No More Learning

Sometimes pranks expand into something closer to a riot. At camp
these larger performances may take the form of panty raids and similar raids
by one group (such as a cabin group) upon another. At boarding schools
there may be institutionalized riots, as there are at some universities (for
example, the University of Pennsylvania "rowbottoms"). At juvenile deten-
tion institutions the true riot might be a cultural performance, and folklor-
ists might want to examine the symbolic details of riots to see if there is not
in them a large element of play (albeit tragic). The residents' capturing of
the staff is far more important as a symbolic inversion of ordinary roles than
it is a strategic move for getting away from the institution.
Residents are likely to play traditional games and invent new ones. I
refer here to the group's true folk games, in contrast to the sports and games
that the staff may make them play (although the folk can also subvert those
compulsory games and turn them to their own uses). I have seen Boy Scouts
improvise a game of "king of the donut" (a ringlike raft) during an unstruc-
tured "free swim" at camp, and this is only one of dozens of occasions on
which boys created a game. Gump, Sutton-Smith, and Redl (1955) observed
fire play among the campers they studied, and it is often the case that campers
will turn into a game their play with the three substances-fire, water, and
the woods-that are the most alien to their urban or suburban everyday lives.
Burch's comments (1965) on "the meaning of different forms of forest play"
and his notion of "symbolic labor" among campers might be relevant in
analyzing children's play at camp.
Another sort of cultural performance highlights one of the method-
ological difficulties facing folklorists who would study residential culture.
These are the forbidden rituals, such as one finds in the collective use of in-
toxicating substances. The caretakers call this "substance abuse" and the
residents mights call it "recreational drug use," but in any guise it is the use
of alcohol, marijuana, inhalants, hard drugs, and even tobacco as part of
the expressive culture of the group. Other illicit activities may include the
smuggling of contraband or gambling (Lambert and Millham 1968). Tat-
tooing, body piercing, and scarification are forbidden rituals of special in-
terest now that folklorists and others in cultural studies have drawn our at-
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? ? tention to "the body as social text. " The adult folklorist will have great dif-
ficulty penetrating the residents' folk culture enough to be witness to for-
bidden rituals, except in those cases where the residents use the ritual to test
or initiate the folklorist. In any case, this raises perplexing ethical questions
for the folklorist (Fine and Glassner 1979).
Of course, sexual behavior ranks with substance abuse as one of the
two most serious illicit activities from the caretaker's point of view. The topics
of heterosexuality and homosexuality pervade the folk cultures of children
and adolescents in residential institutions. Several of the genres already men-
tioned (folk speech, jokes, pranks, insults, narratives) may include matters
sexual. Raphael's informants (1988, 76-77) reported a summer camp con-
test featuring a "Beat the Meat" recording the number of times each boy in
the cabin masturbated. And there also may be a complex body of custom-
ary lore surrounding sex in the institution, such as the elaborate customs
Giallombardo (1974) found regarding courtship, marriage, and divorce in
the adolescent women's prisons she studied. Sexual meanings may also un-
derlie folk performances not explicitly sexual (Dundes 1971). To whatever
extent folklore responds to deeply felt needs and anxieties, it is likely that
the 1 million American adolescents who live in total institutions (Shore and
Gochros 1981) will generate a considerable repertoire of expressive culture
relating somehow to their sexuality.
Finally, the residents' world has a material culture of its own. Jack-
son (1965, 328-29) and Cohen and Eilertsen (1985) describe some artifacts
of the prison world, including the use of tattoos and special ways of tying
shoelaces as signals of identity and affiliation. Giallombardo (1974) describes
in detail the ways the female adolescent inmates use makeup, clothing, and
hair styles to communicate their primary gender identity and power relation-
ships. Contraband in residential institutions can range from forbidden food
at summer camps (especially diet camps, see Rashap 1982) to the more se-
rious contraband of children's prisons-knives, zip guns, and the like. In
these artifacts we see the "bricolage" of American folk crafts, as the inmates
piece together from objects intended for other uses the artifacts of self-de-
fense and attack. We can include even such things as cabin "totems" at camp,
the wearing of special folk costume, the use of animal bones and skins, and
so on (Mechling 1987).
