Their
theories
accounting for Mairchen as broken-down Indo-European
myths are perhaps the main fruit of this orientation.
myths are perhaps the main fruit of this orientation.
Childens - Folklore
In the conclusion to the chapter on "The Inven-
tiveness of Children," he remarks that the majority of children's games have
existed for centuries with "formulas which have been passed from genera-
tion to generation. " "How," Newell asks, "are we to reconcile this fact with
the quick inventiveness we ascribe to children? " (Newell 1963, 27). The in-
ventiveness, Newell tells us, yields localized games-the fantasy play of the
lone child, the "gibberish" of a group of children-which fade when inter-
est lags. Traditional games have passed the test of time-they have survived-
because they have an appeal broader than that of passing innovation: "The
old games, which have prevailed and become familiar by a process of natu-
ral selection, are usually better adapted to children's taste than any new in-
ventions can be; they are recommended by the quaintness of formulas which
come from the remote past, and strike the young imagination as a sort of
sacred law" (Newell 1963, 27). In his notes to the first edition, Newell
singled out the emphasis on tradition in his work: "It is devoted to formu-
las of play which children have preserved from generation to generation,
without intervention, often without the knowledge of older minds" (Newell
1963, i). Newell found "something so agreeable in this inheritance of thought
kept up by childhood itself" (Newell 1963, 12). The imminent disappear-
ance of these rhymes is "a thousand pities" (Newell 1963, 12).
One might caution here against an overly arbitrary division between
inventiveness and conservatism. While Newell posits a division between these
two types of play, children do not-for is it not possible to play a traditional
game with innovation, to chant rhymes centuries old with fantasy of the
moment? Thus even these two forces in children's folklore twine together
in complex interplay. As one individual in her reading of my work has
pointed out, "Innovation has also survived the test of time. " Just as chil-
dren share in traditional games, so they share in fantasy play. In this sense,
innovation has the same depth in children's folklore as tradition. It was
present in the past, it adds intricacies to the traditional games of the mo-
ment, and it will remain a force in the culture of childhood.
Yet still in accord with Newell on this point, might we find "some-
thing so agreeable" in the tradition of children's folklore, and something so
pleasing in the creativity? The challenge is to broaden our grasp, to encom-
pass the complexity of children's folklore-to reach for the text and the con-
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? ? text, the ideal and the real, the tradition and the creativity. Still, in our en-
deavor to encircle all this, we must not expect fully to succeed. There is the
magical in children's folklore that will never be captured. And here we might
learn from the anthropologist who went to Dublin, Ireland, to study a lep-
rechaun. In 1957, as the story goes, a mechanic from the Vauxhall Factory
captured a leprechaun in Phoenix Park. People came from all over to see the
leprechaun, and among these was the anthropologist. For four or five days,
the anthropologist observed the leprechaun. On the fifth day, the leprechaun
took on the appearance of a tiny, shriveled root and died. 23 So with children's
folklore, the voice on the wind, the creativity of the moment, cannot be fully
captured. The fluid world of the child eludes the static state of the printed
word. Their mirthful nature will not be pinned down by our sobriety. That
is fair; it is part of the rules of the game. The children have, after all, warned
us that they do it all "just for the fun of it! "
NOTES TO CHAPTER Two
1. Darwin's twentieth-century descendants in the social sciences are wont to
connect Social Darwinism with others. John Friedl in The Human Portrait says, "Al-
though Darwin did not mean for his theory of evolution to be applied to human so-
cial and cultural change, it was proposed by many social scientists that cultures evolved
in a struggle for survival, just as animals did. This doctrine, inappropriately called 'so-
cial Darwinism,' was ultimately used to justify white supremacist policies of Western
nations . . . " (Friedl 1981, 116). In spite of Friedl's sympathetic interpretation of
Darwin's work, Darwin did not wait for others to create social Darwinism. The seeds
were present in Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the
Countries Visited During the Voyage of H. M. S. Beagle Round the World (1852). It
blossomed in his masterwork, On the Origin of Species (1859), and took firm root in
Descent of Man (1871). It is well to keep in mind the reality of our historical ante-
cedents in theory. For a discussion of the Forerunners of Darwin: 1745-1859, see
Bentley Glass 1968.
2. The cultural evolutionary orientation was opposed to the theory of
degenerationism. Archbishop Whately, the major advocate of the latter theory, repre-
sented the savage as the end point of the fall from grace. From this perspective, to pro-
pose an evolution from savagery was blasphemy. There could be no development from
the savage state, since that ran counter to the biblical account of creation. The savage
represents not the childhood of the race but the depths of degradation. For a detailed
discussion of the theory of degenerationism, see Margaret Hodgen's Doctrine of Sur-
vivals (1936). For a discussion of evolutionary theory, see Frederick Teggart's Theory
and Processes of History (1977 [1941]), and Kenneth Bock's Acceptance of Histories
(1958). See also Dundes's "Devolutionary Premise in Folklore Theory" (1969a).
3. Karl Pearson (1897) Chances of Death, London: Edward Arnold.
2:53-54.
4. Alice Bertha Gomme's two-volume work, The Traditional Games of En-
gland, Scotland and Ireland, was originally published as part one of George Laurence
Gomme's intended but not completed Dictionary of British Folklore. Volume 1 was
published in 1894; Volume 2, in 1898. The Dover edition is an unabridged republi-
cation of this important work. See Dorothy Howard's introduction to the Dover edi-
tion for remarks on Lady Alice's cultural evolutionary theory.
5. Alice Bertha Gomme's treatment of "Round and Round the Village" is an
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? ? example of her thorough scholarship. First she presents the music, then she provides
nineteen versions with informant and geographic designations. There follows a descrip-
tion of how the game is played with accompanying diagrams. Lady Alice includes di-
rections for each version. She then provides a four-page chart that lists the segments
of the rhyme with coordinates for geographical area and version. This facilitates what
she refers to as the analysis of the game rhymes. And finally she discusses the game in
relation to the custom of perambulation of boundaries, with citations to other perti-
nent sources. This is just one game in her two-volume work, which considers more
than two hundred games.
6. For differing interpretations of Aarne-Thompson Tale Type 328, "Jack and
the Beanstalk," see Humphrey Humphreys's "Jack and the Beanstalk" (1965 [1948],
103-6); William H. Desmonde's "Jack and the Beanstalk" (1965 [1951], 107-9); and
Martha Wolfenstein's "Jack and the Beanstalk: An American Version" (1955, 100-
113). For the solar mythological approach, see the summary of Angelo De Gubernatis's
interpretation in Dorson (1955). All of the foregoing articles are reprinted in Dundes's
Study of Folklore. See also Dundes's "Projection in Folklore: A Plea for Psychoana-
lytic Semiotics" (1976a, 1510-11).
7. For an examination of the origin theory as it relates to narrative, see Brian
Sutton-Smith's "The Origins of Fictions and the Fictions of Origin," American Eth-
nological Society Proceedings, 1984, 117-32. In relationship to cultural evolutionary
theory, it might be that a culture has a simple technology, but that is not the same as
a simple cognitive system. The Australian aborigines-who from the nineteenth cen-
tury to the present have been the choice of the evolutionary anthropologists as the sim-
plest, most primitive culture-do, indeed, have a simple stone-tool technology. But they
have a kinship system so complex that it is a point of dispute still among kinship ex-
perts as to how to describe it. The result of the myriad of ethnographies written dur-
ing the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries has been to present the complexity of
cultures; and this complexity is apparent even though the cultures might be described
in these same ethnographies as simple, savage, or primitive.
