Recess Battles: Playing, Fighting, and Storytelling

7. Keywords of the Playground

115 - 7 KEYWORDSOFTHEPLAYGROUND My initial study of the Mill School was never intended to be longitudinal , but I kept going back. After starting out as a study of ethnic diversity , my project shifted to focus on culture change. Like most folklorists, I sought to examine the uniqueness of the location and the variants that could be recorded—the songs, the stories, the moves. I was curious about how the children negotiated spatially across the concrete grid in the shadow of schooling. I remained interested in viewing play as a kind of communicative negotiation, an alternative and much more amusing window into childhood than was typically studied. I would stop by the Mill School, located a few minutes from my home, and find myself using the original data as a baseline. The graffiti would be painted over and return, little ones became the experts, games remained the same even as teachers moved on to other jobs. Game locations floated slightly from one wall to another, like shifting shorelines. My field notes and audiovisual material piled higher and higher, and I realized that the cumulative knowledge, this quantifiable pile, could turn snapshots of games into useful social science. I became convinced that children’s folklore was sociologically and psychologically significant, not just a charming souvenir. This idea is very difficult to prove, in part because of the semiconscious nature of children’s play. Traditional ethnographic interviews did not offer the 116 Play and Children’s Culture desired insight, since the children were often in a dreamlike state of play, or became giddy with the audiovisual playback, or were too focused on not getting in trouble. Violent behavior was easily coded. The texts of singing games and the popularity of ball games were easily counted. Variations could easily be recorded, as in the tradition of most collectors of children’s folklore. But dramatic gestures and words were all over the school yard, not just in singing games and mock aggression, not just reflections of children’s cultures as a subset of adult cultures. I realized that I needed to demonstrate the playground’s keywords and key gestures, the hollered and the silent, which grown-ups may overlook. These shouts and repeated motions are another form of ethnographic evidence, an extreme vocabulary of children ’s culture outside the genre-specific coding of games and conflict. Social theorist Raymond Williams has utilized the concept of keywords to demonstrate the vocabulary and literal contents of a particular milieu.1 Rooted in the practice of “corpus linguistics” (the counting of samples in real-world texts), the practice has been challenged by Noam Chomsky’s cognitive linguistic approach, which acknowledges that language is created in context, performed among players. The playground allows us to examine verbal and nonverbal phrases that repeat and demand our attention. Although Williams attempted to define and show the historical roots of keywords ranging from art to folk to violence, newer attempts to revise his groundbreaking work have struggled, as words have meaning in context and float like generalized half-truths when removed. For grown-ups, all of us expatriates from children’s culture, a translation of some essential keywords of the playground follows. But it does not reflect every playground or every childhood, nor is it in any way complete . These are the terms and the battles of the yard at the Mill School, a working-class, multiracial public elementary at the turn of the millennium . Readers may see similarities to playgrounds they know, but all words and struggles are not necessarily the same. THE CHILDREN’S PLAYGROUND KEYWORDS I intentionally focus here on the vocabulary that is unique to the children ’s cultures, not the vocabulary of children’s struggles with the adult 117 Keywords of the Playground cultures of commercialism and with the school’s institutionalized power, which are addressed in previous chapters. Children’s peer culture and its stylizations, or children’s folklore, are a subset of these struggles but are not merely so. An island may belong to an archipelago, but it has its own characteristics. Each game has its own language. Jump rope, Sui, ball, steps, and numbers have individual histories, rules, aesthetics, and vocabulary. All are associated with overlapping subcultures within children’s culture, yet a vocabulary of the playground transcends that of the game. These are the words of the body, of challenge, of...