" A young woman in the western
institution
also may
have a number of nicknames, "chick terms" (Giallombardo 1974, 212-22).
have a number of nicknames, "chick terms" (Giallombardo 1974, 212-22).
Childens - Folklore
?
is found a basic metaphor for the accumulation of experience and property,
for the child celebrates growth by increments. Children may prefer differ-
ent technical activities, but rarely to the exclusion of others. We often find
children delighting in miniaturizing some figures or exaggerating and enlarg-
ing others. As children who are developing concepts of self in relation to the
society, they are testing the limits of appropriateness socially and person-
ally by using design. They often gravitate toward the very big or the incred-
ibly small, or they experiment with the inner intricacy of realistic scale. They
are exploring the built and natural world by themselves, working at differ-
ent times with peers and parents, friends and neighbors. Play and creativ-
ity, commonly informal, are their frequent modes of discovery, release, and
testing of the many worlds they encounter.
Such classifications raise questions about the social implications of
the creative processes children learn in life. For example, with synthetic ob-
jects can researchers validate whether in a sample population, boys prefer
the hefty and rough textures of stones and boards and girls choose the softer
textures of fabric and vegetation? Variables which might suggest correspon-
dences could be activities stressing rhythm and repetition or strength and
cooperation. Whether correlated by style, age, sex, place, ethnicity, or class,
hypotheses based on statistical analysis need elaboration. Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, for example, asked children,
parents, and grandparents to identify objects with special meanings within
their homes (1981, 99). They created classes of meaning for the objects:
memories, associations, experiences, self, past, and present-future. Children
scored much higher on objects with meanings for self, for experiences, and
for present and future. Parents and grandparents rated higher than children
on objects with meanings for memories, for associations, and for the past.
Folk objects which are made, or objects used according to folk processes,
constitute another important body of data to evaluate. Folk objects are only
a slice of all children's objects, but they can be extremely useful because they
represent informal learning and communication. Researchers can, and
should, ask what folk objects and activities can tell of children's preferences.
In addition how do social changes affect the traditional toys, labors, and
environments of children? Indeed, how do changes in children's material folk
culture effect social change? What skills are especially prevalent in children's
material culture of different areas and backgrounds? Answering these ques-
tions involves far more than mere "child's play. "
Still lingering is the sticky problem of weighing the interplay between
folk and popular culture in children's creativity. Separating the two is often
difficult or misleading, since they commonly appear inexorably entwined.
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? ? Popular culture is more visible, but nonetheless suggests relations with the
private, often hidden realms of children. Children's magazines like Boy's Life,
for example, regularly suggest projects taken from folk crafts. Are they in-
vigorating the tradition or removing the craft from tradition? Popular cul-
ture can reinforce or standardize folk culture, but more often it intertwines
with folklife. When I interviewed chain carvers, many reported learning from
both popular mechanical magazines and other boys. Some had extra incen-
tive to try their hand at carving, since in the 1930s radio hero Jack Armstrong
offered pocketknives to children on every show! Recently, I had another
example of the interrelationship of popular and folk culture when a student
in my class convincingly argued that the Boy Scout manual had influenced
the formation of boys' material folk culture. Among other artifacts and en-
vironments, Boy Scouts prepare small cars made from wood to run in a min-
iature derby. Over the years the boys have developed informal rules and tastes
for building and decorating the cars. Especially aware of folkloristic ap-
proaches, Jay Mechling has extensively reported in several articles on ob-
jects and environments fabricated by and for the Boy Scouts (Mechling
1984b, 1987, 1989).
Look closely at those objects children like to make. They are often
related to prevalent folk ideas and practices, or can reveal much about the
making of tradition. Take note of the behaviors surrounding the conception
and completion of forms for the thoughts they express.
William Golding touched the hearts of readers when he wrote such
behaviors into his bitter allegory Lord of the Flies (19541. Children were
alone on an island after the adults had been killed in a plane crash. The chil-
dren created their own model of society with "littluns" and "biguns. " The
littluns "had built castles in the sand at the bar of the little river. These castles
were about one foot high and were decorated with shells, withered flowers,
and interesting stones. Round the castles was a complex of marks, tracks,
walls, railway lines, that were of significance only if inspected with the eye
at beach level. The littluns played here, if not happily, at least with absorbed
attention; and often as many as three of them would play the same game
together" (Golding 1954, 67). The biguns destroyed the castles, "kicking
them over, burying the flowers, scattering the chosen stones. " Yet they could
not discern or destroy "the particular marks" in which the littluns were ab-
sorbed. Our adult eyes need to be put at beach level, to discern the particu-
lar marks and their deep meanings for the children and for the society. Much
work in material folk culture still lies ahead, so that we can indeed know
the child's world, which is in fact our world.
