





































7

nasCenT Folklore: CommuniCaTion and aesTheTiCs in inFanCy

kAthArine r  m  sChrAmm 

Whereas just as cultural relativity implies that each human group 
fashions its own forms of human adaptation and expression and 
that each has its wonder and beauty (as well as disasters), so with 
childhood there is an aesthetic for each age, which may be celebrated 
(or cursed) by adults, rather than simply glossed as an inevitably 
inferior step on the way to the ‘wonders’ of adults’ civilization, reason, 
and morality (Sutton-Smith and McMahon 1999, 299),

Newborn infants, though weak and inexperienced, are sentient and 
intending agents (Trevarthen, et al. 1999, 143).

The question of when folklore begins is one which is simultaneously 
philosophical, biological, and psychological. It hinges by implication on what, 
indeed, constitutes folklore. If we assume that folklore is artistic, communicative, 
culturally grounded, and socially actuated, something must come before the more 
recognizable forms of tradition, performance, and identity — a nascent folklore. 
Not only is there interesting material in the prelinguistic, pre-genre, pre-self arena 
of infant behavior that recommends itself to our attention as folklorists of children, 
but we as folklorists can recognize it and comment upon it, using the tools at our 
disposal. We can engage with proto-cultural agents through an interdisciplinary 
approach that does not relinquish our qualitative methods for quantitative ones.

In what follows, I will discuss the subfield of children’s folklore as a gateway 
into discussing the broad issues inherent to folkloristics. Once having established a 
few basic criteria and their quantitative-field counterparts, I will press forward into 
an interdisciplinary exploration that takes on infant interaction in an ethnographic 
context, merging the developmental and folk psychological approaches.

In approaching the concept of nascent folklore, it may be useful to consider it 
as a subset of children’s folklore. Children’s folklore is our window through which 
we study expressive forms shared by children, among children, a protean world 
which often functions counter-intuitively to adult sensibilities (Sutton-Smith 1999, 
6). Its study has come a long way from the thorough collection of text and variant 
and a preoccupation with “survivals” to incorporate theory that takes into account 
what William Wells Newell noted well over a century ago — that children’s 
folklore is both innovative and dynamic, as well as traditional and conservative. 
Children’s folkloristics is concerned not only with the contexts where childlore 
occurs, but also the negotiation of social roles and activity surrounding expressive 
forms (Goodwin 1985), and how children learn, adapt, and create within child-
constructed frameworks of performative competence (Brady 1980, 163). Scholars 
are also cognizant of the fact that lore is not transmitted so much as it is activated, 
opening up the possibility of alteration and permutation (McDowell 1999, 61). 
Unlike folklorists who work with adults, folklorists of children are much more 

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likely to be aware of developmental considerations influencing what they observe, 
as those often are telling characteristics in setting childlore apart in both form and 
function (Fine 1980, 172). 

An example of these developmental considerations is McGonnagill’s 1993 study 
of preschoolers at play. The children she observed did not have a high degree 
of communicative or social sophistication, but she found that the game-playing 
behavior she observed still functioned as a way for them to process and cope with 
their social environment, despite relying entirely upon a fluid approach to their 
play, up to and including the actual goal of the game. McGonnagill called this 
behavior “protolore,” because there were substantial differences when compared 
with approaches to folklore that stressed lore performed within the more clearly 
defined boundaries of aesthetic communication marked by particular conventions 
and style. She compared folklore and protolore to riddles and preriddles, enacted 
by young children whose grasp of the genre was not quite sophisticated or 
solidified enough to be considered mastered (McGonnagill 1993, 41). 

However, children’s folklore or protolore has rarely gone into areas that pre-
linguistic children occupy, namely toddlers before 18 months of age. Talkers are 
more interesting: their experimentation with developing language skills gives 
researchers a ready verbal transcript, and the ease with which cognition and 
cultural competence can be evaluated via the increasing complexity and situational 
use of linguistic forms is undeniable. Infant behavior, on the other hand, has been 
dubiously regarded, save the responses and actions directed from adult caregivers 
to infants.1 What occurs in infancy is complex and lays the groundwork for later 
development. I would not expect folklorists anywhere to deny this, just as they 
would not deny that childlore in its various age-appropriate incarnations contains 
its own complexity and significance whose mastery dovetails into the adult-
recognized world of expressive competence. Yet the study of children’s folklore 
ought not be concerned primarily with where child culture is going, through the 
ramifications of performative competence in the child contributing to adult social 
competencies, but with that which is in the moment, and how it has its own value 
which is insubordinate to adult norms. It short, it recognizes the inherent value 
and function of child expressive forms at each age.

Folklorists tend to gravitate to the expert performers, willing performers who 
have mastered their craft, and who are recognized by their community. These 
may include the most authoritative jump-rope ringleader on the playground, the 
snarkiest teenage dirty-joke teller, or the gaggle of kids who are unafraid to harass a 
fieldworker while the tape is running (Goodwin 1985, Bartlett 1971, and McDowell 
1979, respectively). However, infants do not regularly exist in a community of 
peers, because they are incapable of being left to their own devices for long. The 
context one might imagine as hosting an “infant peer community” might be a day-
care setting, or some arranged opportunity when infants are given the opportunity 
to interact with one another. Yet even here, our adult or even older-child 
conceptions of “peer group” seem inadequate. At times, infants do not even seem 
to be responding directly to one another when they’re observed. Or are they?