When we turn our attention to the folk culture of the staff, we do
not have to generate a new list of likely settings and genres. The staff world,
it turns out, is at most times not much different from that of the residents.
It is for them a work setting, so the burgeoning literature on the folklore of
occupations and organizations is relevant to our understanding of the staff
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? ? world. We would expect to find nicknames, folk speech, jokes, insults, oral
narratives, cautionary tales, personal memorates, pranks, games, material
artifacts, and even the recreational use of drugs among staff. In some cases,
such as summer-camp counselors, the staff may even have among them
former residents, creating a further interpenetration of the two cultures. The
staff creates and sustains these cultural performances for many of the same
reasons the residents do, to make visible the categories of their world view
and to fix the public meanings of beliefs and values.
INSTITUTIONAL CEREMONIES
The interpretive approach to the cultures of a residential institution suggests
to the folklorist that in addition to the subcultures of residents and staff there
is a creative, expressive realm of cultural production at the border where
the two subcultures meet. Goffman calls the cultural performances in this
realm "institutional ceremonies," a set of practices that "express unity, soli-
darity, and joint commitment to the institution rather than differences be-
tween the two levels" (Goffman 1961a, 94).
Goffman lists seven of these institutional ceremonies. The first is the
house organ, the institution's newspaper. The folklorist may very well find
in a house organ written by residents or staff items of humor, public ritual,
pranks, and institutional narratives. Related to this form would be the xe-
rography lore that might circulate among the two subcultures and appear
in the house organ.
Goffman refers to forms of self-government and "group therapy" as
the second class of residential institutional ceremonies. Summer camps and
boarding schools are more likely to have some form of self-government than
therapy groups, while hospitals and custodial institutions may well have
both.
The third institutional ceremony in which staff and inmates come
together is the annual (or seasonal) party. On these occasions the members
of the institution mix for eating, playing, and possibly dancing. Seasonal
holidays such as Christmas or the Fourth of July are likely occasions for in-
stitutional parties, during which time normal boundaries may be suspended
and caste lines crossed. The legitimation of symbolic inversions for Hallow-
een may create some interesting situations in a total institution (Santino
1983).
Institutional theatricals are the fourth institutional ceremony, and
Goffman notes that, while the inmates typically are players and the staff are
in charge of production, there are sometimes "mixed" casts. Theatricals are
common in residential camps, even at adult encampments like the famous
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? ? Bohemian Club (Domhoff 1974). The handbooks and novels connected with
Boy Scout, Girl Scout, Campfire Girl, and Y camps describe skits, plays, and
pageants. In my own fieldwork with a troop of Boy Scouts I endured a num-
ber of patrol skits, many of which contained in their story line and symbolic
details clues to the concerns of the boys (Mechling 1980a, 1981; also Brandes
1980, on skits). Songs are often part of these theatricals, from the camp-
fire songs of Boy Scouts to those of summer camps (Mechling 1980a, Posen
1974b). The two "tribes" into which the girls at one summer camp were
divided were each responsible for an evening's theatrical (Chandler 1981).
Ellis's perceptive analysis of the "mock ordeal" at a summer camp
demonstrates how an institutional theatrical of a very different sort requires
camper and staff member alike to participate in the construction of the play
frame (Ellis 1981a). Camp legends and their performance (Leary 1973; Ellis
1981b, 1982) are also institutional theatricals, as are the "proto-dramas"
described by T. Green (1978).
The fifth institutional ceremony common at residential institutions is
the open house. An open house is an institutional display for the public, and
as such it has that quality of fabrication that Goffman's frame analysis dis-
sects so nicely (Goffman 1974). During the open house, staff and residents
cooperate in creating a public symbolic drama about the nature of the in-
stitution. In this sort of cooperative institutional display, as in the others,
the folklorist might want to pursue the activities that "break" the fragile
construction of an institution's image.
