Brian Sutton-Smith Research Articles

Play as dynamic movement in an assemblage: A novel approach to the concept of “play”

As Johan Huizinga argued in Homo Ludens, “play” has not only been part of all human societies throughout history, it has also contributed to the development of numerous cultural, social and political activities, including structured games and sports, certain judicial and legal activities, war, and numerous forms of art. Despite its importance, “play”, with its various manifestations, is often relegated to being a children’s activity or an occasion of pure waste, and is a surprisingly marginalised topic in academic scholarship. In part to remedy this deficit, my aim in this article is to create a novel philosophical conception of “play” by adapting selected concepts from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, as well as from the theories of Brian Sutton-Smith and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The concept of “play” that I propose is not only a useful heuristic for mapping various forms of “play”, it also highlights the creative and transformative potential that is inherent to “play” phenomena.

Brian Sutton-Smith memorial panel – a celebration of the life and works of Brian Sutton-Smith

ABSTRACTOn the final day of the 2015 TASP conference, we heard of the sad passing of our great friend and inspiration, Brian Sutton-Smith. The memorial panel, which was one of the centre-pieces of the 2016 TASP conference, was the first opportunity we had to mark his passing. We did so with a selection of memories and reflections on his life. Brian spent his adult life studying the phenomenon of play in all its forms: child and adult; frivolous and serious; sporting and educational; charming and disgusting. He showed that children are not always innocent in their play, and that adults often feel guilty about theirs. His academic legacy lies in hundreds of articles and over fifty books, including the seminal work The Ambiguity of Play (1997). However, those of us who knew him well also remember the great joy with which he lived his life. The Panel was a mixture of friends, collaborators, ex-students and TASP colleagues. All of them had a story to tell about the way this great supporter of TASP touched their lives.

Brian Sutton-Smith (1924–2015)

Brian Sutton-Smith, one of the leading scholars of play studies for more than half a century, passed away Mar 7, 2015, in White River Junction, Vermont, at the age of 90. From his active childhood to his highly productive career and retirement, Brian took play very seriously. After identifying the triviality barrier that keeps adults from taking children's play seriously, he put a huge amount of energy into breaking down that barrier. Like the anthropologist Margaret Mead, he achieved remarkable success in reaching both the public and scholars across the disciplines: folklorists, psychologists, anthropologists, and others. He was also an extremely kind, generous colleague whose sheer exuberance made interdisciplinary play studies great fun. As an active member of the American Folklore Society and the Anthropological Association for the Study of Play, Brian had a strongly positive influence on conferences and publications.

Call for Papers -Re-thinking the Ludic: Imagining Play as Otherwise

Call for Papers -Re-thinking the Ludic: Imagining Play as Otherwise

The art of play: recess and the practice of invention

The Art of Play: Recess and the Practice of Invention. By Anna R. Beresin. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014. Pp. ix + 191, acknowledgements, introduction, photographs, illustrations, notes, references, index. $25.95 paper.)Children's folklore has been the beneficiary of many prolific advocates in the discipline. The tradition of advocacy begins with William Wells Newell in the late part of the nineteenth century and continues through more recent scholars and collectors such as Iona and Peter Opie, Brian Sutton-Smith, and Simon J. Bronner. With her recent work on children's play, folklorist Anna R. Beresin adds her name to that list. In her 2011 book, Recess Battles: Fighting, Playing, and Storytelling, she examined violence in the schoolyard and the benefits of play. In 2014's The Art of Play, Beresin follows up with an ethnographic description of her service-learning efforts and those of the organization Recess Access with whom she works to provide Philadelphia schoolchildren with materials that encourage creativity and activity at school. She gives the children art materials and then observes and responds to their artistic creations, displaying the paintings of more than one hundred children in this book.Beresin describes The Art of Play as pairing of narratives-the telling of the tales of Recess Access schools from 2010 to 2012 and the examination of the intersection between art and (9). In this book, she details the conditions of eight Philadelphia schools in which recess was either nonexistent or consistently removed as a punishment for bad behavior, and then chronicles the positive effects on children's behavior when they have access to even the simplest play materials: chalk, paint, balls, and jump ropes. Beresin's portrait of children at play depicts the creativity that children possess when provided with the most basic resources, and when the process of creation is unhampered by oppressive and stifling adult power constructs.The biggest difference between Beresin's latest book and a work like Bronner's American Childrens Folklore or Sutton-Smith's The Folkstories of Children is simply a matter of what each author chooses to emphasize. Bronner and SuttonSmith lean heavily on folkloric text, providing the reader with a catalogue of various kinds of children's folklore concentrated into a single encyclopedic volume. Beresin, on the other hand, deals largely with context, texture, and benefits of children's play. By choosing not to separate the children from the games they play and stories they tell, she captures the creative vibrancy of children's play, and the playfulness children bring to the act of creating art.Beresin's writing style and tone throughout the book tend to match the content which she is describing. …

Memories of and reflections on play

I am pleased to prepare a brief snippet about my early childhood play in honor of a long-time friend and colleague, Brian Sutton-Smith. We met many years ago in a New York conference hotel, enjoyed...

