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Childens - Folklore
All members of the appropriate age,
gender, and skill are required to participate in these important events. Even
in modern, solitary play, one can argue that individuals are drawn into their
play by important internal compulsions. What is important is not so much
their choice of the play as their being driven by the passionate idiosyncratic
pleasure to themselves of those choices. It is not the voluntarism but the
compulsion or desire that tells us most about the play.
6. The modern view of play as voluntary, free, intrinsic, and imagina-
tive borrows its major connotations from the Romantic movement of the nine-
teenth century, from which the subject matter of children's folklore also has
its source. It was at that time that the faculty of the imagination was concep-
tualized as a critical human function intervening between rational thought and
sensory experience. It was said that the play of imagination was essential
to human freedom, delivering mankind from the compulsions of both logic
and experience (Spariosu 1989). The modern consumer psychology of
freedom as a form of choice probably also plays a part in this rhetoric. The
most famous expression of this idealized view of play is that presented by
Huizinga in the work Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture
(1955 [1950]), a work on play that has had probably more influence on
interdisciplinary scholarship than any other in this century. Huizinga states
that the "essentials" for play are that it be a free activity, quite consciously
outside "ordinary" life, "not serious," but at the same time absorbing the
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? ? player intensely and utterly. It must be an activity connected with no mate-
rial interest, from which no profit can be gained. It must proceed within its
own proper boundaries of time and space, according to fixed rules and in
an orderly manner. It must promote the formation of social groupings that
tend to surround themselves with secrecy. And players must stress their dif-
ferences from the common world by disguise or other means (1950, 13).
While the notion that such a set of "essential" and static characteris-
tics has been much criticized in the play literature as owing more to the his-
tory of philosophical idealism and to the sociology of the doctrine of "Ama-
teurism" than any universal state of mankind (Gruneau 1980; Duncan 1988),
it is also devastated by the empirical subtleties and intricacies delivered here
in the chapter by Hughes on the game of foursquare. The relationships be-
tween the real and the irreal that she reveals are so complex that this
Huizinga set of qualitative abstractions of the irreal appears to have a quite
limited validity. Even if the message is that the game she studies, foursquare,
is play, Hughes says, that is only the beginning of the entanglements and real
contingencies and consequences that then emerge. In her account, many of
Huizinga's characteristics are at best only a "mask" for what is actually go-
ing on underneath. The players are as much constrained by each other and
by the social contingencies of their group life as they are free. The struggle
for one's group or one's position in the hierarchy that tries to dominate the
game is a very ordinary and yet a quite serious form of social life. The girls
are most intense about their dedication to the supremacy of their own claque.
The profit of their participation is social acceptance and prestige. As she says:
"Their actions in the game had clear social consequences outside its bounds. "
The boundaries of time and space, fixed rules, and orderly manners are not
as definite as Huizinga implies but are as mutable as anything else going on.
Nothing is beyond the gaming manipulations of the players. The play does
maintain and promote social groupings, as Huizinga contends. This is its
main cooperative thrust and motive, according to Hughes. When secrecy and
disguise occur here it is within the game, rather than in its external relation-
ships.
Perhaps Huizinga would respond to these criticisms of his components
of play's formal definition by saying that Hughes's girls are not really playing
because they do not play the game for the game's sake and Hughes doesn't
analyze the game for the game's sake. Instead, the girls seem to manage the
play of the game entirely for the advantage of their own social group. Alter-
natively, Huizinga might say that Hughes is talking about social matters, not
really about games at all, and that these social matters can occur anywhere,
not just in games. He might also argue that females aren't much interested
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? ? in games in any case, so that all we see here is a case of game sabotage. Now
it is true, paradoxically enough, that Hughes does not much talk about the
acts of the game itself. For example, although she talks about the play ac-
tion of "slams" at great length she doesn't talk ludically about "slams"; she
talks rather about the social control of or subversion of "slams. " I think
Hughes would then respond that, on the contrary, she could show that the
same kind of behavior is quite typical in all kinds of play, including the ex-
ample she gives from adult ice hockey. What is clear is that from now on
any definition of play has to measure up to her informal characteristics as
well as those formal ones offered by Huizinga. His formal characteristics can
certainly be found to illuminate some play and games here and there, but
these characteristics come and go along with many others, and we will prob-
ably never be able to ice down and factor these changing clusters of vari-
ables until we have many more concrete studies of the kind given us here
by Hughes.
7. The theory of evolution has contributed in turn its own argument
that play and growth are essentially related, and has led to the great body
of rhetoric trying to show that when children play they develop some kind
of useful skills. Unfortunately, the biologists are not agreed about what spe-
cific functional values play serves in animals, even though the greater neu-
ral complexity of the high players, and the relative ineptness of those within
primate groups who cannot play, has led to the feeling that there must in-
deed be some functional connection between play and growth (Fagen 1980).
The emphasis that there must be such growth is, however, more clearly rheto-
ric than science. As mentioned, Western culture has often opted for the view
that play is useless rather than useful.
8. Modern psychology has added the empirical finding of relationships
between play and novelty, play and creativity (Berlyne 1960). Bateson (1972)
has proposed that all these elements of play history (play as irrational, as com-
petitive, as useless, as deceptive, as free, as growth, and as novel) can be rec-
onciled within a theory that sees play as basically a kind of communication
used by both animals and humans. It is neither good nor bad in its own right,
but serves primarily as a primitive and paradoxical form of expression and
communication in which both primary and secondary processes are united in
a way that is relatively safe for the participants and unites them in a social
community temporally transcending their ordinary ambivalences (Sutton-Smith
1985). Not surprisingly, many of the less civilized of human motives (irratio-
nality, risk, lust, aggression, deception, contest, antithesis in general) here find
acceptable expression. Not surprisingly either, this expression is often banned
by hegemonic culture and must mask itself and hide itself away in order for
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? ? this expression to be achieved. When it is achieved, a considerable degree of
license may ensue, as well as venturesome and novel combinations of thought
and behavior. It is important to emphasize here also the steadily increasing
solitarization of affluent children in their play over the past fifty years. Whether
one measures that play through children's increased time alone with toys,
through their increased time in private bedrooms, in single-child families, or
in front of the television set (consequently not on the streets) the predominant
fact about children's play in this century as compared with the last, is its soli-
tariness (Sutton-Smith 1985).
For overviews of the functional views of play in the psychological lit-
erature we suggest Bruner, Jolly and Sylva (1976), Herron and Sutton-Smith
(1971), Sutton-Smith (1979b), Smith (1984), Yawkey and Pellegrini (1984),
and Hellendorn, van der Kooij and Sutton-Smith (1994). In anthropology,
Helen Schwartzman's Transformations: The Anthropology of Children's Play
(1978) has become the classic. In biology, the classic is Robert Fagen's Ani-
mal Play Behavior (1980). Within folklore, the only scholarly works about
play are generally about speech play as in the Opies' Lore and Language of
Schoolchildren (1959), and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's Speech Play
(1976b). In recent years, probably as an indirect result of the feminist revolu-
tion in behalf of family history, a number of volumes have appeared on the
history of children's play. These are Dominick Cavallo's Muscles and Mor-
als (1981), Gary Goodman's Choosing Sides (1979), Bernard Mergen's Play
and Playthings (1982), David Nasaw's Children of the City (1985), and Brian
Sutton-Smith's History of Children's Play (1981a). Bernard Mergen's own
chapter in this Sourcebook covers these latter volumes. Perhaps the best sin-
gle source of information on play in recent years has been the publications
of the Association for the Anthropological Study of Play, whose annual vol-
umes since 1974 and more recent journals Play and Culture (Champaign,
Ill. : Human Kinetics Press) and Play Theory and Research (Champaign, Ill. :
Sagamore Press) have been the most comprehensive sources for students of
play. In the past several years, the book-length studies in play emerging from
the State University of New York Press have also been a major source.
In sum, we do not have any adequate definition of play, despite our
need for such precision in scientific advancement. Play is a fuzzy concept
and implies a changing family of concepts that include dreams, daydreams,
fantasy, imagination, solitary play, games, sports, festivals, carnivals, tele-
vision, video games, virtual reality, and so forth; the concepts change as we
shift from one culture to another, as some of the above references indicate.
