Children’s Folklore Recent Titles in Greenwood Folklore Handbooks Myth: a handbook

PERFORMANCE
In the late 1960s, emphasis on the context surrounding folklore texts gave 
birth to the performance school of folklore study. Dan Ben-Amos’s article “To-
ward a Definition of Folklore in Context” explains that scholars should pay at-
tention to such contextual elements as place, time, and company (11). Roger 
Abrahams, another eloquent advocate of performance study, makes the point 
that “performance, item, and audience” are all equally significant (143–58). 

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106 Children’s 
Folklore
Performance studies tend to follow a cross-disciplinary approach, emphasizing 
the need for detailed ethnographies and linguistic analysis.
Kenneth S. Goldstein’s “Strategy in Counting-Out: An Ethnographic Folk-
lore Field Study” clearly demonstrates the importance of doing ethnographies of 
children’s games that provide data for analyzing performance. Getting to know 
67 children in Philadelphia from 1966 to 1967, Goldstein discovered that their 
counting-out rhymes to choose sides or determine who would be “it” involved 
complex strategy. When he asked the children why they used counting-out rhymes, 
most of them explained that the rhymes gave them all equal chances. As they per-
formed counting-outs, however, the children used certain strategies to influence 
who got chosen: choosing a particular rhyme, adding extra words, skipping regular 
counts, stopping or continuing, and changing positions. These results proved that 
“for some children ‘counting-out’ is a game of strategy rather than chance” and 
indicated that using similar methods to reexamine other games would be a good 
idea (178).
Richard Bauman’s “Ethnography of Children’s Folklore” argues against “adul-
tocentrism” and for exploration of “the place and uses of folklore in the conduct 
of social life and the competence that underlies this use” (174). Bauman praises 
“the truly impressive range of linguistic and sociolinguistic competencies that is 
fostered by the children’s own peer group culture” (184). In his discussion of catch 
routines, he notes that children’s “striking awareness of sociolinguistic nuances” 
playfully promotes social disorder (181). Instead of identifying “knock knock” inter-
actions as jokes, he suggests that they should be called “solicitational routines”: 
a term that emphasizes social interaction rather than simple humor (177).
Bauman’s direction of dissertations by Children’s Folklore Project participants 
at the University of Texas at Austin resulted in significant studies of children’s 
performance of riddles, jokes, catch routines, and narratives. John H. McDowell’s 
“Speech Play and Verbal Art of Chicano Children: An Ethnographic and Socio-
linguistic Study” (1975) presents children’s interaction in detail, distinguishing 
among descriptive routines, riddles, and routines of victimization, among other 
categories; his attention to poetic form also offers valuable information. In a 
somewhat similar vein, Danielle Roemer’s “Social Interactional Analysis of Anglo 
Children’s Folklore: Catches and Narratives” (1977) closely examines the verbal 
artistry of children aged five to nine in the Austin community. Roemer’s insight-
ful analysis of catch routines gives the children involved in each routine the roles 
of “trickster” and “straightman.” She explains that “dirty” and “nasty” catch routines 
and narratives let children explore forbidden subjects while maintaining “im-
plicit conventions and expectations” (35).
Gary Alan Fine’s “Rude Words: Insults and Narration in Preadolescent Obscene 
Talk” examines children’s use of obscenity in the context of conversation. During 
his fieldwork with children in New England and Minnesota over a three-year pe-
riod, Fine learned that it was often possible to distinguish between rude talk as 

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Scholarship and Approaches 107
interaction (insults) and as narration (53). Face-to-face insults differ from insults 
toward someone who is not present; some insults take the form of playful repartee, 
with no malicious intent. Some obscene narrations emphasize the speaker’s lin-
guistic skill; others focus more on joking or on sexual instruction. Fine makes the 
important point that “the jokes which are told in natural contexts are not carefully 
polished productions, such as we read in jokebooks” (61). By reading full texts of 
conversations, we can gain a better understanding of interactions of this kind.