocence carries with it the moral power attributed to childhood
by Rousseau, and sometimes it carries the bowdlerized fancifulness so char-
acteristic of much twentieth-century children's literature. Childhood as dis-
continuous from adulthood comes to be used as a projective screen for ei-
ther aspiration or despair (Covenay 1957).
These issues are central to the chapter by Zumwalt, in which she con-
trasts some of these older views of children, as savage or innocent or simple,
with her own discoveries of their actual complexity. She contrasts the ideal
and the real behavior of girls who are on the one hand portraying themselves
in their play as obedient, domestic, and romantic and yet, at the same time,
often covertly, also portraying themselves as sexually provocative, manipu-
lative, scheming, and rebellious. She opens up the issue of what Fine (1980b)
has called Newall's paradox-how it is that children can have such a repu-
tation as creatures of tradition, as conservers of child culture, and at the same
time be known for their innovative fantasies and novel behaviors. Zumwalt's
emphasis on these complexities calls into question the more simplistic no-
tions of childhood that often prevail.
In Grider's earlier chapter we have already seen that some major schol-
ars have always seen children's folklore as a conservative event (Gomme, Opie)
whereas others have reckoned it an innovative (Douglas) or changing historical
series of events (Sutton-Smith 1981a). In his chapter John McDowell attempts
a reconciliation of these differences in terms of a modern "performance" theory
of cultural transmission. Children, he says, have reason for conserving some
folklore elements because they are partially appropriate to their needs or are
particularly satisfying aesthetically. Other elements, however, do not meet those
needs, or are changed because of childish perceptions, fantasies, ambivalences,
rebelliousness, misunderstanding, or creativity.
There is an interesting conceptual transition between chapters one and
three that is not unlike the transition that folklore has itself undergone in
this century. Grider expresses some of the traditional concerns of the field:
origins, cultural survivals, the tenacity of tradition on the one hand and lam-
entations over its disappearance on the other. Zumwalt advocates putting
aside these ideas, in which the child is compared with the savage, and sug-
gests instead a focus on the meaning of folklore to the children who engage
in it. Her concern is a combination of psychogenic functionalism
(Wolfenstein), sociogenic functionalism (Malinowski), linguistic structural-
ism (McDowell), and social structuralism (Goodwin after Goffman).
Whether this approach be described as anthropology, ethnography, or dis-
course analysis, it has been among the major "semantics" within which folk-
2I1
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? ? lore has been construed in the past fifty years. McDowell on the other hand,
with his focus on the child player as a performer constantly generating his
play material as an emergent function of his own limitations, perceptions,
and strengths; his ambivalences, phonic subversions and parodies; as a func-
tion of the utility and aesthetic value of the material to the performer as well
as a function of his response to the group; is highlighting concepts about
folklore as performance, as contingent "activation," which have had more
appeal in recent theorizing. There is in McDowell, however, as much of a
romantic attachment to the generating power of the young performers as
there is in, say, the Opies to the constancy of their texts and the continuity
of historical materials. They seek the universal and the constant; he seeks
the specific and the emergent. McDowell gives sufficient examples to set the
stage for a study that will seek to distinguish the genres of the durable from
those that are ephemeral, and to seek accounts of those differences in terms
of place, historical circumstances, and the special character of the players.
While this is undoubtedly a valid quest, in recent play studies by
Meckley it has been discovered that among preschoolers the two phases are
virtually indistinguishable (1994). Studying and video-taping the play behav-
ior of twelve four-year-old children over a six-month period, she discovered
that while some children were more innovative than others, whatever they
invented immediately became a tradition for all of the children in the group-
not just the ones that had initiated the play. So that when a group of chil-
dren played what had been the game of another group, they always repeated
it largely in the way it was done before. What was amazing was how much
shared knowledge there was across this group of children of the play forms
of all the other children.
Admittedly, just as only a minority were strong innovators, there was
also a minority who seldom knew what was going on. This led to the gen-
eralization that as innovation hit the ground it immediately crystallized so
that everyone knew how to continue it. That is, play no sooner appeared in
their group life than it was ritualized so that all could participate. Play and
ritual were, at this embryonic stage of play development at least, a biphasic
phenomenon.
What is also particularly appealing in McDowell's account is the way
in which he shows us that children sometimes go well beyond the antith-
eses (real-ideal, mimicry-mockery, conservative-innovative, play-ritual), for
example, when they engage in flights of playfulness that are a cascade of
nonsense or silliness. The playful idiosyncratic content is often so bizarre it
could never be conserved even if the performance of being bizarre does it-
self become a ritualized kind of nonsense within the playing group.
22 OVERVIEW: HISTORY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
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? ? 2 THE COMPLEXITY
OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
Rosemary Livy Zumwalt
When I first started work in children's folklore, I dutifully asked my five,
six-, and seven-year-old informants all the prescribed questions: Where did
you learn that? Why do you think it's funny? What do you call it? They
would, after the weeks passed, bear this with strained patience. With their
heads cocked to one side and their eyes narrowed, they would answer, "I
didn't learn it from anybody. I made it up! " "Can't you see why it's funny?
It's funny, that's all! " I would persist and get the answers I needed for my
collection.
Now, years later, as I look back at this initial study of children's folk-
lore (Zumwalt 1972, 1976), I am struck with the richness the children were
offering me. At the time, the rhythm, the lyrics, and the image captivated
me. I focused on symbol, the ideal little girl in folklore. And I emphasized
tradition, the creation and continuity of this image. I likened it to the for-
mation of stalactites, the concentrated accretion over centuries, a drop at a
time, forming a multifaceted image. The ideal little girl in folklore could,
according to the refraction of light from her crystalline image, shine with
innocence, glitter with enticement, or gleam with lust.
The ideal little girl was present in the folklore, and she was impor-
tant. Yet, coupled with this ideal little girl portrayed in the texts was the real
little girl who performed the jump-rope songs:
I am a Pretty Little Dutch Girl
All dressed in blue.
And these are the things
I like to do:
Salute to the captain.
Curtsey to the king.
And show my pants to the U. S. Marines!
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? ? This was the same little girl who would throw down her jump rope and run
to the baseball diamond to play what she classified as a boy's game.
The children in my early folklore study were presenting me with the
complexity of their lives. That I chose to study one aspect, the image as re-
vealed in the text, is understandable. Part of the leverage one needs to launch
an undertaking is just such a focus. That I now recognize the text and con-
text, the ideal and the real, the conservative and the innovation, adds to my
wonder of the child's world of folklore.