Play is like the arts in being the name of a manifold colligation of human
activities. It is like sex also in being mainly a source of pleasure and perhaps
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? ? only occasionally a source of function. Undoubtedly there is some ultimate
neural wiring that differentiates this kind of species transformational pro-
cess from others, but at this point we are not very near to what seems to be
its distinctive conative and affective subjunctivity. In evolution, play is a more
primordial language than speech but like speech is neutral as to content, and
like speech can both be communicative or enactive in function. All we can
be sure of is that it suddenly catapults the survival of species from reflexive
behavior into enactive contemplation.
GAMES
Both Beresin and Hughes offer us small-group methodology involving vari-
ous kinds of observations and interviews. More important, however, is the
radical shift that Beresin and Hughes announce in the study of games. Build-
ing on the work of Kenneth Goldstein and Erving Goffman, these young
scholars show that most earlier research has been too limited because it was
largely confined to surface descriptions of the action in games, a descrip-
tion confined to the official rules or the idealized statements of the players.
Their critique is largely true if leveled at the work in folkgames, though it is
less true of game studies in anthropology and psychology, where a much
greater sensitivity to the hidden agendas of games is more manifest. An ex-
ample is Firth's account of the dart game in Tikopia (1930) or in Redl, Gump,
and Sutton-Smith's extensive work with the game playing of disturbed chil-
dren. (Avedon and Sutton-Smith 1971, chapters 18 and 19). Furthermore,
without disparaging Hughes's general position in favor of contextualized
studies, the quite abstract game categories of Roberts, Arth, and Bush
(1959)-those of chance, strategy and physical skill defined in terms of the
attribute determining the game outcome (randomness, intellectual decision,
or physical skill)-have nevertheless been amazingly revelatory of cultural
game patterns throughout the world. Despite the obvious differences in the
way in which these games are played in different societies, each has statisti-
cally significant relationships with other cultural variables: chance with re-
sponsibility training, nomadism, and economic uncertainty; strategy with
obedience training; and social complexity and physical skill with achieve-
ment training. These findings have contributed enormously to bringing games
into serious consideration in modern scholarship within structural-function-
alist theoretical rhetorics.
Like Zumwalt in chapter two, Hughes argues that the child players
are much more complex than has been assumed in prior folklore study. By
not being concerned with the living context of particular games, but of games
in general, earlier researchers tended toward a more separatist view of games
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? ? than appears in the Hughes record, where games are embedded in everyday
social interaction. Other recent researchers who have been similarly con-
cerned with the social interaction actually occurring in the midst of games
and its similarity to everyday life are Denzin (1977), Schwartzman (1978),
Garvey (1977), Von Glascoe (1980), and Goodwin (1985). Goodwin's ap-
proach in particular raises the contrast between the treatment of games as
frames set apart from ordinary experience and transcending that ordinary
experience, and the treatment of games as illustrating the social interaction
and communication norms of ordinary experience. The danger of either
polarity is that at one extreme we may get the philosophically "essential-
ist" view of games as illustrated by Huizinga above (Gruneau 1983); at the
other, the games are reduced to an epiphenomenon of sociolinguistics
(Goodwin 1985). Games need to be accounted for both as continuous and
as discontinuous with everyday experience. There is a real sense in which
games are a quite "different" experience from everyday life, being where one
can safely engage in all kinds of actions that would not be allowed elsewhere;
at the same time it is true that the social interaction, the rule systems, and
the players' temperaments are also continuous with everyday life.
Furthermore, while on the one hand we can say with Bateson (1972)
that the play in a game is "the nip that means the bite but not what the bite
means," on the other hand general success and esteem in play count enor-
mously in childhood success. Not to be able to play is to fail childhood. Play
and games are not separate from life but are interwoven within it in mul-
tiple ways, which are now beginning to be approached by workers such as
Beresin, Hughes, and Goodwin. What may be of ironical interest is the pos-
sible coincidence between a typical male researcher's focus upon the actions
in the games that men play (discontinuity) and female researchers' interest
in the etiquette by which the games women play are sustained (continuity).
In female researchers it is as if the game might be an incident in a prolonged
conversation, whereas in the studies of males it is as if a conversation may
be an interruption of an ongoing gaming activity. It has taken the largely
female investigators mentioned here to bring these differences to light
(Mechling 1985).
For general reviews of prior research and thought on games we can
recommend Avedon and Sutton-Smith (1971), Caillois (1961), Goffman
(1961b), Huizinga (1950), Jones and Hawes (1972), and Sutton-Smith
(1972).
GIRLS
Play and games have throughout Western history been largely the preserve
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? ? of men and boys. The variety of games available to boys yesterday and of toys
today far exceeds in complexity and range those available to girls. Some writers
have even suggested that recreation has simply not been central to the life of
women and girls in Western society (Wimbush and Talbot 1988). Others
have argued that the play of women and girls is much less obvious because
it tends to be verbal and private rather than physical and public (Schwartz-
man 1978). This would parallel cross-cultural sex differences in the display
of humor, where men more generally have access to public and women to
private forms of such expression (Apte 1985). The historical sex-role shift
within children's folklore, however, is that although the nineteenth century
might show more folk gaming activity by boys, the contrary would be the
case today. With their greater access to sports organizations, the playground
play of boys has become increasingly homogenized throughout the century
and increasingly under the sway of modern adult interests in coaching and
sports. The relative neglect of girls, particularly girls in lower socioeconomic
orders and minority races, has left them as the legatee of children's folklore.
Thus jump rope, hopscotch, and jacks continue to flourish with girls, while
marbles, momley peg, and prisoner's base are seldom seen in boys' folkplay
any longer. When girls' games are contrasted with those of boys (team sports)
their games appear to be much less complex, less active, less intrusive, more
confined, less competitive (Sutton-Smith 1979b). Some have written that, as
a result, girls may not develop the large group collaborative and competi-
tive skills that are essential to their success in modern organizations (Lever
1976). The papers by Zumwalt and particularly those by Beresin and Hughes
raise questions about that line of interpretation. The complexity of the girls'
game organization is a complexity in the meta levels of the play. Several so-
cial functions are being accomplished at the same time. It is as if the girls
are using the game to reaffirm their small group ties and to maintain their
collaborative networks in the midst of competitive activity. They do play the
game and abide by its rules, and yet they are also "gaming" the game in terms
of their own social rules of nice versus nasty, and further interpenetrating
these rules with the preexisting coalitions to preserve their favorites. There
is a subtlety here that is ignored in most attempts to compare the role of
games in the lives of boys and girls, men and women. Lever's notion (1976)
that girls break up their games in the presence of argumentation, whereas
boys go on arguing with each other until they finally resume the game again
is countered by this evidence of girls' persisting collaboration by Hughes and
collateral evidence from Goodwin and Von Glascoe (1980). Given Gilligan's
(1982) position of women having a "different voice," a concern, as much
with collaboration as competition, there is evidence here of just that con-
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? ? cern in the method of play. Still, we need to have care here. Hughes's girls
were studied in a Quaker school that had its own particular ethos of coop-
eration, exercised, one presumes, more coercively than in most places. It
could be that some of the differences now appearing between the findings
about girls by Hughes and Goodwin and those of Lever might be due to the
location of the study and the relative familiarity of the girls with each other.
Still, the general fear that girls are underprivileged in their school playground
life continues and it is increasingly suggested that this has a lot to do with
the way in which the rough and tumbling boys dominate the playground
space in a physical way, thus disadvantaging the girls (Thorne 1993).
METHODS
Again in the Beresin and the Hughes studies we have quite intensive inves-
tigations of one particular focus. These studies and those of the prior sec-
tion contrast methodologically with the questionnaire and interview tech-
niques carried out with large numbers of students, more typical in earlier
work in children's folklore. Hughes gives some indications of the step-by-
step process by which she proceeded from observations to interviews. In these
kinds of exploratory studies the investigator cannot know beforehand just
what is to be studied, and must remain open to all kinds of possibilities if
the ultimate outcome is to be of any potential worth. Going beyond Hughes's
assertion that the "gaming of the game is as important as the game," Beresin
suggests that in a variety of ways the larger community also affects what
occurs in the game (for example, commercials, school recess rules). Beresin's
use of video and audio recording reveals a host of contingencies beyond the
text that are relevant to the life of the game in an urban elementary-school
playground. In short, Beresin's study demonstrates the intricate ways in
which a game functions in the context of playground space and the players'
age, gender, and ethnic grouping, and how the commercial world and the
school's rules enter from the outside, thus having their own influence on what
goes on. Once again games are not so separate from life as has often been
suggested.
