Found Photographs and Children's Folklore

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Jay Mechling

Abstract

Children's folklorists do not always have the luxury of studying live children. Because children live largely in an oral, material, and customary world, leaving little written evidence (aside from the occasional diary or autograph book) of their worldviews, reconstructing the history of the everyday lives of children requires the creative use of what scant evidence we do have of their elusive worlds. Folklorists are accustomed to reconstructing the historical cultures of children using written materials, such as autobiographies, diaries, letters, ethnographic accounts dating back to the late 19th century, and other sources largely created by adults. Folklorists and historians also have learned to make creative use of the material culture of childhood in reconstructing the everyday lives of past children (e.g., Bronner 1999). We necessarily make a great many guesses about what the evidence really means, and we know that in most cases the evidence has gone through a great deal of editing, as adults ultimately are the gatekeepers for what evidence of children's lives survives and what perishes.

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