Without our easily usable default (admittedly problematized) terms like 
culture, group, and language, infant behavior seems to be a very amorphous 

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phase. In part, this impression is correct because the forms we enjoy studying 
do not yet exist — what is performative competence for something that is not 
yet performance? However, from another perspective, there is a basic insecurity 
in the way that we approach our informants — namely, that lacking the ability 
to refer to language use as a means to validate our conclusions, we doubt our 
assessments as too adult-centric, or as wishfully inserting the reading of intention 
instead of confirming it. These are perfectly agreeable and acceptable cautions, 
and well worth acknowledging: a teleological angle makes for circular arguments, 
and “just so” stories instead of theory. Another part of this insecurity comes from 
our hesitance to acknowledge infants as actors in their own right, as agents, even 
if they seem to possess an alien form of individuality against our developed sense 
of self. Yet we are creatures that can and do live as a part of a physical world 
wherein body language is read alongside or without spoken language (Cicourel 
1973, 40-41).2 Ascribing intentionality and agency to non-speaking individuals is 
part of all human interpretive communication, yet recognizing infant activity itself 
as part of the range of interpretable human experience clearly requires some sort 
of approach. 

However, what do terms like competence, group, artistic, or communication 
mean in the context of infant interaction? To get at the undergirding elements 
of folklore requires some conception of what folklore itself is. As Oring notes, a 
definition of folklore per se is problematic, as it may be “partial, idiosyncratic, or 
inconsistent” (Oring 1986, 17). However, examining how various scholars have 
approached the problematic definition of folklore yields certain basic commonalities. 

The first is that folklore occurs between and among people. It is discursive, 
interactive, and is a form of communication. This group may be large or small, 
down to a basic binary pair (Dundes 1965). The concept of “group” is fraught 
with ambiguity, and exists on multiple levels and imaginaries. However, it can 
be conceptualized due to shared experience and “bodily patterning” — existing 
in a physical, felt sense of community (Noyes 2003). This sense of community 
(alternatively, communitas as articulated by Victor Turner) hinges on the ability 
to empathize with fellow community members (Kapchan 2003). Empathy 
works to direct communication between members of the group, aiding mutual 
comprehension and sense of identity (Noyes 2003). In seeking out the nascent 
forms of these requirements for folkloric interaction, we will be identifying 
where and if the infant shares the ability to sense others’ motives, if the infant 
can recognize other humans through shared experience, and if the infant can 
communicate interactively with other humans. 

Another basic aspect of folklore lies in its attention to the creative and the 
artistic. Folklore is at some level expressive, and aesthetic expression in turn draws 
in the notion of the repeated, re-creation, tradition, and again, the community 
(Ben-Amos 1971, Glassie 2003, Oring 1986). Creative, artistic, expressive — all of 
these terms are immensely problematic, and must be judged in terms of the culture 
from which they originate. Yet as Pocius points out, regardless of what art might 
be, its expressive potential hinges on the emotional and affective. “Art” comes 
to be considered as a kind of skillful behavior, accomplished between people 
to varying levels of emotionally-affective efficacy (Pocius 2003, 51). In short, the 

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connection between human communication, human skill, and human emotional 
response is inseparable: we will be looking for where infants show the capacity to 
respond and express with emotionally responsive and affective behavior. 

The final basic block in artistic communicative actions is that its performance 
is intentional. The “interpretive frame” within which communication is produced 
and read must be at its heart a reading and evaluation of intention to make sense 
of others’ actions (Hufford 2003). The will to create makes the creation possible 
(Glassie 2003). To see if this aspect of folklore is present in a nascent form, 
we will be looking to see whether infants are capable of reading intention and 
demonstrating intentional behavior. 

However, to seek out what makes the communal, the aesthetic, and the 
intentional feasible during this stage of human development benefits from an 
interdisciplinary stance, through developmental psychology, language socialization, 
and evolutionary biology. Developmental psychology takes as a starting point the 
idea of normative stages through which all humans pass on their way to adulthood. 
It is concerned not only with the development of infant cognition, but also what 
may be considered healthy development in terms of interaction and socialization 
through measurable tests of competence (Sameroff and Cavanaugh 1979, 386).3 

Mediating between developmental psychology and more qualitative research 
is the study of language socialization, which asserts that all human behavior is 
learned interactionally, and that by gradual mastery of interactive forms, children 
become increasingly competent members of their social and cultural contexts 
(Ochs 1986, 2). Children socialize adults, just as adults socialize children, and once 
children are capable enough to work tacitly (if not reflexively) with interactional 
routines, they also socialize one another (Corsaro 1992).4 

However, if infants are born with these socializing abilities, it may also imply a 
biological, evolutionary imperative inherent in infant interaction with adults. The 
evolutionary approach has become very trendy within the past decade. In its most 
fascinating moments, it makes a case for artistic activity as not merely part of what 
“matters” for our mental wellbeing, but that at a basic level it is a trait selected for 
over millennia for human survival (Dissanayake 2000, 2001).5 

The three fields work well in tandem for the same reasons that ethnographers 
learn about a culture in order to interpret it. Developmental psychology points out 
what we can reasonably expect from our infant interlocutors, as well as gives us signs 
to look for during our ethnographic exploration. Language socialization provides 
us with a successful model to follow in terms of merging lab analysis with cultural 
manifestation. The evolutionary approach allows us the possibility that specific 
observations at the nascent level may indeed be generalizable across cultures. 

