







































 

IDEAS FOR INQUIRY: 
"EXHIBITING 
CHILDREN" 

SIMON J. BRONNER 

Think about it—while scholars of children's folklore typically report the 
identification, collection, organization, and interpretation of children's 
traditions, they also must be aware of the variety of ways that this material is 
adapted, displayed, even misrepresented, in museums, publications, festivals, 
web sites, community centers, and classrooms. What are the images of 
tradition projected of children and childhood in various media? The 
Children's Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society sponsored a 
special forum to take up this provocative theme of "exhibiting children" at 
the 2002 annual meeting in Rochester, New York. Conference attendees had 
the opportunity before the forum to visit the Margaret Strong Museum 
(including the National Toy Hall of Fame), renowned for its children's 
material culture collections (see http://www.strongmuseum.org). The opening 
ceremony of the conference was held in the museum. Recognizing dis-
cussions of the visual representation and cultural construction of childhood in 
various disciplines, Children's Folklore Section leaders C. W. Sullivan III and 
JoAnn Conrad working with Robert Baron of the New York State Council on 
the Arts organized the forum as a way to bring this issue to a wider audience 
of folklorists and museum professionals. 

I introduced the concept of the forum this way: 

Children rarely have control of their own representation, and 
yet the exhibition of childhood is usually a key to the understanding 
of the inheritance of culture from one generation to the next. 
Considering the public debate revolving around the decline of 
traditional values passed along to children, the hegemonic structures 
of consumer cultures dictating children's lives, the vulnerability, and 
danger, of children, and the proliferation of alternative children's 
subcultures in America, the forum addresses what impact the 
exhibition of children in media, education, and museums has had on 
the representations of children's culture, especially folk culture. It 
necessarily takes up the difference between material and visual ex- 



 
IDEAS FOR INQUIRY: "EXHIBITING CHILDREN" BRONNER 

hibitions presented by children and adults. These central questions 
lead with oral and social genres while popular culture has exhibited 
the material and visual realm. Against the backdrop of exhibitions 
and collections of childhood by the Strong Museum, the panel 
suggests new intellectual directions that can place folklore at the 
center of scholarly discourse on children, family, and youth as the 
key to cultural analysis. 

One such intellectual direction begins at the museum, gallery, and 
cultural agency interpreting children's artifacts for the public. Jon Paul 
Dyson, historian at the Margaret Strong Museum, explained the background 
of Margaret Strong's collecting and the museum's work in building a cultural 
interpretation of the  collections (see http://www.strongmuseum.org 
/collection/index.htm). The emphasis has been on the historical development 
of children's culture, and Dyson offered insights into the implications of 
comparing contemporary practice with Victorian children's culture. While the 
Victorian sensibility was on accumulation of artifacts, contemporary practice 
calls for themes that suggest the meaning of children's lives. The themes 
presented to exhibit children are: House and Home, Ideas and Images, 
Clothing and Accessories, Play and Work, Sight and Sound. The Museum 
explains the collection this way: 

These artifacts embody, illustrate, illuminate, preserve, and enable 
understanding of the attitudes, beliefs, values, customs, tastes, and 
traditions that Americans have held individually and collectively 
over the last two centuries and have passed, or are passing, to 
subsequent generations. These personal, everyday objects help 
Americans to understand who they are and who they believe they 
are and why. 

C.W. Sullivan III, professor of English at East Carolina University and 
editor of the Children's Folklore Review, discussed what he and some others 
perceive as the passing of spontaneous play. Children's traditional play, 
especially the songs and games that folklorists have collected since W.W. 
Newell's Games and Songs of American Children, published in 1884, has 
long been a central concern of children's folklorists. The songs and games 
that have, in the not-so-recent past, been collected from children at recess, 
before and after school, in the neighborhood in the afternoon or evening may 
soon no longer be available as recess disappears from the elementary school 
schedule, children are signed up for after-school sports, arts, or academic pro 

102 



 BRONNER IDEAS FOR INQUIRY: "EXHIBITING CHILDREN" 

grams, and homework for even first graders becomes the primary activity of 
the evening. In short, children are losing (or having taken away from them) 
the opportunity to exhibit themselves in game and song. As that happens, is 
there any way a museum can exhibit games and songs in any way other than 
photographs and written texts? 

Peter Tokofsky, associate professor at UCLA, addressed the dissonance 
between exhibition of and experience of celebrations from the perspective of 
children. Whereas museums tend to display the sacred or special objects 
associated with these occasions, he pointed out, his observations participating 
in a "Family Traditions: Linking Individuals to Cultures" project in Los 
Angeles, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, marked 
objects for memory, which are ultimately not suitable for most museum 
displays. It might be the foods, spontaneous games, or other ephemera, which 
serve as the highlights of celebratory occasions for children. 

Jeannie Thomas, associate professor of English and folklore at Utah State 
University (see http://english.usu.edu/americanstudies/thomas.html) discussed 
the ways that children perform and exhibit Barbie dolls, the world's most 
popular doll. Thomas's interest in the effects of Barbie on popular culture was 
stimulated by narratives elicited from students in a children's folklore course. 
One student recalled collecting Barbie heads and baking them in the oven. 
Another posed Barbie and Ken dolls in idealistic "Theodore (Beaver) 
Cleaver" tableaus when dysfunctional family interaction became too 
disturbing or painful. For all the controversy and problems surrounding 
Barbie, she maintains her popularity. Thomas said she believes Barbie 
encourages creative play, which has helped Mattel become a part of 
contemporary folk culture. The variety of Barbies on the market enforces the 
connection she has with folklore and culture. "I was struck at how Mattel 
commodifies folklore and sells it. There are Barbies for holidays, fairy tales, 
even international Barbies. Folklore studies places and culture, and Mattel 
markets that in a really superficial way," said Thomas (see 
http://www.hardnewscafe.usu.edu/archive/july2000/0720_barbie. html). 

The lively response from the audience signaled many of the perspectives 
opened up by the theme of "exhibiting children." A number of participants 
remarked on the representation of children's folklore in classroom materials 
available for basic education. Other participants picked up on the tension 
between commercial culture in the marketing of toys and folk culture in the 
performances of children with toys. This led to a lively debate over the 
hegemonic effect that commercial culture has over the folk practices of 
children. The past-orientation of 

103 



 
IDEAS FOR INQUIRY: "EXHIBITING CHILDREN" BRONNER 

museums also received scrutiny, and discussion ensued on incorporating 
ethnographic documentation of contemporary culture, or children's views of 
their own culture, in museums and cultural exhibitions. The session brought 
out the ways that children's folklore scholarship is an act of representation 
and construction. In so doing, participants realized the ethical implications of 
the adaptation of scholarship in various media. 

104 


	CFR_2002-2003_Part33
	Pages from CFR_2002-2003_Part34