270 MATERIAL FOLK CULTURE OF CHILDREN
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? ? NOTES TO CHAPTER TWELVE
1. These are covered in Bronner 1984. Since that study I also observed
children's play in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which is discussed in Bronner 1988 and
1990. I give grateful acknowledgment to my students in American Folklore: Culture
and Aging, at Penn State Harrisburg for additional data and thought-provoking dis-
cussion. Students in American Folklore at the University of California at Davis, whom
I taught as visiting distinguished professor in 1990, also contributed to the data pre-
sented here. I appreciate comments provided to me by colleagues Jay Mechling, David
Wilson, Patricia Turner, and Sue Samuelson.
2. The feature of childlore most prevalent in the literature is that children's
expressions are somehow simultaneously liberal and conservative toward cultural
change in traditions. Gary Alan Fine has called this feature "Newell's Paradox" after
nineteenth-century folklorist William Wells Newell, who studied the feature in
children's games. In Fine's important essay "Children and Their Culture: Exploring
Newell's Paradox," he explains the existence of this apparent paradox between inven-
tiveness and stability in childlore by examining the features of inventiveness in the
components of folklore itself: text, context, and performance. Although concerned
mostly with oral and customary lore, Fine's postulation of a stable text, changing con-
text, and both imaginative and conservative performance also applies to material cul-
ture.
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? ?
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? ? I3
CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
IN RESIDENTIAL INSTITUTIONS
SUMMER CAMPS, BOARDING SCHOOLS, HOSPITALS,
AND CUSTODIAL FACILITIES
Jay Mechling
Even when they are not literally so, young people in American culture some-
times feel like prisoners in the institutions controlled by adults. Their pri-
mary institutional experience during the course of a day is one of being in
"the custody of" adults, from parents to teachers to athletic coaches to Scout
leaders and beyond. To be sure, there are islands of autonomous children's
culture that offer refuge from adult supervision, islands located behind the
locked door of the child's bedroom, within the dark hideout of the school
bathroom, or in the open space of the vacant lot, fields, or woods. But, gen-
erally, our children are an underclass perpetually in the one-down power
position (Mechling 1986).
Nowhere is this more true than in the residential institutions estab-
lished for children. The home and family certainly are residential institutions
that can be the setting for the emergence of the expressive culture of chil-
dren, both as part of the family folk culture and possibly as a semiautono-
mous "sibling culture" interactive with the family culture. But this Source-
book chapter examines residential institutions other than the traditional
family, institutions that sometimes replace the family but more often are a
temporary residence away from the family. They include summer camps,
boarding schools, children's hospitals, and a range of custodial institutions
that make the young person a "ward" of the adult caretakers, either to pro-
tect the ward (as in the case of orphanages), to correct the ward's behavior
(as in juvenile detention facilities and group homes), or to protect society
from the ward's behavior (juvenile prisons, no matter what the euphemism).
Erving Goffman named "total institutions" those places of residence
and work "where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from
the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed,
formally administered round of life" (Goffman 1961a, xiii). A central ele-
ment present in total institutions is the breakdown of the barriers normally
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? ? separating the realms of sleep, work, and play in everyday life. Although
Goffman distinguishes five rough groupings of total institutions in Ameri-
can society, they all seem to share most, if not all, of the following attributes:
First, all aspects of life are conducted in the same place and under
the same single authority. Second, each phase of the member's daily activity
is carried on in the immediate company of a large number of others, all of
whom are treated alike and required to do the same things together. Third,
all phases of the day's activities are tightly scheduled, with one activity lead-
ing at a prearranged time to the next, the whole sequence of activities being
imposed from above by a system of explicit formal rulings and a body of
officials. Finally, the various enforced activities are brought together into a
single rational plan purportedly designed to fulfill the official aims of the
institution (Goffman 1961a, 6).
Goffman's analytic description of total institutions came out of his
fieldwork in a mental hospital, so his definition tends to emphasize the more
tightly controlled sort of total institution. The children's residential institu-
tions examined here vary considerably, representing something of a con-
tinuum of voluntariness, control, length of residence, degree of privacy, de-
gree to which the residents can help set the institution's agenda, and so on.
Yet, despite the stark contrast in our minds between a summer camp or ex-
clusive prep school and a juvenile prison, we ought not miss the point that
even the most benign of these settings shares some of the basic characteris-
tics of a total institution.
Residential institutions have a binary character, which is to say that
there really are two worlds where there seems to be only one. The basic di-
vision is between the residents (the campers, the students, the patients, the
"inmates" of Goffman's total institutions) and the staff. The staff have an
advantage over the resident children and adolescents to the extent that the
staff may participate in the institution only during, say, an eight-hour shift,
and even summer-camp counselors have "staff night out. " So for staff mem-
bers, their participation in the culture of a residential institution may be only
one among many experiences.
It might be better to speak of the "tertiary character" of the residen-
tial institution, because my view is that there really are three distinct realms
of cultural production the folklorist finds in these settings. Two of the realms
are those folk cultures created by the staff among themselves and by the resi-
dents among themselves. The cultural productions, performances, and genres
in these two realms are likely parallel, possibly even mirror images of one
another. At least they are complementary.