Deconstructing games as play: progress, power, fantasy, and self

In this issue, I draw together two sets of papers, with apparently different agendas. Most of the original papers in this issue use various learning perspectives and research approaches to explore the challenges and affordances of digital games for learning science. Associated forum papers challenge the authors and us to critically examine our own approaches to developing learning resources that model experiential phenomena, analyzing data and making claims. I locate all these studies within Brian Sutton-Smith’s philosophy of play. The other set of papers critically examines neo-liberalism and globalization within a consideration of the dimensions of science. I argue for a synergy between both sets of papers.

Aren’t you a doll! Toying with avatars in digital playgrounds

As recognized play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith points out, we have entered a ‘ludic age’ in which a playful attitude is embraced at all ages and play has increasingly come to mean play with toys. Documentations of the material, creative and social dimensions of toy play are increasingly seen in the playgrounds of digital media such as the photo management application Flickr. Dolls are considered as one of the earliest playthings, and in contemporary dolls, fantasy and reality blend into each other as their materialness and the design-storytelling are challenged by adult players/prosumers. A doll may play a part in self-expression and style; owners may customize, photograph and display the toy or share the visual documentations of their play sessions in various digital spaces. In some cases a doll might even become an avatar for the player himself or herself. This article examines how adults use doll characters as avatars by exploring visual narratives in social media environments. This is done through a visual analysis of doll images shared on the Internet-based Flickr and by analysing player created content on websites dedicated to the popular doll Blythe. Through examining the ways of toying with contemporary dolls in the playgrounds of social media, the aim is to build a new understanding of adult creation of second lives online.

From the Streets of Wellington to the Ivy League: reflecting on a lifetime of play

An Interview With Brian Sutton-Smith This interview came about because Brian Sutton-Smith was invited to deliver a keynote address at the 50th Anniversary International Play Association (IPA) Confe...

Recess battles: playing, fighting, and storytelling

As children wrestle with culture through their games, recess itself has become a battleground for the control of children's time. Based on dozens of interviews and the observation of over a thousand children in a racially integrated, working-class public school, Recess Battles is a moving reflection of urban childhood at the turn of the millennium. The book debunks myths about recess violence and challenges the notion that schoolyard play is a waste of time. The author videotaped and recorded children of the Mill School in Philadelphia from 1991 to 2004 and asked them to offer comments as they watched themselves at play. These sessions in Recess Battles raise questions about adult power and the changing frames of class, race, ethnicity, and gender. The grown-ups' clear misunderstanding of the complexity of children's play is contrasted with the richness of the children's folk traditions. Recess Battles is an ethnographic study of lighthearted games, a celebratory presentation of children's folklore and its conflicts, and a philosophical text concerning the ironies of everyday childhood. Rooted in video micro-ethnography and the traditions of theorists such as Bourdieu, Willis, and Bateson, Recess Battles is written for a lay audience with extensive academic footnotes. International scholar Dr. Brian Sutton-Smith contributes a foreword, and the children themselves illustrate the text with black and white paintings.

Child’s Play: Dorothy Howard and the Folklore of Australian Children (review)

