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  • Rituals and Patterns in Children's Lives
  • Kevin L. Gooding
Rituals and Patterns in Children's Lives. Edited by Kathy Merlock Jackson. Madison, Wisconsin: The Popular Press, 2005. x + 285 pp. $45.00 cloth.

Kathy Merlock Jackson begins her collection of essays by noting that "all children in America experience ritualized patterns" that lend structure to the flow of their days and their lives (p. ix). Far from fading away, Jackson asserts that rituals in children's lives "have continued to flourish in both traditional and new ways, forming the glue that holds families, groups, and communities together" (p. ix). The fourteen essays in this book examine the ways in which rituals function in children's lives past and present. Written by authors drawn from the fields of business, economics, communications, design, English, history, and childhood studies, these essays approach their topics from an equally varied array of angles, such as the analysis of material culture, historical and sociological approaches, literary criticism, and even autobiography. The chapters also vary in the time frame of their subject matter, ranging from the seventeenth century, as when Luise Van Keuren considers girls' needlecraft samplers, to the mid-twentieth century in Ray Merlock's analysis of the experience of attending Saturday matinee showings of b-movie Westerns. In an attempt to provide some structure to this variety, the editor divides the essays into seven parts of two essays each: Family, Religion, Education, Play, the curiously paired Marriage and Mourning, Literature, and Electronic Media. Regardless of the topic, Merlock indicates that "at the center of each essay lies the same question: What is the function of rituals and patterns in the lives of American children?" (p. 12).

Before allowing her reader to discover how each author answers this question, Merlock must first establish for the reader two things. First, she must define what she means by "ritual" and explain why an investigation of childhood rituals is a valuable enterprise. For Merlock, a ritual is "an event in the life of a child that has cultural meaning and is experienced, in the same or variant forms, by other children" (p. 4). She sees the value of considering childhood [End Page 282] rituals in the insight such an endeavor can provide into the child's place in the various social groups to which he or she belongs and into the ways in which children's lives are structured temporally. By examining the changes in these rituals over time, such an analysis can also illumine larger cultural changes, such as the evolution in the concept of "woman" as reflected in the changes in girls' needlework samplers between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.

When one turns to the essays themselves one discovers that although Merlock laid out her own definition of "ritual," the authors operate out of somewhat disparate definitions. Some authors, particularly those considering religion, operate out of a more formal understanding of ritual as a prescribed, formulaic event, while others work from a less formal definition in which a ritual is any repeated, shared experience, such as the annual autumnal return to school. Some of the authors provide their own definition, but others choose to leave the term undefined and nebulous. This represents a simultaneous strength and weakness of this collection. The chapters in sum provide a fascinating range of approaches to the topic of rituals in children's lives, yet because of the variety of definitions, one can be left wondering just what constitutes a ritual and if there any limitations on what could be appropriately termed a ritual.

Within this collection, at least three essays stand out as particularly insightful in their consideration of childhood rituals. The first is Jyotsna M. Kalavar's "Hindu Samskāras: Milestones of Childhood Development" (pp. 41–57) in which the author examines those samskāras, or rites of passage, prescribed to occur during childhood. Kalavar's purpose is not merely to describe the various rites and their traditional meanings, but to analyze how the samskāras have been transported from a south Asian to an American context. By interviewing Hindu priests and families at a Pennsylvania temple, Kalavar discovers that the three samskāras that the priests...

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