Why “Nascent Folklore”?

If developmental psychologists, language sociologists, and evolutionary biologists 
are doing so much good work on infant behavior already, why should folklorists 
take it as their interest? As cited in the introductory quote to this article, Felicia 
McMahon and Brian Sutton-Smith make clear that for folklorists of children, 
each age has potential. I read this as a challenge — shortly after the child exits 

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the womb, she is literally severed from the mother to become her own separate 
physical entity that must rely on communication to survive in a cultural context 
that will shape her and be shaped by her. I noted above that infant behavior 
does not always conform to our assumptions about how interaction is supposed 
to work. For cultural relativism to function for infant behavior, we have to 
simultaneously acknowledge infants as cultural agents, and as agents that may 
not yet have internalized cultural practice. This idea is particularly problematic 
when we consider the most loaded assumption of agency — that the agent be 
intentionally setting out to act upon her environment. 

This is the heart of nascent folklore — the abilities, skills, and biologically 
adaptive mental machinery that infants possess as the smallest, most proto-
cultural, and most underrepresented of human agents. The mastery of foundational 
communicative abilities is imperative for the development of later expressive 
forms, yet as an early form of communicative action embedded in shared human 
experience, these abilities can be shown to be themselves a form of folklore. 

To explore what these foundational abilities mean in the context of 
ethnographic infant observation, I was fortunate to enjoy the cooperation of 
mothers and staff in visually recording infant interaction at several parent-baby 
playtimes during the spring of 2007. The playtime took place in a comfortable, 
living-room-like environment in the building of the hosting organization, which 
provides valuable natural-birth and breastfeeding resources, as well as pre- and 
post-natal counseling and other health-related activities particularly geared towards 
new and expecting mothers. During the same time period, I also took video 
footage of my then-baby daughter in our home. In the first situation, infants were 
able to interact with one another as well as with their mothers, though I stayed 
off to the side. While the mothers occasionally conversed with me, I spent no 
time deliberately interacting with the infants. In the second, staying out of direct 
interaction with my daughter was impossible, even with her father trying to 
engage her, due to her curiosity with the video camera.

In what follows, I will engage with the three major, interwoven areas common 
to approaches to folklore — the communal, the aesthetic, and the intentional — 
and argue that the infant abilities of interactive imitation, innovation, and intention 
are where these later orientations find their first expression.

Interactive Imitation 

The first area of nascent folklore is that of interactive imitation. Imitation in infancy 
takes place within an explicitly social framework in which develop forms of social 
cognition, group identity, and aesthetic capacity. 

For present purposes, imitation is, most simply, the reproduction (or attempted 
reproduction) of some act. At its most easily detectable, imitation can resemble 
identical stimulus and response, but its complexity can encompass simultaneous 
movement, affect, sound, timing, and even intention (Trevarthen et al. 1999, 
140-142) Neonate imitation between adult and infant has received substantial 
experimental attention. Minutes after birth, a newborn can imitate simple 
movement, such as tongue protrusion, and by six weeks of age, infants can 

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repeat imitated actions over a day’s delay, indicating some memory of the action 
(Meltzoff and Moore 2001, 176). Furthermore, they can actively influence the flow, 
type, and manner of communication with caregivers by their own positive and 
negative reactions (Dissanayake 2001, 85-86). By eight weeks of age, infants’ sense 
of timing is good enough to know whether or not a play partner is responding 
contingently (Dissanayake 2001, 86). By three months of age, an infant can repeat 
behavior in order to elicit more of the same behavior from her partner, and by 
seven months, the infant repeats behavior to bring about a desirable result from an 
adult (Bretherton, et al. 1981, 334–5). 

The ability to imitate and the awareness of being imitated give infants an 
identity by analogy which serves as a psychological basis for social cognition, not 
its eventual outcome: 

Because human acts are seen in others and performed by the self, the 
infant can represent the other as ‘like me’: I can act like the other and 
reciprocally the other acts like me. Persons are special entities, the 
only entities in the world with whom I can share behavioral states. 
The cross-modal knowledge of what it feels like to perform observed acts 
provides a privileged access to people not afforded by things. This sets 
the child down the pathway of ascribing psychological properties to 
people. (Meltzoff and Brooks 2001, 174, emphasis in original)

In other words, imitation may not only be the sincerest form of flattery, but the 
most direct avenue into forming conceptual as well as lived community. Imitation 
goes hand in hand with what appears to be innate human empathy (Field 2007, 
94; Eisenberg 1992, 8-10). Imitation provides a process by which motives are 
interactively engaged, being simultaneously read and responded to, and innate 
abilities develop into intentional ones (Trevarthen et al 1999,142). Beyond the 
establishing of community and social cognition, infants’ intersubjective reading of 
motivation and early development of the intricacies of timing and signal may be 
responsible for the development of pretense, as they discover that the framework 
can be manipulated between the contingent response and the non-contingent 
response. With the skill in intersubjective comparison and contrast grows an 
increasing awareness of and competence in directing the metacommunicative 
signaling of play.6 

Where to Find Interactive Imitation

To draw out the shared, the aesthetic, and the communicative as one might hope 
to find in a folkloristic analysis, I am looking for consistencies, repetition and 
attempted repetition, what is collectively done, and how knowledge (if any) is 
transmitted, as well as looking out for metacommunicative markers of both play 
and social engagement (Meckley 1994, 5). This includes but is not limited to 
established signs of social interest from developmental literature, such as sustained 
gaze, smiling, outcry, eye contact, directed movement, as well as lack of interest 
denoted by averted gaze. 

