






































OCR Document


 

Expressing and Creating Ourselves in Childhood: 
A Commentary Simon J. Bronner 

Alexander Chamberlain (1865-1914) would have been surprised by 
the essays in this volume. Editor of the Journal of American 
Folklore from 1900-1907, he promoted child study in the under-
standing of culture as the pivot that allows for examination of 
"yesterday" and "to-morrow," for children as a semiliterate society 
inherit the oral tradition of the past and use it to shape the future. 
This concern for historical progression ran through many 
anthropological works of the Gilded Age, including Chamberlain's 
other writings on "primitive science and industry." With folklorists 
taking a prominent role, Gilded Age scholars celebrated and studied 
children's culture with unprecedented enthusiasm. 

Indeed, the Journal of American Folklore was a sympathetic 
home for studies of children's culture, especially since its editors 
from 1888 to 1907 established their reputations in research of 
children's folklore. While Chamberlain's predecessor at the journal, 
William Wells Newell (1839-1907), is often given credit for his 
groundbreaking collection Games and Songs of American Children 
(1883), it was Chamberlain who most forcefully articulated an early 
anthropological interpretation of children's culture in The Child and 
Childhood in Folk-Thought (1896). He fixed on what he called the 
"child-idea" in culture, the view that children represent through 
folklore the vitality of a culture. Unabashedly romantic and 
religious, yet appealing to science, Chamberlain took the vantage of 
"elders" who pass tradition on to children and evaluate them. 
"Everywhere through the world," Chamberlain wrote, "the activities 
of childhood have been appealed to, and the race has wonderfully 
profited by its wisdom, its naiveté, its ingenuity, and its touch of 
divinity" (403). From a perusal of Chamberlain's impressive tome or 
Newell's collection, one might gather that children primarily knew 
simple rhymes, games, and beliefs crafted ages before, probably by 
adults, and surviving despite the advance of civilization. 

Much of children's folklore study in the twentieth century owed 
at least some debt to the collections and ideas of the Gilded Age 
folklorists, but replacing evolutionism with ideas of relativism 
pervading new scholarship in folklore, the essayists in this volume 
make several important theoretical breaks with our Gilded Age 
legacy. I offer that the focus on narrating among the essays in this 
volume is more than the common subject examined; 

47 



 

Bronner 

the focus reveals a rethinking of children's culture in light of new docu-
mentary and interpretative techniques. These historical and theoretical winds 
of change and their implications for comprehending children's culture 
command my attention in this commentary. 

Neither Newell nor Chamberlain offers much in the way of narrative 
behavior given by children; four brief paragraphs in Chamberlain's study 
describe "story-telling" to children, but none gives an account of what 
children do with this knowledge, no less recognize narrative creativity 
(Chamberlain 204-5). Ultimately Chamberlain's book becomes a study of the 
image of the child in adult lore rather than an exposition of children's ways 
of thinking, learning, and developing. 

For Chamberlain, Newell, and so many others to this day, the essential 
question to be answered with the materials of childhood is the relation of 
literary art as a reflection of culture of an early age to the advanced stage of 
adulthood. Hence we can appreciate the remarkable attention to children's 
lore by late-nineteenth-century folklorists as a tribute to the industrial 
progress and rationality supposedly achieved by "modem" adults in the 
Gilded Age (see Bronner, Folklife Studies 119-34). In the predominant 
evolutionary thinking of the day, children represented the infancy, the origins 
of adulthood and civilization. On the ladder of progress from savagery, 
through barbarism, to civilization set up in most evolutionary studies, 
children were our little savages, noteworthy for their retention of ancient lore 
and invention of new fantasies. 