8. See Dundes's foreword to the 1978 edition of Children's Humor for an ap-
praisal of Martha Wolfenstein's contributions.
9. In the winter of 1971, I began a collection of jump-rope and hand-clapping
songs that I gathered from children at an elementary school and from children living
in an apartment complex in Santa Cruz, California. One year later, I broadened the
scope of the project to include the children in two other elementary schools. At this
point, I was still limiting my search to jump-rope and hand-clapping songs. Then, as
serendipity would have it, I recorded some "nasty jokes" from my three major infor-
mants. As I listened to the jokes, I heard the same message threading through the jokes
that bound together the jump-rope and hand-clapping songs. From that point on, I
attempted to study the full gamut of children's folklore.
10. Collected from a six-year-old Caucasian girl in Santa Cruz, California,
February 1971. The informant had learned this two years earlier when she attended
school on the Navajo reservation in Window Rock, Arizona. She used it as a jump-
rope song and she said that the girl jumping rope ran out on the last line.
11. Collected from an eight-year-old Caucasian girl in Santa Cruz, California,
in 1971.
12. Collected from a six-year-old Caucasian girl in Santa Cruz, California, in
1971.
13. Collected from an eight-year-old Caucasian girl in Santa Cruz, California,
in 1971.
14. I used this rhyme to taunt my older sisters when I was a child growing up
in Napa, California, in the 1950s. I also heard it chanted endlessly by my informants
in Santa Cruz, California, in 1971-72.
15. Collected from a six- and an eight-year-old Caucasian girl in Santa Cruz,
California, in 1971. The two learned this from an eight-year-old boy.
46 THE COMPLEXITY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
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? ? 16. Collected from a ten-year-old black girl in Santa Cruz, California, in 1972.
17. I performed this rhyme with my two sisters when we were young. The two
participants join hands and swing their arms back and forth on the first two lines.
On the last line, they attempt to twist around, back-to-back, while still holding hands.
A favorite time to perform this was at the kitchen sink while doing the dishes.
18. I learned this as a child; I also collected a version in 1983 in Columbia,
South Carolina, that is exactly the same, except that the baby is urged to eat "like a
lamb. "
19. Collected from an eight-year-old Caucasian girl in Santa Cruz, California,
in 1972. The rhyme is performed to accompanying pelvic thrusts. On the first "la,"
the pelvis is thrust to the right; on the second, to the front; and on the third, to the
left. As my nine-year-old informant said, "On 'boom dee ay,' you stick your butt out
in the back. " The final word, "underwear," is executed with a pelvic thrust to the front.
20. The tradition and continuity in children's folklore is illustrated in The Lore
and Language of Schoolchildren. Iona and Peter Opie record several versions of the
jump-rope song "Not Last Night but the Night Before," spanning the years from 1835
to 1959. (See Opie and Opie 1959, 23. ) Clearly in their examples, variation does oc-
cur in the text, but the overall form remains intact throughout the years.
21. Gary Alan Fine refers to the dual concerns of conservatism and innova-
tion as "Newell's paradox. " Fine suggests a partial resolution for the division of these
two forces. This involves viewing children's folklore from three analytical perspectives.
In the first (which he calls thematype analysis), the folklore is analyzed according to
theme or structure. In the second (which he calls ecotype analysis), the folklore is ana-
lyzed according to the social environment. And in the third (egotype analysis), the
performance of the folklore is highlighted. Fine notes, "Any item of folklore can be
analyzed from any and all perspectives, although most folklore approaches focus on
only one" (Fine 1980d, 180).
22. For a Japanese version of pig latin, see Thomas W. Johnson (1975, 232-
33) See also Berkovits's "Secret Languages of Schoolchildren" (1970).
23. Folklore Archives, University of California, Berkeley. Collected by Susan
Rush from Penola Campbell in Oakland, California. The informant first heard this
legend in 1968 when she was living in Ireland; it was told to her by her husband, who
had lived all his life in Dublin.
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? ?
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? ? 3 THE TRANSMISSION
OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
John H. McDowell
The transmission of children's folklore naturally falls within the broader
question of the transmission of folklore in general. Every conceptualization
of folklore must contain a theory, whether explicit or implicit, regarding the
transmission of folklore, since folklore is universally recognized as an inher-
ently social phenomenon. While these issues have not always received the
attention they deserve, folkloristic theories of transmission nonetheless
abound in the literature. To gain a grasp on these theories, I suggest the fol-
lowing two categories: theories viewing folklore transmission as a
superorganic, mechanical process; and theories emphasizing its serendipitous
and emergent character.
Folklore transmission viewed as a mechanical process figures promi-
nently in those theories of folklore taking their inspiration from the philo-
logical roots of our discipline. Jakob Grimm, in his studies of Germanic and
Indo-European languages, identified systematic laws of phonological shift
that operate, for all intents and purposes, outside the immediate arena of
concrete speech events. The Grimm brothers considered folklore "only a
higher and freer speech of mankind," and hypothesized that laws similar to
sound shift laws could be discovered to account for the persistence of tradi-
tional items and their variants through time and space (see Crane 1918).
Their theories accounting for Mairchen as broken-down Indo-European
myths are perhaps the main fruit of this orientation. The realm defined by
their compelling aphorism, das Volk dichtet, "the people, as a whole, com-
poses poetry" (Kittredge and Sargent 1904), transcends the sphere of
grounded human interaction.
This superorganic orientation persists in the work of the historic-geo-
graphic folklore scholars. Kaarle Krohn (1971, 98) argues that "it is the
mechanical laws of thought and imagination that prevail in the rich varia-
tion of oral tradition. " In a sequence of chapters entitled "The Influence of
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? ? Faulty Memory," "The Impulse Toward Expansion," and "Laws of Trans-
formation," Krohn discusses a series of "laws of thought" capable of pro-
ducing the observed differences among variants of a migratory folklore item.
But these laws are strictly conjectural, founded on the examination of texts,
rather than on the examination of living folkloristic "cultures. " Folklore
transmission, in this frame of reference, becomes an impersonal process to
be inferred and reconstructed on the basis of exclusively philological evi-
dence. The status of these "laws of thought" is quite analogous to that of
Grimm's laws of consonant shift, founded on the impersonal forces of lan-
guage change.
Krohn sought to embody the "mechanical laws of thought and imagi-
nation" in two models, portraying the spread of folklore materials in the
manner of waves on the water emanating from a central source of distur-
bance, and in the manner of a stream welling forth in a certain direction.
C. W. von Sydow rejects these models, introducing elements of an alterna-
tive theory of folklore transmission. Retaining the same essential goals as
those held by Krohn, von Sydow introduces the concepts of active and pas-
sive bearers, mutation, and oicotypification. "The dissemination of a tale,"
von Sydow contends, "is desultory to a high degree. " "Only a very small
number of active bearers of tradition equipped with a good memory, vivid
imagination, and narrative powers do transmit the tales. It is only they who
tell them. Among their audience it is only a small percentage still who actu-
ally do so. Most of those who have heard a tale told and are able to remem-
ber it, remain passive carriers of tradition, whose importance for the con-
tinued life of the tale consists mainly in their interest in hearing it told again"
(von Sydow 1965 [1948], 231).