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The description that follows is excerpted from my video footage of the local 
parent-baby playtime described above, and lasts approximately fifty seconds. The 
excerpt features two infants of eight months and four months placed face-down, 
roughly two feet apart and facing one another on separate blankets. Both were at 
varying levels apparent strength and balance in maintaining a position in which 
they could push up with their arms on the floor to look around. Their mothers sat 
to their infants’ sides within arm’s reach, frequently speaking on the infants’ behalf, 
interrupting their own casual conversation. 

However, in looking solely at the movements of the infants and their non-
verbal interaction, the two baby girls showed immediate interest in one another 
through sustained gaze and eye contact, breaking it only from time to time to look 
at a toy or a caregiver. These breaks in attention given to other things such as 
toys, blankets, or mothers lasted from one to three seconds. However, their shared 
attentive gazes lasted between fifteen and twenty-seven seconds, making the 
asides comparatively miniscule. Neither infant could creep or crawl effectively yet, 
so they stayed where they had been placed. 

In the first ten seconds of the clip, the younger infant, who demonstrated 
generally a much less physically stable ability to push up and balance herself, 
arched her back and kicked her legs in the air. The older infant watching her 
immediately arched her own back and vigorously wiggled her arms and legs in 
the air. After the older infant repeated this movement several times, the younger 
observer noticed and followed suit. The timing of the wiggling was entirely 
dependent on whether or not they were visually engaged with their partner. 
When the older infant, more capable of turning her head and pushing herself 
up, looked away, she missed her play partner’s break into wiggling, and did not 
wiggle in response until she turned and actually saw what the younger was doing. 
Of particular note was that the infants did not wiggle simultaneously while they 
were closely watching one another, only in alternation. When the younger infant 
averted her gaze, she stopped participating in the activity. It was only a matter of 
seconds after the clip ended before she began to cry and her mother removed her 
from the situation. 

The interactive cues that marked the two infants’ social interest in one another 
included sustained and averted gaze, outcry, isolated arm and leg movement, and 
the fully-engaged body wiggle. The communal co-wiggling activity was, like the 
preschool protolore observed by McGonnagill, spontaneous and structured in part 
by the context in which the mothers had placed the babies, but was not directed 
by the adults. Despite their occasional interference (such as stroking their infants’ 
heads, smiling encouragingly, speaking to the infants or the other mother as if to 
explain their baby’s action), the mothers were never as interesting to the infants as 
the infants were to one another. However, unlike protolore, the imitative wiggling 
cannot be read as including some intent, not even a flexible one. It exists on a 
genre-less level of action and reaction.

The mutually enjoyable patterning of wiggle play between the infants proved 
possible because of the highly developed sense of timing and signal that the 
infants already possessed. With extended observation, tracking cultural cues 
for timing could be achieved for even this young age. It is possible to suggest 

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that instead of disjointed flailing of arms and legs, the younger infant began to 
move in ways that lifted all four limbs up off the ground in closer imitative form 
to the other infant, closely attending to how it was done and then repeating 
the action. Beyond the idea of skill acquisition, the exploration of “turn-taking 
procedures” may be, as Shieffelin and Ochs suggest, a way into understanding 
larger communal social relationships (1986, 171). If we take nascent folklore in 
tandem with language socialization, we can argue that infants at this age not only 
communicate in terms of social cohesion and interaction, but that they actively 
teach one another by imitative skill acquisition within a peer group.

Innovation

Innovation is the second major area of nascent folklore. It is closely linked with 
imitation, but beyond the establishment of community and social cognition, the 
intersubjective reading of motivation and infants’ early awareness of the intricacies 
of timing and signal rapidly transform into experimentation. From the early ability 
to compare and contrast grows an increasing awareness of the metacommunicative 
signaling of play. These markers can be found in “exaggeration and stereotypy, 
(e.g., prolongation, patterning, and repetition),” and the dynamic variation of 
their use serves to establish that intentions can vary dramatically from expectation 
and not be taken seriously, which is the point at which pretense can function 
(Dissanayake 2001, 94-95). 

By nine months of age, an infant’s sense of timing is not only good enough 
to imitate when she wishes, but also to try different tactics in imitative interaction 
to see if the imitator is watching or not, which often becomes a game to see if 
the other is following (Meltzoff and Brooks 2001, 179). The infant also begins to 
attempt different means of accomplishing the same goal (Meltzoff and Brooks 
2001, 182).

However, deciding when and where infant inventiveness occurs may hinge 
on uncovering the point at which habitual action and delayed imitation can be 
distinguished from “innovation,” as well as coming to terms with what innovation 
may mean for infancy. The field observation in the previous section dealt with 
infant interaction in a face-to-face context, but it must also be noted that much 
of infant and toddler play is done in apparent solitude, with little or no direct 
interaction at all. However, this co-presence still functions as a basis for imitation 
and learning. Tullia Musatti explains that among infants and toddlers, it has 
been experimentally verified that even during apparently non-related play, 
children’s activities are related consistently to what other children have done 
previously during the same time, with varying degrees of relationship between 
them. In studies where the range of age went from twelve to eighteen months 
and eight to twenty-seven months, imitation occurred that did not necessitate 
direct communication; infants and toddlers aligned themselves to what occurred 
around them. “Having a child’s own activity and that of the partner simultaneously 
displayed makes it easier for the child to assess the activities’ similarities and 
differences” (Musatti 1993, 245). In other words, they are able to distinguish 

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between their own activities and those of others, and to incorporate and imitate 
that which is new.