Intramural sports are the sixth sort of institutional display the folk-
lorist finds in a residential institution for youths. Staff and campers, for ex-
ample, might square off for a softball game. Included in this category, too,
would be sport events between rival institutions. The theatrical film Meat-
balls (1979) builds much of its plot around the sports rivalries between ad-
jacent summer camps, and it is a common feature of boarding schools for
interschool rivalries to give rise to a variety of folklore expressions. The Boy
Scout camp I studied had several organized games in which staff and camp-
ers played together, and it was in the details of those games of "poison,"
"capture the flag," and "treasure hunt" that I discovered much about the
relations between the staff and camper cultures (Mechling 1980b, 1981,
1984b, 1985).
Sunday services and Sunday amusements are Goffman's seventh and
last category of institutional ceremonies. Religious ceremonies are the ob-
vious ritual occasions of interest to the folklorist, but we should not over-
look a score of other Sunday amusements. Summer camps frequently run
in weekly cycles, so weekends turn out to be the setting for rituals of transi-
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? ? tion-campers leaving and campers arriving. Sundays may be the days of
the rituals of incorporation and separation, discussed below.
To Goffman's seven institutional ceremonies I want to add four more.
Goffman underestimates the role of meals as institutional ceremonies. There
is considerable foodways research for the folklorist to draw upon here, in-
cluding some on the reactions of young people to institutional food. Sum-
mer-camp and boarding-school populations always seem to have a rich vo-
cabulary to describe the food (for example, the persistence of "bug juice"
for Kool-Aid). Lambert and Millham (1968, 108-50) pay considerable at-
tention to their informants' folk speech about food. Ashley (1968, 256-71)
provides a splendid catalog of the words British children use to describe
foods, including in his "scoff lore" some items drawn from the Opies (1959;
see also Farmer 1968 and Marples 1940). Especially likely in these settings
are folk beliefs about foreign matter in the food, beliefs ranging from those
studied by Domowitz (1979) and Fine (1980c) to the persistent male worry
about saltpeter (Rich and Jacobs 1973). I found at a Boy Scout camp a strong
tendency to link food and feces in the speech play of the boys, and I am cer-
tain this pattern reflects both social concerns about pollution (M. Douglas
1966) and psychological concerns about being male in American society
(Mechling 1984a).
Cookouts are another summer camp setting for expressive behavior
regarding both the food and the fire. Even food fights in residential institu-
tions may be folk performances. Finally, the folklorist should note that so-
ciologists like Polsky (1962) learn a great deal about residential institutions
by attending to seating arrangements in the dining hall and to the dozens
of small dramas that get played out during a meal.
Assemblies are still another institutional ceremony of great importance
in camps and boarding schools. Flag ceremonies are common in those set-
tings, especially military schools. Assemblies can be occasions for just about
anything in a residential institution, from talks by visiting dignitaries to
"town meeting" affairs. Once more, the folklorist's interest in the assembly
is how the staff and residents may discover ways to "break frame" and as-
sault the fragile collective construction. One is reminded, for example, of
the closing scenes in Lindsay Anderson's film If (1968).
Rituals of incorporation and rituals of separation are the last two
institutional ceremonies I would commend to the folklorist's attention. Both
sorts of ritual are dramatizations of a change in status. They occur at the
borders of the residential institutions themselves and at interior borders.
Turner (1974a) reminds us to follow Van Gennep's lead (1960) in looking
at the threshold situations in cultural processes. A residential institution usu-
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? ? ally has an official orientation session, sometimes including artifacts that are
symbolic adjuncts to the ritual (Fortes 1968). Thus, campers may receive a
distinctive item of clothing and prisoners may get haircuts and be stripped
naked before donning the institutional uniform. Once past this initial thresh-
old, the child or adolescent may face unofficial forms of initiation into the
folk culture of the group. The "mock ordeal" described by Ellis (1981a) is
one such initiation ritual, as are a "snipe hunt" and assorted other forms of
hazing. The folk group tests the neophyte, through verbal assault, exploit-
ative games, and dares (R. Johnson 1978).
The rituals of separation come at the other threshold, the border the
child crosses to rejoin everyday society. Awards ceremonies often cap the
residential period and camps and schools may have true "graduation" cer-
emonies. We have no studies of these folk rituals, but Myerhoff's insightful
analysis (1978) of a concocted graduation ceremony at a senior citizen cen-
ter provides good folkloristic questions to pose in the case of graduation
ceremonies for youngsters.