The commitment to folkloristics as a philological inquiry is evident
in the key construction here, "the life of the tale. " Yet at the same time,
von Sydow delves beyond the impersonal forces of language and culture
drift to enfranchise the individual performers and audience members in his
general theory of folklore transmission. Krohn had spoken of bilingual
border populations, and "temporary visits by hunters, fishermen, crafts-
men, merchants, sailors, soldiers, pilgrims, and other wanderers" (Krohn
1971, 59), but von Sydow's concept of active and passive bearers locates
folklore transmission directly in the immediate context of the folklore per-
formance.
Von Sydow introduces the term mutation to refer to specific alter-
ations of narrative materials as storytellers constantly reinterpret a narra-
tive tradition. The language he uses here creates a juxtaposition between the
superorganic framework of folklore transmission, and a more situated, hu-
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? ? man-oriented approach: "An original motif may be superseded by a new
mutation, but a new mutation may also yield to the older form, being un-
able to assert itself at its expense. If a motif is particularly popular, this very
fact may induce various narrators to mutate it in different ways" (von Sydow
1971, 234). The process envisioned here is still somewhat mechanistic, yet
the term mutation admits an element of caprice, since the precise moment
and direction of a mutation cannot be foreseen with any certainty. The con-
cept of mutation presupposes recognition of the immense range of poten-
tial inherent in any act of folklore transmission.
One possible result of mutation in the folklore transmission process
is "a certain unification of the variants within one and the same linguistic
or cultural area on account of isolation from other areas," a result referred
to by von Sydow as oicotypification (von Sydow 1971, 238). He observes
that oicotypification might result "from the circumstance that one mutation
has prevailed over the rest so as to become the oicotype of the tale within
the area concerned" (von Sydow 1971, 238). In this manner, the demands
of scientific generalization are reconciled with recognition of the autonomy
of each individual instance: the individual cases, autonomous in themselves,
nonetheless are thought to pattern into configurations describable in terms
of scientific laws. In the end, von Sydow remains a voice of loyal opposi-
tion within the camp of philologically inspired folklorists.
In recent years, folklorists have developed approaches to folklore
transmission amenable to the groundwork laid in von Sydow's critique of
overly mechanistic models of transmission. The work of these scholars
readily incorporates von Sydow's notions of active and passive bearers, lo-
cating folklore transmission within finite communicative contexts, and mu-
tations, pointing to the unique, unpredictable quality of any given instance
of folklore transmission. Perhaps the key word is emergence, indicating a
fortuitous result achieved through the continuous interaction of all relevant
components in a given folklore performance. According to Richard
Bauman, "The concept of emergence is necessary to the study of perfor-
mance as a means towards comprehending the uniqueness of particular
performances within the context of performance as a generalized cultural
system in a community" (Bauman 1977a, 37). The theory of folklore trans-
mission residing in the performance-centered approach is one concerned
with "the interplay between communicative resources, individual compe-
tence, and the goals of the participants, within the context of particular
situations" (Bauman 1977a, 38).
In a theory centered on the creation and re-creation of folklore
through performance, the term transmission becomes extremely problem-
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? ? atic. The very notion of the "item" of folklore, with its demonstrable "life
history," is no longer entirely tenable. The folklore text, formerly thought
to embody the empirical foundation for folklore studies, becomes, in this
light, a pale and in many ways a misleading reflection of the performance it
purports to record (McDowell 1982).
If it is no longer possible to hold that folklore is "transmitted" in
the manner of a mechanical signal, then how are we to speak of that criti-
cal moment when folklore enters into an interactional format, finding ar-
ticulation in the speech or action of one individual, yet leaving a trace in
the short- or long-term memory of another, eventually to spring forth as a
performance that in some sense repeats the original? How are we to ac-
count for the persistence of form and content in folklore over time? And
what constraints, or patterns, can we identify in the extensive capacity of
performers to shape and reshape folkloric routines that have entered their
repertoires? These are the central issues in the construction of a modern
theory of folklore transmission, a theory intended to address the stable,
generalizable aspects of the process in question, as well as its more capri-
cious, serendipitous aspect.
The domain of children's folklore is a good place to begin formulat-
ing such a theory. The world of the child is in some sense more contained,
and thus more accessible to study, than the multifarious world of the adult.
In the child's realm, we can often specify with some precision the sources of
the routines we observe, and thereby gain a better handle on the processes
of transformation and preservation operative therein. In short, the child's
processing of folkloric materials can be taken as a microcosm of the pro-
cess of folklore transmission in general, and, as such, can provide some pro-
vocative clues of relevance both within and beyond the realm of children's
folklore.
What is it, then, that happens when one child performs a folkloric
routine in the presence of another child, or group of children? Speech act
theory, with its emphasis on perlocutionary effect (Austin 1962), would sug-
gest isolating one complete interactional node as the focus of our analysis,
but we must go one better, to incorporate the arrival of a "repeatable" mes-
sage to the position of a third individual:
child A child B child C
1 (encodes a message) 2 (decodes the message) 5 (decodes a message)
3 (processes the message)
4 (reencodes the message)
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? ? This model draws attention to five discrete moments in the process
of folklore transmission. The first moment, when child A encodes a mes-
sage, initiates a string of events culminating in the arrival of that message
to a third child, who then proceeds to decode it. Clearly, the boundaries of
this model are arbitrary, but we may nonetheless utilize it as a tool for iden-
tifying the basic structure of one finite instance of folklore transmission
among children.
STAGE ONE: CHILD A ENCODES A MESSAGE
In the initial formulation of the message, child A draws on previous experi-
ence in the world to produce a message containing the kinds of features we
identify as folkloric. While there is no consensus on this point, we can gen-
erally mention features such as provenience from a common store of com-
municative resources lying outside the official, institutional channels; pos-
sessing a formulaic quality, something I have referred to elsewhere as an ac-
cessible rhetoric (McDowell 1979); and in some way betraying a ground-
ing in the ethos of some finite, operative human community. In short, child
A produces an item of folklore.
The inspiration for this initial action need not proceed from a folk-
loric source. In many instances, children do draw on these folkloric resources,
the forms so richly documented by Opie and Opie (1959) and elsewhere.
Yet even the briefest exposure to children's folklore reveals the almost amoe-
bic ability of children to incorporate extraneous materials into their expres-
sive competencies. Along these lines, I would mention two particularly im-
portant tributaries: materials proceeding from the folkloric repertoires of
adults, yet suitable for child consumption (for example, fairy tales, riddles,
nursery rhymes, and lullabies); and materials proceeding from popular cul-
ture sources, of major importance in the expressive behavior of contempo-
rary children (Sutton-Smith 1971a).
When adult folklore or popular culture is assimilated into the realm
of children's folklore, changes take place that are most revealing of childish
attitudes and concerns. These extraneous materials undergo a sea change,
to eventually display the contours of perception and conception character-
istic of the child's mind. The distance between the original material and the
child's revamping of it thus stands as an indication of the difference between
the child's cosmology and that of the adult. Consider the following narra-
tive, produced by an eight-year-old child of Mexican descent:
Hey, you know that little girl, she had a, she had a mother but the
mother was witch, and the mother had said:
53
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? ? "Go get apples and don't give anybody one. "
So that lady had turned into a witch, and she went up there, and
she said:
"Can I have an apple? I haven't eaten for years and years. "
And she goes:
"OK. "
So that lady had eat it and turned into her mother again, and she
said:
"Didn't I tell you not to give anybody an apple? "
"Mom," she said, "she never eat for-"
Then her mother had killed her.