I would like to reflect on what I see as the complexity of children's
folklore, a complexity that has sometimes been overlooked for a simpler
view. An approach that was predicted on the simple nature of the child was
nineteenth-century cultural evolutionary theory. In this framework, the child
was equated with the savage. In much twentieth-century literature on
children's folklore, the equation remains. For an understanding of cultural
evolutionary theory as it pertains to children, we must turn to the works of
Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Edward Burnett Tylor.
Charles Darwin, in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to
Sex (1871), extended the evolutionary theory developed in On the Origin
of Species (1859)-one focused primarily on natural selection-to the evo-
lution of the sexes and of social behavior. ' In Darwin's framework, the male
and female child are equal, mentally and physically. At puberty, the inequality
between the sexes begins to develop. The male grows to full intellectual and
physical capacity. The female, retaining aspects of the child, is arrested in
development between the child and the adult male. This was attributed to
the evolution of the species and the sexual maturation of the individual.
Of the "Mental Powers of Man and Woman," Darwin concluded,
"man has ultimately become superior to woman" (Darwin 1871, 2:382).
During "primeval times," men had to compete with rivals for "the posses-
sion of the females. " This competition led to "the greater intellectual vigor
and power of invention" in man (Darwin 1871, 2:382). It also led to "the
greater size, strength, courage, pugnacity, and . . . energy of man in com-
parison with the same qualities in woman. . . " (Darwin 1871, 2:382).
Coupled with the results of an evolutionary selection for a male of
superior strength and intellect were the effects of sexual maturation of the
individual organisms. In childhood, the male and the female are equal in
intellectual capacity. At puberty, there is differential development of the in-
tellect according to sex. In support of his position, Darwin notes "that eu-
nuchs remain throughout life inferior in" mental faculties (Darwin 1871, 2:
328-29). This disparity in intellectual capacity between the sexes has been
mitigated by "the law of equal transmission of characters to both sexes"
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? ? (Darwin 1871, 2: 329). Without this law, Darwin says, "it is probable that
man would have become as superior in mental endowment to woman, as
the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen" (Darwin 1871, 2: 329).
Herbert Spencer-a man who influenced Darwin and was influenced
by him-discussed the evolution of mental complexity in The Comparative
Psychology of Man, an address delivered to the Royal Anthropological In-
stitute. Spencer endeavored to establish the evolution of the intellect and to
link it with the development of mankind from savagery to civilization. To
establish the degrees of intellectual capacity, Spencer compared the child's
mind with the adult's. This contrast, between the child and the adult mind,
is analogous, Spencer said, to that between "the minds of savage and civi-
lized" (Spencer 1977 [1876], 9). To support his position Spencer notes that
"the sudden gusts of feeling which men of inferior types display" are like
"the passions of childhood" (Spencer 1977 [1876], 12).
Following the evolutionary scheme of Darwin and Spencer, man,
woman, and child could be arranged hierarchically: Man is rational, physi-
cally and emotionally strong, civilized. Woman is irrational, physically and
emotionally weak, and childlike. The child is weak and unformed, with a
need to be emotionally nurtured by the mother and physically strengthened
by the father. The child, then, is the living link with the savage past.
Edward Burnett Tylor continued in Darwin's theoretical footsteps. For
Tylor, folklore was the remnant of the intellectual past, just as the fossil was
the remnant of the physical past. The survival of the primitive was preserved
in children's folklore. Rhymes, songs, games, and toys of children "repro-
duce, in what are at once sports and little children's lessons, early stages in
the history of childlike tribes of mankind" (Tylor 1929 [1871], 1: 74).
Cultural evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century was, in the lit-
eral sense of the word, progressive. It was predicated on the notion of
progress, of development from the simple stages of savagism to barbarism
and to civilization.
It was also progressive in terms of its representation of
human potential, that moving toward increasing complexity. Within each
individual infant and each infant race, there is a potential to develop out of
the state of savagism. Certain savage races might need the assistance of the
civilized races to speed up the evolutionary process. Again, there is the par-
allel between the child and the race. Just as the child is raised by the parent,
so can the savage be pulled out of the primitive state by the representatives
of the civilized nations. 2
In this theoretical framework, the child recapitulates the development
of the race. As Alexander Chamberlain says in The Child and Childhood in
Folk- Thought: "Ethnology, with its broad sweep over ages and races of man,
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? ? its searchings into the origins of nations and of civilizations, illumined by
the light of Evolution, suggests that in the growth of the child from helpless
infancy to adolescence, and through the strong and trying development of
manhood to the idyosyncracies of disease and senescence, we have an
epitome in miniature of the life of the race . . . " (Chamberlain 1896, 3).
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown in The Andaman Islanders draws the same
parallel between the development of the individual and the development of
the race. As he explains, the primary task of the child is to bring order to
his social world. The same process is at work in primitive society where,
Radcliffe-Brown says, "the supreme need" requires that the primitive bring
order to the world around him. "Just as the child organises and develops
his experience by treating inanimate objects as if they were persons . . . , so
primitive man, in exactly the same way, organises and develops his social
experience by conceiving the whole universe as if it were the interaction of
personal forces" (Radcliffe-Brown 1948 [1922]: 380).
Born in a state of nature, naked and vulnerable, the infant gradually
is tamed, grows to manhood, acquires the manners of the civilized. If the
child grows to womanhood, she never thoroughly outgrows the child. It re-
mains within her, part of her essence, her childlike nature. Thus these three
categories-man, woman, and child-reflected the hierarchical division of
culture into civilized, barbaric, and savage:
man = civilized
woman = barbaric
child = savage
Cultural evolutionary theory did not just overlook the complexities
inherent in children's folklore, it denied them. Children's folklore was simple;
it was a direct link to the lower-and therefore simpler-stages of cultural
evolution. In this vein, Karl Pearson reasoned, children's delight in nursery
tales "arises from an unconscious sympathy between the child and the
thought and customs of the childhood of civilization" (Bett 1924, 1-2; quot-
ing Pearson). 3
Following this approach, since the child is linked through an uncon-
scious sympathy to the lower stages of evolution, it is understandable that
we would find aspects of the savage and the barbaric in children's folklore.
In Counting-Out Rhymes of Children, Walter Gregor remarks, "It is now
an acknowledged fact that some of the games of children are survivals of
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? ? what was once the occupation of men in less advanced stages of civilization
. . " (Gregor 1973 [1891], 9). Henry Bett, in Nursery Rhymes and Tales;
Their Origin and History, points to the element of cannibalism in "our
children's tales. "
Fee fi fo fum I smell the blood of an Englishman!
Be he alive or be he dead,
I'll grind his bones to make my bread! (Bett 1924, 31)
This, Bett said, was "simply a remembrance of times when primitive men were
cannibals and ate their enemies, as some savages do today" (Bett 1924, 30).