What is remarkable about Fine's overview is first his enunciation of
a series of principles of ethical procedure (informed consent, credit to in-
formants, lack of deception, lack of harm to subjects) and then his pursuit
of examples, many of which some readers will find controversial. With an
admirable openness Fine details his own ad hoc responses on a number of
difficult questions, and we are left with a clear impression that when one is
attempting to gather the often arcane and antithetical lore of children, the
phenomena of racism, obscenity, cruelty, gifts, and gender can arise and leave
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? ? the researchers in a highly ambiguous position between wanting to uphold
public morality and retaining the confidence of their informants. Not every-
one will agree with the "solutions" that Fine adopts here, but we can ap-
plaud his courage in telling us about them, and we can realize that these are
very real problems because children's folklore is often about culturally an-
tithetical matters. Subject matter that might be incidental to orthodox so-
cialization research can be central to children's folklore and cause ethical
problems perhaps beyond neat solution.
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? ? 4 DOUBLE DUTCH
AND DOUBLE CAMERAS
STUDYING THE TRANSMISSION OF CULTURE
IN AN URBAN SCHOOL YARD
Ann Richman Beresin
It can be said that within the children's game lies an entire cosmos. For Jean
Piaget, the study of marbles uncovered the wrestlings of the moral judgments
of the child. For Brian Sutton-Smith, the flexibility of children's games re-
vealed play itself as a process of invention and reversal. For John McDowell,
the riddle texts unfolded an array of themes reflecting that of the children's
lives as a whole. (Piaget 1965; Sutton-Smith 1976b; McDowell 1979). This
paper will examine the complex world of double dutch jump rope as prac-
ticed and performed by third- through fifth-grade girls in an urban, public,
working-class, racially integrated elementary school yard in Pennsylvania.
It will be argued here that the study of the game reveals complex, overlap-
ping cultural worlds, and that if we can attune our eyes to the game beyond
the basic game text, that the potential meaning of such study goes beyond
the collection of interesting rhymes.
Unlike the classic studies of jump-rope rhymes which have privileged
the texts of the rhymes over their actions (Abrahams 1969; Butler 1989;
Delamar 1983; Gomme 1894; Newell 1883), in this paper I seek to explore
the interaction around the game in addition to its texts, and to examine its
relationship to the specific context of the urban school yard. I suggest not
only that the school yard shapes the game-and it is indeed inseparable from
it-but that the privileging of game texts by collectors of children's folklore
has been directly related to the available methodologies for folk-game study.
Rhymes and songs were written down by observers of children, and these
rhymes were then compared with older rhymes and rhymes from different
regions in order to examine cultural uniqueness and distribution. It was not
until recently that the invention of the audio tape recorder enabled the stu-
dent of games to capture verbal nuances, cadence, and rhythm, thus allow-
ing for the preservation of detail beyond the mere text.
Although it is hard to imagine folk song collectors today not using a
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? ? tape recorder to capture the details of song, the use of visual media in game
study is virtually untapped. Like dance ethnography, the study of folk games
could greatly benefit from the preservation of actual game performances on
film or videotape, in order to examine the game in its rapid-fire detail, and
then, perhaps most significantly, to replay the game for the participants to
get their expert views.
Prior to the use of audio and video equipment, students of children's
folklore made use of historical documentation and oral history to extract
meaning from rhymes and games. The Opies' extensive use of written docu-
mentation and Sutton-Smith's vast collection of oral history around folk
games have emphasized the shifting temporal context of the games (Opie
and Opie 1959, 1969; Sutton-Smith 1981a). Although collections from
Gomme to the Opies have included musical notation in singing games, the
jump-rope literature has, to this day, typically emphasized the poetic meter,
and done so sparingly, leaving the impression that jumping rope was some-
thing one does perhaps sitting down with one's mouth (Butler 1989). The
first in-depth interactionist study of the game of jump rope is Goodwin's
1985 article "The Serious Side of Jump Rope: Conversation Practices and
Social Organization in the Frame of Play," which, by using audiotaped tran-
scripts of talk around the games, allowed for the capturing of variation in
actual rope games as they were performed in the streets of Philadelphia. Al-
though still emphasizing the verbal interaction around the game and imply-
ing that the game of rhythmic foot work, known as jump rope, was prima-
rily a verbal art, this provided a step into the study of the game as more than
fixed text. Goodwin's study demonstrated that the game was a framework,
as Bateson and also Goffman have suggested, for other kinds of dramas
(Bateson 1972; Goffman 1959, 1974). For more on the significance of the
inclusion of the larger social context and folk interaction, see Bauman 1982;
Briggs 1988; and Kendon 1990.
The majority of the folk-game literature can be said to be either a mi-
cro or a macro survey, leaving us with often uncomparable details, as
Schwartzman has noted, or acontextual lists of separate events, as is popu-
lar in the general books on American children's folklore (Bronner 1988;
Knapp and Knapp 1976; Schwartzman 1978). For years the historical com-
parative methodology when used in combination with fieldwork provided
the only way to merge the two perspectives. But, given our relative access
to the technology of wide-angle and close-up footage, this is no longer the
case. Rivka Eifermann's massive study of Israeli Arab and Jewish children's
games serves as perhaps the closest prevideographic model of combined
micro and macro study; she utilized hundreds of simultaneous observers
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? ? within the same play area. (Eifermann 1971, 1979). In this manner
Eifermann was able to amass a wealth of detail in survey form and to com-
pare children of different social classes, locales, and ethnicities. Although the
published versions of her study do not illuminate the important details of
the folk games within its survey, it stands as a marker in the careful exami-
nation of the meaning of children's games in the larger culture.
THE USE OF FILM AND VIDEO
Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead pioneered the use of film in Learning
to Dance in Bali, as they captured the nonverbal stylistics of a cross-cultural
dance lesson. Reels of unedited film recorded the instruction of cultural
forms. Film documentary, which by definition is an edited process of graphic
storytelling, has its own fascinating history, but what is relevant here is not
the use of film and video as storyteller, but rather as presenter of art forms.
Helen Schwartzman's encyclopedic text Transformations: The Anthro-
pology of Children's Play includes in its final pages a listing of ethnographic
films, ranging from Bateson's own 1954 film of river otters at play to Bess
Lomax Hawes and Robert Eberlein's Pizza Pizza Daddyo in 1969, a film
about a special performance of favorite African American singing games. It
is in these films that the details and nuances of the games emerge, and the
texts can be placed in perspective, as verbal expressions of bodily forms.
What is being proposed in this paper is the use of film or video as
witnessing or documentation, so that when a game is described in transcrip-
tion or in actual videographic presentation we can see the phenonemon
being discussed. Unfortunately, this chapter is itself limited to the paper
medium, but with careful description of a few minutes of actual footage,
it is hoped that the reader will begin to see and hear details of the game.
As microethnographers Adam Kendon and Frederick Erickson advocate,
through the use of such documentation we can begin to be more consistent
about our study of social phenomenon, in this case the cultural transmis-
sion of folkgames, and build upon a collection of real cases involving real
human beings (Kendon 1979; Erickson and Wilson 1982). We have the
possibility of checking them, and rechecking them, long after the fieldwork
is over, in slow motion and in fast forward, with sound on and sound
off, to see things not possible in the quick blur of the moment. And we have
the possibility of the local experts sharing their specific insights on their
own folk process, well after the moment of concentration is past. The very
field of children's folklore expands before us, and it has the potential to
become the study of children's cultures and folklife, in all its richness and
complexity.
