Baiba Krogzeme-Mosgarda’s The Tradition of Autograph Albums in the Culture of Latvian Schoolchildren is an original look at a largely overlooked genre of children’s folklore, children’s autograph albums.
These albums are found in children’s traditions in Europe and America from the nineteenth century on. The schoolchildren’s traditions of albums was, Krogzeme-Mosgarda shows, borrowed from adult traditions, but as she writes, “children’s folklore and art blending into this [adult] tradition, as well as their own rules of text improvisation, changed the autograph album style from romantically didactic to creatively entertaining.” She continues, “in function, the autograph albums changed from a souvenir to an actively used means of communication, which, in contrast to other children’s traditions, is at times available to adults” (233).
Krogzeme-Mosgarda presents her arguments and materials in three large chapters, plus an appendix of poetic texts found in her album samples. The first chapter, “Autograph Albums in Culture,” examines the historical background of both child and adult forms of albums, and sets out her theoretical models as well. Her approach to her materials is well-informed by recent folklore and speech act theories, as well as the sociology of children’s culture. The methodological basis for her study, Krogzeme-Mosgarda writes, is the contextual analysis of folklore developed by Richard Bauman and the performance school theorists’ ideas about context dynamics, which promote looking at texts as components of changing communicative practice (234).
Chapter 2 describes the social context of the autograph album tradition. This is a gendered tradition; schoolgirls will typically offer their albums to other schoolgirls for entries, and schoolboys to schoolboys. Krogzeme-Mosgarda notes too that, “although boys also create autograph albums, the majority of album owners are elementary-school age girls” (235). A major function of this sharing is to create circles of friends for the album owners.
The third chapter is a description of the repertoire of autograph albums that Krogzeme-Mosgarda used in her study. She divides this chapter into two main parts: the first looks at the textual traditions present in the albums, and the second the illustrations encountered in the albums. The contents of the albums vary considerably, but they will typically include illustrations and folk rhymes of several types; Krogzeme-Mosgarda notes that “there is a constant repetition of certain [folksong] texts, the so-called ethical songs…. These ethical songs have become the compulsory folksong minimum known to several generations of Latvian schoolchildren, and they form the folksong repertoire of their albums as well” (236-237). The use of these compulsory folksongs shows that adult culture impinges on the album tradition in some ways, but that the children still maintain control of how this material is used in the albums.
Most English-speaking folklorists will examine this book through its English summary, which follows the chapter and section headings in the book closely. Though brief, the summary does give a good idea of what is in Krogzeme-Mosgarda’s book, but of course much essential detail is also lost; for example, the captions describing the illustrations, the textual content of the illustrations, and the poetic texts in the appendix to the book, all, unfortunately, go untranslated.
Even if the language presents some difficulty of access, this is not a book that English-speaking folklorists should ignore. Krogzeme-Mosgarda’s book is an excellent and original study of an important genre of children’s folklore.
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[Review length: 547 words • Review posted on February 4, 2015]