Alice Bertha Gomme, the grand lady of nineteenth-century childlore
studies, worked within this cultural evolutionary framework. 4 According to
Lady Alice, children's games are "some of the oldest historical documents
belonging to our race"; they show "man's progress from savagery to civili-
zation" (Gomme 1964 [1898], 2: 461). In Lady Alice's work, this progress
from savagery to civilization does not entail a movement from simple to
complex. Though she was evolutionary in her approach to folklore, she was
also ritualistic in her interpretation. Accordingly, children's games originated
from complex traditions. As Lady Alice says, "If [children] saw a custom
periodically and often practised with some degree of ceremonial importance,
they would in their own way act in play what their elders do seriously"
(Gomme 1964 [1898], 2: 142).
Such was the case in the game "Round and Round the Village. " The
children in their play retained the ancient custom of "the perambulation of
boundaries, often associated with festive dances, courtship, and marriage"
(Gomme 1964 [1898], 2: 142). s As evidence of this early origin, Lady Alice
refers to the ritual in southeast Russia. On the eve of her wedding, the bride
goes round the village and kneels before the head of each household. In In-
dia, the bride and groom are both transported round the village (Gomme
1964 [1898], 2: 143). Lady Alice concludes that "the Indo-European mar-
riage-rite contained just such features as are represented in this game"
(Gomme 1964 [1898], 2: 143). Further, she says, "the changes from rite to
popular customs, from popular custom to children's game" show the use-
fulness of folklore study.
To her credit, Lady Alice did not reduce children's folklore to a single
theoretical approach. The games were not merely a survival from a past age.
Nor were the games simply a key to past rituals. Children's folklore was a
living tradition-a link to the past, to be sure, but also a vibrant force in
the present.
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? ? The identification of children's lore with survivals from earlier stages
of cultural development is no longer part of contemporary interpretation.
Now the giant's chanting "Fee, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an English-
man" might be interpreted as the dreaded father-figure. As Alan Dundes says,
"Up in the beanstalk world, there is a cannibalistic giant who often in some
vague way is linked with Jack's father. . . " (Dundes 1980, 41). By exten-
sion, the cannibalistic element could be interpreted as the child's fear of the
father's brutal strength and oral power. 6
Still, while the literal interpretation of child's lore as survival has been
discarded, the fundamental equation between child and savage remains, at
least as a metaphor, in much work on children's folklore. The child has be-
come the savage in our midst. Iona and Peter Opie, in the introduction to
The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, remark that "the folklorist and
anthropologist can, without traveling a mile from his door, examine a thriv-
ing unself-conscious culture" which is as unnoticed and untouched by "the
sophisticated world. . . as is the culture of some dwindling aboriginal tribe
living out its helpless existence in the hinterland of a native reserve" (Opie
and Opie 1959, 1-2). Sylvia Ann Grider, in her editorial statement to West-
ern Folklore's special issue on Children's Folklore makes a similar observa-
tion: "In this day of inflated costs and shrinking grants, there is no need for
the folklorist to scour the outback of Australia in search of aborigines, for
all he needs to do is glance into his own apartment complex courtyard or
neighborhood playground to find a cooperative group of informants whose
private worlds are dominated by tradition" (Grider 1980, 162).
Iona and Peter Opie conclude their remarks on the child as the sav-
age in our midst by quoting Douglas Newton: "The world-wide fraternity
of children is the greatest of savage tribes, and the only one which shows
no sign of dying out" (Opie and Opie 1959, 2, quoting Newton). Sylvia
Grider, after suggesting the affinity between the Australian aborigines and
children, denies the savage nature of children: "And these little folks are not
savages either . . . " (Grider 1980, 162). Thus for the Opies, the child is like
the aboriginal in the hinterland. For Grider, the child offers the exotic of the
outback, but has the advantages of not really being savage.
In his discussion of children's riddling, John McDowell notes the "ten-
dency to despise the products of childish cognition. " To recognize the intel-
lectual sophistication of child's lore, McDowell suggests that we borrow from
Claude Levi-Strauss's cerebral savage, "whose primitive speculation repre-
sents another, not a cognitively inferior, science" (McDowell 1979, 144).
"The time may be ripe to turn our humanistic energies to those savages
among us and discover at our very portals the cerebral child, concerned in
2. 8 THE COMPLEXITY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
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? ? his or her verbal art with complex matters of rationality, logic, sociability,
and aesthetics" (McDowell 1979, 144). In his analysis of a children's rid-
dling session which focuses on the differences between animals and machines,
McDowell suggests that the children "are working through basic anoma-
lies in their cultural apparatus, much as primitives examine apparent con-
tradictions through the logical tools of mythology" (McDowell 1979, 145).
In suggesting the analogy between the cerebral child and the cerebral
savage, McDowell is not stressing the simple nature of children or of primi-
tives. Rather he is stressing the complex nature of the intellectual system,
that the riddles of the child and the mythology of the primitive serve to or-
der their cognitive universe. Even with his recognition of the complexities
in child and primitive lore, McDowell is using the basic equation of cultural
evolutionary theory. The child is equal to the savage. The frame he uses is
Levi-Strauss's: The cerebral child is to the cerebral savage as children's in-
tellectualization is to primitive speculation, as children's riddling is to primi-
tive mythology.
The groundrock of this system is Tylor's. According to Edward
Burnett Tylor, comparisons could be made between groups widely separated
in space and time. This could be done because of one common factor, the
psychic unity of mankind. The results of Tylor's comparative study were
arranged on an evolutionary ladder, from the simplicity of savagery to the
complexity of civilization. L6vi-Strauss and McDowell lay this ladder on its
side and eliminate the notion of progress from simple to complex. Savage
thought is complex; children's thought is complex. But for all three, the com-
mon factor that allows comparison is the same, the intellectual capacity of
humankind. For Tylor, it is psychic unity; for Levi-Strauss, la pense sauvage;
for McDowell, the cerebral child.
In this survey of cultural evolutionary theory, we have gone from the
classic form of the nineteenth century, when it was thought that the savage
state survives in children's folklore, to the twentieth-century equation be-
tween savage and child. Scholars in children's folklore would do well to ex-
amine the assumptions underlying cultural evolutionary theory. The first step
would be to scrutinize the concept of the simple.