The influences of Darwinian philosophy and modem aesthetic values 
should be apparent in the assumptions of many studies of children's folklore 
from the nineteenth-century to the present. From Darwin's influence is an 
evolutionary premise about the "natural" movement from simple to complex 
forms, from children's rhymes to adult narratives. The "specimens" of past 
lore therefore needed to be collected and arranged into comparable types that 
showed the evolution of forms according to natural laws (see Bronner, 
American Folklore Studies 1-38). Although Newell recognized the 
inventiveness of children, he and others nonetheless selected the "traditional" 
forms showing stability and distribution over generations for comparison 
(see Fine). Scholars well after Newell chose specimens that had a completed 
quality to them and drew attention to themselves because of their artistic 
characteristics. Such arrangements and choices resulted in a picture of 
cultural stability over an extended time. Another result was a map of cultural 
space in which isolable groups expressed their differences through lore. 
Within this map, children and adults, women and men, to name some groups, 
inhabited separate spheres (see Bronner, American Folklore Studies 1-38). 

I consider the essayists here as part of a trend toward asking different 

48 



 

A Commentary 

kinds of questions based on new assumptions. They share with Chamberlain 
a concern for the "thought" that folklore reveals, although they would 
probably phrase it as process rather than form, as "thinking" rather than 
"thought." Significantly, in their very raising of narrative as an essential part 
of the child's way of forming and communicating meaning, they suggest a 
further departure from the evolutionary model of movement from simple to 
complex forms. They don't collect so much as recognize interactions that 
employ "stories," many of which may be unique but follow recognizable 
structures (see Goodwin). The child studied by Judith Haul, for example, 
responds with narrative behavior to different situations. The understanding of 
these interactions comes not from the historical forms to which they relate as 
much as the social needs presented in certain situations and the ways that 
people communicate with one another. Natural laws commanding cultural 
development over the globe don't explain the scene presented by Haut as 
much as do the functions and structures of the moment. The essential 
questioning thus becomes behavioral rather than naturalistic. The questioning 
is not about the lines from "yesterday" into "tomorrow," but rather about the 
ways people express themselves taking cues from any number of 
simultaneous influences, and indeed create themselves through expression. 

The breaks that this questioning of expression make with Gilded Age 
approaches are evident in the emphasis placed today on the keywords of 
development, learning, and communication. By using development, many 
researchers today draw attention to varying rates of growth and varieties of 
expression among children. Its is granted that children strive toward the 
maturity of adulthood, but one also recognizes that children have distinctive 
behaviors that don't necessarily carry over in to adulthood. In looking at 
development, researchers also try to get around the misleading opposition of 
childhood and adulthood as unified groups. Children, the researchers point 
out, have individual profiles and acquire different skills and tendencies 
according to a wide array of factors—including gender, class, ethnicity, 
location, and family. Even taking into account the predominance of shared 
age-related traits among children, one finds more complexity to the subtle 
difference between, as one child exclaimed in an interview to me, "fifth and 
sixth grade!" (see Fine, 17083, for discussion of "circular generations"). He 
was not talking about educational skills as much a cultural property of play 
and narrative styles appropriate to the group with whom he spent most of his 
time and the environment in which it was spent (see Virtanen for a study 
using these considerations). In addition, many interviewers of youth note the 
insistence of children ("kids," children prefer to say) on their age not as five 
or six, but as five and a half or six and a half. 

49 



 

Bronner 

Within the broad neutral native category of "kids" lies an implication of 
change, physical and social-and cultural. The rapid physical and cognitive 
changes that occur in childhood, not to mention the social clustering of 
children in school, tempt us to categorize it separately. Yet contexualizing 
aging with the life course in the investigation of children's lives offers a 
closer look at the ways children use lore to respond to developmental and 
social changes (Bronner "Left to Their Own Devices"). 

Through the life course, individuals learn from a variety of sources 
about responding to different situations. During the late nineteenth century, 
evolutionary assumptions led some scholars to imagine that literacy and 
technology naturally replace oral forms of learning. Yet experience shows 
that people surrounded by technology demand the kind of learning we 
usually associate with folklore-by word of mouth, by imitation and 
demonstration, by custom. Indeed, literacy and technology often become 
tools to engage narrative behavior, as Elizabeth Tucker's study shows. Other 
examples might be the use of photocopiers for passing traditional humor and 
computers for folk games. The important lesson is that people use folklore 
for the kind of powerful learning and communication it offers and are 
willing to adjust it to new technology so as to engage its qualities. 