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? ? DOUBLE CAMERAS
When this author set out to study the games and rituals of one multiethnic
working-class school yard in 1991, it became clear that one pair of eyes
would not be sufficient to capture the details or the larger boundaries of
school-yard interaction. In the summer months, the principal of the Mill
School was approached for general permission to spend time at the daily fif-
teen-minute recess periods, and eventually to use audio and video record-
ers. Permission was granted, as no individuals were being targeted in the
study, and student anonymity was assured. General information letters were
sent in the fall to one class in each of the third, fourth, and fifth grades on
which the fieldwork was based. In mid-fall, a stationary videocamera was
placed in a second-floor window facing the school yard, and set on a wide
angle. This was done to capture the basic traffic zones and play spaces, and
as an aid in the locating of field observations within the larger picture. The
principal was supportive and accepted such a plan, as the individual faces
were obscured, and he, too, was curious to learn what kinds of interaction
were occurring. Recess had been canceled by his predecessor out of fear of
school-yard violence, and the status of recess time was uncertain. Such docu-
mentation, to be shared with him and his staff at the end of the year in re-
port form, was of interest and had policy implications.
On the first day of school, daily nonparticipant observation fieldnotes
were written, and it was not until rapport was firmly established with the chil-
dren and staff that audiotaping commenced. From January to May, daily
audiotapes were made, overtly, with many texts collected, rules explained,
interactions noted, and nonverbal information described. It was not until May
that the researcher felt ready to ask the children if a mobile video camera could
be set up on the school yard to record their games directly. A deep rapport had
developed by that time, and their response was universally positive. They were
quite excited, as it had been our agreement that they could see themselves on
video later in the month. At that time, they were to tell me what they thought
about the games they played. Small group interviews with the three classes
under study had been conducted since the beginning of the year, so this would
be another round of interviewing, also considered a pleasant task.
In sum, the methodology included ongoing small group interviews,
daily fieldwork, gradual inclusion of audio recording, seasonal wide-angled
videotaping from the second-floor window, eventual close-up or micro-video
footage, and then the presentation of samples of the footage to the partici-
pants. A total of thirty-three videotapes were recorded, covering twenty-seven
days of recess. Nineteen tapes of wide-angled footage were made, and four-
teen tapes of close-up micro footage were made. Fifty-one days of live au-
78 DOUBLE DUTCH AND DOUBLE CAMERAS
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? ? diotape were also recorded.
One hundred and four third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade boys and girls
were observed, audiotaped, and videotaped during recess. Forty-seven chil-
dren served as native experts and provided their own commentary as they
watched themselves at play on videotape. Occasionally younger and older
children were included in the taping process, if they were part of a game being
studied and played by the core participants.
Although not the first study to utilize videotaped games of children
in this manner, this study is among few to share the footage with its partici-
pants in this age group (see also Sutton-Smith and Magee's "Reversible Child-
hood" [1989a], on the use of reflexive video ethnography with young chil-
dren). Although this is not the first study to examine school-yard games and
the transmission of culture in one place (See Parrott 1972; Sluckin 1981; Hart
1993), it is unique in its deliberate emphasis on a public, multiethnic school.
Studies of urban play, such as Dargan's and Zeitlin's extensive photo essay
City Play (1990), capture bits of the cultural crossover visible in urban street
games, but in the following transcriptions we can see it emerge in the school-
yard games themselves. Such cultural crossover is significant in the light of
the emphasis on school desegregation so important to the American public-
school system, and in the light of the potential elimination of recess as school
policy (Sutton-Smith 1990b).
Several games were studied in this larger exploration of the folklore
of the 1991-92 Mill School yard, including the games of the third- through
fifth-grade boys. This paper, however, will serve as a window to the specific
game worlds of the double dutch players. (For a complete view of the larger
study, which includes handball, folk basketball, hopscotch, step dancing, and
play fighting, see Beresin 1993. ) Double dutch was perhaps the chief peer-led
activity for African American girls at the Mill School, and provided a perfor-
mance focus for a mobile audience of both girls and boys in the school yard.
DOUBLE DUTCH
A fast-paced, polyrhythmic jump-rope style, double dutch utilizes two ropes,
typically turned inwards, egg beater fashion, by two girls who have "the
ends," while a single jumper executes specific steps to a specific song or
chant. It is almost exclusively an African American girls' tradition in urban
Pennsylvania, and has been virtually ignored in the jump-rope literature.
There has been so little written on double dutch in the folklore literature,
and in the collections of African American folklore, that it could even have
been said to be skipped over.
Singing game and street game collections like those of the Opies have
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? ? described larger game traditions but excluded rope singing. American
children's folklore, as in the works of Bronner and Knapp and Knapp, have
homogenized the ethnicity of their young experts and have given us only
single rope traditions; the African American collections of general folklore
have rarely even mentioned the lore of young girls (Kochman 1972; Jack-
son 1967; Whitten and Szwed 1982). With the exception of Jones's and
Hawes's Step It Down (1972) and Black Girls at Play (1975) by Bauman,
Eckhardt, and Brady, the games of African American girls have been ren-
dered practically invisible, and these collections have examined only the step-
ping and clapping forms. Abrahams's Jump-Rope Rhymes: A Dictionary
(1969), a text called "the most thorough recent compilation of these (jump
rope) rhymes for English-speaking children" (Schwartzman 1978, 36), lists
a handful of articles relevant to double dutch, but, with the exception of his
own useful 1963 article, all deal with it only in passing.
Even when only a single rope was available-it was typically one
brought by a child from home-it was utilized in the style and steps of double
dutch. Two girls hold the ends and turn for the girl who is jumping, and
often it is expected that one must turn for someone before getting the chance
to jump. Occasionally the "double Irish" or "double orange" style of rope
turning was observed; that is the term for the turning of the ropes outward,
egg beater style. This method was considered more difficult and sometimes
occurred by accident when the turners changed direction. More typically,
there would be two turners rapidly turning the rope inward, left, right, left,
right, swaying rhythmically to the slapping beat as the rope brushed the
ground. The jumper would dance the steps associated with the song or
rhyme, and a group of singers, ranging from the turners to nonparticipants
to would-be participants, would dance a minimal version of the game in
place. This was considered both a fun thing to do while you await your turn,
as well as a chance to practice the sequence.
The game was competitive, with jumpers vying to be the one who
could not only stay in the ropes the longest but could progress the furthest
in the particular rhyme. Someone would shout "She got foot" or "She got
turn. " And one would often hear the cry of "Saved! " or "Saved by one! "
meaning that the person shouting had progressed farther than the jumper
who had just tripped on the turning rope. Steps were parodied, styles imi-
tated, and occasionally corrected in order to ensure that the jumper did the
job right. Turners could be accused of turning too rapidly, or of intention-
ally "flicking" the rope to make it more difficult, and high-status
jumpers,usually the more skilled fifth and sixth graders, claimed first jumps,
while the younger, less experienced players would be the turners. The chance
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? ? to jump first, and if one was skilled, stay in the spotlight, was often called
long before the game started, in the hallway, in the classroom, or at the end
of one round for the round the next recess.
Double Dutch Style
Count 2 turns
left hand
clockwise
Count 1 turn
right hand
clockwise
ouble Dutch Style Count 2 turns
right hand
clockwise
Count 1 turn
left hand
clockwise
Immigrant Chinese and Haitian girls, representing a small minority
of this officially racially desegregated school, also occasionally did individual,
single jump rope. Two Chinese girls sometimes jumped in two parallel ropes
and, in their own ropes, looped circles around each other, sort of a couple
dance while jumping. The Haitian girls sometimes jumped with a second girl
in the same small rope, either face to face or back to front. Regardless of
form or ethnicity, jump rope was almost always competitive, either by en-
durance, elaborateness of steps, or frequency of turns.
The European American girls would often be observers of the double
dutch games, and on only rare occasions do individual ropes themselves.
When they did so they would compete to see which of them could jump the
most times. They would not sing or chant, just count the number of con-
tinuous jumping steps. One girl was up to 230 and still jumping. Unlike the
African American girls, who stayed in one place or rotated their positions
slightly to be out of the bright sun, or the immigrant girls, who stayed in
one place with their individual ropes, the European American girls did a
running jump rope step and would, one at a time, run around the entire yard
counting. Like their hand-clap games, which were also done to numbers or
counting, the European American girls had clearly distilled their games and
no longer had an active jump-rope singing tradition at this school. The sing-
ing jump rope game, and for that matter the singing hand-clapping game,
had become predominantly an African American tradition.