It is past time to recognize that children are not simple, nor are soci-
eties simple. The child is a complex individual, not a simple adult, or a link
to the savage past. And the savage past cannot be exemplified by savage
cultures in our midst, except those of our own making. 7
The term savage carries with it the weight of the cultural evolution-
ary theory. The whole world rises on the shoulders of the savage-be it
the Australian aborigine or the African tribesman. Whether used in L&vi-
29
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? ? Strauss's clever turn-of-phrase, la pensee sauvage-the savage thought or the
wild pansy-or McDowell's offspring of the cerebral savage, the cerebral
child, the term denotes the wild, untamed, uncivilized. This equation between
the child and the savage, whether intended in the literal or the metaphori-
cal sense, is a disservice to the folk group, its culture, and its folklore. What
is needed is a recognition of the complexity and the integrity of cultures and
of children.
The child-as-savage, the child-as-exotic, has also been used as a jus-
tification for studying children's folklore. The reasoning is as follows: There
is no need to go to faraway lands when the exotic is within, in our own
households. This need to justify the study of children's folklore could be
avoided if we simply accept the obvious-that children's folklore is a legiti-
mate and an important area of study.
A major theoretical shift has occurred between the nineteenth and the
twentieth centuries, from a search for origins to a search for meaning. As
we have seen, in the nineteenth-century cultural-evolutionary framework,
children's folklore provided a link with the past. In contemporary ap-
proaches, children's folklore provides a key to understanding the crucial,
unstated elements in a child's life. This stress on meaning is apparent in the
psychological, functional, structural, and symbolic theories.
Martha Wolfenstein's Children's Humor shows just such an attempt
to arrive at the underlying, unconscious meaning of children's jokes. She
anticipates the criticism that she has given undue emphasis to the trivial.
She counters, "But when one hears one child after another repeat these same
apparently trivial witticisms, and sees what value they attach to learning and
telling them, one feels that there is a discrepancy between the intensity
of their interest and the seeming triviality of the content. This gap can be
filled in if we reconstruct the underlying meaning of the joke" (Wolfenstein
1978 [1954], 14). In Wolfenstein's psychological approach, the underly-
ing meaning of the joke is directly related to the basic motive of joking,
"the wish to transform a painful experience and to extract pleasure from
it" (Wolfenstein 1978, 18). This Wolfenstein calls "the wish to joke"
(Wolfenstein 1978, 25).
The release of anxiety through joking is a constant, as Freud has
shown in Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, but the joking forms
themselves change according to the developmental stages of the child. It is
Wolfenstein's attempt to correlate the different forms of humor with the dif-
ferent age levels of children that makes her work unique. 8 Wolfenstein fol-
lows the psychoanalytic scheme of emotional development, the Oedipal, la-
tency, and adolescent periods. For example, Wolfenstein discusses verbal play
30 THE COMPLEXITY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
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? ? in which a child changes the sex or name of another child. A three-year-old
makes a joke by calling a girl a boy, or vice versa (Wolfenstein 1978, 19,
89), and the child of four does the same thing by changing proper names.
These children are playing with verbal ambiguity; underlying this is the ques-
tion about sexual identity and individual identity. As Wolfenstein says, this
joking behavior carries a powerful message, "I change your sex; I change
your name; I change your meaning" (Wolfenstein 1978, 82).
The moron joke cycle, for Wolfenstein, marks the latency period of
children, from six to eleven years. At that age, the children are greatly con-
cerned "with the issue of smartness and dumbness. " The riddles ". . . serve
in part the function of demonstrating that they are smart and the other
fellow, who does not know the answer, is dumb" (Wolfenstein 1978, 20).
This contrasts with the endless fantasies of the Oedipal children and the
artful anecdotes of the adolescent. The joking riddle makes a parody of ques-
tions and answers. As Wolfenstein says, "The question posed is trivial or
absurd; the solution is nonsensical" (Wolfenstein 1978, 94). This is linked
to the concern of the latency period, the child's repressed curiosity about
his/her parents' sexuality (Wolfenstein 1978, 95). This curiosity reveals
itself in the joking riddle: "Beneath this verbal formula is a latent meaning
which has been drastically condensed and disguised. The child values the
joke's concealment of material which he is anxious to repress. He also strenu-
ously denies that the joke has any relation to himself" (Wolfenstein 1978,
138).
In the introduction, Wolfenstein notes that she, at times, ventures on
"not too certain ground" when she relates a frequent theme from psycho-
analytic observation to "other subjects in other circumstances" (Wolfenstein
1978, 18). It is her analysis of the repressed sexual meaning of the moron
jokes which seems so strained. For example, Wolfenstein analyzes one of the
most popular moron jokes: "Why did the moron tiptoe past the medicine
cabinet? Because he didn't want to wake the sleeping pills. " The clue to the
joke's meaning lies in the action of the moron and the function of the pills.
The moron tiptoes and the pills induce sleep. As one child explained to
Wolfenstein, the joke is funny because "sleeping pills put you to sleep.
? ? SECTION I
OVERVIEW
HISTORY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
Brian Sutton-Smith
This section continues to be centrally concerned with who the children in
children's folklore are. It approaches that question through two reviews of
the field of children's folklore. The first, by Zumwalt, is about the history
of the concept of the child; the second, by McDowell, is about the way in
which folklore gets transmitted.
In order to set these chapters in context some further remarks on the
history of childhood are needed. In recent scholarship the notion has become
widespread that childhood is a modern and invented concept. This brilliant
idea, attributed to Philippe Aries, has had a powerful impact on the recogni-
tion of how relative many of our current twentieth-century ideas about child-
hood are, although many historians have been dubious about the simplicity
of the picture that Aries has drawn (Wilson 1980). What does seem worth
stressing is that, with the industrial revolution, children became increasingly
separated from the work world and gradually accrued more and more mark-
ers as a distinctive subcultural group. Their acquisition of special clothes,
special literatures, and special toys, particularly in the late seventeenth cen-
tury, is taken by some historians as evidence of a change toward a special
status (L. J. Stone 1977). Over the next two hundred years a series of steps
brought this group into coordination with the rest of the sociopolitical sys-
tem. Universal schooling was introduced, and, in our own century, the ever-
increasing organization of children's recreational time, at first through games
and sports and subsequently through television and the mass marketing of
toys. Through these two hundred years children also organized themselves,
within a variety of subcultures of street and playground and neighborhood
(see chapters by Mechling, Mergen, and Beresin). As they became free from
apprenticeships in village and town, they roamed their neighborhoods and
streets, both exploring and engaging in the traditional pastimes, once shared
by all ages, related to the seasons and the festivals that characterized life in
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? ? the Middle Ages. Thus the children in children's folklore were a group dis-
enfranchised from the economic machine by the events of the industrial revo-
lution; they then reconstituted themselves as a distinct subculture, associat-
ing themselves with such leisure activities as had already been prevalent in
their own societies. They took upon themselves the traditional leisure-time
customs that they could reconstitute according to their own more elemen-
tary capacities, gradually honing them down to the kind of dimensions with
which we are now familiar. Complex adult sports, such as Prisoner's Base,
which is said to have been a popular adult game of the 1100s, were aban-
doned for the simpler versions, such as King on the Mountain; the more com-
plex linear forms of Nuts and May were given up for the simpler circular
pleasures of Farmer and the Dell (Sutton-Smith 1959b). For some hundred
or so years these traditions have persisted in childhood, while the adults of
modern society have gradually adopted the spectator activities and mass-
participation forms that have become the leisure culture of modern society
(R. Williams 1979). Children, still a distinctive group in most respects, de-
spite some claims to the contrary (Postman 1982) have increasingly found
an antithesis in mass cultural phenomena (parodies of commercials, distinc-
tive play with Barbie dolls, topical graffiti, rhymes, etc. ) and in persisting
earlier elements from adult expressive behavior (e. g. , hopscotch).