The question then is whether any innovation is truly new, or if infants simply 
learn by watching others and trying out new activities the first time for themselves. 
While I do not want to dismiss the infant at solo play, the autotelic, self-sustaining 
enjoyment of his experimentation feeds upon itself. Much like studying dialogue 
with oneself, solo play bears the hallmarks of communicative activity while not 
explicitly being so. Innovation rises out of interaction with others, even when it is 
in parallel and indirect. 

In summary, dynamic variation existing between the infant and the other, 
whether another infant or an adult, gives rise to the co-interpretative, intersubjective 
existence of imaginative play, all by the age of nine months. The ability to engage 
and recognize engagement by the other is fundamental to recognize what is play 
and what is not, in order to establish the subtle framing of experience and 
interaction.

Where to Find Innovation

For the purposes of identifying nascent folklore, we turn our focus to what is 
communicatively effected during the flow of an interactive scene, setting aside for 
the time being the more difficult-to-identify innovation at work within individual 
experimentation.

Signs to look for in identifying innovation are similar to imitation. Sustained 
gaze can denote interest, and shared actions and patterns mark the interactive 
element. However, to discover innovation, we seek those actions which break 
the pattern, and in a play context, are used for the purpose of contributing to 
a sustained and mutual enjoyment of an activity. To know whether an action 
is truly innovative, a fresh invention of game play that the child has never 
witnessed before, is simply not in the scope of these field observations. However, 
introduction of a fresh movement, a different cry, or a different use of a toy that 
is done for the purpose of prolonging the enjoyment of play demonstrates the 
innovative ability of the infant to string together prior witnessed behaviors into a 
fluid whole, not unlike verbal formulas and innovative variations within a riddle 
sequence that require skill, intelligence, and creativity to fashion together.7 

By way of illustration, let me sketch a play scene based on my own observation 
of infants at play. Two infants are playing with toys which rattle. One lifts his toy 
into the air and shakes it vigorously, eliciting the sound. The enjoyment of doing 
the action appears to be reason enough to continue shaking the rattle periodically. 
Meanwhile, the second infant begins to pay attention and lifts her rattling toy, 
imitating her play partner’s movement. Now there are two infants rattling toys in 
similar ways. At this point, the second infant, whose toy is not of the rattle-specific 
variety, but has a number of other bells and whistles attached, begins to bang it on 
the carpet, and it makes a most pleasing cacophony of noise. Infant one continues 
shaking his rattle midair for a moment more, then begins enthusiastically pounding 
it on the floor, smiling, eyes wide. 

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We do not know whether the second infant had experienced floor-pounding 
with the toy prior to this situation. However, the break in the rattle pattern 
was directed by the infants’ choices, and, most importantly, contributed to the 
continuation of the play activity. Perhaps after a time, rattling midair would have 
ceased to be enjoyable. Perhaps changing the activity to pounding allowed the 
infants’ enjoyment of the activity to endure ten or even twenty seconds longer 
than the rattle game might have lasted on its own––a significant space of time 
for their attention spans. The possibility for this early creative process hinged 
on the intersubjective space between the two infants where variation could be 
incorporated and improved upon. 

This example suggests an approach much like trial and error in the ways 
that human beings mutually construct culture. Behavior is imitated, and when 
improvements are attempted, the response of the community (or party) for whom 
the communicative behavior is initiated determines whether those changes in turn 
are repeated. This early pattern in infant rattle play becomes writ large, with all 
of the same messy and subjective misfires of communication building upon and 
responding to one another, smoothing into established patterns over time.

The attempting of new or previously demonstrated behavior for one’s own 
ends (often in the same process of trial and error) is also foundational in regard 
to creativity. Creativity and innovation as terminology possess culturally-laden 
value; and the idea of innovation as “newness” and therefore “good” certainly 
creates problems. However, if we recognize the interactive quality of innovation 
— namely, that it is dependent upon others to validate it, repeat it, or encourage 
further repetition — we can see that together, imitation and innovation in 
interactive symbiosis provide rudimentary guidelines for judging activities that 
evoke pleasure, such as play (Miller 1973, 91). In other words, they form the 
foundational properties of aesthetics. 

As noted earlier, distinguishing the difference between previously imitated 
behavior, a failed imitation, and a completely original innovation is beyond 
the scope of my observation. However, I would question to what extent such 
distinction truly matters. The communicative function of the innovation is 
located in the context where it occurs, and its effect is of greater interest than its 
originality. However, as noted above, imitated behavior and innovative behavior 
do differ somewhat in the matter of intention, for it is in the exploration of 
intention that we can create a picture of the infant as agent.

Intention

The final area in which to see the nascent stage of folklore is intention. Imitation 
and innovation in the context of interaction are intimately tied to the simultaneous 
and mutual reading of intention and motivation by infants. Intention, motivation, 
belief, and desire are all terms considered to fall into the realm of “folk 
psychology,” namely, the interpretive system(s) that humans utilize to make sense 
of others’ actions through the attribution of mental states (Malle and Knobe 2001, 
45-46).8 Despite its relative lack of empirical provability, intention has been the 
focus of much attention in recent years, and considerable effort has been made to 

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analyze the various aspects of intention as well as to do empirical study of how 
the concept is put to use (see Malle and Knobe 2001, Ames et al. 2001). What is 
particularly relevant for this analysis is that intention and the reading thereof is a 
social, survival-oriented trait, culturally nuanced and intimately connected with 
communication. 