The third realm of cultural production is one Goffman recognizes but
274 CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE IN RESIDENTIAL INSTITUTIONS
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? ? most people working in this area overlook. This is the culture at "the bor-
der," the realm of interaction between the staff's world and the residents'
world. Goffman, for example, focuses upon the "institutional ceremonies"
through which staff and inmates come together, and it is not surprising that
Goffman acknowledges in a footnote (1961a, 7) that it was Bateson who
first alerted him to the staff/inmate dialectic. Indeed, Bateson's notion of
"schismogenesis," the creation of meaning out of the confrontation of dif-
ference, is precisely what happens when the staff and residents interact, and
it would have been interesting to have seen Goffman pursue Bateson's lead
by using the latter's concepts of complementary and reciprocal
schismogenesis to explore the staff/inmate dialectic (Bateson 1958 [1936];
Mechling 1983).
The folklorist must understand this perspective on the three cultures
of a total institution. Whereas "normative" social science adopts the view-
point of the dominant group, seeing socialization as the making of complete
persons (that is, adults) out of incomplete persons (that is, children), "in-
terpretive" social science "restores the interaction between adults and chil-
dren based on interpretive competences as the phenomenon of study"
(Mackay 1974, 183). Normative social science tends to favor the center of
a cultural system, while interpretive social science looks to the fringes, the
borders where differences meet and where people engage in creative actions
as they interpret the other and interpret themselves for others (MacCannell
1979).
As we shall see, a serious problem with most of the scholarship on
residential institutions for children and adolescents is that it takes the per-
spective of normative, rather than interpretive, social science. Much of the
literature is by, about, and for the adult managers, helpers, and "child sav-
ers" (Platt 1969) who run the residential institutions. A chief goal of this
chapter is to reverse this trend, to redirect scholarship on residential insti-
tutions toward the interpretive approach.
This chapter has four main sections. The first is a discussion of the
cultural productions of the residents' world and of the staff world. This is a
discussion of genres of "cultural performances" (Geertz 1973) prominent
in the two worlds and does not substitute for more extensive treatments of
genres in other chapters of this Source Book and in other standard folklore
textbooks, such as Dorson's (1972, 1983) or Brunvand's (1978). The second
section examines those "institutional ceremonies" through which the staff
and residents come together to make the public, interactive culture of the
institution. I discuss there Goffman's seven ceremonies and add some more
I think are relevant. The third section surveys existing literature on the spe-
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? ? cial features of each of the four categories of residential institutions for chil-
dren and adolescents. The final section identifies special issues or problems
that ought to concern folklorists as they embark on the research this chap-
ter outlines.
CULTURAL PERFORMANCES AMONG RESIDENTS AND STAFF
I am adopting here Geertz's term (1973, 113) "cultural performances" to
denominate that large class of cultural productions that interest the folklor-
ist. "Ritual" and "play" are two of the most important sorts of cultural per-
formance, and some of the best work available to folklorists comes to deal,
one way or another, with these two and the relation between them. Rituals
tend to be the traditionalizing productions meant to confer legitimation and
order upon cultural ideas (Moore and Myerhoff 1977). Rituals serve to fix
public meanings, the objects and other symbols in the ritual aiding in the
process of making "visible and stable the categories of culture" (Douglas and
Isherwood 1979). Ritual and its symbolic adjuncts are both "models of" and
"models for" larger cultural patterns (Geertz 1973, 93).
Play, and all the cultural performances that are playful, are also es-
pecially framed realities, but in the case of play the function of the frame is
as often as not to cast doubt upon everyday life. Where ritual confirms, play
doubts (Handelman 1977, 1980). Play, Sutton-Smith reminds us, tends to
be antithetical, and play frames permit "transformations" of status, experi-
ment with otherwise terrifying objects or ideas, and a safe territory for try-
ing out alternative solutions to everyday problems (Schwartzman 1978). Our
goal is to be able to describe not only the structures and functions of these
framed experiences but to capture something of the "style" these children
and adolescents bring to their cultural performances (Hebdige 1979).
Having said this much about ritual and play as two possible frames
for cultural performances, we might identify some genres of performance
we would expect to find in the residents' culture. Many of these will be what
Goffman calls "secondary adjustments," that is to say, "practices that do
not directly challenge staff but allow inmates to obtain forbidden satisfac-
tions or to obtain permitted ones by forbidden means" (Goffman 1961a, 54).
Put differently, many of the cultural performances we find among the resi-
dential children are strategies of resistance, folk offensives in the political
struggle over "whose institution is this, anyway? "
We expect, for example, that the residents of one of these institutions
will develop a range of folk speech, an "institutional lingo" including nick-
names, special words for places, a special folk speech referring to the insti-
tutional food, and so on (Jackson 1965, 326-27). Lambert and Millham's
276 CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE IN RESIDENTIAL INSTITUTIONS
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? ? 1968 study of boys' and coeducational boarding schools in England and
Wales is full of the specialized folk speech of those institutions, and the great
virtue of their collection is that they used the diaries and other writings of
nearly seventeen hundred pupils. The authors found that these children cre-
ated their own private languages either by translating ordinary vocabulary
into a private one (for example, by adding "-mble" to all possible words,
so "grim" becomes "grimble" and "yes" becomes "yemble") or by bestow-
ing upon an existing word "a special meaning which, by and large, only the
underworld fully comprehends and savours. " Giallombardo (1974) found
that each of the three institutions for juvenile delinquents had complex sets
of "campus names," nicknames that were sometimes personal, sometimes
linked the young woman to one of the fictitious campus families that con-
stituted the prison social system, and sometimes distinguished those occu-
pying male and female roles. A whole complex of prison folk speech sus-
tains the social system of these incarcerated adolescent females, including
use of the masculine pronouns to refer to those assuming a male identity.