Then her little brother had pulled her hair:
"Brother, brother, don't pull my hair;
Mother had killed me for a single pear. "
And then he ran and go called her father. Then her father pulled her
hair, she said:
"Father, father don't pull my hair;
"Mother had killed me for one single pear. "
And her father killed that lady. 1
There is a strong sense of the presence of the Mairchen in this story.
The pattern of interdiction-violation, the poetic couplets, and the familiar
motive of the informing corpse, all testify to an origin in the adult fairy tale
corpus. Yet this is a rather odd performance by adult standards. The shift
from apples to pears is unsettling, and in general the plot is too skeletal, rush-
ing to the denouement without fully exploiting the available sources of ten-
sion and ambiguity.
Abandoning the adult perspective momentarily, the most remarkable
aspect of this story is its manifest assimilation to the world of the child. The
child is placed in the center of the action, the protagonist of a story devel-
oping a cruel and fatal conflict: Either the child denies food to a starving
person or the child transgresses the command of her mother, thus to pay the
ultimate price. The transformation of the mother into a witch is a telling,
indirect portrait of the ambivalence inherent in mother-daughter relation-
ships, as well as the ultimate extension of the nightmare wherein all famil-
iar things crumble before our eyes into strange and evil forces.
A similar adaptation of external materials to the consciousness of the
child can be observed in reference to popular culture. Consider the popular
ditty associated with the cartoon figure Popeye. The original text, so far as
I can recall, is as follows:
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? ? I'm Popeye the sailor man,
I'm Popeye the sailor man,
I'm strong to the finish
'Cause I eats me spinach,
I'm Popeye the sailor man.
Now consider the following two parodies of this ditty, the first ubiquitous
among North American schoolchildren, and the second found among chil-
dren of Mexican descent in Texas:2
I'm Popeye the sailor man,
I live in a garbage can,
I eat all the worms
And spit out the germs,
I'm Popeye the sailor man.
Popeye naci6 en Torre6n Popeye was born in Torreon
Encima de una sill6n, On top of a toilet seat,
Mat6 a su tfa He killed his aunt
Con una tortilla, With a tortilla
Popeye naci6 en Torre6n. Popeye was born in Torreon.
Two features are especially striking in these transformations. For one
thing, the content of the original message, an instance of exemplary behav-
ior in respect to eating habits, is radically altered to produce a message sub-
versive of standard, adult-imposed decorum. Each parody creates a fictive
world that stands as a miniature rite of rebellion, a vision of a counter-fac-
tual world inhabited by worm-eating garbage-can residents, and tortilla-
wielding aunt killers. The exemplary Popeye is converted into an anti-Popeye,
exhibiting filthy and murderous qualities obviously anathema to the con-
ventional etiquette.
The second feature of interest here is the scope given to the child's
poetic muse, which reverses the dominance relationship between phonologi-
cal and semantic elaboration obtaining in adult verbal creations (Sanches
and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1976). In these parodies, the semantic thread is
a bare one indeed, subservient to the phonological attraction of such lexi-
cal items as worms/germs, and tia/tortilla, Torre6n/sill6n. In reference to style
as well as to content, the parodies transform the original material into ves-
sels expressing the child's sensitivities.
55
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? ? STAGE Two: CHILD B DECODES THE MESSAGE
The communications we are concerned with are primarily lodged in the ver-
bal and kinesic media, and thus are perishable upon performance. The words
spoken by child A, or the folkloric activity performed, vanish rapidly as a
physical presence, leaving behind only a trace in the memory of those who
were witness to them. Under these conditions, the decoding of the message
must, of course, be a precipitous affair, without recourse to a permanent or
perduring record. As a result, there is no guarantee that the message encoded
by child A is the same message after decoding by child B. Imperfectly per-
ceived material, or material not familiar to the recipient, may be assimilated
into gestalts (frameworks) already present in the mind of child B.
In the section titled "Wear and Repair During Transmission," the
Opies (1959) provide a number of characteristic examples, including the
delightful recasting of the old hymn:
Can a woman's tender care
Cease towards the child she-bear?
A great many studies in folklore have shown how traditional materials adapt
in this fashion to their new environments, and, indeed, this is one of the
sources of "mutation" recognized in the theories of von Sydow (1971). In
the absence of a written record serving as a check to this process of muta-
tion, there exists in every instance of folklore transmission the possibility for
text modification due to spontaneous assimilative processes. The child's
world, so little affected by written constraints, offers an excellent field labo-
ratory in this respect.
STAGE THREE: CHILD B PROCESSES THE MESSAGE
In the model directing our discussion, there ensues a period, however brief
or protracted, dedicated to the activity of conceptual processing. The mes-
sage has been received and decoded by child B, perhaps already in modified
form due to the rigors of instantaneous registration of a perishing stimulus.
At this point, the message as received must be digested, that is, broken down
into information units compatible with the child's concept of the world and
his or her aesthetic proclivities. The assimilative processes initiated at the
moment of message reception are accelerated, as the new information is
stored through association with familiar archetypes. Theories relating to this
stage have been quite celebrated in the history of folklore studies, and in-
clude such prominent constructs as Max Milller's disease of language, and
the irrepressible construct faulty memory, to be found in the writings of
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? ? Kaarle Krohn (1971), among others.
Alan Dundes (1969a) has noted, I think quite correctly, the degenera-
tive bias in most of these constructs. It is just as plausible to cite the creative,
generative dimensions of this message-processing stage. We have already seen,
in reference to materials received by children from outside sources such as adult
folklore and popular culture, that these assimilative processes refurbish the
materials received, endowing them with their inimitable fidelity to the out-
look and expressive preferences of the communities in which they circulate.
The exuberant and unbounded give-and-take of children's play ensures the
continuous reworking of traditional materials; yet strikingly, children have
shown themselves to be among the most dedicated supporters of tradition, as
folklorists have often noted. A theory of folklore transmission must allow for
each of these possibilities, the retention of traditional models, and the piecing
together of new models out of traditional materials.
STAGE FOUR: CHILD B REENCODES THE MESSAGE
Any theory of folklore transmission must at some point take into account
the moment of composition, generally occurring without the use of artifi-
cial aids to the memory such as scripted texts or plans. Folklorists have de-
veloped important perspectives, such as Albert Lord's theory of composition
during performance (1960), and Ruth Finnegan's alternative model of re-
hearsal and performance (1977), with its greater weight on memorization
as a factor in folklore transmission. The work of Parry and Lord and their
followers indicates that in many folklore traditions a type of spontaneous
poetic composition takes place, a process comparable to linguistic perfor-
mance (capable of creating an unlimited number of novel utterances on the
basis of internalized linguistic structures), but operating at a higher, extra-
sentential, poetic level.