Reviewed by: Child’s Play: Dorothy Howard and the Folklore of Australian Children Jan Rosenberg Child’s Play: Dorothy Howard and the Folklore of Australian Children. Eds. Kate Darian-SmithJune Factor. (Melbourne: Museum Victoria, 2005. Pp. vii + 231, 20 black-and-white photos, 33 illustrations, two appendices, bibliography.) Child’s Play: Dorothy Howard and the Folklore of Australian Children is a celebration of Howard, the pioneer of children’s folklore study in [End Page 372] Australia. Edited by historian Kate Darian- Smith and folklorist June Factor, the book consists of ten Howard articles and three contemporary essays contextualizing her work. These are written by Factor, Darian-Smith, and Brian Sutton-Smith, whom Howard first met when she visited New Zealand during her Fulbright tenure. When Howard (1902–96) landed in Victoria in 1954, she resolved to stay for ten months to document the games of Australian children. To cover as much of the country as possible, she traveled by bus and rail and overcame many obstacles along the way. Folklore was something Australians didn’t regard highly at the time, and they said that Australian children had no folklore of their own. Rather, Australians believed that their traditional expressions had their basis in the lore of the British Isles. A Fulbright scholar sponsored by the University of Melbourne, Howard came to Australia interested in the traditions of English-speaking children outside the United States. She had spent the past twenty-five years working with schoolchildren in the United States, teaching language arts by encouraging students to collect their own verbal lore, and she wholly believed that one learns by experiencing one’s own world. Although she didn’t teach in Australia, she let hundreds of children teach her what they knew. Child’s Play starts out with the two essays by Factor and Darian-Smith. Factor’s essay outlines Howard’s life, beginning in 1902 when she was born in the Sabine Bottom of East Texas and following through to her teaching career and discovery of children’s folklore while observing students on a school playground in upstate New York. Howard developed one of the first modern folklife-in-education programs through her introduction to children’s rhymes; there, she had students record their chants and rhymes and then study them for their literary structure, content, and merit. She did the same thing with students’ names, having them spell the names and research their origins. She applied John Dewey’s concept of experience—the interaction of the individual with the environment— in a way that met the school curriculum with ease. In Factor’s essay we learn that Howard first heard the word “folklore” from a professor her sister encouraged her to meet in New York City. The discussion led to Howard’s entry into the education program at New York University, where she shaped her exploration of children’s play life into a dissertation titled “Folk Jingles of American Children,” accepted by her committee in 1938. She collected the folklore of children’s play and taught in New Jersey at a junior high before transferring to teach at Frostburg State Teachers College, located in the Appalachian mountain range of western Maryland. Howard taught folklore and literature at Frostburg, encouraging her students to collect and analyze child lore. Given all of her experience, she became curious about the child lore of English-speaking students in other countries. When she proposed to document the child lore of the entire country of Australia, she was awarded the Fulbright fellowship for her 1954 trip. According to Darian-Smith, Howard arrived on the cusp of the postwar period in a country that was finding its feet as an industrialized nation. Her visit preceded two important events: the Olympics, held in Melbourne, and the introduction of television, both in 1956. During her Fulbright tenure, Howard experienced an Australia that was developing its modern national pride and the anticipation of communications technology. It was a country increasingly immersed in traditional Christian values, moving forward in the midst of economic upheaval. Howard does not mention these changes, so Darian-Smith’s essay deftly contextualizes the experience. What we do learn from Howard is that children’s folklife...

Experiencing Architectural Interiors and Exteriors in Computer Games

This paper looks at the design of “place” in a game-environment. It sets out to present a way of analyzing and evaluating game environments using Brian Sutton-Smith's seven rhetorics of play as a framework. The question this paper investigates, is what can be learnt from our intrinsic ability to navigate our environment in relation to play? Physical architecture offers the game designer metaphors for virtual worlds that have meaning based on experiences people associate with them. True innovation in game-world design requires an understanding of our built environment that extends beyond the surface aesthetic appeal of architecture, through concentration on the way we experience architecture and interact with our built environment.