Thus, in a Midwestern prison the inmates' typology is of "studs, pimps and
foxes" (where a "popcorn" is an inmate who switches roles), and in a west-
ern prison the typologies contrast "fems and butches," "finks and snitchers,"
"squares and straights.
" A young woman in the western institution also may
have a number of nicknames, "chick terms" (Giallombardo 1974, 212-22).
Total institutions sometimes attempt to control communications be-
tween the adolescent inmates, so there arise genres of folk speech both to
refer to illicit communications and to communicate illicitly. Again, prisons
seem to have the most developed versions of these codes. In the East Coast
institution Giallombardo studies, inmates communicated by letter (an "is-
sue") and developed an elaborate set of abbreviations and numbers to be
used in the margins, at the end of an "issue," or on the corner of the enve-
lope. TDDUP, for example, meant "Til Death Do Us Part," and H. n. W. A.
meant "Husband and Wife Always. " The numerical code "110" (pro-
nounced one-ten) meant "I Love You," and Giallombardo found that the
inmates sometimes increased the sentiment by doubling (220), tripling (330),
and so on. The number "225" meant a relationship as being terminated,
"333" meant a kiss, "711" a marriage, and "117" a divorce (Giallombardo
1974, 154-67).
Other genres of oral performance, including insults, jokes, toasts, and
similar shorter narratives, help create solidarity and hierarchy among the
residents. Polsky (1962) found ritual insults, "ranking," to be an important
form of communication in his study of a residential program for delinquent
boys, and I certainly found considerable "ranking" and joking among the
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? ? Boy Scouts I studied at their summer encampments (Mechling 1980a, 1981).
Residents are likely to have longer narratives as well, stories about
legendary happenings, colorful characters, and the like. Some may be per-
sonal history narratives, some cautionary tales. Single-sex camps have their
stories about the camper who "made it" to the other side of the lake to
"make it" with opposite-sex campers, and custodial institutions have rich
traditions of stories about escapes and captures. Jackson found in his prison
research a clear code among the inmates: "Don't inform, don't meddle, don't
bring heat-says the code. . . . A Folklore repertory accompanies the Code-
stories illustrating it in action or the dire retributions visited upon violators"
(Jackson 1965, 320). A sociologist employed by the California Youth Au-
thority tells me that supervisors have found handwritten lists of rules lay-
ing out just such a code.
Residential institutions are also likely to have legends and ghost sto-
ries, two genres that depend the most upon children and adolescents for their
survival and diffusion. Leary (1973) traces the history of one legend through
three decades in one Boy Scout troop and across several groups, making the
point that "Swamp Man" legends allow the adult leaders to exercise indi-
rect control over campers' behavior. Ellis (1981b, 1982) makes the same
point in his analysis of the contextual uses of legends by the staff members
of a camp serving potentially unruly, "underprivileged" children from ur-
ban Cleveland. Bronner (1988, 152-54; 315-16) discusses camp legends (see
his discursive footnotes in the fully annotated edition of his volume) and
Wells (1988) recounts the uses of the Girl Scout camp legend, "Red Eyes. "
Residential institutions may also have "humorous anti-legends" (Vlach 1971;
Bronner 1988, 154-59).
Ghost stories constitute a special case of legends at residential insti-
tutions. Hawes's 1968 collection and analysis of "La Llorona" stories told
among the female inmates of a California correctional institution for girls
shows us how we may relate the symbolic content of the story texts to the
concerns of these girls, ages fourteen to sixteen, who were at Las Palmas for
sexual offenses or for habitual truancy. Hawes concludes that "this multi-
faceted, loving, hating ghost-mother seems the explicit embodiment of the
emotional conflicts of the adolescent delinquent girl" (Hawes 1968, 165).
Similarly, Krell (1980, 227-30) gives us a long text of a ghost story told
among thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds at a children's hospital in Denver.
Young residents in the less restrictive insitutions are prone to pranks
and practical joking. Beds and food are two favorite targets, with water,
urine, excrement, and animals serving as favorite substances for pranks.
Krell's informants (1980, 230) put toothpaste on toilet seats, Saran Wrap
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? ? over toilet bowls, and one hapless boy "got into his bed to find a tampax
covered with jelly. " Posen (1974a) surveys a broad array of pranks and prac-
tical jokes he found at a summer camp, including the "apparent
transsubstantiation of supernatural figures from ghost stories told by the
staff. " Posen mentions such classic practical jokes as the "Snipe Hunt" and
notes how campers maintain a "practical joke etiquette" at camp (see also
Bronner 1988, 170-71).