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? ? Many double dutch songs included the same sequence of steps or
commands: foot, bounce, hop, turn, criss (crossing), clap, with "foot" or
"footin" being the basic right, left, right, left running step over the quickly
turning ropes.
gender, and skill are required to participate in these important events. Even
in modern, solitary play, one can argue that individuals are drawn into their
play by important internal compulsions. What is important is not so much
their choice of the play as their being driven by the passionate idiosyncratic
pleasure to themselves of those choices. It is not the voluntarism but the
compulsion or desire that tells us most about the play.
6. The modern view of play as voluntary, free, intrinsic, and imagina-
tive borrows its major connotations from the Romantic movement of the nine-
teenth century, from which the subject matter of children's folklore also has
its source. It was at that time that the faculty of the imagination was concep-
tualized as a critical human function intervening between rational thought and
sensory experience. It was said that the play of imagination was essential
to human freedom, delivering mankind from the compulsions of both logic
and experience (Spariosu 1989). The modern consumer psychology of
freedom as a form of choice probably also plays a part in this rhetoric. The
most famous expression of this idealized view of play is that presented by
Huizinga in the work Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture
(1955 [1950]), a work on play that has had probably more influence on
interdisciplinary scholarship than any other in this century. Huizinga states
that the "essentials" for play are that it be a free activity, quite consciously
outside "ordinary" life, "not serious," but at the same time absorbing the
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? ? player intensely and utterly. It must be an activity connected with no mate-
rial interest, from which no profit can be gained. It must proceed within its
own proper boundaries of time and space, according to fixed rules and in
an orderly manner. It must promote the formation of social groupings that
tend to surround themselves with secrecy. And players must stress their dif-
ferences from the common world by disguise or other means (1950, 13).
While the notion that such a set of "essential" and static characteris-
tics has been much criticized in the play literature as owing more to the his-
tory of philosophical idealism and to the sociology of the doctrine of "Ama-
teurism" than any universal state of mankind (Gruneau 1980; Duncan 1988),
it is also devastated by the empirical subtleties and intricacies delivered here
in the chapter by Hughes on the game of foursquare. The relationships be-
tween the real and the irreal that she reveals are so complex that this
Huizinga set of qualitative abstractions of the irreal appears to have a quite
limited validity. Even if the message is that the game she studies, foursquare,
is play, Hughes says, that is only the beginning of the entanglements and real
contingencies and consequences that then emerge. In her account, many of
Huizinga's characteristics are at best only a "mask" for what is actually go-
ing on underneath. The players are as much constrained by each other and
by the social contingencies of their group life as they are free. The struggle
for one's group or one's position in the hierarchy that tries to dominate the
game is a very ordinary and yet a quite serious form of social life. The girls
are most intense about their dedication to the supremacy of their own claque.
The profit of their participation is social acceptance and prestige. As she says:
"Their actions in the game had clear social consequences outside its bounds. "
The boundaries of time and space, fixed rules, and orderly manners are not
as definite as Huizinga implies but are as mutable as anything else going on.
Nothing is beyond the gaming manipulations of the players. The play does
maintain and promote social groupings, as Huizinga contends. This is its
main cooperative thrust and motive, according to Hughes. When secrecy and
disguise occur here it is within the game, rather than in its external relation-
ships.
Perhaps Huizinga would respond to these criticisms of his components
of play's formal definition by saying that Hughes's girls are not really playing
because they do not play the game for the game's sake and Hughes doesn't
analyze the game for the game's sake. Instead, the girls seem to manage the
play of the game entirely for the advantage of their own social group. Alter-
natively, Huizinga might say that Hughes is talking about social matters, not
really about games at all, and that these social matters can occur anywhere,
not just in games. He might also argue that females aren't much interested
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? ? in games in any case, so that all we see here is a case of game sabotage. Now
it is true, paradoxically enough, that Hughes does not much talk about the
acts of the game itself. For example, although she talks about the play ac-
tion of "slams" at great length she doesn't talk ludically about "slams"; she
talks rather about the social control of or subversion of "slams. " I think
Hughes would then respond that, on the contrary, she could show that the
same kind of behavior is quite typical in all kinds of play, including the ex-
ample she gives from adult ice hockey. What is clear is that from now on
any definition of play has to measure up to her informal characteristics as
well as those formal ones offered by Huizinga. His formal characteristics can
certainly be found to illuminate some play and games here and there, but
these characteristics come and go along with many others, and we will prob-
ably never be able to ice down and factor these changing clusters of vari-
ables until we have many more concrete studies of the kind given us here
by Hughes.
7. The theory of evolution has contributed in turn its own argument
that play and growth are essentially related, and has led to the great body
of rhetoric trying to show that when children play they develop some kind
of useful skills. Unfortunately, the biologists are not agreed about what spe-
cific functional values play serves in animals, even though the greater neu-
ral complexity of the high players, and the relative ineptness of those within
primate groups who cannot play, has led to the feeling that there must in-
deed be some functional connection between play and growth (Fagen 1980).
The emphasis that there must be such growth is, however, more clearly rheto-
ric than science. As mentioned, Western culture has often opted for the view
that play is useless rather than useful.
8. Modern psychology has added the empirical finding of relationships
between play and novelty, play and creativity (Berlyne 1960). Bateson (1972)
has proposed that all these elements of play history (play as irrational, as com-
petitive, as useless, as deceptive, as free, as growth, and as novel) can be rec-
onciled within a theory that sees play as basically a kind of communication
used by both animals and humans. It is neither good nor bad in its own right,
but serves primarily as a primitive and paradoxical form of expression and
communication in which both primary and secondary processes are united in
a way that is relatively safe for the participants and unites them in a social
community temporally transcending their ordinary ambivalences (Sutton-Smith
1985). Not surprisingly, many of the less civilized of human motives (irratio-
nality, risk, lust, aggression, deception, contest, antithesis in general) here find
acceptable expression. Not surprisingly either, this expression is often banned
by hegemonic culture and must mask itself and hide itself away in order for
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? ? this expression to be achieved. When it is achieved, a considerable degree of
license may ensue, as well as venturesome and novel combinations of thought
and behavior. It is important to emphasize here also the steadily increasing
solitarization of affluent children in their play over the past fifty years. Whether
one measures that play through children's increased time alone with toys,
through their increased time in private bedrooms, in single-child families, or
in front of the television set (consequently not on the streets) the predominant
fact about children's play in this century as compared with the last, is its soli-
tariness (Sutton-Smith 1985).
For overviews of the functional views of play in the psychological lit-
erature we suggest Bruner, Jolly and Sylva (1976), Herron and Sutton-Smith
(1971), Sutton-Smith (1979b), Smith (1984), Yawkey and Pellegrini (1984),
and Hellendorn, van der Kooij and Sutton-Smith (1994). In anthropology,
Helen Schwartzman's Transformations: The Anthropology of Children's Play
(1978) has become the classic. In biology, the classic is Robert Fagen's Ani-
mal Play Behavior (1980). Within folklore, the only scholarly works about
play are generally about speech play as in the Opies' Lore and Language of
Schoolchildren (1959), and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's Speech Play
(1976b). In recent years, probably as an indirect result of the feminist revolu-
tion in behalf of family history, a number of volumes have appeared on the
history of children's play. These are Dominick Cavallo's Muscles and Mor-
als (1981), Gary Goodman's Choosing Sides (1979), Bernard Mergen's Play
and Playthings (1982), David Nasaw's Children of the City (1985), and Brian
Sutton-Smith's History of Children's Play (1981a). Bernard Mergen's own
chapter in this Sourcebook covers these latter volumes. Perhaps the best sin-
gle source of information on play in recent years has been the publications
of the Association for the Anthropological Study of Play, whose annual vol-
umes since 1974 and more recent journals Play and Culture (Champaign,
Ill. : Human Kinetics Press) and Play Theory and Research (Champaign, Ill. :
Sagamore Press) have been the most comprehensive sources for students of
play. In the past several years, the book-length studies in play emerging from
the State University of New York Press have also been a major source.
In sum, we do not have any adequate definition of play, despite our
need for such precision in scientific advancement. Play is a fuzzy concept
and implies a changing family of concepts that include dreams, daydreams,
fantasy, imagination, solitary play, games, sports, festivals, carnivals, tele-
vision, video games, virtual reality, and so forth; the concepts change as we
shift from one culture to another, as some of the above references indicate.