Having added four ceremonial occasions-meals, assemblies, rituals
of incorporation, and rituals of separation-to Goffman's list, we now have
at least eleven sorts of performance occasions in which to look for the emer-
gence of children's folklore. So far this discussion has taken genre and per-
formance context as primary categories, treating as roughly interchangeable
the four sorts of residential institutions. To offset the impression that these
performance contexts across the four institutions are really the same, I shall
turn now to each sort of institution to comment briefly upon its unique char-
acteristics and the extant scholarship.
SPECIAL FEATURES OF EACH INSTITUTION
Summer camps certainly are the most benign of the total institutions for
children and adolescents, fitting closest the adult's romantic notion of what
the child's folk culture should be. The folklorist should note, however, that
there are many kinds of camps, from the general recreational, to the ones
connected with youth groups (Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, YMCA, etc. ), to
camps featuring single activities (sports, art, cheerleading, computer), to
camps for special populations (handicapped, ill, disadvantaged, delinquent).
The day-camper's experience will overlap with that of residential campers,
so it is good to ask what features of the campers' folk culture we can at-
tribute to the long-term stay.
Unfortunately, we do not yet have much in the way of folkloristic
study of camps. Chandler's 1981 essay on a Girl Scout camp, Wells's 1988
study of a Girl Scout camp, Rashap's 1982 work on a camp for overweight
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? ? teenagers, Ellis's (1981a, 1981b, 1982) several essays on a camp for under-
privileged urban children, Savin-Williams's work on summer camps (1980a,
1980b), Tillery's 1992 ongoing work on a YMCA camp, and my own work
on a Boy Scout camp are the only sustained studies of camp experiences from
a point of view valuable to folklorists. Most other studies of camps feature
an interventionist frame of mind coming out of normative social science's
view of socialization. The investigation of camp experiences created to serve
some other goal, such as better racial relations (Eaton and Clore 1975) or
the treatment of emotionally disturbed children (Behar and Stephens 1978),
rarely includes evidence of the campers' folk culture.
The scholarship on boarding schools is more plentiful than that for
camps, thanks largely to research on the British public school. McLachlan's
1970 history of the boarding school in America provides good background
for understanding whose children go to boarding schools and why (see also
Levine 1980). For work taking the children's point of view, however, it is
still hard to surpass the work done by the British. Lambert and Millham
(1968) and Ashley (1968) I've already praised for their collection of the ac-
tual lore of children. On American schools we have less data, but Gillespie
(1970) is a good example. More recently, noted feminist psychologist Carol
Gilligan and her coworkers (1990) have been working at a private girls'
school in upstate New York as part of a larger "Harvard Project on the Psy-
chology of Women and Development of Girls. "
The study of the folklore of children and adolescents in hospitals suf-
fers somewhat the same interventionist fate as the study of camps. Krell's 1980
survey is folkloristic, but the folklorist might also get something out of the
work of the interventionists who are interested in using play as an adjunct to
medical treatments (M. Adams 1976; D. Hall 1977; Miura 1981). Bluebond-
Langner's work (1978, 1981) with dying children also contains some insight
into the ways the children and parents construct reality, though one wishes
the author had paid more attention to the ways in which dying children cre-
ate expressive support groups among themselves. Bergmann's 1965 case his-
tories of children in a hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, include incisive observa-
tions on the denials, regressions, defensive devices and "constructive resources
the children use to battle fears. " But, again, the folklorist wishes Bergmann
more often stepped aside from her etic, psychoanalytic perspective (Anna Freud
was a collaborator) and presented a more emic account of the children's ex-
pressive culture in the face of disease, amputation, and death. Beuf's 1979 study
of the lives of children in hospitals is our most complete ethnographic study,
and that contains much of use to the folklorist.
It is an odd paradox that the children's residential institutions for
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? ? which we have some of the best folklore data are the residential correctional
facilities, the institutions in which it would be the most difficult for the out-
side folklorist to penetrate the folk group. This paradox ought to warn us
that the plentiful data has some hidden contextual conditions. Most of the
studies of group homes, residential treatment centers, and prisons clearly
espouse an adult, interventionist point of view, and we easily may dismiss
these studies (for example, Balbernie 1966; Tizard, Sinclair, and Clarke 1975)
as unlikely to provide much of use to the folklorist.