This brief description is a considerable over-simplification of the great
changes that have taken place in Western civilization and the distinctive role
of children in those changes. It may serve, however, as a corrective to the
notion that children's folklore has always been the same and is of a univer-
sal character. That is unqualifiedly not the case. The concept of childhood
varies not only historically but also anthropologically, and, as children's sta-
tus varies within different groups, so does their distinctive subcultural tra-
ditions. In most respects child subculture is not different from any other sub-
culture. A group that senses itself to be distinct usually develops character-
istic customs and ceremonies, many of which express opposition to those
of the hegemonious surrounding culture. In these terms children's folklore
is the product of a kind of generational subculture instigated by a society
that requires quasi-dependence and quasi-independence in the young.
But whatever the larger economic and sociological processes, philo-
sophical reactions to this process have led to many other and often contrary
descriptions of this novel subculture. Some descriptions attribute subordi-
nate qualities to the child group, such as primitive, prelogical, synaesthetic,
atavistic, irrational, and disenfranchised; these are characteristics that until
recently have been thought to be shared with savages and women. The same
condition has been romanticized by those who have spoken of "noble say-
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? ? ages" and childhood as especially imaginative, idyllic, and innocent. Some-
times this innocence carries with it the moral power attributed to childhood
by Rousseau, and sometimes it carries the bowdlerized fancifulness so char-
acteristic of much twentieth-century children's literature. Childhood as dis-
continuous from adulthood comes to be used as a projective screen for ei-
ther aspiration or despair (Covenay 1957).
These issues are central to the chapter by Zumwalt, in which she con-
trasts some of these older views of children, as savage or innocent or simple,
with her own discoveries of their actual complexity. She contrasts the ideal
and the real behavior of girls who are on the one hand portraying themselves
in their play as obedient, domestic, and romantic and yet, at the same time,
often covertly, also portraying themselves as sexually provocative, manipu-
lative, scheming, and rebellious. She opens up the issue of what Fine (1980b)
has called Newall's paradox-how it is that children can have such a repu-
tation as creatures of tradition, as conservers of child culture, and at the same
time be known for their innovative fantasies and novel behaviors. Zumwalt's
emphasis on these complexities calls into question the more simplistic no-
tions of childhood that often prevail.
In Grider's earlier chapter we have already seen that some major schol-
ars have always seen children's folklore as a conservative event (Gomme, Opie)
whereas others have reckoned it an innovative (Douglas) or changing historical
series of events (Sutton-Smith 1981a). In his chapter John McDowell attempts
a reconciliation of these differences in terms of a modern "performance" theory
of cultural transmission. Children, he says, have reason for conserving some
folklore elements because they are partially appropriate to their needs or are
particularly satisfying aesthetically. Other elements, however, do not meet those
needs, or are changed because of childish perceptions, fantasies, ambivalences,
rebelliousness, misunderstanding, or creativity.
There is an interesting conceptual transition between chapters one and
three that is not unlike the transition that folklore has itself undergone in
this century. Grider expresses some of the traditional concerns of the field:
origins, cultural survivals, the tenacity of tradition on the one hand and lam-
entations over its disappearance on the other. Zumwalt advocates putting
aside these ideas, in which the child is compared with the savage, and sug-
gests instead a focus on the meaning of folklore to the children who engage
in it. Her concern is a combination of psychogenic functionalism
(Wolfenstein), sociogenic functionalism (Malinowski), linguistic structural-
ism (McDowell), and social structuralism (Goodwin after Goffman).
Whether this approach be described as anthropology, ethnography, or dis-
course analysis, it has been among the major "semantics" within which folk-
2I1
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? ? lore has been construed in the past fifty years. McDowell on the other hand,
with his focus on the child player as a performer constantly generating his
play material as an emergent function of his own limitations, perceptions,
and strengths; his ambivalences, phonic subversions and parodies; as a func-
tion of the utility and aesthetic value of the material to the performer as well
as a function of his response to the group; is highlighting concepts about
folklore as performance, as contingent "activation," which have had more
appeal in recent theorizing. There is in McDowell, however, as much of a
romantic attachment to the generating power of the young performers as
there is in, say, the Opies to the constancy of their texts and the continuity
of historical materials. They seek the universal and the constant; he seeks
the specific and the emergent. McDowell gives sufficient examples to set the
stage for a study that will seek to distinguish the genres of the durable from
those that are ephemeral, and to seek accounts of those differences in terms
of place, historical circumstances, and the special character of the players.
While this is undoubtedly a valid quest, in recent play studies by
Meckley it has been discovered that among preschoolers the two phases are
virtually indistinguishable (1994). Studying and video-taping the play behav-
ior of twelve four-year-old children over a six-month period, she discovered
that while some children were more innovative than others, whatever they
invented immediately became a tradition for all of the children in the group-
not just the ones that had initiated the play. So that when a group of chil-
dren played what had been the game of another group, they always repeated
it largely in the way it was done before. What was amazing was how much
shared knowledge there was across this group of children of the play forms
of all the other children.
Admittedly, just as only a minority were strong innovators, there was
also a minority who seldom knew what was going on. This led to the gen-
eralization that as innovation hit the ground it immediately crystallized so
that everyone knew how to continue it. That is, play no sooner appeared in
their group life than it was ritualized so that all could participate. Play and
ritual were, at this embryonic stage of play development at least, a biphasic
phenomenon.
What is also particularly appealing in McDowell's account is the way
in which he shows us that children sometimes go well beyond the antith-
eses (real-ideal, mimicry-mockery, conservative-innovative, play-ritual), for
example, when they engage in flights of playfulness that are a cascade of
nonsense or silliness. The playful idiosyncratic content is often so bizarre it
could never be conserved even if the performance of being bizarre does it-
self become a ritualized kind of nonsense within the playing group.