Infants appear to learn intentionality within the same interactive and imitative 
framework that Dissanayake credits with laying the foundation for later aesthetic 
imagination. Meltzoff notes that infants are taught the idea of actions being linked 
with intention by virtue of their own experience in trying to fulfill their own goals 
and watching others do the same:

Infants have goals and act intentionally. They have experienced 
their own failed plans and unfulfilled intentions … When an infant 
sees another act in this same way, the infant’s self-experience could 
suggest that there is a goal, plan, or intention beyond the surface 
behavior. Thus infants would come to read the adult’s failed attempts 
[at doing a task], and the behavioral envelope in which they occur, as 
a pattern of ‘strivings’ rather than ends in themselves. (Meltzoff 2007, 
131)

However, this broad analysis gives us little assurance. By three months of age, 
it has been shown, infants repeat behavior in order to bring about a repeated 
response in a caregiver, and infants from seven months repeat behavior in order to 
make an adult laugh (Bretherton et al. 1985, 334-5). Elsewhere, it has been argued 
that infants begin to infer absent goals from between nine to thirteen months of 
age (Meltzoff and Brooks 2001, 181). 

However, to what extent can such activities be considered intentional? Knowing 
that infants are intentional agents and recognizing infant intention may be separate 
matters. Ascribing intentionality may itself be a component in whether an action 
achieves its goal, since reading a situation as goal-oriented implies the existence 
of intention. Relevant as well is the idea of self, and to what extent the infant 
agent conceives of the self, as we approach intention’s sister concept, agency. The 
awareness of how one acts upon the world, in tandem with how much one may 
exert one’s own action upon it, vary substantially within the first year of life.

In order to interpret underlying intentions, there must be a shared “framework 
of meaning,” as well as some medium through which communication can be 
achieved (Bretherton et al. 1981, 340). As discussed in the previous sections, this 
framework of meaning is constructed through the minutiae of action and reaction, 
imitation and innovation, and infants can direct and influence its flow. I read 
this as arguing that infants do not need to possess a “theory of mind,” that is, the 
ability to recognize intentionality in others, in order to express desire in a goal-
directed way. 

Desire is another folk psychological concept. As Malle and Knobe point out 
among adults discerning between desire and intention, desire is often defined 
as an internal state, while intention is the action that springs from desire. In 
determining intention, social perceivers suppose strength of a person’s desire to 

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do something. If that desire is acted upon, then it is read as intention, but only if 
there is an equally perceived presence of commitment (Malle and Knobe 2001, 60). 

This raises a teleological spectre. Do varying assumptions of present desire and 
committed action risk adults reading too much intention into infant behavior than 
actually is present? I think that we as ethnographers must be willing to spend the 
time necessary to interpret infant behavior in long-term ethnographic context, to 
recognize individuated cries and gestures, as well as culturally-relevant recognizing 
of infant intention — what is recognized will be responded to. 

 In studies of vocal imitative behavior between infants and parents, 
developmental psychologists Kokkinaki and Kugiumutzakis found that with infants 
between two and six months of age, imitation with parents gave rise to “two 
specific kinds of emotion: interest and pleasure.” They go on to write that, “Given 
that emotions are regarded as motives in human intentional communication, this 
later finding provides evidence that infants and parents also share the ability to 
read each others’ motives and intentions” (Kokkinaki and Kugiumutzakis 2000, 
185). 

While this developmental work does not prove anything about perfect strangers 
being able to read the intentions of infants whom they do not know, it does 
suggest that drawing in expert observers, namely parents, could provide an angle 
for making more accurate conclusions about infants’ intentions during a given 
interaction. Like any human interaction, reading motivation is an interpretive 
process. 

When looking to establish and interpret infant intention, many of the same 
criteria that are useful in recognizing imitation and innovation also apply. 
However, this time the approach must also incorporate more obvious emotional 
signs of response — pleasure, excitement, and interest — that work to direct 
action. 

Beyond merely signaling and recognizing intent with sustained gaze, or 
looking for consistencies and repetitions and breaks in that repetition for new 
permutations on an old theme, the indication that the collective play activity has a 
clearly defined emotional component is key in attributing intention, as well as are 
metacommunicative markers of play, such as exaggeration and stereotypy.

Where to Find Intention

I hope to illustrate this concept of intention by comparing the following two 
scenes, where I have entered as an “expert observer” of my own child. Both 
scenes demonstrate attempts at a game variant of peek-a-boo played with my 
daughter of thirteen months at our home. The first scene is directed by me, 
stationed to one side of a video recorder. The second is the same game played 
with her father while I filled the role of observer and camera person. Both video 
clips do not last more than thirty seconds each in recorded form. 