The new awareness of children' s complexity and ability that informs 
essays here by C. W. Sullivan III and Judith Haut leads us to consider the 
remarkable rapidity with which children learn language and the distinc-
tiveness of the first few years of life (see Brown; Sanches and Kirshenblatt-
Gimblett). Within their first year, children become aware quickly of 
sequences of words that carry meaning and evoke responses from adults 
(Brown 1973). In multilingual households, children can quickly select 
different codes of speech and often exaggerate their styles.1 All to little 
recognized are the culturally variable developments of ordered "baby talk" 
and the creative uses of play languages by children (see Sherzer; Sanches 
and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett). 

Explaining the mechanisms by which children recognize some word 
sequences as "stories" and find ways to strategically use them essentially 
challenges scholars to question social interaction and development. Even 
before language is acquired, children become aware of culturally defIned 
spaces that suggest narrative structures in that they have directions and 
boundaries. In American culture, the rectangle-in the crib, the room, the play 
block-is an particularly ubiquitous model (see Bronner, Grasping Things 15-
17). In many cultures, circular spaces dominate and may be investigated for 
a relation to narrative structure. In one study of the Mescalero Apache, for 
example, Claire Farrer found that houses, dances, 

50 



 

A Commentary 

and children's games such as Tag show strong circularity in contrast to 
Anglo-American linearity (Farrer; see also Bronner "Anglo-American 
Aesthetic"). 

While C.W. Sullivan III asks readers to contemplate the influence of 
the reading process in the ways that children perceive their own narrating, 
he also notes the processes that occur prior to reading. Before adults "read" 
to children, they typically use play to enumerate objects on the body as 
points of reference for narrative sequencing. Among the first playful 
performances recalled from tradition offered by adults to children are finger 
or toe formulas. In French a formula uses the structure of the family in a 
sequence from the thumb to the little finger: 

Voici le pére 
Voici la mére 
Voici la demoiselle 
Voici le fils 
Voici le petit rincouincouin. [Shiver 223] 

Some of my Pennsylvania-German informants recall a formula using the 
occupations on the farm: 

Der ist der Bauer [farmer] 
Der ist die Bauerin [farmer's wife] 
Der ist der Knecht [farmhand] 
Der ist die Dien'rn [farmhand's wife] 
Und ides kleine wutzklein in der wiegen [piglet in a cradle]. 
[see Stoudt] 

A common sequence played on the toes in American culture is: 

This little piggy wen to market 
This little piggy stayed home 
This little piggy had roast beef 
This little piggy had none 
And this little piggy went wee, wee, wee. 

Sometimes known inaccurately as "rhymes," these expressions offered by 
adults usually before they read to a child are more in the way of verbal 
formulas accompanied by physical action that make the infant aware of 
itself. The verbal stress and elongation in the conclusion accompanying the 
grabbing of the toes or fingers gives the sense of an ending that relies on 
what preceded it. Are these expressions recognized as stories? In some 
German sources, these expressions are called Fingermächen, or "finger 
tales" (Shiver). If American children do not recognize them as 

51 



 

Bronner 

stories, then they may employ their structures in their own playful expressions 
using repetition and rhythm. The formulaic rhythm of "This Little Piggy," for 
instance, relates closely to the youthful narrative Elizabeth Tucker identifies as "In 
a Dark, Dark Wood": 

Okay, you walk down this long, black road and there's this 
big, urn, black house and you go in this big black room and there's--
(speeds up) In the big black room there's a big black closet, in the big 
black closet there's a big black tuxedo, in the big black tuxedo there's a 
big black pocket, in the big black pocket is a big black box, in the big 
black box is a red jelly bean. (laughs) [Tucker 483; see also Opie and 
Opie 36]. 

Even later in childhood, the rhythm and repetition characterizing this 
narrative form appears in ghost stories often given at camps and slumber 
parties. One such story is sometimes identified as a subunit under the 
heading "Johnny, I Want My Liver" (a subtype, as it has been categorized by 
folklorists, of Aarne- Thompson Tale-Type 366), although the narrative 
technique repeats in many stories used by children. 