22 OVERVIEW: HISTORY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
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? ? 2 THE COMPLEXITY
OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
Rosemary Livy Zumwalt
When I first started work in children's folklore, I dutifully asked my five,
six-, and seven-year-old informants all the prescribed questions: Where did
you learn that? Why do you think it's funny? What do you call it? They
would, after the weeks passed, bear this with strained patience. With their
heads cocked to one side and their eyes narrowed, they would answer, "I
didn't learn it from anybody. I made it up! " "Can't you see why it's funny?
It's funny, that's all! " I would persist and get the answers I needed for my
collection.
Now, years later, as I look back at this initial study of children's folk-
lore (Zumwalt 1972, 1976), I am struck with the richness the children were
offering me. At the time, the rhythm, the lyrics, and the image captivated
me. I focused on symbol, the ideal little girl in folklore. And I emphasized
tradition, the creation and continuity of this image. I likened it to the for-
mation of stalactites, the concentrated accretion over centuries, a drop at a
time, forming a multifaceted image. The ideal little girl in folklore could,
according to the refraction of light from her crystalline image, shine with
innocence, glitter with enticement, or gleam with lust.
The ideal little girl was present in the folklore, and she was impor-
tant. Yet, coupled with this ideal little girl portrayed in the texts was the real
little girl who performed the jump-rope songs:
I am a Pretty Little Dutch Girl
All dressed in blue.
And these are the things
I like to do:
Salute to the captain.
Curtsey to the king.
And show my pants to the U. S. Marines!
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? ? This was the same little girl who would throw down her jump rope and run
to the baseball diamond to play what she classified as a boy's game.
The children in my early folklore study were presenting me with the
complexity of their lives. That I chose to study one aspect, the image as re-
vealed in the text, is understandable. Part of the leverage one needs to launch
an undertaking is just such a focus. That I now recognize the text and con-
text, the ideal and the real, the conservative and the innovation, adds to my
wonder of the child's world of folklore.
I would like to reflect on what I see as the complexity of children's
folklore, a complexity that has sometimes been overlooked for a simpler
view. An approach that was predicted on the simple nature of the child was
nineteenth-century cultural evolutionary theory. In this framework, the child
was equated with the savage. In much twentieth-century literature on
children's folklore, the equation remains. For an understanding of cultural
evolutionary theory as it pertains to children, we must turn to the works of
Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Edward Burnett Tylor.
Charles Darwin, in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to
Sex (1871), extended the evolutionary theory developed in On the Origin
of Species (1859)-one focused primarily on natural selection-to the evo-
lution of the sexes and of social behavior. ' In Darwin's framework, the male
and female child are equal, mentally and physically. At puberty, the inequality
between the sexes begins to develop. The male grows to full intellectual and
physical capacity. The female, retaining aspects of the child, is arrested in
development between the child and the adult male. This was attributed to
the evolution of the species and the sexual maturation of the individual.
Of the "Mental Powers of Man and Woman," Darwin concluded,
"man has ultimately become superior to woman" (Darwin 1871, 2:382).
During "primeval times," men had to compete with rivals for "the posses-
sion of the females. " This competition led to "the greater intellectual vigor
and power of invention" in man (Darwin 1871, 2:382). It also led to "the
greater size, strength, courage, pugnacity, and . . . energy of man in com-
parison with the same qualities in woman. . . " (Darwin 1871, 2:382).
Coupled with the results of an evolutionary selection for a male of
superior strength and intellect were the effects of sexual maturation of the
individual organisms. In childhood, the male and the female are equal in
intellectual capacity. At puberty, there is differential development of the in-
tellect according to sex. In support of his position, Darwin notes "that eu-
nuchs remain throughout life inferior in" mental faculties (Darwin 1871, 2:
328-29). This disparity in intellectual capacity between the sexes has been
mitigated by "the law of equal transmission of characters to both sexes"
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? ? (Darwin 1871, 2: 329). Without this law, Darwin says, "it is probable that
man would have become as superior in mental endowment to woman, as
the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen" (Darwin 1871, 2: 329).
Herbert Spencer-a man who influenced Darwin and was influenced
by him-discussed the evolution of mental complexity in The Comparative
Psychology of Man, an address delivered to the Royal Anthropological In-
stitute. Spencer endeavored to establish the evolution of the intellect and to
link it with the development of mankind from savagery to civilization. To
establish the degrees of intellectual capacity, Spencer compared the child's
mind with the adult's. This contrast, between the child and the adult mind,
is analogous, Spencer said, to that between "the minds of savage and civi-
lized" (Spencer 1977 [1876], 9). To support his position Spencer notes that
"the sudden gusts of feeling which men of inferior types display" are like
"the passions of childhood" (Spencer 1977 [1876], 12).
Following the evolutionary scheme of Darwin and Spencer, man,
woman, and child could be arranged hierarchically: Man is rational, physi-
cally and emotionally strong, civilized. Woman is irrational, physically and
emotionally weak, and childlike. The child is weak and unformed, with a
need to be emotionally nurtured by the mother and physically strengthened
by the father. The child, then, is the living link with the savage past.
Edward Burnett Tylor continued in Darwin's theoretical footsteps. For
Tylor, folklore was the remnant of the intellectual past, just as the fossil was
the remnant of the physical past. The survival of the primitive was preserved
in children's folklore. Rhymes, songs, games, and toys of children "repro-
duce, in what are at once sports and little children's lessons, early stages in
the history of childlike tribes of mankind" (Tylor 1929 [1871], 1: 74).
Cultural evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century was, in the lit-
eral sense of the word, progressive. It was predicated on the notion of
progress, of development from the simple stages of savagism to barbarism
and to civilization.
It was also progressive in terms of its representation of
human potential, that moving toward increasing complexity. Within each
individual infant and each infant race, there is a potential to develop out of
the state of savagism. Certain savage races might need the assistance of the
civilized races to speed up the evolutionary process. Again, there is the par-
allel between the child and the race. Just as the child is raised by the parent,
so can the savage be pulled out of the primitive state by the representatives
of the civilized nations. 2
In this theoretical framework, the child recapitulates the development
of the race. As Alexander Chamberlain says in The Child and Childhood in
Folk- Thought: "Ethnology, with its broad sweep over ages and races of man,
25
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? ? its searchings into the origins of nations and of civilizations, illumined by
the light of Evolution, suggests that in the growth of the child from helpless
infancy to adolescence, and through the strong and trying development of
manhood to the idyosyncracies of disease and senescence, we have an
epitome in miniature of the life of the race . . . " (Chamberlain 1896, 3).
