His most recent work in children's folklore, The Folkstories of Children b , however, departs from games and play and turns instead to narrative, using a phenomenological approach radically different from that of previous studies. Speech Play: Research and Resources for the Study of Linguistic Creativity , edited by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, is an extensive in- vestigation of the application of linguistics to the study of children's verbal lore.
In conclusion, we see that the field of children's folklore is interdisciplinary, depending heavily on cross-cultural, comparative systems that have been worked out through generations of research. Folklorists have stayed in the research forefront because their discipline is the best for documentation and analysis of traditional materials of all kinds. Even so, folklorists have not abdicated their responsibility to the enrichment of knowledge just because the subject matter happens to concern children.
Specialists throughout the world are continuing to document and investigate the traditions of childhood in an attempt to understand this integral aspect of our common cultural heritage. It approaches that question through two reviews of the field of children's folklore. The first, by Zumwalt, is about the history of the concept of the child; the second, by McDowell, is about the way in which folklore gets transmitted.
In order to set these chapters in context some further remarks on the history of childhood are needed. In recent scholarship the notion has become widespread that childhood is a modern and invented concept. This brilliant idea, attributed to Philippe Aries, has had a powerful impact on the recognition of how relative many of our current twentieth-century ideas about childhood are, although many historians have been dubious about the simplicity of the picture that Aries has drawn Wilson What does seem worth stressing is that, with the industrial revolution, children became increasingly separated from the work world and gradually accrued more and more markers as a distinctive subcultural group.
Their acquisition of special clothes, special literatures, and special toys, particularly in the late seventeenth century, is taken by some historians as evidence of a change toward a special status L. Stone Over the next two hundred years a series of steps brought this group into coordination with the rest of the sociopolitical system. Universal schooling was introduced, and, in our own century, the everincreasing organization of children's recreational time, at first through games and sports and subsequently through television and the mass marketing of toys.
Through these two hundred years children also organized themselves, within a variety of subcultures of street and playground and neighborhood see chapters by Mechling, Mergen, and Beresin. As they became free from apprenticeships in village and town, they roamed their neighborhoods and streets, both exploring and engaging in the traditional pastimes, once shared by all ages, related to the seasons and the festivals that characterized life in the Middle Ages. Thus the children in children's folklore were a group disenfranchised from the economic machine by the events of the industrial revolution; they then reconstituted themselves as a distinct subculture, associating themselves with such leisure activities as had already been prevalent in their own societies.
They took upon themselves the traditional leisure-time customs that they could reconstitute according to their own more elementary capacities, gradually honing them down to the kind of dimensions with which we are now familiar. Complex adult sports, such as Prisoner's Base, which is said to have been a popular adult game of the s, were abandoned for the simpler versions, such as King on the Mountain; the more complex linear forms of Nuts and May were given up for the simpler circular pleasures of Farmer and the Dell Sutton-Smith b.
For some hundred or so years these traditions have persisted in childhood, while the adults of modern society have gradually adopted the spectator activities and massparticipation forms that have become the leisure culture of modern society R. Williams Children, still a distinctive group in most respects, de- spite some claims to the contrary Postman have increasingly found an antithesis in mass cultural phenomena parodies of commercials, distinc-' tive play with Barbie dolls, topical graffiti, rhymes, etc.
This brief description is a considerable over-simplification of the great changes that have taken place in Western civilization and the distinctive role of children in those changes.
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It may serve, however, as a corrective to the notion that children's folklore has always been the same and is of a universal character. That is unqualifiedly not the case. The concept of childhood varies not only historically but also anthropologically, and, as children's status varies within different groups, so does their distinctive subcultural traditions. In most respects child subculture is not different from any other subculture. A group that senses itself to be distinct usually develops characteristic customs and ceremonies, many of which express opposition to those of the hegemonious surrounding culture.
In these terms children's folklore is the product of a kind of generational subculture instigated by a society that requires quasi-dependence and quasi-independence in the young. But whatever the larger economic and sociological processes, philosophical reactions to this process have led to many other and often contrary descriptions of this novel subculture. Some descriptions attribute subordinate qualities to the child group, such as primitive, prelogical, synaesthetic, atavistic, irrational, and disenfranchised; these are characteristics that until recently have been thought to be shared with savages and women.
Sometimes this innocence carries with it the moral power attributed to childhood by Rousseau, and sometimes it carries the bowdlerized fancifulness so characteristic of much twentieth-century children's literature. Childhood as discontinuous from adulthood comes to be used as a projective screen for either aspiration or despair Covenay These issues are central to the chapter by Zumwalt, in which she contrasts some of these older views of children, as savage or innocent or simple, with her own discoveries of their actual complexity.