This lady gave this boy named Johnny a dollar to go to the store 
to get some liver. But he spent it on something else before he got 
the liver, and he had to bring this lady her liver. So he saw this 
graveyard right next to the store. So he unburied a guy, and he got 
the guy's liver and brought it to the lady. The lady said, "this is a 
real good liver." But that night they heard, "I want my liver back, 
I want my liver back, I want my liver back." Then they hear, "I'm 
on your first step, I want my liver back, I want my liver back, I 
want my liver back." Then "I'm on your porch, I want my liver 
back, I want my liver back. I'm in your living room, I want my 
liver back, I want my liver back. I'm in the bedroom, I want my 
liver back, I want my liver back" (teller grabs listener in 
abdomen) [Bronner, American Children's Folklore 158; see also 
Opie and Opie 36; Virtanen 76; Tucker 370-73,495-96] 

And in so-called invented stories, one can discern similar structures and 
rhythms, such as this one told repeatedly by a girl from two to three years 
old that employs the familiar family structure along with the repetition of 
actions leading to a conclusion: 

2/22/75 

The man stayed home 
the children went out 
then a Cookie Monster came 

52 



 

A Commentary 

then the Cookie Monster went away 
and the mommy was angry 
and then the father was angry 
and then the children went out again 
then the father went out 
then the mother went out 
they went to the park 
then they went home 
and then the father was doing work 
and then it was getting late 
the children went to sleep 
and the mommy and the father went to sleep 

8/13/75 

The mother went out 
then the father went out 
then the mother went out again 
and then the father went out 
then the children went out 
then policeman came 
the mother came back from the meeting 
then the father came back from the meeting 
then a Cookie Monster came 
and the policeman came again 
then the Cookie Monster went away [Sutton-Smith 53] 

With these "texts," we long to know the social interactions and cues that 
gave rise to them to understand how participants understood their 
meaning. When these texts are construed as narrative, there is an 
assumption that they are in themselves part of a sequence. There is an 
additional assumption that while the story draws attention to the text, 
"narrative" directs inquiry to the performance, some of which may be out 
of the awareness of the "story-teller." As Judith Haut's essay 
demonstrates, the sequence around the narrative may involve 
conversation, or play, signals that aid in the recognition of the beginning 
and ending of "story" and its different meanings in various situations. 

The use of "narrative" to describe such sequences deserves discussion 
because it illustrates the different questions being asked by the essayists in 
this issue. The use of "narrative" is more characteristic of present scholarship 
than the Gilded Age folklorists (see Bronner 1987). Narrative is a technical 
term that refers to the result of a process (narrating in context) rather than the 
form of relating information in an organized way. "Narrative" is 
conspicuously absent in folkloristic dictionaries such as the Standard 
Dictionary of Folklore. Mythology and Legend (1950) and 

53 



 

Bronner 

General Ethnological Concepts (1960). Elliott Oring, however, made the 
term central in his chapter on "Folk Narratives" in the textbook Folk Groups 
and Folklore Genres (1986). "Narrative," be declared, "is another word for 
story." Then why not use the more familiar "story"? The answer lies in the 
suggestion of process of "narrating" in narrative. Oring continues, "Narrating 
is a method by which an experience is transformed into verbal account" 
(121). In an even more recent source, the Dictionary of Concepts in Cultural 
Anthropology (1991), Robert Winthrop claims that "one trend discernible, in 
both anthropology and folklore studies, is a concern for understanding 
narrative as a communicative performance, 'a totality encompassing not only 
the verbal story but the entire narrative experience, auditory and visual, of 
spectator and actor.''' Essentially, narrative, Winthrop argues, brings out the 
"expressive dimension of culture" (126). 