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-
2Z79
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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
280 CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE IN RESIDENTIAL INSTITUTIONS
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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
28 i
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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.
for the child celebrates growth by increments. Children may prefer differ-
ent technical activities, but rarely to the exclusion of others. We often find
children delighting in miniaturizing some figures or exaggerating and enlarg-
ing others. As children who are developing concepts of self in relation to the
society, they are testing the limits of appropriateness socially and person-
ally by using design. They often gravitate toward the very big or the incred-
ibly small, or they experiment with the inner intricacy of realistic scale. They
are exploring the built and natural world by themselves, working at differ-
ent times with peers and parents, friends and neighbors. Play and creativ-
ity, commonly informal, are their frequent modes of discovery, release, and
testing of the many worlds they encounter.
Such classifications raise questions about the social implications of
the creative processes children learn in life. For example, with synthetic ob-
jects can researchers validate whether in a sample population, boys prefer
the hefty and rough textures of stones and boards and girls choose the softer
textures of fabric and vegetation? Variables which might suggest correspon-
dences could be activities stressing rhythm and repetition or strength and
cooperation. Whether correlated by style, age, sex, place, ethnicity, or class,
hypotheses based on statistical analysis need elaboration. Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, for example, asked children,
parents, and grandparents to identify objects with special meanings within
their homes (1981, 99). They created classes of meaning for the objects:
memories, associations, experiences, self, past, and present-future. Children
scored much higher on objects with meanings for self, for experiences, and
for present and future. Parents and grandparents rated higher than children
on objects with meanings for memories, for associations, and for the past.
Folk objects which are made, or objects used according to folk processes,
constitute another important body of data to evaluate. Folk objects are only
a slice of all children's objects, but they can be extremely useful because they
represent informal learning and communication. Researchers can, and
should, ask what folk objects and activities can tell of children's preferences.
In addition how do social changes affect the traditional toys, labors, and
environments of children? Indeed, how do changes in children's material folk
culture effect social change? What skills are especially prevalent in children's
material culture of different areas and backgrounds? Answering these ques-
tions involves far more than mere "child's play. "
Still lingering is the sticky problem of weighing the interplay between
folk and popular culture in children's creativity. Separating the two is often
difficult or misleading, since they commonly appear inexorably entwined.
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? ? Popular culture is more visible, but nonetheless suggests relations with the
private, often hidden realms of children. Children's magazines like Boy's Life,
for example, regularly suggest projects taken from folk crafts. Are they in-
vigorating the tradition or removing the craft from tradition? Popular cul-
ture can reinforce or standardize folk culture, but more often it intertwines
with folklife. When I interviewed chain carvers, many reported learning from
both popular mechanical magazines and other boys. Some had extra incen-
tive to try their hand at carving, since in the 1930s radio hero Jack Armstrong
offered pocketknives to children on every show! Recently, I had another
example of the interrelationship of popular and folk culture when a student
in my class convincingly argued that the Boy Scout manual had influenced
the formation of boys' material folk culture. Among other artifacts and en-
vironments, Boy Scouts prepare small cars made from wood to run in a min-
iature derby. Over the years the boys have developed informal rules and tastes
for building and decorating the cars. Especially aware of folkloristic ap-
proaches, Jay Mechling has extensively reported in several articles on ob-
jects and environments fabricated by and for the Boy Scouts (Mechling
1984b, 1987, 1989).
Look closely at those objects children like to make. They are often
related to prevalent folk ideas and practices, or can reveal much about the
making of tradition. Take note of the behaviors surrounding the conception
and completion of forms for the thoughts they express.
William Golding touched the hearts of readers when he wrote such
behaviors into his bitter allegory Lord of the Flies (19541. Children were
alone on an island after the adults had been killed in a plane crash. The chil-
dren created their own model of society with "littluns" and "biguns. " The
littluns "had built castles in the sand at the bar of the little river. These castles
were about one foot high and were decorated with shells, withered flowers,
and interesting stones. Round the castles was a complex of marks, tracks,
walls, railway lines, that were of significance only if inspected with the eye
at beach level. The littluns played here, if not happily, at least with absorbed
attention; and often as many as three of them would play the same game
together" (Golding 1954, 67). The biguns destroyed the castles, "kicking
them over, burying the flowers, scattering the chosen stones. " Yet they could
not discern or destroy "the particular marks" in which the littluns were ab-
sorbed. Our adult eyes need to be put at beach level, to discern the particu-
lar marks and their deep meanings for the children and for the society. Much
work in material folk culture still lies ahead, so that we can indeed know
the child's world, which is in fact our world.
270 MATERIAL FOLK CULTURE OF CHILDREN
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? ? NOTES TO CHAPTER TWELVE
1. These are covered in Bronner 1984. Since that study I also observed
children's play in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which is discussed in Bronner 1988 and
1990. I give grateful acknowledgment to my students in American Folklore: Culture
and Aging, at Penn State Harrisburg for additional data and thought-provoking dis-
cussion. Students in American Folklore at the University of California at Davis, whom
I taught as visiting distinguished professor in 1990, also contributed to the data pre-
sented here. I appreciate comments provided to me by colleagues Jay Mechling, David
Wilson, Patricia Turner, and Sue Samuelson.