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown in The Andaman Islanders draws the same
parallel between the development of the individual and the development of
the race. As he explains, the primary task of the child is to bring order to
his social world. The same process is at work in primitive society where,
Radcliffe-Brown says, "the supreme need" requires that the primitive bring
order to the world around him. "Just as the child organises and develops
his experience by treating inanimate objects as if they were persons . . . , so
primitive man, in exactly the same way, organises and develops his social
experience by conceiving the whole universe as if it were the interaction of
personal forces" (Radcliffe-Brown 1948 [1922]: 380).
Born in a state of nature, naked and vulnerable, the infant gradually
is tamed, grows to manhood, acquires the manners of the civilized. If the
child grows to womanhood, she never thoroughly outgrows the child. It re-
mains within her, part of her essence, her childlike nature. Thus these three
categories-man, woman, and child-reflected the hierarchical division of
culture into civilized, barbaric, and savage:
man = civilized
woman = barbaric
child = savage
Cultural evolutionary theory did not just overlook the complexities
inherent in children's folklore, it denied them. Children's folklore was simple;
it was a direct link to the lower-and therefore simpler-stages of cultural
evolution. In this vein, Karl Pearson reasoned, children's delight in nursery
tales "arises from an unconscious sympathy between the child and the
thought and customs of the childhood of civilization" (Bett 1924, 1-2; quot-
ing Pearson). 3
Following this approach, since the child is linked through an uncon-
scious sympathy to the lower stages of evolution, it is understandable that
we would find aspects of the savage and the barbaric in children's folklore.
In Counting-Out Rhymes of Children, Walter Gregor remarks, "It is now
an acknowledged fact that some of the games of children are survivals of
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? ? what was once the occupation of men in less advanced stages of civilization
. . " (Gregor 1973 [1891], 9). Henry Bett, in Nursery Rhymes and Tales;
Their Origin and History, points to the element of cannibalism in "our
children's tales. "
Fee fi fo fum I smell the blood of an Englishman!
Be he alive or be he dead,
I'll grind his bones to make my bread! (Bett 1924, 31)
This, Bett said, was "simply a remembrance of times when primitive men were
cannibals and ate their enemies, as some savages do today" (Bett 1924, 30).
Alice Bertha Gomme, the grand lady of nineteenth-century childlore
studies, worked within this cultural evolutionary framework. 4 According to
Lady Alice, children's games are "some of the oldest historical documents
belonging to our race"; they show "man's progress from savagery to civili-
zation" (Gomme 1964 [1898], 2: 461). In Lady Alice's work, this progress
from savagery to civilization does not entail a movement from simple to
complex. Though she was evolutionary in her approach to folklore, she was
also ritualistic in her interpretation. Accordingly, children's games originated
from complex traditions. As Lady Alice says, "If [children] saw a custom
periodically and often practised with some degree of ceremonial importance,
they would in their own way act in play what their elders do seriously"
(Gomme 1964 [1898], 2: 142).
Such was the case in the game "Round and Round the Village. " The
children in their play retained the ancient custom of "the perambulation of
boundaries, often associated with festive dances, courtship, and marriage"
(Gomme 1964 [1898], 2: 142). s As evidence of this early origin, Lady Alice
refers to the ritual in southeast Russia. On the eve of her wedding, the bride
goes round the village and kneels before the head of each household. In In-
dia, the bride and groom are both transported round the village (Gomme
1964 [1898], 2: 143). Lady Alice concludes that "the Indo-European mar-
riage-rite contained just such features as are represented in this game"
(Gomme 1964 [1898], 2: 143). Further, she says, "the changes from rite to
popular customs, from popular custom to children's game" show the use-
fulness of folklore study.
To her credit, Lady Alice did not reduce children's folklore to a single
theoretical approach. The games were not merely a survival from a past age.
Nor were the games simply a key to past rituals. Children's folklore was a
living tradition-a link to the past, to be sure, but also a vibrant force in
the present.
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? ? The identification of children's lore with survivals from earlier stages
of cultural development is no longer part of contemporary interpretation.
Now the giant's chanting "Fee, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an English-
man" might be interpreted as the dreaded father-figure. As Alan Dundes says,
"Up in the beanstalk world, there is a cannibalistic giant who often in some
vague way is linked with Jack's father. . . " (Dundes 1980, 41). By exten-
sion, the cannibalistic element could be interpreted as the child's fear of the
father's brutal strength and oral power. 6
Still, while the literal interpretation of child's lore as survival has been
discarded, the fundamental equation between child and savage remains, at
least as a metaphor, in much work on children's folklore. The child has be-
come the savage in our midst. Iona and Peter Opie, in the introduction to
The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, remark that "the folklorist and
anthropologist can, without traveling a mile from his door, examine a thriv-
ing unself-conscious culture" which is as unnoticed and untouched by "the
sophisticated world. . . as is the culture of some dwindling aboriginal tribe
living out its helpless existence in the hinterland of a native reserve" (Opie
and Opie 1959, 1-2). Sylvia Ann Grider, in her editorial statement to West-
ern Folklore's special issue on Children's Folklore makes a similar observa-
tion: "In this day of inflated costs and shrinking grants, there is no need for
the folklorist to scour the outback of Australia in search of aborigines, for
all he needs to do is glance into his own apartment complex courtyard or
neighborhood playground to find a cooperative group of informants whose
private worlds are dominated by tradition" (Grider 1980, 162).
Iona and Peter Opie conclude their remarks on the child as the sav-
age in our midst by quoting Douglas Newton: "The world-wide fraternity
of children is the greatest of savage tribes, and the only one which shows
no sign of dying out" (Opie and Opie 1959, 2, quoting Newton). Sylvia
Grider, after suggesting the affinity between the Australian aborigines and
children, denies the savage nature of children: "And these little folks are not
savages either . . . " (Grider 1980, 162). Thus for the Opies, the child is like
the aboriginal in the hinterland. For Grider, the child offers the exotic of the
outback, but has the advantages of not really being savage.
In his discussion of children's riddling, John McDowell notes the "ten-
dency to despise the products of childish cognition. " To recognize the intel-
lectual sophistication of child's lore, McDowell suggests that we borrow from
Claude Levi-Strauss's cerebral savage, "whose primitive speculation repre-
sents another, not a cognitively inferior, science" (McDowell 1979, 144).
"The time may be ripe to turn our humanistic energies to those savages
among us and discover at our very portals the cerebral child, concerned in
2. 8 THE COMPLEXITY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
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? ? his or her verbal art with complex matters of rationality, logic, sociability,
and aesthetics" (McDowell 1979, 144). In his analysis of a children's rid-
dling session which focuses on the differences between animals and machines,
McDowell suggests that the children "are working through basic anoma-
lies in their cultural apparatus, much as primitives examine apparent con-
tradictions through the logical tools of mythology" (McDowell 1979, 145).