By using narrative, researchers blur the lines between the verbal and 
non-verbal dimensions of culture. Narrative suggests the organization of 
experience in a number of ways. Non-verbal customs such as games played 
in childhood also follow narrative structure that culturally varies. In many 
American chasing games, for example, dramatic tension is created in a 
tripartite narrative structure: a departure from home, a chase, and return 
home (Dundes). In what ways does the parent's playing of "Peek-a-boo," one 
of the first traditional forms of play experienced between adult and child in 
American culture affect an understanding of narrative sequence? The 
structure moves from the bidden face to the face revealed accompanied by a 
rhyme, "Peek-a-boo, I see you!" This frame around the repeated play activity 
causes delight in the child. Then among the first organized games played by 
children among themselves is Hide-and-Go-Seek (Bronner, American 
Children's Folklore 176-78). One can also notice that a number of 
spontaneously "invented" fantasies in verbal and non-verbal form reported in 
The Folkstories of Children by Brian Sutton-Smith (1981) or City Play by 
Amanda Dargan and Steven Zeitlin (1990) involve the dramatic tension of 
disappearance and recovery. 

Of particular significance to the analysis of learning and development 
raised by these books and the essays here is the questioning of the uses to 
which narrating is put. Strictly speaking, children don't need stories to 
communicate, but they demand stories, and quickly employ narrative 
behavior for various ends. From their early and subsequent experiences, the 
question arises, bow do children perceive the functions of narrative 
behavior? Is their demand based on the aid to learning that stories provide? 
Do they recall the entertaining reinforcement of the finger rhyme, the social 
organizing effect of the game, and the communicative clarity of putting ideas 
in story? How are distinctions made between the 

54 



 

A Commentary 

televised story and the told story? Or for that matter, between the true and 
fantastic story? How do they perceive the strategies for recounting a tale 
to an adult or to other children? Judith Haut keenly observes the impor-
tance of social awareness to the kinds of performances she heard from a 
single child, while C.W. Sullivan III incisively questions the ways that 
children learn structural competence for performance. Sullivan's inquiry 
begins at the point of literary understanding of story, but suggests a broader 
inquiry into the relations of narrative to children's cognitive development. To 
view such relations and the strategies for employing narrative, the emphasis 
needs to be on the expressive behavior used, rather than the isolation of 
finished forms. The categories of pre- and post applied to the development of 
narrative forms, I'm afraid, reflect the old evolutionary opposition of child 
and adult, and may be misleading because they suggest a magical 
transformation caused by natural law rather than the process by which 
expressions are used. 

When talking of process, researchers look to the communication that can 
be observed and documented. This discussion differs from the collections of 
specimens because in the study of communication the lore emerges as a 
small part of an encompassing event. Judith Haut, for example, documents 
several situations in which a story emerged in response to the conversation 
between participants in the situation. In some cases, the story was offered 
because one was specifically asked for: "Tell me a story," someone asked. 
On other occasions, the story came out as part of conversation to impose an 
effect on listeners. What Haut is describing is a process of creativity rather 
than one of creations. Creativity is employed to bring old and new elements, 
as well as individual and social concerns, together in response to the social 
situation; it suggests a process that combines tradition and invention. The 
"creation" of concern to Chamblerlain implied the separation of folklore 
survivals from new inventions. As the essays in this issue show, various 
kinds of learning intertwine as do creativity and tradition. The essays suggest 
therefore that our driving ethnographic task is to examine the various roles of 
tradition in the communication of meaning. No longer considering the 
survival of folklore the main issue, they turn to the creativity of tradition in 
everyday life (see Bronner Creativity and Tradition).2 

I'm not surprised by the themes presented in the essays here. As 
Chamberlain and Newell used folklore research to reflect on the hierarchical 
industrial age rising in their Gilded Age society, so the trend today is to 
contemplate the swirling social currents of an electronic era. More than an 
objective anthropological endeavor envisioned by Chamberlain, the 
ethnographic task now is broadly interdisciplinary and simultaneously 
involves us as participants and observers. One might argue that the 

55 



 

Bronner 

observations made by the essayists are at least a response to our ability to 
document ourselves in the communication technology that in itself stresses 
process. From this communication technology, we learn more about the 
simultaneity and spontaneity of everyday life, and we are reminded of how 
little we remember of ourselves from our own childhoods. We need more 
attention to children's folklore in an interactional framework to move beyond 
the blinding influence of the "child-idea." 

