When you need the perfect resource on children’s folklore for the teacher or parent in your midst, or perhaps something to springboard a student fresh to the field, this succinct and excellent book on children’s folklore serves as a ready reference and portal. In it, Elizabeth Tucker provides a historical overview of children’s folklore studies with its major contributors and pioneering works, presents key conceptual frameworks and genres, and furnishes a wealth of texts and contexts as well as readily accessible resources, all in units that can be accessed thematically in neat, bite-sized chunks, or wolfed down greedily all at once.
The book opens by showing how children’s folklore is an extremely fluid and vital manifestation of the ways children respond to and interact with their environments. Children educate one another through their lore, wrought of long tradition as well as ever-changing creativity, yet adult appropriation of childlore can often be turned to public educational projects. What this chapter does particularly well is address the issues inherent in doing research with children, noting the positions of the American Folklore Society regarding folkloristic research, but also taking into account the necessity of treating children as a vulnerable population (9–11).
Chapter 2, “Definitions and Classifications,” introduces major concepts in children’s folklore studies and approaches to them, particularly the ideas of childhood as a cultural construct, folklore as a form of cultural expression, and play as a culturally constitutive activity. It then describes various genres of children’s folklore that interest folklorists of childhood, such as the numerous varieties of verbal lore (including riddles, jokes, taunts, cheers, and narratives), customary lore (such as games, pranks, and rituals), and material culture.
Chapter 3, “Examples and Texts,” gives examples of various genres of children’s folklore spanning the last century. Many genres have multiple examples showcasing tradition as well as creativity, such as the handclapping rhyme that goes, “Miss Sue, Miss Sue, Miss Sue from Alabama, Sitting in a rocking chair, eating Betty Crocker,” collected in 1934 by John and Alan Lomax and again in 1994 for the Berkeley Folklore Archives, and another that goes, “Xena (clap) Warrior (clap) Princess, Came here last year,” collected in New Zealand by Janice Ackerly in 2002 (57–58).
Tucker provides ample sourcing of each of her examples and also mentions relevant works dealing with the texts in the brief paragraph following. She also notes the potential interpretation of certain texts and the circumstances of their performance. The range of texts is remarkable, from the supernatural to the scatological, from the divinatory to the downright disgusting. Yet what is plain from all her examples is that she has only brushed the surface of the variations within children’s culture, and that each of those variations has meaning and importance.
Chapter 4, “Scholarship and Approaches,” gives an overview of seminal work in the field, as well as of the various paradigms of thought that have shaped and continue to influence children’s folklore studies. Those of special contemporary relevance include psychoanalysis, performance studies, gender studies, space and place, cross-cultural comparison, and concerns with child violence.
Chapter 5, “Contexts,” is less about where to find or listen to children’s folklore in performance and more about where children’s folklore is perpetuated outside of children themselves. These contexts include literature (autobiographies and children’s books); media (film and television); and material culture (for example, dolls, whether handmade or mass-produced).
This book makes for interesting reading. Its forte is not in its analysis as in other relatively recent and similarly-themed volumes on children’s folklore [1]. Rather, Children’s Folklore: A Handbook sketches out myriad tantalizing possibilities. Each time a brief analysis of a text made me say “Hey, but what about—?!” I realized that the book was doing precisely what it meant to. The pages lure the reader toward the references at the end of each chapter, pointing toward the glossary and encouraging interaction with a readily accessible resource list at the end of the book, which includes children’s folklore collections online, folklore journals, children’s museums, and folklore archives.
If I would offer one critique of this fine introduction to children’s folklore, it would be the limited role allotted to children’s digital activity. While the internet is noted in the introduction (8–9) as a place where children’s folklore is shared and as a convenient location in which to collect it (11), there are few mentions after that of internet-based folklore. In the discussion of child conceptions of space and place there could have been a gesture toward the internet as a fertile zone where children’s folklore is occurring and some mention of how this may alter traditional ideas of what constitutes place/space as well as what counts as representations of children’s identity and sociality in an online context [2]. In the same way, while certain early examples of internet folklore, such as YouTube videos of “light as a feather” appear on page 1, the opportunity to consider child-produced new media, such as video, hypertext, and digital art as new permutations of childlore and even “material” culture (consider the overwhelming youth presence on the free art gallery giant deviantART.com!) seems to have been overlooked in favor of examples from permanently archived collections stressing games, rhymes, and songs.
However, I do not feel that this detracts significantly from the value of this book overall. Indeed, for anyone whose daily life often intersects with that of children, this attractive and concise volume provides a useful foundation with which to appreciate and perhaps pursue the expressive and endless varieties of children’s folklore.
[1] See, for example, Brian Sutton-Smith, Jay Mechling, Thomas W. Johnson, and Felicia R. McMahon, eds., Children’s Folklore: A Source Book. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1999.
[2] There are a number of recent ethnographic studies that explore facets of child/youth culture online: Digital Youth Project, and Angela Thomas, Youth Online: Identity and Literacy in the Digital Age. New York: Peter Lang, 2007.
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[Review length: 985 words • Review posted on February 26, 2010]