Children's folklore performances amply exhibit the effects of both rote
memorization and improvisation on the basis of traditional models. In the
verbal genres capable of stimulating a field of discourse, that is, a sequence
of related items, the children frequently first exhaust their store of traditional
items, and then move on to novel items, spontaneously composed on the
model of familiar traditional items. The following sequence of interrogative
ludic routines, taken from a riddling session among middle-class North
American children, illustrates some facets of this process:
1. What did the big chimney say to the little chimney?
2. What did the Aggie say to the other Aggie?
3. What did the three Aggies say to the other four Aggies?
57
?
tiveness of Children," he remarks that the majority of children's games have
existed for centuries with "formulas which have been passed from genera-
tion to generation. " "How," Newell asks, "are we to reconcile this fact with
the quick inventiveness we ascribe to children? " (Newell 1963, 27). The in-
ventiveness, Newell tells us, yields localized games-the fantasy play of the
lone child, the "gibberish" of a group of children-which fade when inter-
est lags. Traditional games have passed the test of time-they have survived-
because they have an appeal broader than that of passing innovation: "The
old games, which have prevailed and become familiar by a process of natu-
ral selection, are usually better adapted to children's taste than any new in-
ventions can be; they are recommended by the quaintness of formulas which
come from the remote past, and strike the young imagination as a sort of
sacred law" (Newell 1963, 27). In his notes to the first edition, Newell
singled out the emphasis on tradition in his work: "It is devoted to formu-
las of play which children have preserved from generation to generation,
without intervention, often without the knowledge of older minds" (Newell
1963, i). Newell found "something so agreeable in this inheritance of thought
kept up by childhood itself" (Newell 1963, 12). The imminent disappear-
ance of these rhymes is "a thousand pities" (Newell 1963, 12).
One might caution here against an overly arbitrary division between
inventiveness and conservatism. While Newell posits a division between these
two types of play, children do not-for is it not possible to play a traditional
game with innovation, to chant rhymes centuries old with fantasy of the
moment? Thus even these two forces in children's folklore twine together
in complex interplay. As one individual in her reading of my work has
pointed out, "Innovation has also survived the test of time. " Just as chil-
dren share in traditional games, so they share in fantasy play. In this sense,
innovation has the same depth in children's folklore as tradition. It was
present in the past, it adds intricacies to the traditional games of the mo-
ment, and it will remain a force in the culture of childhood.
Yet still in accord with Newell on this point, might we find "some-
thing so agreeable" in the tradition of children's folklore, and something so
pleasing in the creativity? The challenge is to broaden our grasp, to encom-
pass the complexity of children's folklore-to reach for the text and the con-
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? ? text, the ideal and the real, the tradition and the creativity. Still, in our en-
deavor to encircle all this, we must not expect fully to succeed. There is the
magical in children's folklore that will never be captured. And here we might
learn from the anthropologist who went to Dublin, Ireland, to study a lep-
rechaun. In 1957, as the story goes, a mechanic from the Vauxhall Factory
captured a leprechaun in Phoenix Park. People came from all over to see the
leprechaun, and among these was the anthropologist. For four or five days,
the anthropologist observed the leprechaun. On the fifth day, the leprechaun
took on the appearance of a tiny, shriveled root and died. 23 So with children's
folklore, the voice on the wind, the creativity of the moment, cannot be fully
captured. The fluid world of the child eludes the static state of the printed
word. Their mirthful nature will not be pinned down by our sobriety. That
is fair; it is part of the rules of the game. The children have, after all, warned
us that they do it all "just for the fun of it! "
NOTES TO CHAPTER Two
1. Darwin's twentieth-century descendants in the social sciences are wont to
connect Social Darwinism with others. John Friedl in The Human Portrait says, "Al-
though Darwin did not mean for his theory of evolution to be applied to human so-
cial and cultural change, it was proposed by many social scientists that cultures evolved
in a struggle for survival, just as animals did. This doctrine, inappropriately called 'so-
cial Darwinism,' was ultimately used to justify white supremacist policies of Western
nations . . . " (Friedl 1981, 116). In spite of Friedl's sympathetic interpretation of
Darwin's work, Darwin did not wait for others to create social Darwinism. The seeds
were present in Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the
Countries Visited During the Voyage of H. M. S. Beagle Round the World (1852). It
blossomed in his masterwork, On the Origin of Species (1859), and took firm root in
Descent of Man (1871). It is well to keep in mind the reality of our historical ante-
cedents in theory. For a discussion of the Forerunners of Darwin: 1745-1859, see
Bentley Glass 1968.
2. The cultural evolutionary orientation was opposed to the theory of
degenerationism. Archbishop Whately, the major advocate of the latter theory, repre-
sented the savage as the end point of the fall from grace. From this perspective, to pro-
pose an evolution from savagery was blasphemy. There could be no development from
the savage state, since that ran counter to the biblical account of creation. The savage
represents not the childhood of the race but the depths of degradation. For a detailed
discussion of the theory of degenerationism, see Margaret Hodgen's Doctrine of Sur-
vivals (1936). For a discussion of evolutionary theory, see Frederick Teggart's Theory
and Processes of History (1977 [1941]), and Kenneth Bock's Acceptance of Histories
(1958). See also Dundes's "Devolutionary Premise in Folklore Theory" (1969a).
3. Karl Pearson (1897) Chances of Death, London: Edward Arnold.
2:53-54.
4. Alice Bertha Gomme's two-volume work, The Traditional Games of En-
gland, Scotland and Ireland, was originally published as part one of George Laurence
Gomme's intended but not completed Dictionary of British Folklore. Volume 1 was
published in 1894; Volume 2, in 1898. The Dover edition is an unabridged republi-
cation of this important work. See Dorothy Howard's introduction to the Dover edi-
tion for remarks on Lady Alice's cultural evolutionary theory.
5. Alice Bertha Gomme's treatment of "Round and Round the Village" is an
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? ? example of her thorough scholarship. First she presents the music, then she provides
nineteen versions with informant and geographic designations. There follows a descrip-
tion of how the game is played with accompanying diagrams. Lady Alice includes di-
rections for each version. She then provides a four-page chart that lists the segments
of the rhyme with coordinates for geographical area and version. This facilitates what
she refers to as the analysis of the game rhymes. And finally she discusses the game in
relation to the custom of perambulation of boundaries, with citations to other perti-
nent sources. This is just one game in her two-volume work, which considers more
than two hundred games.
6. For differing interpretations of Aarne-Thompson Tale Type 328, "Jack and
the Beanstalk," see Humphrey Humphreys's "Jack and the Beanstalk" (1965 [1948],
103-6); William H. Desmonde's "Jack and the Beanstalk" (1965 [1951], 107-9); and
Martha Wolfenstein's "Jack and the Beanstalk: An American Version" (1955, 100-
113). For the solar mythological approach, see the summary of Angelo De Gubernatis's
interpretation in Dorson (1955). All of the foregoing articles are reprinted in Dundes's
Study of Folklore. See also Dundes's "Projection in Folklore: A Plea for Psychoana-
lytic Semiotics" (1976a, 1510-11).
7. For an examination of the origin theory as it relates to narrative, see Brian
Sutton-Smith's "The Origins of Fictions and the Fictions of Origin," American Eth-
nological Society Proceedings, 1984, 117-32. In relationship to cultural evolutionary
theory, it might be that a culture has a simple technology, but that is not the same as
a simple cognitive system. The Australian aborigines-who from the nineteenth cen-
tury to the present have been the choice of the evolutionary anthropologists as the sim-
plest, most primitive culture-do, indeed, have a simple stone-tool technology. But they
have a kinship system so complex that it is a point of dispute still among kinship ex-
perts as to how to describe it. The result of the myriad of ethnographies written dur-
ing the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries has been to present the complexity of
cultures; and this complexity is apparent even though the cultures might be described
in these same ethnographies as simple, savage, or primitive.