Can we separate what happens in childhood from the "child-idea," the 
images we have created as adults for the age? Priscilla Ord approaches this 
subject by examining the adaptations of children's language and lore in books 
written for children. Her discussion reminds me of my experience with 
reality and image in American Children's Folklore (1988). In the book, I 
recorded children's traditions as I heard them, and that commonly included 
language somehow considered fit only for adults. I received less than kind 
comments for suggesting in the book that children's expressiveness 
frequently takes on a harsh tone. "I swear that my child doesn't say those 
things," I heard. Yet many open-minded parents came back to me after I 
asked them to ask their children about the content of their "stories" and told 
me that, to their surprise, their children indeed expressed themselves and 
created themselves outside of adult limits. In recording the creativity of 
children's tradition, I violated the idea of childhood as evolving from 
innocence to experience. I also violated the notion of children's expression--
sometimes referred to as "ditties"--as quaint or "childish" art. 

What may be surprising as well in these essays to some readers is the 
turn from art to expression, for the popular study of children's lore still has a 
tendency to identify the gems of a diminutive art. In the questioning of 
structure and process in this special issue, I hope we come to appreciate more 
the competence each child has for creativity, rather than the concern of 
Chamberlain for "those rude scribblings and quaint efforts at delineations, 
whence, in the course of ages, have been evolved. . . the marvelous creations 
of a Rubens and an Angelo" (Chamberlain 3). Even Priscilla Ord's essay, 
apparently concerned with literary devices used by accomplished authors, 
reveals sources of narration in the everyday language of children. The 
"creativity of tradition" thus applies as much to authors as to storytellers. In 
Judith Haut's essay, we learn that there is no right version of the child's 
favorite story; the child employs the structure of what he recognizes as 
"story" in several situations to create something new. In Elizabeth Tucker's 
essay, we learn the ways that children interpret packaged stories for 
themselves. Indeed, all these essays touch on how narrating or storytelling as 
cultural praxis becomes a way of knowing (see Bronner "Art, Performance, 
and Praxis"). 

56 



 

A Commentary 

If the major theme presented in the various essays for consideration is 
the appreciation for the complexity of children's communication using 
narrative behavior, then the subtheme is the need to understand children as 
they perceive their situation in addition to the way we perceive them. These 
essays signal, in sum, the recognition of tell-tale signs of human thinking. 
Their suggestions inspire an uncovering of the ways that discernment is 
connected to the telling, the ways as folklore offers, that every child sees, or 
should I say, tells which way the wind blows. 

The Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg 

NOTES 

1. To give an example in my home state of the implication of multilingualism 
on the development of speech and narrative styles, 6.9 percent of Pennsylvanians 
speak a language other than English at home. Yet too often, American researchers 
assume narrative ability exclusively in English. The Pennsylvania-German folklorists 
early on discussed multilingual abilities to express folklore among children; see 
Gladfelter, Kreider, and Spotts; Shoemaker; Stoudt. A more recent exception to the 
American tendency is found in Brady on Navajo children's stories, although no texts 
are offered in Navajo. 

2. Similar to the guiding concept of "narrative," the use of "creativity of 
tradition" underscores the emergent quality of expressive behavior and its purposeful 
uses in various situations. This folkloristic consideration of the "creativity of 
tradition" cuts across material and verbal expressions. See Crowley; Evans; Bronner, 
Grasping Things; Briggs; Jones. 

REFERENCES 

Brady, Margaret K. "Some Kind of Power": Navajo Children's Skinwalker 
 Narratives. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 1984. 
Briggs, Charles L. Competence in Performance: The Creativity of Tradition in 
 Mexicano Verbal Art. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1988. 
Bronner, Simon J. American Children's Folklore. Little Rock: August House, 
 1988. 
________. American Folklore Studies: An Intellectual History. Lawrence: UP of 
 Kansas, 1986. 
________. Anglo-American Aesthetic." Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Ed.    
       Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris. Chapel Hill: U of North 
       Carolina P, 1989. 458-60. 
_______. "Art, Performance, and Praxis: The Rhetoric of Contemporary Folklore 
 Studies." Western Folklore 47 (1988): 75-102. 
_______. ed. Creativity and Tradition: New Directions. Logan: Utah State UP, 
 1992. 
_______. ed. Folklife Studies from the Gilded Age: Object, Rite, and Custom in 