But there is a whole middle range of studies done by sociologists and
psychologists who are interventionist in their goals while, at the same time,
displaying an ethnographic respect for the small-group culture of the chil-
dren and adolescents in these institutions. These fieldworkers practice some-
thing closer to the "interpretive" rather than the "normative" approach to
socialization.
As is the case in the study of children's lore in boarding schools,
some of the best work on the folk cultures of children in residential correc-
tional institutions comes out of England, where studies on the "Borstal boys"
already constitute a long research tradition. Walter's 1977 critique of research
in British "approved schools" is a good introduction to this literature, es-
pecially in light of Walter's view that the best work is done by those who
attempt to present the boys' or girls' perspective. Walter admires the work
of Gill (1974) in this regard.
Turning to American institutions for juvenile offenders, the folklor-
ist would do well to begin with Polsky's classic Cottage Six study (1962). A
young postdoctoral fellow at the time, Polsky entered Hollymeade residen-
tial treatment center as a participant-observer. He discovered in this coedu-
cational institution what we now recognize as the folk culture of the 195
inmates (boys aged eight to eighteen, girls twelve to eighteen). In the words
of Leonard Cottrell, Jr. , from the introduction to Polsky's book, "Dr. Polsky
demonstrates beyond cavil that it is possible for at least a significant seg-
ment of the resident population of even a first-rate institution like
Hollymeade to create, maintain, and transmit a separate deviant subculture
that supports values and a social system that are counter to the institution
itself and in substantial part negate even the most intensive and skillful in-
dividual therapeutic efforts" (Polsky 1962, 6-7).
Polsky had found, in short, the folk culture of the cottage, of the resi-
dential group, that persisted beyond members' coming and going and that
was the cultural context for sustaining deviant behavior. Polsky's book is full
of ethnographic detail that will delight the folklorist, including a close reading
of a dining-hall incident in which one group's control over access to certain
foods becomes a symbolic performance of power. Polsky's typology of de-
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? ? viant interactive modes-namely aggression, deviant skills and activities,
threat gestures, ranking, and scapegoating-translate into familiar folk
genres. Especially enlightening is Polsky's candid, confessional chapter on
the "Participant Observer in a Deviant Subculture," wherein he recounts how
the boys tested him by making him smoke (against the rules), by "ranking"
him with their ritual insults, and occasionally by physically attacking him.
In many ways Polsky's accomplishment in the Cottage Six study has
not been duplicated. Even Polsky's later study of another residential treat-
ment center (Polsky and Claster 1968) is too preoccupied with applying a
Bales/Parsons scheme and quantifying the results, failing to match the rich
ethnographic detail of the Cottage Six work. Empey and Lubeck (1971) simi-
larly fail to describe in detail the delinquent subculture the authors know
exists at such residential facilities. The surveys by Street, Vinter, and Perrow
(1969), by Cole (1972), and Feld (1981) hint at the subcultures of the in-
mates of a broad range of residential institutions for juvenile offenders, but
ultimately they fail to deliver the details the folklorist wants.
Fortunately, there are a few ethnographic studies by folklorists who
were able to penetrate to some extent the cultures of children in custodial
institutions. R. Roberts's 1965 study of an industrial school for boys is an
early example. Cohen and Eilertsen (1985) discovered through interviews a
broad range of folklore at a New Jersey correctional institution for boys,
but they were unable to do the follow-up fieldwork that would have located
these folk genres in their natural contexts (see Bennett 1981 for a history
and overview of the uses of the delinquent's life history). The research by
Horan while he worked as a staff member at a New Jersey boys' home holds
the most promise, and in his study of play fighting (1988) and of patterns
of sharing and withholding possessions (1984) Horan displays deft control
of the folklorist's inquiry.
We still do not have the data we would need to determine, for ex-
ample, if the folk cultures of the inmates differ significantly across kinds of
institutions (private/public, large/small, open/closed, religious/secular, rural/
urban). Clearly, we need to replicate Hawes's (1968) sort of study for all these
institutional variations. Giallombardo's (1974) very fine work on imprisoned
girls is a good model in this vein. There is still much to do.