In the first recording, our daughter turns from standing at a door and walks 
roughly fifteen feet away from the camera, through a living area scattered with 
toys, and down a hallway. I ask her where she is going (in high-pitched play 
tones) even as she disappears out of sight around a doorway. Then come the 

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cue words of our game, which we have played numerous times before: “Where’s 
[Name]?” The sing-song chant is repeated at a higher pitch. As the repetition of 
the cue comes to a close, the child runs out from the doorway with a huge smile 
on her face, looking for my face. I exclaim with exaggerated excitement, round 
eyes, and large smile, “Ohh, there she is!” My daughter responds by squealing in 
delight and prancing on her tiptoes. She drops eye contact with me, and continues 
to create the squealing noise for her own apparent pleasure. She averts her gaze 
to inspect the basket momentarily before she looks up and turns back for the 
doorway. 

In the second clip, the toddler is standing behind her father, seated in the 
middle of the living room floor. He begins the game cue. “Where’s [name]? Where 
did [name] go?” He turns around quickly with a wide, open-mouthed smile and 
exaggeratedly wide eyes. “There she is!” 

However, our daughter has instead turned to a nearby toy behind her father, 
and does not respond to his cue. As her father turns to make eye contact with her, 
she looks up from the toy, and then to where I am seated with the video camera 
(about ten feet away) and then back to her father (about a foot away), before she 
returns her gaze to the camera, with a slight smile. The father tries again, turning 
away from her and repeating the game cue again. However, the direction of my 
daughter’s gaze does not stay more than a moment on her father, and with an 
increasingly large smile, the indirect steps that had taken her to the toy become 
more direct, and she makes an unsteady beeline in the direction of the camera. 
As she passes her father by, he laughs, “Ohh, [Name]’s not paying any attention to 
Daddy; [Name] wants the video camera!” The clip ends as the child, grinning into 
the lens, gets her wish, grabbing for the camera and wrenching it to one side. 

The desire of our daughter to play the game with us was just as important as 
our willingness to play it with her. Through metacommunicative exaggeration, we 
parents in both clips demonstrated our intent to play, and our daughter picked 
up on it. In variation one, she used the doorframe to hide behind. In the second 
variation, her father expected her to hide behind his back and appear to one side 
(based on their previous game play). However, whether due to the distraction 
of the camera, or the lack of ability to see his face as he signaled the game to 
her through exaggerated expression and repeated, patterned behavior, her direct 
engagement with him and with the game were fleeting, despite his numerous 
attempts at re-establishing the flow of interaction between them. 

In the first clip, pleasure could be interpreted and shared by both participants, 
and recognized in the form of squealing, exaggerated expressions, and body 
language, such as excitable prancing. The appearance of the toddler was marked 
by the child’s pleasure. Perhaps this came from filling the hanging, uncertain 
expectation of the situation and gratifying it, but it engendered a return of clear, 
affective signals that reinforced and heightened the her own emotional response. 
Pleasure was also demonstrated for pleasure’s sake, such as the continued 
squealing that was disengaged from seeking a response. When we re-engaged 
through eye contact, she immediately turned back and walked directly for the 
doorway, a clear gestural sign that she wanted to repeat the action and have the 
game continue. 

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In the second clip, the child’s own gauging of the likelihood of chasing the 
camera seemed to grow steadily, first in the uncertainty of her glances between 
camera, father, and toy, and then in the widening smile she manifested in 
advancing in the direction she wished to go. It might also be noted, however, that 
she was never dissuaded from heading toward the video camera. Both parents 
reinforced their own amusement to the child through smiles and laughter as the 
incongruencies between the situation they were trying to effect and the child’s 
actions became more and more pronounced, first through her utterly ignoring her 
father in favor of the nearby toy, and then as she toddled purposefully for the 
camera.

Both of these clips make apparent the ability of the parents and the toddler 
to establish a pattern and a play frame for the game. The parents achieved 
this through a repeated call with a specific vocal tone and exaggerated facial 
expressions. The child accomplished this through the repetition of actions that 
will trigger the calling cue, and enabled her to share in the expression of delight 
and surprise. The delight and surprise that generated the fun of the game hinged 
on the toddler’s ability to distinguish between that which was expected, and that 
which was not expected. By failing to appear immediately in the first game, the 
toddler experimented with the concept of expectation, of the absent being present, 
and her own control in eliciting a reaction. She was in control of the flow of the 
response (though if she had disappeared into the bathroom for too long, I would 
have assumed that she was no longer participating, and would have broken the 
play frame to deny her agency in exploring that particular location). In the second 
situation, parental attempts at creating a recognizable play frame can be seen to 
exist somewhat shakily, and then fall apart. In the uncertain glances between 
father and mother and camera, it was apparent that not only did the parents 
recognize what their daughter wanted, but that the toddler was not entirely at 
ease with pursuing her goal until the signals were clear — the parents had been 
attempting to make eye contact and repeat a cue call, but once their laughter and 
smiling at her replaced their (feeble) attempts to maintain the play situation, her 
steps became faster and more direct, and her smile widened and grew to a cry of 
pleasure upon reaching her destination.

The Promise of Nascent Folklore 

The areas of interactive imitation, innovation, and intention have much to offer 
folklorists who wish to understand this stage of human aesthetic potential. 

The seeds of identity and community sprout in shared communicative and 
intentional behavior, the mutual recognition and empathy inherent in imitation, and 
the developing theory of mind that comes out of the developing child recognizing 
others as “like me,” perhaps the most early experience of Turnerian communitas. 
The most basic experience of imitation and innovation is relived in tradition, 
paralleling the conception of folklore’s ability to be both conservative and dynamic 
(Toelken 1979, 39-40). This “communal creation and recreation” (Ben-Amos 1971, 
7) is negotiated through a social community and its inherent system of response 
and evaluation, and the building fluency of triggering response in others and in 

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turn reading their intention provides for the existence of framing and the reading 
of contextual clues (Hufford 1995, 532). The ability to read the differences in 
performance and intention can be argued as the foundation of genre. 