2. The feature of childlore most prevalent in the literature is that children's
expressions are somehow simultaneously liberal and conservative toward cultural
change in traditions. Gary Alan Fine has called this feature "Newell's Paradox" after
nineteenth-century folklorist William Wells Newell, who studied the feature in
children's games. In Fine's important essay "Children and Their Culture: Exploring
Newell's Paradox," he explains the existence of this apparent paradox between inven-
tiveness and stability in childlore by examining the features of inventiveness in the
components of folklore itself: text, context, and performance. Although concerned
mostly with oral and customary lore, Fine's postulation of a stable text, changing con-
text, and both imaginative and conservative performance also applies to material cul-
ture.
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? ?
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? ? I3
CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
IN RESIDENTIAL INSTITUTIONS
SUMMER CAMPS, BOARDING SCHOOLS, HOSPITALS,
AND CUSTODIAL FACILITIES
Jay Mechling
Even when they are not literally so, young people in American culture some-
times feel like prisoners in the institutions controlled by adults. Their pri-
mary institutional experience during the course of a day is one of being in
"the custody of" adults, from parents to teachers to athletic coaches to Scout
leaders and beyond. To be sure, there are islands of autonomous children's
culture that offer refuge from adult supervision, islands located behind the
locked door of the child's bedroom, within the dark hideout of the school
bathroom, or in the open space of the vacant lot, fields, or woods. But, gen-
erally, our children are an underclass perpetually in the one-down power
position (Mechling 1986).
Nowhere is this more true than in the residential institutions estab-
lished for children. The home and family certainly are residential institutions
that can be the setting for the emergence of the expressive culture of chil-
dren, both as part of the family folk culture and possibly as a semiautono-
mous "sibling culture" interactive with the family culture. But this Source-
book chapter examines residential institutions other than the traditional
family, institutions that sometimes replace the family but more often are a
temporary residence away from the family. They include summer camps,
boarding schools, children's hospitals, and a range of custodial institutions
that make the young person a "ward" of the adult caretakers, either to pro-
tect the ward (as in the case of orphanages), to correct the ward's behavior
(as in juvenile detention facilities and group homes), or to protect society
from the ward's behavior (juvenile prisons, no matter what the euphemism).
Erving Goffman named "total institutions" those places of residence
and work "where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from
the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed,
formally administered round of life" (Goffman 1961a, xiii). A central ele-
ment present in total institutions is the breakdown of the barriers normally
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? ? separating the realms of sleep, work, and play in everyday life. Although
Goffman distinguishes five rough groupings of total institutions in Ameri-
can society, they all seem to share most, if not all, of the following attributes:
First, all aspects of life are conducted in the same place and under
the same single authority. Second, each phase of the member's daily activity
is carried on in the immediate company of a large number of others, all of
whom are treated alike and required to do the same things together. Third,
all phases of the day's activities are tightly scheduled, with one activity lead-
ing at a prearranged time to the next, the whole sequence of activities being
imposed from above by a system of explicit formal rulings and a body of
officials. Finally, the various enforced activities are brought together into a
single rational plan purportedly designed to fulfill the official aims of the
institution (Goffman 1961a, 6).
Goffman's analytic description of total institutions came out of his
fieldwork in a mental hospital, so his definition tends to emphasize the more
tightly controlled sort of total institution. The children's residential institu-
tions examined here vary considerably, representing something of a con-
tinuum of voluntariness, control, length of residence, degree of privacy, de-
gree to which the residents can help set the institution's agenda, and so on.
Yet, despite the stark contrast in our minds between a summer camp or ex-
clusive prep school and a juvenile prison, we ought not miss the point that
even the most benign of these settings shares some of the basic characteris-
tics of a total institution.
Residential institutions have a binary character, which is to say that
there really are two worlds where there seems to be only one. The basic di-
vision is between the residents (the campers, the students, the patients, the
"inmates" of Goffman's total institutions) and the staff. The staff have an
advantage over the resident children and adolescents to the extent that the
staff may participate in the institution only during, say, an eight-hour shift,
and even summer-camp counselors have "staff night out. " So for staff mem-
bers, their participation in the culture of a residential institution may be only
one among many experiences.
It might be better to speak of the "tertiary character" of the residen-
tial institution, because my view is that there really are three distinct realms
of cultural production the folklorist finds in these settings. Two of the realms
are those folk cultures created by the staff among themselves and by the resi-
dents among themselves. The cultural productions, performances, and genres
in these two realms are likely parallel, possibly even mirror images of one
another. At least they are complementary.