57 



 

Bronner 

 Victorian America. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987. 
______. Grasping Things: Folklife Material Culture and Mass Society in 
 America. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1986. 
______. "'Left to Their Own Devices': Interpreting American Children's 
 Folklore as an Adaptation to Aging," Southern Folklore 47 (1990): 101-16. 
Brown, Roger. A First Language: The Early Stages. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 
 1973. 
Chamberlain, Alexander Francis. The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought. 
 New York: Macmillan, 1896. 
Crowley, Daniel J. I Could Talk Old-Story Good: Creativity in Bahamian 
 Folklore. Berkeley: U of California P, 1966. 
Dargan, Amanda, and Steven Zeitlin. City Play. New Brunswick, New Jersey: 
 Rutgers UP, 1990. 
Dundes, Alan. "On Game Morphology: A Study of the Structure of Non-Verbal 
 Folklore." New York Folklore Quarterly 20 (1964): 276-88. 
Evans, David. Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues. 
 Berkeley: U of California P, 1982. 
Farrer, Claire R. "Play and Inter-Ethnic Communication." The Anthropological 
 Study of Play: Problems and Prospects. Ed. David F. Lancy and B. Allan 
 Tindal. Cornwall, NY: Leisure Press, 86-92. 
Fine, Gary Alan. "Children and Their Culture: Exploring Newell's Paradox." 
 Western Folklore 39 (1980): 170-83. 
Gladfelter, Millard E., Homer L. Kreider, and Charles D. Spotts. "Symposium on 
 the Pennsylvania Dutch Dialect." Pennsylvania Folklife 18 (Autumn 1968): 
 44-48. 
Goodwin, Marjorie Harness. He-Said-She-Said: Talk as Social Organization 
 Among Black Children. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. 
Hultkrantz, Alee. General Ethnological Concepts. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and 
 Bagger, 1960. 
Jones, Michael Owen. Craftsman of the Cumberlands: Traditional and Creativ- 
 ity. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1989. 
Leach, Maria. Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend. 2 vols.. 

New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1950.  
Newell, William Wells. 1883. Baltimore: Clearfield, 1992.  
Opie, Iona, and Peter Opie. Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. London: 
 Oxford UP, 1959. 
Oring, Elliott. "Folk Narratives." Folk Groups and Folklore Genres. Ed. Elliott 
 Oring. Logan: Utah State UP, 1986. 121-45. 
Sanches, Mary, and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. "Children's Traditional 
 Speech Play and Child Language." Speech Play: Research and Resources 
 for the Study of Linguistic Creativity. Ed. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. 
 Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1976.65-110. 
Sherzer, Joel. "Play Languages: Implication for (Socio) Linguistic." Speech Play: 

Research and Resources for the Study of Linguistic Creativity. Ed. Barbara 
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1976. 19-36. 

Shiver, Sam M. "Finger Rhymes." Southern Folklore Quarterly 5 (1941): 221 

58 



 

A Commentary 

 34. 
Shoemaker, Alfred A. Traditional Rhymes and Jingles of the Pennsylvania Dutch. 
 Lancaster: Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center, 1951. 
Stoudt, Rev. John Baer. The Folklore of the Pennsylvania Germans. Lancaster, 
 Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania-German Society, supplement to Volume 23 of 
 the Proceedings, 1915. 
Sutton-Smith, Brian. The Folkstories of Children. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylva- 

nia P, 1981.  
Toelken, Barre. The Dynamics of Folklore. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. 
Tucker, Elizabeth. "Tradition and Creativity in the Storytelling of Pre-Adoles- 
 cent Girls." Diss., Indiana University: Blooimington, Ann Arbor: UMI, 
 1977. 7805583 
Virtanen, Leea. Children's Lore. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 1978. 
Winthrop, Robert H. Dictionary of Concepts in Cultural Anthropology. New 
 York: Greenwood, 1991. 

59 




