Like many folklorists who study children’s folklore, my first introduction to the field was Iona and Peter Opie’s 1959 book, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. The editors and authors of the eleven chapters in this collection describe a massive, funded project (and related projects) honoring the work of the Opies in England and extending the “project” initiated by the Opies into the present. The Opies had a mission, not long after the end of World War II, to prove that English children’s folk traditions—games, songs, clapping rhymes, riddles, material culture, and more—were alive and healthy, making an argument against the adult concern that children simply did not play as they used to. In their minds, they were not engaged in “salvage ethnography,” as their collections proved that children’s folk traditions were as healthy as ever, proving children to be creative and resilient.
The word “archive” in Playing the Archive title signals the main goal of the projects—namely, to “re-animate archival material” (xix), to “play” with the collections of children’s folklore using new digital tools the Opies never had. Several of the chapters show how these tools of the digital age can help the scholar and even teachers and parents access the traditions documented in children’s lore. Beyond digitizing the Opie manuscript archive, the project aims to “develop innovative digital interfaces through which the archive could be animated, reimagined and experienced by audiences young and old” (5). The projects also declare that “memory” is of interest, finding in decades-old traditions materials that survived to the present, those traditions endlessly and creatively adapted by children. The Opies also recognized in those years the ways children incorporated popular culture into their everyday folk traditions, so many chapters of this collection update examples of the ways children appropriate mass-mediated materials (television, film, videogames, advertising, and so on). Finally, an aspect of the project is new ethnographic fieldwork on the playgrounds in London, Sheffield, Cardiff, and Aberdeen.
As I read this collection, I wondered, who is the audience? The essays are written in prose now familiar in postmodern cultural studies, a prose I do not like much; I prefer plain, clear writing that avoids jargon and unnecessary neologisms. My preference aside, and possibly not shared by some readers of this review, the writing style narrows the potential audience for the book. Lay audiences—and by this I mean teachers and parents—will not read this book beyond the first pages, which is a loss since folklorists writing about children’s folklore should be writing books for parents and schoolteachers as well as for other scholars, books that make the case for appreciating and encouraging the behavior some adults wish they could extinguish. None of the children’s folklorists I know write this way, and I think they are unlikely to read this collection. So, again, I ask the question: who is the audience for this book?
The collection does touch many of the usual elements in children’s expressive culture of interest to folklorists, including the transmission of traditions and the appropriation of mass-mediated culture for the children’s own interests. To my mind, though, even enhanced description of the children’s folk traditions is only the first step in what should be the interpretive goal of the study of children’s folklore, a step not taken by any of the authors in this collection. We should not confuse description with interpretation. When studying folklore as symbolic action, we must ask and attempt to answer the questions, who performed what traditional symbolic action for what audience, how, and what was the purpose or motive? None of the chapters, including those using data from the ethnographies of the children’s play on playgrounds at schools, attempt to interpret the motive driving the performance of a tradition, conscious motives and unconscious ones.
For example, in the introductory chapter Andrew Burn devotes three pages (12-14) to the clapping rhyme from the archives, “My boyfriend gave me an apple,” but he offers no analysis of the contexts for the primary schoolgirl’s performance on a London playground. Contrast this absence of interpretation with Bronner’s descriptions and analysis of clapping rhymes in his annotated version of his American Children’s Folklore (1988). The reader might not accept Bronner’s interpretation of a given clapping rhyme (e,g, “My boyfriend gave me peaches,” page 63), especially when he offers a psychological or psychoanalytic interpretation of the meanings of a clapping rhyme’s symbolism. But Bronner knows that merely recording the rhyme is only half the job. The more interesting task lies ahead.
Playing the Archive is a valuable update on the ground-breaking work of the Opies and introduces many new research possibilities in the digital age. Certainly, the description of current children’s play and games can be interesting, but toward what end, beyond assuring adults that digital cultures are not killing the natural creativity of children? I still wonder who the audience is for the book.
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[Review length: 819 words * Review posted on February 8, 2026]