Play is like the arts in being the name of a manifold colligation of human
activities. It is like sex also in being mainly a source of pleasure and perhaps
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? ? only occasionally a source of function. Undoubtedly there is some ultimate
neural wiring that differentiates this kind of species transformational pro-
cess from others, but at this point we are not very near to what seems to be
its distinctive conative and affective subjunctivity. In evolution, play is a more
primordial language than speech but like speech is neutral as to content, and
like speech can both be communicative or enactive in function. All we can
be sure of is that it suddenly catapults the survival of species from reflexive
behavior into enactive contemplation.
GAMES
Both Beresin and Hughes offer us small-group methodology involving vari-
ous kinds of observations and interviews. More important, however, is the
radical shift that Beresin and Hughes announce in the study of games. Build-
ing on the work of Kenneth Goldstein and Erving Goffman, these young
scholars show that most earlier research has been too limited because it was
largely confined to surface descriptions of the action in games, a descrip-
tion confined to the official rules or the idealized statements of the players.
Their critique is largely true if leveled at the work in folkgames, though it is
less true of game studies in anthropology and psychology, where a much
greater sensitivity to the hidden agendas of games is more manifest. An ex-
ample is Firth's account of the dart game in Tikopia (1930) or in Redl, Gump,
and Sutton-Smith's extensive work with the game playing of disturbed chil-
dren. (Avedon and Sutton-Smith 1971, chapters 18 and 19). Furthermore,
without disparaging Hughes's general position in favor of contextualized
studies, the quite abstract game categories of Roberts, Arth, and Bush
(1959)-those of chance, strategy and physical skill defined in terms of the
attribute determining the game outcome (randomness, intellectual decision,
or physical skill)-have nevertheless been amazingly revelatory of cultural
game patterns throughout the world. Despite the obvious differences in the
way in which these games are played in different societies, each has statisti-
cally significant relationships with other cultural variables: chance with re-
sponsibility training, nomadism, and economic uncertainty; strategy with
obedience training; and social complexity and physical skill with achieve-
ment training. These findings have contributed enormously to bringing games
into serious consideration in modern scholarship within structural-function-
alist theoretical rhetorics.
Like Zumwalt in chapter two, Hughes argues that the child players
are much more complex than has been assumed in prior folklore study. By
not being concerned with the living context of particular games, but of games
in general, earlier researchers tended toward a more separatist view of games
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? ? than appears in the Hughes record, where games are embedded in everyday
social interaction. Other recent researchers who have been similarly con-
cerned with the social interaction actually occurring in the midst of games
and its similarity to everyday life are Denzin (1977), Schwartzman (1978),
Garvey (1977), Von Glascoe (1980), and Goodwin (1985). Goodwin's ap-
proach in particular raises the contrast between the treatment of games as
frames set apart from ordinary experience and transcending that ordinary
experience, and the treatment of games as illustrating the social interaction
and communication norms of ordinary experience. The danger of either
polarity is that at one extreme we may get the philosophically "essential-
ist" view of games as illustrated by Huizinga above (Gruneau 1983); at the
other, the games are reduced to an epiphenomenon of sociolinguistics
(Goodwin 1985). Games need to be accounted for both as continuous and
as discontinuous with everyday experience. There is a real sense in which
games are a quite "different" experience from everyday life, being where one
can safely engage in all kinds of actions that would not be allowed elsewhere;
at the same time it is true that the social interaction, the rule systems, and
the players' temperaments are also continuous with everyday life.
Furthermore, while on the one hand we can say with Bateson (1972)
that the play in a game is "the nip that means the bite but not what the bite
means," on the other hand general success and esteem in play count enor-
mously in childhood success. Not to be able to play is to fail childhood. Play
and games are not separate from life but are interwoven within it in mul-
tiple ways, which are now beginning to be approached by workers such as
Beresin, Hughes, and Goodwin. What may be of ironical interest is the pos-
sible coincidence between a typical male researcher's focus upon the actions
in the games that men play (discontinuity) and female researchers' interest
in the etiquette by which the games women play are sustained (continuity).
In female researchers it is as if the game might be an incident in a prolonged
conversation, whereas in the studies of males it is as if a conversation may
be an interruption of an ongoing gaming activity. It has taken the largely
female investigators mentioned here to bring these differences to light
(Mechling 1985).
For general reviews of prior research and thought on games we can
recommend Avedon and Sutton-Smith (1971), Caillois (1961), Goffman
(1961b), Huizinga (1950), Jones and Hawes (1972), and Sutton-Smith
(1972).
GIRLS
Play and games have throughout Western history been largely the preserve
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? ? of men and boys. The variety of games available to boys yesterday and of toys
today far exceeds in complexity and range those available to girls. Some writers
have even suggested that recreation has simply not been central to the life of
women and girls in Western society (Wimbush and Talbot 1988). Others
have argued that the play of women and girls is much less obvious because
it tends to be verbal and private rather than physical and public (Schwartz-
man 1978). This would parallel cross-cultural sex differences in the display
of humor, where men more generally have access to public and women to
private forms of such expression (Apte 1985). The historical sex-role shift
within children's folklore, however, is that although the nineteenth century
might show more folk gaming activity by boys, the contrary would be the
case today. With their greater access to sports organizations, the playground
play of boys has become increasingly homogenized throughout the century
and increasingly under the sway of modern adult interests in coaching and
sports. The relative neglect of girls, particularly girls in lower socioeconomic
orders and minority races, has left them as the legatee of children's folklore.
Thus jump rope, hopscotch, and jacks continue to flourish with girls, while
marbles, momley peg, and prisoner's base are seldom seen in boys' folkplay
any longer. When girls' games are contrasted with those of boys (team sports)
their games appear to be much less complex, less active, less intrusive, more
confined, less competitive (Sutton-Smith 1979b). Some have written that, as
a result, girls may not develop the large group collaborative and competi-
tive skills that are essential to their success in modern organizations (Lever
1976). The papers by Zumwalt and particularly those by Beresin and Hughes
raise questions about that line of interpretation. The complexity of the girls'
game organization is a complexity in the meta levels of the play. Several so-
cial functions are being accomplished at the same time. It is as if the girls
are using the game to reaffirm their small group ties and to maintain their
collaborative networks in the midst of competitive activity. They do play the
game and abide by its rules, and yet they are also "gaming" the game in terms
of their own social rules of nice versus nasty, and further interpenetrating
these rules with the preexisting coalitions to preserve their favorites. There
is a subtlety here that is ignored in most attempts to compare the role of
games in the lives of boys and girls, men and women. Lever's notion (1976)
that girls break up their games in the presence of argumentation, whereas
boys go on arguing with each other until they finally resume the game again
is countered by this evidence of girls' persisting collaboration by Hughes and
collateral evidence from Goodwin and Von Glascoe (1980). Given Gilligan's
(1982) position of women having a "different voice," a concern, as much
with collaboration as competition, there is evidence here of just that con-
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? ? cern in the method of play. Still, we need to have care here. Hughes's girls
were studied in a Quaker school that had its own particular ethos of coop-
eration, exercised, one presumes, more coercively than in most places. It
could be that some of the differences now appearing between the findings
about girls by Hughes and Goodwin and those of Lever might be due to the
location of the study and the relative familiarity of the girls with each other.
Still, the general fear that girls are underprivileged in their school playground
life continues and it is increasingly suggested that this has a lot to do with
the way in which the rough and tumbling boys dominate the playground
space in a physical way, thus disadvantaging the girls (Thorne 1993).
METHODS
Again in the Beresin and the Hughes studies we have quite intensive inves-
tigations of one particular focus. These studies and those of the prior sec-
tion contrast methodologically with the questionnaire and interview tech-
niques carried out with large numbers of students, more typical in earlier
work in children's folklore. Hughes gives some indications of the step-by-
step process by which she proceeded from observations to interviews. In these
kinds of exploratory studies the investigator cannot know beforehand just
what is to be studied, and must remain open to all kinds of possibilities if
the ultimate outcome is to be of any potential worth. Going beyond Hughes's
assertion that the "gaming of the game is as important as the game," Beresin
suggests that in a variety of ways the larger community also affects what
occurs in the game (for example, commercials, school recess rules). Beresin's
use of video and audio recording reveals a host of contingencies beyond the
text that are relevant to the life of the game in an urban elementary-school
playground. In short, Beresin's study demonstrates the intricate ways in
which a game functions in the context of playground space and the players'
age, gender, and ethnic grouping, and how the commercial world and the
school's rules enter from the outside, thus having their own influence on what
goes on. Once again games are not so separate from life as has often been
suggested.
