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book reviews

Recess Battles: Playing, Fighting, and Storytelling. By Anna R. Beresin. 
Foreword by Brian Sutton-Smith. (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2010. Pp. xii + 
168. Appendixes, notes, bibliography, index.)

simon J  bronner

A spate of books lately have signaled a dire warning about the threat to free play 
with the elimination of recess by school administrations and the regimentation of 
children at camps and after-school programs. Folklorists have much to contribute 
to this discourse in the “war on recess” because of the association of recess play 
with spontaneous, evolving traditional practices controlled by children rather than 
administrated by adults or influenced by corporations (in the form of video games 
and other gadgets directing play). Some advocates such as Joe L. Frost have even 
referred to a movement to counter the detrimental effects on child development 
with the redesign of playgrounds and the war on recess with the urgency 
of a “child-saving movement” (see his A History of Children’s Play and Play 
Environments: Toward a Contemporary Child-Saving Movement, 2009). To date, 
much of the folkloristic attention to the issue of the decline of free play seems to 
have been centered in Great Britain with the publication of Steve Roud’s sweeping 
tome, The Lore of the Playground (2010), and Julia C. Bishop and Mavis Curtis’s 
editing of nine insightful essays in Play Today in the Primary School Playground 
(2001). To this bookshelf can now be added an incisive ethnography by Anna R. 
Beresin of recess at one American urban school between 1991 and 2004.

Readers might wonder if this focus on one school severely limits the possibility 
of generalizing about play and the framed activity of recess. Beresin is good about 
contextualizing the distinctive background of the children and their environment, 
and yet at the same time she draws lessons from what she saw in the schoolyard 
that could contribute to the discourse on “the war on recess.” She clearly falls on 
the side of advocates for recess as essential to children’s development and she 
views detrimental effects to children when recess is removed. She explains the 
assault on recess as an adult fear of violence and she uses ethnography to show 
that the “roughness” of time that children have to themselves occurs primarily in 
the transitions in and out of organization time rather than in the activities of recess. 
She confirmed this observation with video and showed it to administrators who set 
new guidelines for moving in and out of recess. This section is probably the most 
revealing of the book, not only for childhood and play studies, but for the uses of 
ethnography. 

Beresin also uses a narrow ethnographic lens for a wider vision about play 
in her drawing out children’s own views on what constitutes play—and for 
that matter violence—in a brief but provocative section on “Keywords of the 
Playground.” She raises, as others have done, the linkage in children’s cognition of 

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book reviews bronner

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play and “fun,” and readers might wish for conversation that reveals the rhetoric 
of play as a mode of self-awareness. Also on the wish list is visual material, since 
Recess Battles more than other studies of children’s play refers to patterns evident 
in visual terms. To be sure, she includes illustrations rendered by the children 
themselves, a reminder of the “native” terms she seeks through ethnography, but 
perhaps out of concern for children’s privacy, photographic figures are omitted 
from the book. To Beresin’s credit, the photography is instrumental not only as  
a tool but also as a concept of frame and paradox borrowed from Bateson. She 
sees, perhaps more readily than many folklorists, the power of child-controlled 
frames in the form of supposedly invented games to resist, and comment on,  
adult control. 

There is text, and musical transcription, that add to the understanding of 
changing expressive forms in twenty-first century childhood environments. 
Beresin is especially concerned with a reading of the many adaptation, and 
in many instances, apparently unique expressions, that draw on commercial 
references (“Mine costs more, Yours costs less, Mine Footlocker, Yours Payless”). 
She considers the reflection of corporate exploitation of inner-city youth in this 
folkloric “incorporation” on the playground. She also astutely interprets the “old 
school” rhymes, or rather their adaptation (e.g., “Mailman mailman, Do your 
duty, ‘Cause here come miss American beauty, She can do the pom pom, She can 
do the twist, Most of all, she can make the boys kiss”) as framed performances 
of bodily asset and control. This question of children’s culture in conflict when 
expressed as free play with adult sense of restricting movement, and hence the 
body, also comes into play in the resources of popular culture, and especially 
hip-hop music, in the content of rhymes and actions. Beyond this one schoolyard, 
Beresin coins the term “gamestory” to designate the narrative intrinsic in activities 
children associate with the playground. Her book is a starting point to decode the 
frames and patterns elsewhere, that is, if recess survives administrative fiats that 
Beresin shows to derive from serious misunderstandings of what children do when 
they play.

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