8. See Dundes's foreword to the 1978 edition of Children's Humor for an ap-
praisal of Martha Wolfenstein's contributions.
9. In the winter of 1971, I began a collection of jump-rope and hand-clapping
songs that I gathered from children at an elementary school and from children living
in an apartment complex in Santa Cruz, California. One year later, I broadened the
scope of the project to include the children in two other elementary schools. At this
point, I was still limiting my search to jump-rope and hand-clapping songs. Then, as
serendipity would have it, I recorded some "nasty jokes" from my three major infor-
mants. As I listened to the jokes, I heard the same message threading through the jokes
that bound together the jump-rope and hand-clapping songs. From that point on, I
attempted to study the full gamut of children's folklore.
10. Collected from a six-year-old Caucasian girl in Santa Cruz, California,
February 1971. The informant had learned this two years earlier when she attended
school on the Navajo reservation in Window Rock, Arizona. She used it as a jump-
rope song and she said that the girl jumping rope ran out on the last line.
11. Collected from an eight-year-old Caucasian girl in Santa Cruz, California,
in 1971.
12. Collected from a six-year-old Caucasian girl in Santa Cruz, California, in
1971.
13. Collected from an eight-year-old Caucasian girl in Santa Cruz, California,
in 1971.
14. I used this rhyme to taunt my older sisters when I was a child growing up
in Napa, California, in the 1950s. I also heard it chanted endlessly by my informants
in Santa Cruz, California, in 1971-72.
15. Collected from a six- and an eight-year-old Caucasian girl in Santa Cruz,
California, in 1971. The two learned this from an eight-year-old boy.
46 THE COMPLEXITY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
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? ? 16. Collected from a ten-year-old black girl in Santa Cruz, California, in 1972.
17. I performed this rhyme with my two sisters when we were young. The two
participants join hands and swing their arms back and forth on the first two lines.
On the last line, they attempt to twist around, back-to-back, while still holding hands.
A favorite time to perform this was at the kitchen sink while doing the dishes.
18. I learned this as a child; I also collected a version in 1983 in Columbia,
South Carolina, that is exactly the same, except that the baby is urged to eat "like a
lamb. "
19. Collected from an eight-year-old Caucasian girl in Santa Cruz, California,
in 1972. The rhyme is performed to accompanying pelvic thrusts. On the first "la,"
the pelvis is thrust to the right; on the second, to the front; and on the third, to the
left. As my nine-year-old informant said, "On 'boom dee ay,' you stick your butt out
in the back. " The final word, "underwear," is executed with a pelvic thrust to the front.
20. The tradition and continuity in children's folklore is illustrated in The Lore
and Language of Schoolchildren. Iona and Peter Opie record several versions of the
jump-rope song "Not Last Night but the Night Before," spanning the years from 1835
to 1959. (See Opie and Opie 1959, 23. ) Clearly in their examples, variation does oc-
cur in the text, but the overall form remains intact throughout the years.
21. Gary Alan Fine refers to the dual concerns of conservatism and innova-
tion as "Newell's paradox. " Fine suggests a partial resolution for the division of these
two forces. This involves viewing children's folklore from three analytical perspectives.
In the first (which he calls thematype analysis), the folklore is analyzed according to
theme or structure. In the second (which he calls ecotype analysis), the folklore is ana-
lyzed according to the social environment. And in the third (egotype analysis), the
performance of the folklore is highlighted. Fine notes, "Any item of folklore can be
analyzed from any and all perspectives, although most folklore approaches focus on
only one" (Fine 1980d, 180).
22. For a Japanese version of pig latin, see Thomas W. Johnson (1975, 232-
33) See also Berkovits's "Secret Languages of Schoolchildren" (1970).
23. Folklore Archives, University of California, Berkeley. Collected by Susan
Rush from Penola Campbell in Oakland, California. The informant first heard this
legend in 1968 when she was living in Ireland; it was told to her by her husband, who
had lived all his life in Dublin.
47
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? ?
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? ? 3 THE TRANSMISSION
OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
John H. McDowell
The transmission of children's folklore naturally falls within the broader
question of the transmission of folklore in general. Every conceptualization
of folklore must contain a theory, whether explicit or implicit, regarding the
transmission of folklore, since folklore is universally recognized as an inher-
ently social phenomenon. While these issues have not always received the
attention they deserve, folkloristic theories of transmission nonetheless
abound in the literature. To gain a grasp on these theories, I suggest the fol-
lowing two categories: theories viewing folklore transmission as a
superorganic, mechanical process; and theories emphasizing its serendipitous
and emergent character.
Folklore transmission viewed as a mechanical process figures promi-
nently in those theories of folklore taking their inspiration from the philo-
logical roots of our discipline. Jakob Grimm, in his studies of Germanic and
Indo-European languages, identified systematic laws of phonological shift
that operate, for all intents and purposes, outside the immediate arena of
concrete speech events. The Grimm brothers considered folklore "only a
higher and freer speech of mankind," and hypothesized that laws similar to
sound shift laws could be discovered to account for the persistence of tradi-
tional items and their variants through time and space (see Crane 1918).
Their theories accounting for Mairchen as broken-down Indo-European
myths are perhaps the main fruit of this orientation. The realm defined by
their compelling aphorism, das Volk dichtet, "the people, as a whole, com-
poses poetry" (Kittredge and Sargent 1904), transcends the sphere of
grounded human interaction.
This superorganic orientation persists in the work of the historic-geo-
graphic folklore scholars. Kaarle Krohn (1971, 98) argues that "it is the
mechanical laws of thought and imagination that prevail in the rich varia-
tion of oral tradition. " In a sequence of chapters entitled "The Influence of
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? ? Faulty Memory," "The Impulse Toward Expansion," and "Laws of Trans-
formation," Krohn discusses a series of "laws of thought" capable of pro-
ducing the observed differences among variants of a migratory folklore item.
But these laws are strictly conjectural, founded on the examination of texts,
rather than on the examination of living folkloristic "cultures. " Folklore
transmission, in this frame of reference, becomes an impersonal process to
be inferred and reconstructed on the basis of exclusively philological evi-
dence. The status of these "laws of thought" is quite analogous to that of
Grimm's laws of consonant shift, founded on the impersonal forces of lan-
guage change.
Krohn sought to embody the "mechanical laws of thought and imagi-
nation" in two models, portraying the spread of folklore materials in the
manner of waves on the water emanating from a central source of distur-
bance, and in the manner of a stream welling forth in a certain direction.
C. W. von Sydow rejects these models, introducing elements of an alterna-
tive theory of folklore transmission. Retaining the same essential goals as
those held by Krohn, von Sydow introduces the concepts of active and pas-
sive bearers, mutation, and oicotypification. "The dissemination of a tale,"
von Sydow contends, "is desultory to a high degree. " "Only a very small
number of active bearers of tradition equipped with a good memory, vivid
imagination, and narrative powers do transmit the tales. It is only they who
tell them. Among their audience it is only a small percentage still who actu-
ally do so. Most of those who have heard a tale told and are able to remem-
ber it, remain passive carriers of tradition, whose importance for the con-
tinued life of the tale consists mainly in their interest in hearing it told again"
(von Sydow 1965 [1948], 231).