Love in Toytown

Love in Toytown

"It Can't Rain Every Day": The Year-Round Experience of Carnival

A NOTE ON DAN CROWLEY As a new graduate student in Folklore interested in festival, and Carnival in particular, I attended my first AFS conference, the 1996 Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh, with a healthy measure of ambivalence. Having lived and worked in New Orleans as an elementary school teacher for over five years, Mardi Gras had always provided a welcomed cathartic release, the ultimate street party, or, as my advisor Roger Abrahams would later put it, with a capital F Thus, returning to New Orleans as an academic to Carnival seemed oxymoronic, or at the very least moronic. Surely it is disingenuous to attend an event so seemingly donning the notoriously lens of the academy. My concerns were only exacerbated by the reactions of New Orleans friends and former co-workers, who felt that I had pulled off the ultimate scam, saying it was `just like Lohman to find a way to get a Ph.D. in partying. This sentiment, I soon discovered, was unfortunately shared by many in the academy, particularly across disciplinary lines. Like many other past and present scholars who have attended to the areas of play and festivity, I have often run up against what Brian Sutton-Smith has termed the within the academy (1984). Many scholars have overcompensated for this triviality barrier by making their analysis of the playful as serious as possible. In the name of establishing play and festivity as a legitimate, area of study, this approach may have tipped the balance of the participant-observer scale a bit too far to the side of observation, thus reinforcing the idea that in order for an ethnographer to effectively write about fun, she must not have too much fun herself. Seeing Dan Crowley speak at the AFS Meetings in Pittsburgh, however - the excitement in his voice, the way he described his experiences with such festive spirit, the jokes he cracked about his own position as ethnographer and even his own physical condition-assured me that it is okay, in fact most advantageous, not only to love what you study, but to study what you love. Dan's passion for Carnival and all things festive did not diminish the quality of his work, but brought unusual insights to it This all-too-short encounter with Dan encouraged me to stay the course, to continue to mix business and pleasure, and to book the next available flight to Trinidad's Carnival-for which I will be forever grateful. This paper has been written in his honor. On a Tuesday, in February of 1996, it rained all day in New Orleans, Louisiana. This, in itself, was not a particularly unusual or noteworthy phenomenon; the shortened winters are often wet in the gulf region, and rainfall in February is quite common. This, however, was not just any other Tuesday, but rather the day before Ash Wednesday: Shrove Tuesday, better known as Fat Tuesday-Mardi Gras. The New Orleans Mardi Gras is one of America's largest tourist attractions and greatest spectacles, attracting visitors from all over the globe who make the annual pilgrimage to experience Carnival's notoriously lascivious and licentious atmosphere. During Mardi Gras, this spirit of license is not only deeply felt by its participants, but is accompanied by a tangible relaxation of many everyday regulations of behavior. During Carnival, activities such as public drunkenness, indecent exposure, and disturbance of the peace are tolerated, and arguably celebrated. Regular business hours are disrupted, schools are closed, and the city experiences a near tripling in population. Mardi Gras becomes virtually all-encompassing, and even those residents who dread the wild crowds of Carnival season-those who track the inevitable coming of Carnival like a hurricane, not knowing whether to evacuate the city or board up their windows-find they must temporarily yield to Carnival's control over much of the city's spaces. Carnival is celebrated by both young and old, locals and tourists, men and women, blacks and whites-consequently blurring, twisting, and challenging these very distinctions. …

The Anthropology of Sport: An Introduction

Foreword by Brian Sutton-Smith Preface Sport and Anthropology The Meaning of Sport: A Cultural Approach Anthropology of Sport: Theory and Method Prehistory and Early History of Sport Sport in Culture: An Evolutionary Perspective. I: Band Society Sport in Culture: An Evolutionary Perspective. II: Supraband Society Applications Epilogue References Index

Book Reviews

Abstract Abstract Mechanics for Gymnastics Coaching. Myke Gluck. Charles C. Thomas Publisher, 2600 South First Street, Springfield, Ill 617170001. 1982. 163 pp. Reviewed by Dale Brown The Nautilus Nutrition Book. Ellington Darden. Contemporary Books, 180 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60601. 1981. 367 pages. $7.95. Reviewed by Melvin H. Williams A History of Children's Play: The New Zealand Playground 1840–1950. Brian Sutton-Smith. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1981, 327 pp. $20. Reviewed by Donna Seline The Wilmore Fitness Program. Jack H. Wilmore. Simon & Schuster, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. 1981. 253 pp. Reviewed by Russell R. Pate Leisure in Your Life: An Exploration. Geoffrey Godbey, Philadelphia: Saunders College Publishing, 198, 316 pp. Reviewed by Teresita E. Aguilar Exetra Perspectives: Concepts in Therapeutic Recreation. Larry L. Neal and Christopher R. Edginton. Eugene, Oregon: Center of Leisure Studies, University of Oregon, 1982. Reviewed by M. Sydney Post Reaching Your Athletic Potential. J. G. Robinson, Quality Publication, Tigard, OR, 1981, 166 pp. Reviewed by Dean Austin

A History of Children's Play: The New Zealand Playground, 1840-1950. Brian Sutton-Smith

<i>A History of Children's Play: The New Zealand Playground, 1840-1950</i>. Brian Sutton-Smith