What is remarkable about Fine's overview is first his enunciation of
a series of principles of ethical procedure (informed consent, credit to in-
formants, lack of deception, lack of harm to subjects) and then his pursuit
of examples, many of which some readers will find controversial. With an
admirable openness Fine details his own ad hoc responses on a number of
difficult questions, and we are left with a clear impression that when one is
attempting to gather the often arcane and antithetical lore of children, the
phenomena of racism, obscenity, cruelty, gifts, and gender can arise and leave
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? ? the researchers in a highly ambiguous position between wanting to uphold
public morality and retaining the confidence of their informants. Not every-
one will agree with the "solutions" that Fine adopts here, but we can ap-
plaud his courage in telling us about them, and we can realize that these are
very real problems because children's folklore is often about culturally an-
tithetical matters. Subject matter that might be incidental to orthodox so-
cialization research can be central to children's folklore and cause ethical
problems perhaps beyond neat solution.
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? ?
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? ? 4 DOUBLE DUTCH
AND DOUBLE CAMERAS
STUDYING THE TRANSMISSION OF CULTURE
IN AN URBAN SCHOOL YARD
Ann Richman Beresin
It can be said that within the children's game lies an entire cosmos. For Jean
Piaget, the study of marbles uncovered the wrestlings of the moral judgments
of the child. For Brian Sutton-Smith, the flexibility of children's games re-
vealed play itself as a process of invention and reversal. For John McDowell,
the riddle texts unfolded an array of themes reflecting that of the children's
lives as a whole. (Piaget 1965; Sutton-Smith 1976b; McDowell 1979). This
paper will examine the complex world of double dutch jump rope as prac-
ticed and performed by third- through fifth-grade girls in an urban, public,
working-class, racially integrated elementary school yard in Pennsylvania.
It will be argued here that the study of the game reveals complex, overlap-
ping cultural worlds, and that if we can attune our eyes to the game beyond
the basic game text, that the potential meaning of such study goes beyond
the collection of interesting rhymes.
Unlike the classic studies of jump-rope rhymes which have privileged
the texts of the rhymes over their actions (Abrahams 1969; Butler 1989;
Delamar 1983; Gomme 1894; Newell 1883), in this paper I seek to explore
the interaction around the game in addition to its texts, and to examine its
relationship to the specific context of the urban school yard. I suggest not
only that the school yard shapes the game-and it is indeed inseparable from
it-but that the privileging of game texts by collectors of children's folklore
has been directly related to the available methodologies for folk-game study.
Rhymes and songs were written down by observers of children, and these
rhymes were then compared with older rhymes and rhymes from different
regions in order to examine cultural uniqueness and distribution. It was not
until recently that the invention of the audio tape recorder enabled the stu-
dent of games to capture verbal nuances, cadence, and rhythm, thus allow-
ing for the preservation of detail beyond the mere text.
Although it is hard to imagine folk song collectors today not using a
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? ? tape recorder to capture the details of song, the use of visual media in game
study is virtually untapped. Like dance ethnography, the study of folk games
could greatly benefit from the preservation of actual game performances on
film or videotape, in order to examine the game in its rapid-fire detail, and
then, perhaps most significantly, to replay the game for the participants to
get their expert views.
Prior to the use of audio and video equipment, students of children's
folklore made use of historical documentation and oral history to extract
meaning from rhymes and games. The Opies' extensive use of written docu-
mentation and Sutton-Smith's vast collection of oral history around folk
games have emphasized the shifting temporal context of the games (Opie
and Opie 1959, 1969; Sutton-Smith 1981a). Although collections from
Gomme to the Opies have included musical notation in singing games, the
jump-rope literature has, to this day, typically emphasized the poetic meter,
and done so sparingly, leaving the impression that jumping rope was some-
thing one does perhaps sitting down with one's mouth (Butler 1989). The
first in-depth interactionist study of the game of jump rope is Goodwin's
1985 article "The Serious Side of Jump Rope: Conversation Practices and
Social Organization in the Frame of Play," which, by using audiotaped tran-
scripts of talk around the games, allowed for the capturing of variation in
actual rope games as they were performed in the streets of Philadelphia. Al-
though still emphasizing the verbal interaction around the game and imply-
ing that the game of rhythmic foot work, known as jump rope, was prima-
rily a verbal art, this provided a step into the study of the game as more than
fixed text. Goodwin's study demonstrated that the game was a framework,
as Bateson and also Goffman have suggested, for other kinds of dramas
(Bateson 1972; Goffman 1959, 1974). For more on the significance of the
inclusion of the larger social context and folk interaction, see Bauman 1982;
Briggs 1988; and Kendon 1990.
The majority of the folk-game literature can be said to be either a mi-
cro or a macro survey, leaving us with often uncomparable details, as
Schwartzman has noted, or acontextual lists of separate events, as is popu-
lar in the general books on American children's folklore (Bronner 1988;
Knapp and Knapp 1976; Schwartzman 1978). For years the historical com-
parative methodology when used in combination with fieldwork provided
the only way to merge the two perspectives. But, given our relative access
to the technology of wide-angle and close-up footage, this is no longer the
case. Rivka Eifermann's massive study of Israeli Arab and Jewish children's
games serves as perhaps the closest prevideographic model of combined
micro and macro study; she utilized hundreds of simultaneous observers
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? ? within the same play area. (Eifermann 1971, 1979). In this manner
Eifermann was able to amass a wealth of detail in survey form and to com-
pare children of different social classes, locales, and ethnicities. Although the
published versions of her study do not illuminate the important details of
the folk games within its survey, it stands as a marker in the careful exami-
nation of the meaning of children's games in the larger culture.
THE USE OF FILM AND VIDEO
Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead pioneered the use of film in Learning
to Dance in Bali, as they captured the nonverbal stylistics of a cross-cultural
dance lesson. Reels of unedited film recorded the instruction of cultural
forms. Film documentary, which by definition is an edited process of graphic
storytelling, has its own fascinating history, but what is relevant here is not
the use of film and video as storyteller, but rather as presenter of art forms.
Helen Schwartzman's encyclopedic text Transformations: The Anthro-
pology of Children's Play includes in its final pages a listing of ethnographic
films, ranging from Bateson's own 1954 film of river otters at play to Bess
Lomax Hawes and Robert Eberlein's Pizza Pizza Daddyo in 1969, a film
about a special performance of favorite African American singing games. It
is in these films that the details and nuances of the games emerge, and the
texts can be placed in perspective, as verbal expressions of bodily forms.
What is being proposed in this paper is the use of film or video as
witnessing or documentation, so that when a game is described in transcrip-
tion or in actual videographic presentation we can see the phenonemon
being discussed. Unfortunately, this chapter is itself limited to the paper
medium, but with careful description of a few minutes of actual footage,
it is hoped that the reader will begin to see and hear details of the game.
As microethnographers Adam Kendon and Frederick Erickson advocate,
through the use of such documentation we can begin to be more consistent
about our study of social phenomenon, in this case the cultural transmis-
sion of folkgames, and build upon a collection of real cases involving real
human beings (Kendon 1979; Erickson and Wilson 1982). We have the
possibility of checking them, and rechecking them, long after the fieldwork
is over, in slow motion and in fast forward, with sound on and sound
off, to see things not possible in the quick blur of the moment. And we have
the possibility of the local experts sharing their specific insights on their
own folk process, well after the moment of concentration is past. The very
field of children's folklore expands before us, and it has the potential to
become the study of children's cultures and folklife, in all its richness and
complexity.