SPECIAL ISSUES AND PROSPECTS
The discussion so far has been something of a survey of the existing litera-
ture on the folklore of children and adolescents in residential institutions,
organized in the first section by genres in performance settings, in the sec-
ond by types of institutional ceremonies, and in the third by type of institu-
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? ? tion. In this final section I want to address more what needs to be done by
folklorists, alerting the reader to certain problems and certain possibilities
that seem to me unique and exciting.
Regarding the special problems of fieldwork in residential institutions
for children, there is not much more to be added to the warnings and ad-
vice offered by Fine and Glassner (1979), Fine (1987, 222-44), and Foley
(1990, 206-31). Obviously, the fieldworker will have more and more trouble
establishing a trusting relationship with the informants the closer the insti-
tution gets to being a "total institution. " Nonetheless, Giallombardo's suc-
cess (1974) is encouraging. Most folklorists will probably enter these insti-
tutions through the staff world, so the great task is to establish a relation-
ship of trust with the residents. I would recommend Polsky's chapter seven
(1962) as a reminder to fieldworkers what they might have in store for them
in the process of building that trust.
Folklorists working in these settings might try some special fieldwork
techniques. Sol Worth's film projects, teaching first Philadelphia black gang
members, then Navajo gang members, how to use 8-mm cameras to make
films of their worlds (Worth and Adair 1972), seem to me a promising model
for work in residential institutions, where the folklorist could provide the
children with low-cost video equipment. Of course, the children would have
to be assured that their own narratives would not be "used against them"
by the adult authorities, and the folklorist should keep that promise.
Csikszentmihalyi, Larson, and Prescott's technique (1977) of using beepers
to signal adolescents to enter into diaries what they are doing is another idea
that could be used in residential settings. Caughey (1982) seems to get good
results asking students to use introspective reports as data, and these tech-
niques could be added to the institutional repertoire of interviews and pro-
jective tests.
As may be evident in some of my examples above, I also believe that
the folklorist will find in some unlikely places examples of the folklore of
children and adolescents in residential institutions. In literature, for example,
John Knowles's novel A Separate Peace (1959), James Kirkwood's novel
Good Times, Bad Times (1968), and Robert Morasco's play Child's Play
(1970) are all set in boarding schools and contain examples of the lore of
the schools. Autobiographies are another literary genre that may contain a
participant's comments on the folk cultures of residential institutions. Walter
(1977) discusses autobiographies and memoirs by men who attended Brit-
ish approved schools.
Commercial feature films, such as Meatballs (1979) and Little Dar-
lings (1980), are set in summer camps, as are the several Friday the Thir-
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? ? teenth films that dramatically render adolescent legends wherein the pen-
alty for teenage sex is mutilation by a crazed monster. Lindsay Anderson's
cult film If (1968) is set in a British boarding school, and Bad Boys (1983)
is filled with ethnographic detail of an Illinois prison for adolescent males.
In addition to the commercial films are a few folklore or ethnographic
films set in residential facilities for youthful offenders. Broomfield and
Churchill's Tattooed Tears (1978) is a powerful film about a California youth
detention center and training school. A dramatized version of this sort of
scene is Juvie (1976). The CBS News special report What Are We Doing to
Our Children? -Locked Up, Locked Out (1973) follows a ten-year-old de-
linquent boy through the legal system and into the threatening world of a
modern "children's treatment center. " These are merely examples; folklor-
ists should be on the lookout for similar films on residential settings.