She contrasts the ideal and the real behavior of girls who are on the one hand portraying themselves in their playas obedient, domestic, and romantic and yet, at the same time, often covertly, also portraying themselves as sexually provocative, manipulative, scheming, and rebellious. She opens up the issue of what Fine b has called Newall's paradox-how it is that children can have such a reputation as creatures of tradition, as conservers of child culture, and at the same time be known for their innovative fantasies and novel behaviors. Zumwalt's emphasis on these complexities calls into question the more simplistic notions of childhood that often prevail.
In Grider's earlier chapter we have already seen that some major scholars have always seen children's folklore as a conservative event Gomme, Opie whereas others have reckoned it an innovative Douglas or changing historical series of events Sutton-Smith a. In his chapter John McDowell attempts a reconciliation of these differences in terms of a modern "performance" theory of cultural transmission. Children, he says, have reason for conserving some folklore elements because they are partially appropriate to their needs or are particularly satisfying aesthetically.
Other elements, however, do not meet those needs, or are changed because of childish perceptions, fantasies, ambivalences, rebelliousness, misunderstanding, or creativity. There is an interesting conceptual transition between chapters one and three that is not unlike the transition that folklore has itself undergone in this century.
Grider expresses some of the traditional concerns of the field: origins, cultural survivals, the tenacity of tradition on the one hand and lamentations over its disappearance on the other. Zumwalt advocates putting aside these ideas, in which the child is compared with the savage, and suggests instead a focus on the meaning of folklore to the children who engage in it. Her concern is a combination of psychogenic functionalism Wolfenstein , sociogenic functionalism Malinowski , linguistic structuralism McDowell , and social structuralism Goodwin after Goffman.
Whether this approach be described as anthropology, ethnography, or discourse analysis, it has been among the major "semantics" within which folk21 lore has been construed in the past fifty years. McDowell on the other hand, with his focus on the child player as a performer constantly generating his play material as an emergent function of his own limitations, perceptions, and strengths; his ambivalences, phonic subversions and parodies; as a function of the utility and aesthetic value of the material to the performer as well as a function of his response to the group; is highlighting concepts about folklore as performance, as contingent "activation," which have had more appeal in recent theorizing.
There is in McDowell, however, as much of a romantic attachment to the generating power of the young performers as there is in, say, the Opies to the constancy of their texts and the continuity of historical materials. They seek the universal and the constant; he seeks the specific and the emergent. McDowell gives sufficient examples to set the stage for a study that will seek to distinguish the genres of the durable from those that are ephemeral, and to seek accounts of those differences in terms of place, historical circumstances, and the special character of the players.
While this is undoubtedly a valid quest, in recent play studies by Meckley it has been discovered that among preschoolers the two phases are virtually indistinguishable Studying and video-taping the play behavior of twelve four-year-old children over a six-month period, she discovered that while some children were more innovative than others, whatever they invented immediately became a tradition for all of the children in the groupnot just the ones that had initiated the play. So that when a group of children played what had been the game of another group, they always repeated it largely in the way it was done before.
What was amazing was how much shared knowledge there was across this group of children of the play forms of all the other children.
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Admittedly, just as only a minority were strong innovators, there was also a minority who seldom knew what was going on. This led to the generalization that as innovation hit the ground it immediately crystallized so that everyone knew how to continue it. That is, play no sooner appeared in their group life than it was ritualized so that all could participate. Play and ritual were, at this embryonic stage of play development at least, a biphasic phenomenon.
What is also particularly appealing in McDowell's account is the way in which he shows us that children sometimes go well beyond the antitheses real-ideal, mimicry-mockery, conservative-innovative, play-ritual , for example, when they engage in flights of playfulness that are a cascade of nonsense or silliness.
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The playful idiosyncratic content is often so bizarre it could never be conserved even if the performance of being bizarre does itself become a ritualized kind of nonsense within the playing group. Why do you think it's funny?
What do you call it? They would, after the weeks passed, bear this with strained patience. With their heads cocked to one side and their eyes narrowed, they would answer, "I didn't learn it from anybody. I made it up!
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It's funny, that's all! Now, years later, as I look back at this initial study of children's folklore Zumwalt , , I am struck with the richness the children were offering me. At the time, the rhythm, the lyrics, and the image captivated me.
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I focused on symbol, the ideal little girl in folklore. And I emphasized tradition, the creation and continuity of this image.
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I likened it to the formation of stalactites, the concentrated accretion over centuries, a drop at a time, forming a multifaceted image. The ideal little girl in folklore could, according to the refraction of light from her crystalline image, shine with innocence, glitter with enticement, or gleam with lust.
The ideal little girl was present in the folklore, and she was important. Yet, coupled with this ideal little girl portrayed in the texts was the real little girl who performed the jump-rope songs: I am a Pretty Little Dutch Girl All dressed in blue. And these are the things I like to do: Salute to the captain.