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? ? DOUBLE CAMERAS
When this author set out to study the games and rituals of one multiethnic
working-class school yard in 1991, it became clear that one pair of eyes
would not be sufficient to capture the details or the larger boundaries of
school-yard interaction. In the summer months, the principal of the Mill
School was approached for general permission to spend time at the daily fif-
teen-minute recess periods, and eventually to use audio and video record-
ers. Permission was granted, as no individuals were being targeted in the
study, and student anonymity was assured. General information letters were
sent in the fall to one class in each of the third, fourth, and fifth grades on
which the fieldwork was based. In mid-fall, a stationary videocamera was
placed in a second-floor window facing the school yard, and set on a wide
angle. This was done to capture the basic traffic zones and play spaces, and
as an aid in the locating of field observations within the larger picture. The
principal was supportive and accepted such a plan, as the individual faces
were obscured, and he, too, was curious to learn what kinds of interaction
were occurring. Recess had been canceled by his predecessor out of fear of
school-yard violence, and the status of recess time was uncertain. Such docu-
mentation, to be shared with him and his staff at the end of the year in re-
port form, was of interest and had policy implications.
On the first day of school, daily nonparticipant observation fieldnotes
were written, and it was not until rapport was firmly established with the chil-
dren and staff that audiotaping commenced. From January to May, daily
audiotapes were made, overtly, with many texts collected, rules explained,
interactions noted, and nonverbal information described. It was not until May
that the researcher felt ready to ask the children if a mobile video camera could
be set up on the school yard to record their games directly. A deep rapport had
developed by that time, and their response was universally positive. They were
quite excited, as it had been our agreement that they could see themselves on
video later in the month. At that time, they were to tell me what they thought
about the games they played. Small group interviews with the three classes
under study had been conducted since the beginning of the year, so this would
be another round of interviewing, also considered a pleasant task.
In sum, the methodology included ongoing small group interviews,
daily fieldwork, gradual inclusion of audio recording, seasonal wide-angled
videotaping from the second-floor window, eventual close-up or micro-video
footage, and then the presentation of samples of the footage to the partici-
pants. A total of thirty-three videotapes were recorded, covering twenty-seven
days of recess. Nineteen tapes of wide-angled footage were made, and four-
teen tapes of close-up micro footage were made. Fifty-one days of live au-
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? ? diotape were also recorded.
One hundred and four third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade boys and girls
were observed, audiotaped, and videotaped during recess. Forty-seven chil-
dren served as native experts and provided their own commentary as they
watched themselves at play on videotape. Occasionally younger and older
children were included in the taping process, if they were part of a game being
studied and played by the core participants.
Although not the first study to utilize videotaped games of children
in this manner, this study is among few to share the footage with its partici-
pants in this age group (see also Sutton-Smith and Magee's "Reversible Child-
hood" [1989a], on the use of reflexive video ethnography with young chil-
dren). Although this is not the first study to examine school-yard games and
the transmission of culture in one place (See Parrott 1972; Sluckin 1981; Hart
1993), it is unique in its deliberate emphasis on a public, multiethnic school.
Studies of urban play, such as Dargan's and Zeitlin's extensive photo essay
City Play (1990), capture bits of the cultural crossover visible in urban street
games, but in the following transcriptions we can see it emerge in the school-
yard games themselves. Such cultural crossover is significant in the light of
the emphasis on school desegregation so important to the American public-
school system, and in the light of the potential elimination of recess as school
policy (Sutton-Smith 1990b).
Several games were studied in this larger exploration of the folklore
of the 1991-92 Mill School yard, including the games of the third- through
fifth-grade boys. This paper, however, will serve as a window to the specific
game worlds of the double dutch players. (For a complete view of the larger
study, which includes handball, folk basketball, hopscotch, step dancing, and
play fighting, see Beresin 1993. ) Double dutch was perhaps the chief peer-led
activity for African American girls at the Mill School, and provided a perfor-
mance focus for a mobile audience of both girls and boys in the school yard.
DOUBLE DUTCH
A fast-paced, polyrhythmic jump-rope style, double dutch utilizes two ropes,
typically turned inwards, egg beater fashion, by two girls who have "the
ends," while a single jumper executes specific steps to a specific song or
chant. It is almost exclusively an African American girls' tradition in urban
Pennsylvania, and has been virtually ignored in the jump-rope literature.
There has been so little written on double dutch in the folklore literature,
and in the collections of African American folklore, that it could even have
been said to be skipped over.
Singing game and street game collections like those of the Opies have
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? ? described larger game traditions but excluded rope singing. American
children's folklore, as in the works of Bronner and Knapp and Knapp, have
homogenized the ethnicity of their young experts and have given us only
single rope traditions; the African American collections of general folklore
have rarely even mentioned the lore of young girls (Kochman 1972; Jack-
son 1967; Whitten and Szwed 1982). With the exception of Jones's and
Hawes's Step It Down (1972) and Black Girls at Play (1975) by Bauman,
Eckhardt, and Brady, the games of African American girls have been ren-
dered practically invisible, and these collections have examined only the step-
ping and clapping forms. Abrahams's Jump-Rope Rhymes: A Dictionary
(1969), a text called "the most thorough recent compilation of these (jump
rope) rhymes for English-speaking children" (Schwartzman 1978, 36), lists
a handful of articles relevant to double dutch, but, with the exception of his
own useful 1963 article, all deal with it only in passing.
Even when only a single rope was available-it was typically one
brought by a child from home-it was utilized in the style and steps of double
dutch. Two girls hold the ends and turn for the girl who is jumping, and
often it is expected that one must turn for someone before getting the chance
to jump. Occasionally the "double Irish" or "double orange" style of rope
turning was observed; that is the term for the turning of the ropes outward,
egg beater style. This method was considered more difficult and sometimes
occurred by accident when the turners changed direction. More typically,
there would be two turners rapidly turning the rope inward, left, right, left,
right, swaying rhythmically to the slapping beat as the rope brushed the
ground. The jumper would dance the steps associated with the song or
rhyme, and a group of singers, ranging from the turners to nonparticipants
to would-be participants, would dance a minimal version of the game in
place. This was considered both a fun thing to do while you await your turn,
as well as a chance to practice the sequence.
The game was competitive, with jumpers vying to be the one who
could not only stay in the ropes the longest but could progress the furthest
in the particular rhyme. Someone would shout "She got foot" or "She got
turn. " And one would often hear the cry of "Saved! " or "Saved by one! "
meaning that the person shouting had progressed farther than the jumper
who had just tripped on the turning rope. Steps were parodied, styles imi-
tated, and occasionally corrected in order to ensure that the jumper did the
job right. Turners could be accused of turning too rapidly, or of intention-
ally "flicking" the rope to make it more difficult, and high-status
jumpers,usually the more skilled fifth and sixth graders, claimed first jumps,
while the younger, less experienced players would be the turners. The chance
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? ? to jump first, and if one was skilled, stay in the spotlight, was often called
long before the game started, in the hallway, in the classroom, or at the end
of one round for the round the next recess.
Double Dutch Style
Count 2 turns
left hand
clockwise
Count 1 turn
right hand
clockwise
ouble Dutch Style Count 2 turns
right hand
clockwise
Count 1 turn
left hand
clockwise
Immigrant Chinese and Haitian girls, representing a small minority
of this officially racially desegregated school, also occasionally did individual,
single jump rope. Two Chinese girls sometimes jumped in two parallel ropes
and, in their own ropes, looped circles around each other, sort of a couple
dance while jumping. The Haitian girls sometimes jumped with a second girl
in the same small rope, either face to face or back to front. Regardless of
form or ethnicity, jump rope was almost always competitive, either by en-
durance, elaborateness of steps, or frequency of turns.
The European American girls would often be observers of the double
dutch games, and on only rare occasions do individual ropes themselves.
When they did so they would compete to see which of them could jump the
most times. They would not sing or chant, just count the number of con-
tinuous jumping steps. One girl was up to 230 and still jumping. Unlike the
African American girls, who stayed in one place or rotated their positions
slightly to be out of the bright sun, or the immigrant girls, who stayed in
one place with their individual ropes, the European American girls did a
running jump rope step and would, one at a time, run around the entire yard
counting. Like their hand-clap games, which were also done to numbers or
counting, the European American girls had clearly distilled their games and
no longer had an active jump-rope singing tradition at this school. The sing-
ing jump rope game, and for that matter the singing hand-clapping game,
had become predominantly an African American tradition.
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? ? Many double dutch songs included the same sequence of steps or
commands: foot, bounce, hop, turn, criss (crossing), clap, with "foot" or
"footin" being the basic right, left, right, left running step over the quickly
turning ropes.