The third realm of cultural production is one Goffman recognizes but
274 CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE IN RESIDENTIAL INSTITUTIONS
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? ? most people working in this area overlook. This is the culture at "the bor-
der," the realm of interaction between the staff's world and the residents'
world. Goffman, for example, focuses upon the "institutional ceremonies"
through which staff and inmates come together, and it is not surprising that
Goffman acknowledges in a footnote (1961a, 7) that it was Bateson who
first alerted him to the staff/inmate dialectic. Indeed, Bateson's notion of
"schismogenesis," the creation of meaning out of the confrontation of dif-
ference, is precisely what happens when the staff and residents interact, and
it would have been interesting to have seen Goffman pursue Bateson's lead
by using the latter's concepts of complementary and reciprocal
schismogenesis to explore the staff/inmate dialectic (Bateson 1958 [1936];
Mechling 1983).
The folklorist must understand this perspective on the three cultures
of a total institution. Whereas "normative" social science adopts the view-
point of the dominant group, seeing socialization as the making of complete
persons (that is, adults) out of incomplete persons (that is, children), "in-
terpretive" social science "restores the interaction between adults and chil-
dren based on interpretive competences as the phenomenon of study"
(Mackay 1974, 183). Normative social science tends to favor the center of
a cultural system, while interpretive social science looks to the fringes, the
borders where differences meet and where people engage in creative actions
as they interpret the other and interpret themselves for others (MacCannell
1979).
As we shall see, a serious problem with most of the scholarship on
residential institutions for children and adolescents is that it takes the per-
spective of normative, rather than interpretive, social science. Much of the
literature is by, about, and for the adult managers, helpers, and "child sav-
ers" (Platt 1969) who run the residential institutions. A chief goal of this
chapter is to reverse this trend, to redirect scholarship on residential insti-
tutions toward the interpretive approach.
This chapter has four main sections. The first is a discussion of the
cultural productions of the residents' world and of the staff world. This is a
discussion of genres of "cultural performances" (Geertz 1973) prominent
in the two worlds and does not substitute for more extensive treatments of
genres in other chapters of this Source Book and in other standard folklore
textbooks, such as Dorson's (1972, 1983) or Brunvand's (1978). The second
section examines those "institutional ceremonies" through which the staff
and residents come together to make the public, interactive culture of the
institution. I discuss there Goffman's seven ceremonies and add some more
I think are relevant. The third section surveys existing literature on the spe-
275
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? ? cial features of each of the four categories of residential institutions for chil-
dren and adolescents. The final section identifies special issues or problems
that ought to concern folklorists as they embark on the research this chap-
ter outlines.
CULTURAL PERFORMANCES AMONG RESIDENTS AND STAFF
I am adopting here Geertz's term (1973, 113) "cultural performances" to
denominate that large class of cultural productions that interest the folklor-
ist. "Ritual" and "play" are two of the most important sorts of cultural per-
formance, and some of the best work available to folklorists comes to deal,
one way or another, with these two and the relation between them. Rituals
tend to be the traditionalizing productions meant to confer legitimation and
order upon cultural ideas (Moore and Myerhoff 1977). Rituals serve to fix
public meanings, the objects and other symbols in the ritual aiding in the
process of making "visible and stable the categories of culture" (Douglas and
Isherwood 1979). Ritual and its symbolic adjuncts are both "models of" and
"models for" larger cultural patterns (Geertz 1973, 93).
Play, and all the cultural performances that are playful, are also es-
pecially framed realities, but in the case of play the function of the frame is
as often as not to cast doubt upon everyday life. Where ritual confirms, play
doubts (Handelman 1977, 1980). Play, Sutton-Smith reminds us, tends to
be antithetical, and play frames permit "transformations" of status, experi-
ment with otherwise terrifying objects or ideas, and a safe territory for try-
ing out alternative solutions to everyday problems (Schwartzman 1978). Our
goal is to be able to describe not only the structures and functions of these
framed experiences but to capture something of the "style" these children
and adolescents bring to their cultural performances (Hebdige 1979).
Having said this much about ritual and play as two possible frames
for cultural performances, we might identify some genres of performance
we would expect to find in the residents' culture. Many of these will be what
Goffman calls "secondary adjustments," that is to say, "practices that do
not directly challenge staff but allow inmates to obtain forbidden satisfac-
tions or to obtain permitted ones by forbidden means" (Goffman 1961a, 54).
Put differently, many of the cultural performances we find among the resi-
dential children are strategies of resistance, folk offensives in the political
struggle over "whose institution is this, anyway? "
We expect, for example, that the residents of one of these institutions
will develop a range of folk speech, an "institutional lingo" including nick-
names, special words for places, a special folk speech referring to the insti-
tutional food, and so on (Jackson 1965, 326-27). Lambert and Millham's
276 CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE IN RESIDENTIAL INSTITUTIONS
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? ? 1968 study of boys' and coeducational boarding schools in England and
Wales is full of the specialized folk speech of those institutions, and the great
virtue of their collection is that they used the diaries and other writings of
nearly seventeen hundred pupils. The authors found that these children cre-
ated their own private languages either by translating ordinary vocabulary
into a private one (for example, by adding "-mble" to all possible words,
so "grim" becomes "grimble" and "yes" becomes "yemble") or by bestow-
ing upon an existing word "a special meaning which, by and large, only the
underworld fully comprehends and savours. " Giallombardo (1974) found
that each of the three institutions for juvenile delinquents had complex sets
of "campus names," nicknames that were sometimes personal, sometimes
linked the young woman to one of the fictitious campus families that con-
stituted the prison social system, and sometimes distinguished those occu-
pying male and female roles. A whole complex of prison folk speech sus-
tains the social system of these incarcerated adolescent females, including
use of the masculine pronouns to refer to those assuming a male identity.