I mentioned above, in my discussion of the literature on residential
institutions for youthful offenders, that we lack enough rich ethnographies
of the folk cultures of several sorts of institutions to be able to determine if
there are significant variations across settings. The comparative approach
is essential to the study of folklore. Eventually, we would like to know how
folk performance texts vary across contexts. What difference, for example,
does gender make in the folklore of children's residential institutions? I have
found the little work there is on Girl Scout camps (such as Chandler 1981
and Wells 1988) to be immensely helpful in my understanding of a Boy Scout
camp. Giallombardo (1974) makes much of the influence of gender upon
the expressive culture she found in women's prisons. She noted significant
differences between the adolescent women's inmate culture and that of ado-
lescent males. Why the difference? To be sure, admits Giallombardo, "the
adult male and female inmate cultures are a response to the deprivations of
prison life, but the nature of the response in both prison communities is in-
fluenced by the differential participation of males and females in the exter-
nal culture . . . . The family group in female prisons is singularly suited to
meet the inmates' internalized cultural expectations of the female role"
(1974, 3). Hawes's 1968 interpretation of the meaning of "La Llorona" simi-
larly rests upon the fact that this is a legend told among female adolescents.
Barrie Thorne's (1993) book on the ways children construct and deconstruct
gender in their play on school grounds provides several hypotheses which
folklorists might test for residential insitutions.
Folklorists will want to attend, as well, to the confounding effects of
other variables in addition to setting and gender. Do ethnicity or social class
matter? What of religion? One of my Boy Scout informants had worked as
a staff member in both a Boy Scout camp and a YMCA camp, and he was
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? ? sure there were differences in style and values attributable to the explicit
religious orientation of a Y camp (see also Tillery 1992). The comparative
approach also must include cross-cultural perspectives. We have the British/
American comparison on boarding schools and residential treatment cen-
ters, but what of camps and hospitals?
Finally, I want to comment briefly on what I see as the implications
of study in this area for what is known as "applied folklore. " First, for the
sake of getting folklorists into these institutional settings, we ought to train
staff members to be folklorists. A folklore education for continuing students
with jobs in residential institutions will simultaneously yield an increasing
body of ethnographic descriptions of the folk cultures of these institutions
and, in the bargain, make these staff members better caretakers. I mean "bet-
ter" in the sense that they will have a new cognitive respect for the expres-
sive culture of their wards; and better, too, in the sense that the very act of
collecting the lore becomes a mode of communication between caretaker and
ward. Savin-Williams (1980a) gathered his information thanks to his role
as program director for two groups of counselors-in-training, and there is
no reason that we cannot have an army of folklore fieldworkers living and
working in residential institutions and bringing their studies back to the class-
room. I see Outward Bound programs and special camps (public and pri-
vate) for "troubled teens," for example, as two fieldwork settings desper-
ately in need of the folklorist's perspectives.
There is also something the folklorist has to offer the adult caretaker,
even if that caretaker does not wish to "join up" and become a participant-
observer. On one level, the folklorist can offer his or her services as a paid
consultant, to come into a residential institution, study the folk cultures of
both staff and inmates, and make recommendations to the administrators
of the institution. Folklorists are doing this already for businesses and not-
for-profit organizations, so I see no reason why we cannot offer our exper-
tise to the organizations that have as their wards millions of American chil-
dren.
There are seductions to beware of here, and I want to be realistic
about this. Some folklorists will be ineffective because they will maintain too
romantic a notion that folkloristics can ameliorate the sometimes awful con-
ditions in these institutions. And some folklorists, no doubt, will be coopted
early and find themselves serving the manipulative, interventionist goals of
the bureaucratic managers. But I am counting on the good sense and good
sensibilities of the greater number of folklorists who apply their expertise
to these "practical" settings with a proper sense of what folkloristics can
and cannot do.
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? ? I began this chapter by saying that American children sometimes feel
like prisoners in the institutions controlled by adults. I declared that I pre-
fer the interpretive to the normative approach to socialization, and every-
thing I wrote thereafter betrays (no doubt) that my sympathies lie more with
the vibrant, resisting folk culture of the residents and inmates than with the
adult staff. But the staff often feel like prisoners, too, and this may be the
final truth of this chapter-that the nature of modern civilization is such that
we all feel like prisoners. I am not sure if it is uniquely folkloristic to side
with the oppressed, any more than I am certain this is a uniquely American
trait, but I do know that a large part of the exhilaration I get from studying
the expressive folk cultures of children in residential institutions is to see how
resilient are human beings in controlled settings. No matter how deeply we
folklorists probe into the most awful and alienating human situations, we
usually find those humans able to make an artistic performance out of the
little left to them. Children are neither the innocents nor the enemy within.