The commitment to folkloristics as a philological inquiry is evident
in the key construction here, "the life of the tale. " Yet at the same time,
von Sydow delves beyond the impersonal forces of language and culture
drift to enfranchise the individual performers and audience members in his
general theory of folklore transmission. Krohn had spoken of bilingual
border populations, and "temporary visits by hunters, fishermen, crafts-
men, merchants, sailors, soldiers, pilgrims, and other wanderers" (Krohn
1971, 59), but von Sydow's concept of active and passive bearers locates
folklore transmission directly in the immediate context of the folklore per-
formance.
Von Sydow introduces the term mutation to refer to specific alter-
ations of narrative materials as storytellers constantly reinterpret a narra-
tive tradition. The language he uses here creates a juxtaposition between the
superorganic framework of folklore transmission, and a more situated, hu-
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? ? man-oriented approach: "An original motif may be superseded by a new
mutation, but a new mutation may also yield to the older form, being un-
able to assert itself at its expense. If a motif is particularly popular, this very
fact may induce various narrators to mutate it in different ways" (von Sydow
1971, 234). The process envisioned here is still somewhat mechanistic, yet
the term mutation admits an element of caprice, since the precise moment
and direction of a mutation cannot be foreseen with any certainty. The con-
cept of mutation presupposes recognition of the immense range of poten-
tial inherent in any act of folklore transmission.
One possible result of mutation in the folklore transmission process
is "a certain unification of the variants within one and the same linguistic
or cultural area on account of isolation from other areas," a result referred
to by von Sydow as oicotypification (von Sydow 1971, 238). He observes
that oicotypification might result "from the circumstance that one mutation
has prevailed over the rest so as to become the oicotype of the tale within
the area concerned" (von Sydow 1971, 238). In this manner, the demands
of scientific generalization are reconciled with recognition of the autonomy
of each individual instance: the individual cases, autonomous in themselves,
nonetheless are thought to pattern into configurations describable in terms
of scientific laws. In the end, von Sydow remains a voice of loyal opposi-
tion within the camp of philologically inspired folklorists.
In recent years, folklorists have developed approaches to folklore
transmission amenable to the groundwork laid in von Sydow's critique of
overly mechanistic models of transmission. The work of these scholars
readily incorporates von Sydow's notions of active and passive bearers, lo-
cating folklore transmission within finite communicative contexts, and mu-
tations, pointing to the unique, unpredictable quality of any given instance
of folklore transmission. Perhaps the key word is emergence, indicating a
fortuitous result achieved through the continuous interaction of all relevant
components in a given folklore performance. According to Richard
Bauman, "The concept of emergence is necessary to the study of perfor-
mance as a means towards comprehending the uniqueness of particular
performances within the context of performance as a generalized cultural
system in a community" (Bauman 1977a, 37). The theory of folklore trans-
mission residing in the performance-centered approach is one concerned
with "the interplay between communicative resources, individual compe-
tence, and the goals of the participants, within the context of particular
situations" (Bauman 1977a, 38).
In a theory centered on the creation and re-creation of folklore
through performance, the term transmission becomes extremely problem-
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? ? atic. The very notion of the "item" of folklore, with its demonstrable "life
history," is no longer entirely tenable. The folklore text, formerly thought
to embody the empirical foundation for folklore studies, becomes, in this
light, a pale and in many ways a misleading reflection of the performance it
purports to record (McDowell 1982).
If it is no longer possible to hold that folklore is "transmitted" in
the manner of a mechanical signal, then how are we to speak of that criti-
cal moment when folklore enters into an interactional format, finding ar-
ticulation in the speech or action of one individual, yet leaving a trace in
the short- or long-term memory of another, eventually to spring forth as a
performance that in some sense repeats the original? How are we to ac-
count for the persistence of form and content in folklore over time? And
what constraints, or patterns, can we identify in the extensive capacity of
performers to shape and reshape folkloric routines that have entered their
repertoires? These are the central issues in the construction of a modern
theory of folklore transmission, a theory intended to address the stable,
generalizable aspects of the process in question, as well as its more capri-
cious, serendipitous aspect.
The domain of children's folklore is a good place to begin formulat-
ing such a theory. The world of the child is in some sense more contained,
and thus more accessible to study, than the multifarious world of the adult.
In the child's realm, we can often specify with some precision the sources of
the routines we observe, and thereby gain a better handle on the processes
of transformation and preservation operative therein. In short, the child's
processing of folkloric materials can be taken as a microcosm of the pro-
cess of folklore transmission in general, and, as such, can provide some pro-
vocative clues of relevance both within and beyond the realm of children's
folklore.
What is it, then, that happens when one child performs a folkloric
routine in the presence of another child, or group of children? Speech act
theory, with its emphasis on perlocutionary effect (Austin 1962), would sug-
gest isolating one complete interactional node as the focus of our analysis,
but we must go one better, to incorporate the arrival of a "repeatable" mes-
sage to the position of a third individual:
child A child B child C
1 (encodes a message) 2 (decodes the message) 5 (decodes a message)
3 (processes the message)
4 (reencodes the message)
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? ? This model draws attention to five discrete moments in the process
of folklore transmission. The first moment, when child A encodes a mes-
sage, initiates a string of events culminating in the arrival of that message
to a third child, who then proceeds to decode it. Clearly, the boundaries of
this model are arbitrary, but we may nonetheless utilize it as a tool for iden-
tifying the basic structure of one finite instance of folklore transmission
among children.
STAGE ONE: CHILD A ENCODES A MESSAGE
In the initial formulation of the message, child A draws on previous experi-
ence in the world to produce a message containing the kinds of features we
identify as folkloric. While there is no consensus on this point, we can gen-
erally mention features such as provenience from a common store of com-
municative resources lying outside the official, institutional channels; pos-
sessing a formulaic quality, something I have referred to elsewhere as an ac-
cessible rhetoric (McDowell 1979); and in some way betraying a ground-
ing in the ethos of some finite, operative human community. In short, child
A produces an item of folklore.
The inspiration for this initial action need not proceed from a folk-
loric source. In many instances, children do draw on these folkloric resources,
the forms so richly documented by Opie and Opie (1959) and elsewhere.
Yet even the briefest exposure to children's folklore reveals the almost amoe-
bic ability of children to incorporate extraneous materials into their expres-
sive competencies. Along these lines, I would mention two particularly im-
portant tributaries: materials proceeding from the folkloric repertoires of
adults, yet suitable for child consumption (for example, fairy tales, riddles,
nursery rhymes, and lullabies); and materials proceeding from popular cul-
ture sources, of major importance in the expressive behavior of contempo-
rary children (Sutton-Smith 1971a).
When adult folklore or popular culture is assimilated into the realm
of children's folklore, changes take place that are most revealing of childish
attitudes and concerns. These extraneous materials undergo a sea change,
to eventually display the contours of perception and conception character-
istic of the child's mind. The distance between the original material and the
child's revamping of it thus stands as an indication of the difference between
the child's cosmology and that of the adult. Consider the following narra-
tive, produced by an eight-year-old child of Mexican descent:
Hey, you know that little girl, she had a, she had a mother but the
mother was witch, and the mother had said:
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? ? "Go get apples and don't give anybody one. "
So that lady had turned into a witch, and she went up there, and
she said:
"Can I have an apple? I haven't eaten for years and years. "
And she goes:
"OK. "
So that lady had eat it and turned into her mother again, and she
said:
"Didn't I tell you not to give anybody an apple? "
"Mom," she said, "she never eat for-"
Then her mother had killed her.
