Ethnography of Children's Folklore

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Richard Bauman

Abstract

First presented in 1978 at the Colloquium on Ethnography and Education, which was hosted by Research for Better Schools, Inc. and the University of Pennsylvania, Bauman’s “Ethnography of Children’s Folklore” was also printed in Children In and Out of School: Ethnography and Education in 1982. Thank you to the Center for Applied Linguistics for permission to reprint in this Special Issue of Children’s Folklore Review.



Via an examination of children’s folklore—including riddles, jokes, catches, and solicitational routines—Bauman’s article makes strong claims for the importance of ethnographic study of children’s folklore as a source of insight into the rich artistic, expressive competencies too frequently ignored by educators.

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Author Biography

Richard Bauman

Richard Bauman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Folklore and Anthropology at Indiana University, Bloomington. The principal foci of his research include narrative, oral poetics, performance, genre, and language ideologies. Among his publications are Verbal Art as Performance (1977), Let Your Words Be Few (1983), Story, Performance, and Event (1986), Voices of Modernity (with Charles L. Briggs, 2003; Sapir Prize 2006), A World of Others’ Words (2004), and A Most Valuable Medium (2023). Bauman has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recipient of the Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award of the American Folklore Society, and the Franz Boas Award for Exemplary Service to Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association.

References

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