Children's Folk Speech

Children's Folk Speech Gary Alan Fine Probably no other wordsmiths are as creative as children. Children love to create new words and to use old, established words for new purposes. Children's language is continually evolving —at a rate much more rapid than that of adults. Children have no Edwin Newmans, William Safires, or John Simons to tell them what they must or must not do. Their rule of thumb is: if it sounds good and communicates meaning pungently, then say it. Children are continually creating new, topical expressions. Most of these expressions have a short "referential after-life" (that is, they are forgotten quickly) and have very local diffusion (for example, they are spread only within one school). Yet, some children's folk speech has considerable diffusion and longevity and may in time become part of adult vocabulary. What do we mean by children's folk speech? A precise definition may be impossible; however, we mean generally those words and phrases spoken by children, which are distinctively different both from standard American usage and from the slang used by other social groups. Obviously the boundaries of such a definition are vague; for example, is the word "crummy" children's folk speech despite its frequent usage by other groups and its near-acceptability? Still, we have general agreement on most instances of children's folk speech. Some include speech style under children's folk speech, but since aspecpts of style have been discussed as "speech play" I shall not consider it here. Given its physical proximity to adult culture, it is surprising that a children's culture exists and has such a wide and distinctive lexicon. Listening to preadolescents talk among themselves without self-consciousness and without a need to speak "properly," one is impressed by the richness of their vocabulary and with the realization that sizable portions of their vocabulary are either unknown to adults or are unusable by them. Even when known by adults this speech is seen as irrelevant and "childish" and not worth adult attention. Perhaps for this reason —what Brian Sutton-Smith has named the "triviality barrier" —children's folk speech has been little studied. The major series of studies of children's folk speech has involved simple enumerations of terms used in the game of marbles1 or among British "public school" students.2 Several studies of children's culture have dealt with children's folk speech, although not in a systematic fashion.3 This lack of research is unfortunate because the examination of children's speech tells us both about children and about language generally. Although it is important for children to maintain a system of communication that is partially independent —even secret —from that of adults, the good teacher, parent, or librarian must be able to communicate with children, not just on the adult's terms, but on the child's terms.4 Being aware of the folk speech of children permits this beneficial opening of communication barriers. It must be recognized, however, that, because of the local and evanescent character of children's talk, the compilation of children's talk must be continuous. Second, some terms, because of their obscene or deviant nature, will be very difficult for adults to learn about and will be altered if known. Hearing such terms as "bite the bag," "marmie," or "fig newton" will not upset adults because adults are ignorant of their obscene referents. Likewise, sixth-graders in one community used the word "schmedley" to indicate that one wanted to smoke a cigarette with the other. If adults knew the significance of "let's schmedley," a new code would have to be developed. Folk speech also tells us about language. Because of the rapid change of children's folk speech, it serves as a laboratory for examining language change and diffusion. Children's folk speech can be internally differentiated on the basis of how widely it has spread, and the process of diffusion of such items can be examined. Some terms in children's folk speech are regional. For example, what is the term that is used by boys to indicate the prank of sneaking up behind another and yanking his underpants? In...

The Folkstories of Children

The Folkstories of Children* Brian Sutton-Smith I have approached children's folklore partly as a psychologist and partly as a folklorist. In consequence, my contributions are often the progeny of a mixed theoretical marriage. After all, there are folktales and [End Page 14] there are stories, but what on earth are folkstories? In my misce-generative mind, these are stories which children make up voluntarily and which they continue to tell in much the same fashion over continuing periods of time. One finds that such stories can be analyzed as we analyze true folktales, so I call them folkstories. If we kept listening to them and if children repeated each other's stories and continued to enjoy them, they might indeed become children's folktales, but that doesn't seem to happen. It is true that there are still children in parts of the world who tell something like folktales (McDowell, 1975; Watson, 1972), and one might suppose that where an oral tradition is dominant this could be a regular form of child behavior. Several hundred years of literacy training, however, seem to have made it an infrequent form of children's folklore in industrial civilization. In some recent studies (with Mary Ann Magee), we have attempted to find out how children first learn to tell these stories. For example, we studied a two-year-old child for approximately a year, having the parents tape record their storytelling sessions with her every week or so. The first thing to note is that like other researchers (Ninio & Bruner, 1976) we found an enormous amount of repetition on the part of the tale telling adults. The child ultimately came to tell a story of her own, but she had had thousands of storytime repetitions before that event came about. The early stories were made up about picture books with both adult and child looking at the pictures. Increasingly, however, the child herself began to ask the questions (What is it?) and call out the names of the animals and say what they were doing (The doggy is running). This shift from the passive audience posture seems to be a basic way in which children become participators in the act of story making. It needs to be emphasized, though, that participation can only occur easily if the parent gives the child leeway. The same process was then gone through with storybooks. For several months the child mainly listened. Then she increasingly anticipated and told the story of the action to come. Perhaps more importantly, in the story telling as in her active role with the picture books, she enacted the story to come with gestures and noises and movements. The increasing volume of this play enactment was the most prominent feature of her response over the year. One could well argue that an active response through play enactment was the major basis for subsequent story confidence in this girl. Surprisingly, however, when the first story emerged, it was not derived from any of the stories she had heard in the books. It came directly out of her own experience. Several times throughout that first year she began to talk about somebody biting somebody else, but, although this was recorded on the tape recorder, the parents did not recognize what she was attempting to do and ignored her. We should say that she had already acquired a reputation as a biter, having bitten several other children. As one writer might have put it, this was her "peremptory metaphor." Finally she got her "story" out, and it was about herself biting her cat and then kissing it better. Our preliminary thinking about this sequence (very barely sketched here) is that the parents provided the "staging" for how to tell stories and how to make them up. They repeatedly rehearsed the child in these procedures, and then when the time was ripe she used her knowledge of this staging to project onto it a novel story derived from her own personal concerns. From them she learned story staging (rhetoric) and story form (structure), but the precipitating metaphor (or symbolism) was directly from her own experience. She had bitten a cat, and been bitten by a...