Thus, in a Midwestern prison the inmates' typology is of "studs, pimps and
foxes" (where a "popcorn" is an inmate who switches roles), and in a west-
ern prison the typologies contrast "fems and butches," "finks and snitchers,"
"squares and straights.
" A young woman in the western institution also may
have a number of nicknames, "chick terms" (Giallombardo 1974, 212-22).
Total institutions sometimes attempt to control communications be-
tween the adolescent inmates, so there arise genres of folk speech both to
refer to illicit communications and to communicate illicitly. Again, prisons
seem to have the most developed versions of these codes. In the East Coast
institution Giallombardo studies, inmates communicated by letter (an "is-
sue") and developed an elaborate set of abbreviations and numbers to be
used in the margins, at the end of an "issue," or on the corner of the enve-
lope. TDDUP, for example, meant "Til Death Do Us Part," and H. n. W. A.
meant "Husband and Wife Always. " The numerical code "110" (pro-
nounced one-ten) meant "I Love You," and Giallombardo found that the
inmates sometimes increased the sentiment by doubling (220), tripling (330),
and so on. The number "225" meant a relationship as being terminated,
"333" meant a kiss, "711" a marriage, and "117" a divorce (Giallombardo
1974, 154-67).
Other genres of oral performance, including insults, jokes, toasts, and
similar shorter narratives, help create solidarity and hierarchy among the
residents. Polsky (1962) found ritual insults, "ranking," to be an important
form of communication in his study of a residential program for delinquent
boys, and I certainly found considerable "ranking" and joking among the
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? ? Boy Scouts I studied at their summer encampments (Mechling 1980a, 1981).
Residents are likely to have longer narratives as well, stories about
legendary happenings, colorful characters, and the like. Some may be per-
sonal history narratives, some cautionary tales. Single-sex camps have their
stories about the camper who "made it" to the other side of the lake to
"make it" with opposite-sex campers, and custodial institutions have rich
traditions of stories about escapes and captures. Jackson found in his prison
research a clear code among the inmates: "Don't inform, don't meddle, don't
bring heat-says the code. . . . A Folklore repertory accompanies the Code-
stories illustrating it in action or the dire retributions visited upon violators"
(Jackson 1965, 320). A sociologist employed by the California Youth Au-
thority tells me that supervisors have found handwritten lists of rules lay-
ing out just such a code.
Residential institutions are also likely to have legends and ghost sto-
ries, two genres that depend the most upon children and adolescents for their
survival and diffusion. Leary (1973) traces the history of one legend through
three decades in one Boy Scout troop and across several groups, making the
point that "Swamp Man" legends allow the adult leaders to exercise indi-
rect control over campers' behavior. Ellis (1981b, 1982) makes the same
point in his analysis of the contextual uses of legends by the staff members
of a camp serving potentially unruly, "underprivileged" children from ur-
ban Cleveland. Bronner (1988, 152-54; 315-16) discusses camp legends (see
his discursive footnotes in the fully annotated edition of his volume) and
Wells (1988) recounts the uses of the Girl Scout camp legend, "Red Eyes. "
Residential institutions may also have "humorous anti-legends" (Vlach 1971;
Bronner 1988, 154-59).
Ghost stories constitute a special case of legends at residential insti-
tutions. Hawes's 1968 collection and analysis of "La Llorona" stories told
among the female inmates of a California correctional institution for girls
shows us how we may relate the symbolic content of the story texts to the
concerns of these girls, ages fourteen to sixteen, who were at Las Palmas for
sexual offenses or for habitual truancy. Hawes concludes that "this multi-
faceted, loving, hating ghost-mother seems the explicit embodiment of the
emotional conflicts of the adolescent delinquent girl" (Hawes 1968, 165).
Similarly, Krell (1980, 227-30) gives us a long text of a ghost story told
among thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds at a children's hospital in Denver.
Young residents in the less restrictive insitutions are prone to pranks
and practical joking. Beds and food are two favorite targets, with water,
urine, excrement, and animals serving as favorite substances for pranks.
Krell's informants (1980, 230) put toothpaste on toilet seats, Saran Wrap
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? ? over toilet bowls, and one hapless boy "got into his bed to find a tampax
covered with jelly. " Posen (1974a) surveys a broad array of pranks and prac-
tical jokes he found at a summer camp, including the "apparent
transsubstantiation of supernatural figures from ghost stories told by the
staff. " Posen mentions such classic practical jokes as the "Snipe Hunt" and
notes how campers maintain a "practical joke etiquette" at camp (see also
Bronner 1988, 170-71).
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.