They are just human beings, like us, a fact we sometimes forget.
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? ? CONCLUSION
THE PAST IN THE PRESENT
THEORETICAL DIRECTIONS FOR CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
Felicia R. McMahon and Brian Sutton-Smith
We believe that with this collection of articles the groundwork has been laid
for future studies of children's folklore. The articles themselves vary between
older or newer approaches to the discipline-in that respect they are fairly
representative of the field as it currently stands-and they also indicate the
areas in which more work needs to be done. In an attempt to advance the
field, we begin this final chapter by analyzing past scholarship before pre-
ceding with suggestions for future directions. Mechling, for example, is con-
fident that the "interpretive" trend will become the major force in children's
folklore; that we will have more studies like those of Beresin and Hughes
of specific children in specific places and in consequence a more multifari-
ous set of children's subcultures-and less children's folklore composed sim-
ply of collections or only of an historical kind. The authors in this
Sourcebook are split about evenly among traditional, ethnographic, perfor-
mance, and interpretive kinds of approach.
THE OLDER TRADITION
The field of folklore began with an interest in origins, with survivals, and
with history, and this interest will probably continue; many of the problems
of historical origins and historical change have not been solved. Iona and
Peter Opie, for example, present us with an interesting test case. They are
undoubtedly the world's most famous children's folklorists, and over the past
forty years they have turned out classic after classic on children's lore
(rhymes, poems, tales, sayings and games). Their latest book, The Singing
Game (1985), is a product of anecdotal collections from many informants
and historical sources using meticulous literary scholarship. In this work they
largely eschew theory and interpretation and provide instead a grand
colligation of items organized in an encyclopedic manner. Insofar as there
is a main theme, it is that human nature is constant and continuous and gives
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? ? forth in different eras similar expressions in play, game, and song. They sup-
port this theme by offering sporadic evidence of ancient games or songs per-
sisting into modern times. In their present collection of 133 games, however,
of which eighty-two are singing games-the others being clapping, chant-
ing, or dramatic games-no more than half of those listed have persisted
beyond World War II, and only a handful of those that have persisted ex-
hibit much vigor in modern play. The exceptions appear to be Big ship sails
(a modern and reduced version of the ancient Thread the needle), Oranges
and lemons, A duke a riding, Rosey apple, Sally water, wallflowers, old
Roger, Jenny Jones, Romans and English, Nuts in May, the Mulberry bush
and Dusty bluebells.
Despite their interest in origins, what the Opies actually give us is a
picture of historical change as much as a picture of historical continuity. In
general, modern children, being younger players at these games than their
forebears, prefer games of simpler organization: circles with central persons,
chain games rather than couple games, or contest games and processional
games, which were once played so frequently by what we would now call
teenagers. Most striking in their work, and not commented on by the Opies,
is the remarkable upsurge in post-television years of games of buffoonery,
impersonation, dance routines, and clapping. These are by and large the sim-
plest unison games with all players acting in concert, singing either nonsense
or topical songs, and with players taking turns in the center. While there are
historical forerunners to many of these games, what most strikes our atten-
tion is their fadlike character and their ephemerality. Children's folklore
appears in many games to have taken on the character of modern mass-me-
dia culture, with its cycles of fashion and popularity. Dance routines, in par-
ticular, come and go as quickly as the topical songs that stimulate them.
There is, in addition, a more explicit vulgarity and sexuality in many of these
than was the case in the singing games of the prior century (Sutton-Smith
1987, 239-40).
But the most interesting picture of change in these fascinating pages
of The Singing Game is that which takes place from the lusty Middle Ages
to the bowdlerized late nineteenth century. These singing games were origi-
nally for couples with marital interests (at the advanced ages of twelve to
fifteen), who, through wild and bawdy actions, could try out their choices.
But in the 1800s, after centuries of church and civil suppression, they came
finally to be the games of unsophisticated girls who could make their choices
among other girls largely without the presence of boys at all. The games
became an enacted fantasy of marriage without the prospect that one might
in fact find one's real partner in the course of the play. But then the same
294 CONCLUSION: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT
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