Speech Play

Speech Play John H. McDowell Speech play transforms the verbal routines of ordinary discourse into derivative routines savored for their distinctive phonological and semantic patterning. It draws on latencies within the linguistic code, such as the phonetic resemblance of certain phonemes or the coincidence of two meanings on a single phonetic unit, to create palpable layers of verbal patterning tending to draw attention to speech itself as a medium of communication. Speech play may be as slight as a reduplicated syllable or as systematic as an epic poem built on an invariant rhyme [End Page 26] and metric scheme. When its devices are institutionalized, speech play becomes verbal art or verbal game. These exhibit normative procedures themselves vulnerable to transformation through the subversive tendencies of speech play. The child's involvement in speech play begins in infancy. Early cooing and babbling stages allow the infant to experiment with the production and combination of sounds. Mother and child often work out elaborate phonetic exchanges encouraging the child to explore and augment incipient verbal capacities. Stimulated by the attention of caretakers and by the enveloping acoustic environment, the infant gleefully produces large inventories of sounds, gradually settling on those particular sounds and combinations of sounds that are significant in the local speech ecology. The young child's investment in speech play is passionate and total. Early forms betray a strong emphasis on sound to the virtual exclusion of sense, but by the age of seven the child insists on some level of semantic integrity in speech play that may still be largely determined by phonological considerations. The speech play of the four-to eleven year-old child is increasingly manifested in the conventional folkloric genres such as riddles, stories, jokes, and insults, though unincorporated forms of speech play continue to occur. The teenager continues to play with speech, maintaining a delight in the creation of striking phonetic patterns, but also producing acute parodies of ordinary discourse routines. Our involvement in speech play transcends the period of childhood; as adults we participate in joking sessions, religious ritual, and literary experiences all founded on the essential transformational properties of speech play. Children's speech play is a fragile thing and rarely survives transplantation out of its natural environment, the juvenile peer group. Those who would harken to the genuine sound of speech play among children must find ways of approaching and entering into the banter of peer-group interaction. One basic safeguard entails attending to groups of children on their native turf rather than to a single child isolated in some academic Laboratory. The presence of the adult colLector is initially disrupting, but if the peer group survives this initial impact, it may eventually regain much of its authenticity as the children return to their own business and pay increasingly less heed to their adult observer. The native fragility of children's speech play also requires that special measures be taken if it is to be introduced into the school classroom. The essential research tool for those interested in children's speech play is the volume edited by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Speech Play: Research and Resources for the Study of Linguistic Creativity.1 This volume contains an outstanding bibliography on the subject, as well as seminal articles by the editor and Mary Sanches,2 and by Brian Sutton-Smith on riddles.3 Early research that continues to be of interest includes Sigmund Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,4 and Martha Wolfenstein's Children's Humor.5 Each of these works contains a highly valuable account of the techniques of speech play and their developmental disposition. The broad theoretical perspective on speech play can be obtained through consultation of Roman Jakobson's Closing Statement: "Linguistics and Poetics"6 and two articles by Jan Mukarovsky published in English translation in the Garvin reader.7 While these articles do not deal explicitly with children's speech play (except in occasional passages), they provide an excellent theoretical handle on verbal creativity which can readily be applied to the speech play of children. Most of my own work in the area of children's speech play has been centered on children's riddling,8 and...