In suggesting the analogy between the cerebral child and the cerebral
savage, McDowell is not stressing the simple nature of children or of primi-
tives. Rather he is stressing the complex nature of the intellectual system,
that the riddles of the child and the mythology of the primitive serve to or-
der their cognitive universe. Even with his recognition of the complexities
in child and primitive lore, McDowell is using the basic equation of cultural
evolutionary theory. The child is equal to the savage. The frame he uses is
Levi-Strauss's: The cerebral child is to the cerebral savage as children's in-
tellectualization is to primitive speculation, as children's riddling is to primi-
tive mythology.
The groundrock of this system is Tylor's. According to Edward
Burnett Tylor, comparisons could be made between groups widely separated
in space and time. This could be done because of one common factor, the
psychic unity of mankind. The results of Tylor's comparative study were
arranged on an evolutionary ladder, from the simplicity of savagery to the
complexity of civilization. L6vi-Strauss and McDowell lay this ladder on its
side and eliminate the notion of progress from simple to complex. Savage
thought is complex; children's thought is complex. But for all three, the com-
mon factor that allows comparison is the same, the intellectual capacity of
humankind. For Tylor, it is psychic unity; for Levi-Strauss, la pense sauvage;
for McDowell, the cerebral child.
In this survey of cultural evolutionary theory, we have gone from the
classic form of the nineteenth century, when it was thought that the savage
state survives in children's folklore, to the twentieth-century equation be-
tween savage and child. Scholars in children's folklore would do well to ex-
amine the assumptions underlying cultural evolutionary theory. The first step
would be to scrutinize the concept of the simple.
It is past time to recognize that children are not simple, nor are soci-
eties simple. The child is a complex individual, not a simple adult, or a link
to the savage past. And the savage past cannot be exemplified by savage
cultures in our midst, except those of our own making. 7
The term savage carries with it the weight of the cultural evolution-
ary theory. The whole world rises on the shoulders of the savage-be it
the Australian aborigine or the African tribesman. Whether used in L&vi-
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? ? Strauss's clever turn-of-phrase, la pensee sauvage-the savage thought or the
wild pansy-or McDowell's offspring of the cerebral savage, the cerebral
child, the term denotes the wild, untamed, uncivilized. This equation between
the child and the savage, whether intended in the literal or the metaphori-
cal sense, is a disservice to the folk group, its culture, and its folklore. What
is needed is a recognition of the complexity and the integrity of cultures and
of children.
The child-as-savage, the child-as-exotic, has also been used as a jus-
tification for studying children's folklore. The reasoning is as follows: There
is no need to go to faraway lands when the exotic is within, in our own
households. This need to justify the study of children's folklore could be
avoided if we simply accept the obvious-that children's folklore is a legiti-
mate and an important area of study.
A major theoretical shift has occurred between the nineteenth and the
twentieth centuries, from a search for origins to a search for meaning. As
we have seen, in the nineteenth-century cultural-evolutionary framework,
children's folklore provided a link with the past. In contemporary ap-
proaches, children's folklore provides a key to understanding the crucial,
unstated elements in a child's life. This stress on meaning is apparent in the
psychological, functional, structural, and symbolic theories.
Martha Wolfenstein's Children's Humor shows just such an attempt
to arrive at the underlying, unconscious meaning of children's jokes. She
anticipates the criticism that she has given undue emphasis to the trivial.
She counters, "But when one hears one child after another repeat these same
apparently trivial witticisms, and sees what value they attach to learning and
telling them, one feels that there is a discrepancy between the intensity
of their interest and the seeming triviality of the content. This gap can be
filled in if we reconstruct the underlying meaning of the joke" (Wolfenstein
1978 [1954], 14). In Wolfenstein's psychological approach, the underly-
ing meaning of the joke is directly related to the basic motive of joking,
"the wish to transform a painful experience and to extract pleasure from
it" (Wolfenstein 1978, 18). This Wolfenstein calls "the wish to joke"
(Wolfenstein 1978, 25).
The release of anxiety through joking is a constant, as Freud has
shown in Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, but the joking forms
themselves change according to the developmental stages of the child. It is
Wolfenstein's attempt to correlate the different forms of humor with the dif-
ferent age levels of children that makes her work unique. 8 Wolfenstein fol-
lows the psychoanalytic scheme of emotional development, the Oedipal, la-
tency, and adolescent periods. For example, Wolfenstein discusses verbal play
30 THE COMPLEXITY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
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? ? in which a child changes the sex or name of another child. A three-year-old
makes a joke by calling a girl a boy, or vice versa (Wolfenstein 1978, 19,
89), and the child of four does the same thing by changing proper names.
These children are playing with verbal ambiguity; underlying this is the ques-
tion about sexual identity and individual identity. As Wolfenstein says, this
joking behavior carries a powerful message, "I change your sex; I change
your name; I change your meaning" (Wolfenstein 1978, 82).
The moron joke cycle, for Wolfenstein, marks the latency period of
children, from six to eleven years. At that age, the children are greatly con-
cerned "with the issue of smartness and dumbness. " The riddles ". . . serve
in part the function of demonstrating that they are smart and the other
fellow, who does not know the answer, is dumb" (Wolfenstein 1978, 20).
This contrasts with the endless fantasies of the Oedipal children and the
artful anecdotes of the adolescent. The joking riddle makes a parody of ques-
tions and answers. As Wolfenstein says, "The question posed is trivial or
absurd; the solution is nonsensical" (Wolfenstein 1978, 94). This is linked
to the concern of the latency period, the child's repressed curiosity about
his/her parents' sexuality (Wolfenstein 1978, 95). This curiosity reveals
itself in the joking riddle: "Beneath this verbal formula is a latent meaning
which has been drastically condensed and disguised. The child values the
joke's concealment of material which he is anxious to repress. He also strenu-
ously denies that the joke has any relation to himself" (Wolfenstein 1978,
138).
In the introduction, Wolfenstein notes that she, at times, ventures on
"not too certain ground" when she relates a frequent theme from psycho-
analytic observation to "other subjects in other circumstances" (Wolfenstein
1978, 18). It is her analysis of the repressed sexual meaning of the moron
jokes which seems so strained. For example, Wolfenstein analyzes one of the
most popular moron jokes: "Why did the moron tiptoe past the medicine
cabinet? Because he didn't want to wake the sleeping pills. " The clue to the
joke's meaning lies in the action of the moron and the function of the pills.
The moron tiptoes and the pills induce sleep. As one child explained to
Wolfenstein, the joke is funny because "sleeping pills put you to sleep.