Then her little brother had pulled her hair:
"Brother, brother, don't pull my hair;
Mother had killed me for a single pear. "
And then he ran and go called her father. Then her father pulled her
hair, she said:
"Father, father don't pull my hair;
"Mother had killed me for one single pear. "
And her father killed that lady. 1
There is a strong sense of the presence of the Mairchen in this story.
The pattern of interdiction-violation, the poetic couplets, and the familiar
motive of the informing corpse, all testify to an origin in the adult fairy tale
corpus. Yet this is a rather odd performance by adult standards. The shift
from apples to pears is unsettling, and in general the plot is too skeletal, rush-
ing to the denouement without fully exploiting the available sources of ten-
sion and ambiguity.
Abandoning the adult perspective momentarily, the most remarkable
aspect of this story is its manifest assimilation to the world of the child. The
child is placed in the center of the action, the protagonist of a story devel-
oping a cruel and fatal conflict: Either the child denies food to a starving
person or the child transgresses the command of her mother, thus to pay the
ultimate price. The transformation of the mother into a witch is a telling,
indirect portrait of the ambivalence inherent in mother-daughter relation-
ships, as well as the ultimate extension of the nightmare wherein all famil-
iar things crumble before our eyes into strange and evil forces.
A similar adaptation of external materials to the consciousness of the
child can be observed in reference to popular culture. Consider the popular
ditty associated with the cartoon figure Popeye. The original text, so far as
I can recall, is as follows:
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? ? I'm Popeye the sailor man,
I'm Popeye the sailor man,
I'm strong to the finish
'Cause I eats me spinach,
I'm Popeye the sailor man.
Now consider the following two parodies of this ditty, the first ubiquitous
among North American schoolchildren, and the second found among chil-
dren of Mexican descent in Texas:2
I'm Popeye the sailor man,
I live in a garbage can,
I eat all the worms
And spit out the germs,
I'm Popeye the sailor man.
Popeye naci6 en Torre6n Popeye was born in Torreon
Encima de una sill6n, On top of a toilet seat,
Mat6 a su tfa He killed his aunt
Con una tortilla, With a tortilla
Popeye naci6 en Torre6n. Popeye was born in Torreon.
Two features are especially striking in these transformations. For one
thing, the content of the original message, an instance of exemplary behav-
ior in respect to eating habits, is radically altered to produce a message sub-
versive of standard, adult-imposed decorum. Each parody creates a fictive
world that stands as a miniature rite of rebellion, a vision of a counter-fac-
tual world inhabited by worm-eating garbage-can residents, and tortilla-
wielding aunt killers. The exemplary Popeye is converted into an anti-Popeye,
exhibiting filthy and murderous qualities obviously anathema to the con-
ventional etiquette.
The second feature of interest here is the scope given to the child's
poetic muse, which reverses the dominance relationship between phonologi-
cal and semantic elaboration obtaining in adult verbal creations (Sanches
and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1976). In these parodies, the semantic thread is
a bare one indeed, subservient to the phonological attraction of such lexi-
cal items as worms/germs, and tia/tortilla, Torre6n/sill6n. In reference to style
as well as to content, the parodies transform the original material into ves-
sels expressing the child's sensitivities.
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? ? STAGE Two: CHILD B DECODES THE MESSAGE
The communications we are concerned with are primarily lodged in the ver-
bal and kinesic media, and thus are perishable upon performance. The words
spoken by child A, or the folkloric activity performed, vanish rapidly as a
physical presence, leaving behind only a trace in the memory of those who
were witness to them. Under these conditions, the decoding of the message
must, of course, be a precipitous affair, without recourse to a permanent or
perduring record. As a result, there is no guarantee that the message encoded
by child A is the same message after decoding by child B. Imperfectly per-
ceived material, or material not familiar to the recipient, may be assimilated
into gestalts (frameworks) already present in the mind of child B.
In the section titled "Wear and Repair During Transmission," the
Opies (1959) provide a number of characteristic examples, including the
delightful recasting of the old hymn:
Can a woman's tender care
Cease towards the child she-bear?
A great many studies in folklore have shown how traditional materials adapt
in this fashion to their new environments, and, indeed, this is one of the
sources of "mutation" recognized in the theories of von Sydow (1971). In
the absence of a written record serving as a check to this process of muta-
tion, there exists in every instance of folklore transmission the possibility for
text modification due to spontaneous assimilative processes. The child's
world, so little affected by written constraints, offers an excellent field labo-
ratory in this respect.
STAGE THREE: CHILD B PROCESSES THE MESSAGE
In the model directing our discussion, there ensues a period, however brief
or protracted, dedicated to the activity of conceptual processing. The mes-
sage has been received and decoded by child B, perhaps already in modified
form due to the rigors of instantaneous registration of a perishing stimulus.
At this point, the message as received must be digested, that is, broken down
into information units compatible with the child's concept of the world and
his or her aesthetic proclivities. The assimilative processes initiated at the
moment of message reception are accelerated, as the new information is
stored through association with familiar archetypes. Theories relating to this
stage have been quite celebrated in the history of folklore studies, and in-
clude such prominent constructs as Max Milller's disease of language, and
the irrepressible construct faulty memory, to be found in the writings of
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? ? Kaarle Krohn (1971), among others.
Alan Dundes (1969a) has noted, I think quite correctly, the degenera-
tive bias in most of these constructs. It is just as plausible to cite the creative,
generative dimensions of this message-processing stage. We have already seen,
in reference to materials received by children from outside sources such as adult
folklore and popular culture, that these assimilative processes refurbish the
materials received, endowing them with their inimitable fidelity to the out-
look and expressive preferences of the communities in which they circulate.
The exuberant and unbounded give-and-take of children's play ensures the
continuous reworking of traditional materials; yet strikingly, children have
shown themselves to be among the most dedicated supporters of tradition, as
folklorists have often noted. A theory of folklore transmission must allow for
each of these possibilities, the retention of traditional models, and the piecing
together of new models out of traditional materials.
STAGE FOUR: CHILD B REENCODES THE MESSAGE
Any theory of folklore transmission must at some point take into account
the moment of composition, generally occurring without the use of artifi-
cial aids to the memory such as scripted texts or plans. Folklorists have de-
veloped important perspectives, such as Albert Lord's theory of composition
during performance (1960), and Ruth Finnegan's alternative model of re-
hearsal and performance (1977), with its greater weight on memorization
as a factor in folklore transmission. The work of Parry and Lord and their
followers indicates that in many folklore traditions a type of spontaneous
poetic composition takes place, a process comparable to linguistic perfor-
mance (capable of creating an unlimited number of novel utterances on the
basis of internalized linguistic structures), but operating at a higher, extra-
sentential, poetic level.
Children's folklore performances amply exhibit the effects of both rote
memorization and improvisation on the basis of traditional models. In the
verbal genres capable of stimulating a field of discourse, that is, a sequence
of related items, the children frequently first exhaust their store of traditional
items, and then move on to novel items, spontaneously composed on the
model of familiar traditional items. The following sequence of interrogative
ludic routines, taken from a riddling session among middle-class North
American children, illustrates some facets of this process:
1. What did the big chimney say to the little chimney?
2. What did the Aggie say to the other Aggie?
3. What did the three Aggies say to the other four Aggies?
57
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