There are some unsettling implications that we can draw out of the areas of 
infant ability that I have discussed above. One harks back to outdated assumptions 
about “primitive” man and cultural group-think. Another could be perceived as a 
flattening of cultural variation and change under biological reductionism. However, 
despite the implied conclusion that all infants everywhere share these foundational 
abilities as part of their biologically evolved equipment for survival, there is no 
cause to diminish the role of human agency. 

By recognizing foundational abilities which incorporate the desires and the 
intentions of the individual actor, there exists room for the growth of the master 
performer as well as creative expression. Between cultural and social frameworks, 
I would expect to find imitation, innovation, and intention appearing in varying 
forms, with peer and adult responses to proxemics, timing, and variations of 
intentional action being read and responded to very differently. The forms that 
these infant desires and intentions grow into will be diverse — what creativity 
looks like, and indeed what constitutes mastery or performance, will vary by 
culture and folk group. 

The folklorists of infancy are few and far between, which suggests challenges 
in negotiating developmental literature, dealing with the lack of a clearly 
defined group identity, and transcribing multimodal, nonverbal communication. 
However, perhaps we set aside ethnographic methodology and interdisciplinary 
experimentation too soon. As adult humans we possess years of practice past that 
early developmental milestone of nine months to begin grasping that others have 
goals and that other humans are “like me,” while simultaneously acknowledging 
that expectations can and do differ from what actually occurs. Already highly 
experienced readers of intention and action, as ethnographers we hone this skill 
to make our interpretations as accurate and culturally sensitive as possible; as 
folklorists, we engage the expressive, emotionally moving, communicative aspects 
of human behavior — regardless of the phase of human development at which it 
occurs. 

Infants experience emotionally meaningful shared communication––between 
one another and others. They possess their own means for evaluating contingency 
and demonstrating their engagement and preference; they interact creatively and 
imitatively. With expressive communication which is wordless yet vocal, active and 
intentional, infants can be recognized as significant bearers of protoculture — their 
own nascent folklore.

NOTES

Many thanks go to John McDowell for his continual support and encouragement, 
and infinitely helpful commentary during the revisionary process, as well as to 
the dependable friends/sharp-eyed editors of thesis group. Thanks also to Harper, 
without whom it never would have occurred to me to consider people her age 
inspirational. 

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NOTES

1. A notable anthropological exception to this that I have found is Alma 
Gottlieb’s “Do Infants Have Religion?: The Spiritual Lives of Beng Babies,” in 
American Anthropologist 100 (1998: 122-135). She spent over 700 hours with 
infants in order to counterbalance a potentially “adulto-centric” perspective. 

2. See Noyes’ discussion of physical experience (and academic discomfort in 
addressing it) Fire in the Plaça: Catalan Festival Politics after Franco (Philadelphia: 
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). See also Sklar 1994.

3. It would be incorrect to assert that all developmental psychology is clinically 
“cold” or unconcerned with cultural nuance, though critically speaking, quite a 
lot of literature suggests Western-centric universals in forming normative bases 
for comparison with other cultures that has in turn been picked up by the social 
sciences (see Burman 2008, Hirschfield 2002 for extended discussions).

4. While this assertion would not be hotly disputed in many psychological circles, 
these two fields of developmental psychology and language socialization differ 
in many ways. Language socialization is positioned between the quantitative lab 
analysis common to most psychological studies and qualitative ethnographic research, 
incorporating both statistical and interpretive elements, with an end focus on what 
can be learned about cultural values encoded in the medium of language forms and 
how they are taught and internalized by children (Shieffelin and Ochs 1986, 168). 

5. In its most extreme forms, the evolutionary approach risks falling into 
biological reductionism, taking for granted that there are a set of universals that 
exist a priori to culture manifesting in its various forms. However, for early infant 
behavior, where cultural forms are in fact in a nascent and largely unformed state, 
biology may offer insights — especially when we take as a possibility that certain 
human behaviors may be evolved just as physical characteristics are, rejecting the 
idea that evolution is the equivalent of biological determinism (see Bandura 2001 
for an extended discussion). 

For an excellent critique of this evolutionary position, which in many studies 
contains at its core the reverse-engineering of culture, see Robert C. Richardson’s 
Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).

6. By exploring this area, I do not mean to conflate protolore and nascent 
folklore with play, despite some of their obvious similarities. For example, 
Piagetian sensorimotor-period “practice play,” is certainly marked by an intrinsic 
enjoyment of the act of doing itself, its agents not yet having reached the 
developmental capacity for symbols or rule-based games, yet it is often done 
in solitude (Miller 1973, 90). While I do not believe that the ability to derive 
pleasure from solitary play is unimportant or unrelated to an intersubjective social 
framework, it does not receive focus here. 

7. See McDowell 1979 for an extended discussion of the creativity and variation 
within riddling sessions.

8. A term generally considered pejorative by the psychological literature, I 
wonder if we cannot bring some respectability to the idea of “folk psychology” 
by recognizing it as the way in which humans perceive others, a cultural system 
which is taught and believed. 

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