Child's Play

Myth, Mimesis and Make-Believe

Laurence R. Goldman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781859739136
• eBook ISBN: 9781000180848
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Psicoterapia

This innovative book finally takes seriously the need for anthropologists to produce in-depth ethnographies of children's play. In examining the subject from a cross-cultural perspective, the author argues that our understanding of the way children transform their environment to create make-believe is enhanced by viewing their creations as oral poetry. The result is a richly detailed 'thick description' of how pretence is socially mediated and linguistically constructed, how children make sense of their own play, how play relates to other imaginative genres in Huli life, and the relationship between play and cosmology. Informed by theoretical approaches in the anthropology of play, developmental and child psychology, philosophy and phenomenology and drawing on ethnographic data from Melanesia, the book analyzes the sources for imitation, the kinds of identities and roles emulated, and the structure of collaborative make-believe talk to reveal the complex way in which children invoke their experiences of the world and re-invent them as types of virtual reality. Particular importance is placed on how the figures of the ogre and trickster are articulated. The author demonstrates that while the concept of 'imagination' has been the cornerstone of Western intellectual traditions from Plato to Postmodernism, models of child fantasy play have always intruded into such theorizing because of children's unique capacity to throw into relief our understanding of the relationship between representation and reality.

Chapter 1
Naming and Gaming

Huli

Question: I ambologo beraria minaribe? Where did you get that baby?

Answer: Hai/Anga maneha beraria minaru I got it from the top of the banana/pandanus tree

[Huli caretakers frequently identify heard but unseen frogs in the bush as ‘babies’. When a newborn arrives, the above response references the frogs mentioned on previous occasions.]

Anglo-Australian

Question: Where do babies come from?

Answer: I found it under the gooseberry [mulberry] bush/in the cabbage patch/the stork brought it.

Ethnographic Context

The above conventionalised question-response sequences speak directly of attitudes to truth-telling and of the social expediency of pretence between caretakers and children. Such cultural routines do more though than register an intercultural coincidence. They surely display universal problems associated with children as Homo interrogans - their responses to a new arrival, the symbolism attached to newborns, and the problems that confront adults when accounting to younger others for their existence. That cultures should have engendered broadly comparable and fossilised speech sequences attests to a perhaps ubiquitous recognition that the unvarnished facts of procreation may hurt children. We understand from the mere existence of these routines that certain types of knowledge are ‘classified’ in nature, and thus compel culturally shaped and pretenceful responses. Children are socialised through pretence as much as to pretence by the ‘play sequences’ (Anderson 1986:332; cf. Furth 1996:10) of adults’ lies, lullabies, threats, teases and stories. Such seemingly mundane interchanges have the power to open up the sub-cultural world of caretaking as one predicated upon deception and false promise. These sensitise the child to the dissonance between someone’s presentation of the world and the way the world otherwise seems (Marrelli 1994:263; Goldman 1995). Significantly, this question-response sequence is in Hull as in Western cultures remembered as knowledge communicated predominantly by female caregivers.

In this chapter my concern then is to present a preparatory backcloth to social fantasy play in Hull by examining the culturally patterned, or ‘ready-made’, set of analogic renamings found in ‘baby-talk’, nursery rhymes and lore, and child games. In the talk for and by children speech play (bi gini) becomes, as it were, a prolegomenon to the speech of play. But why choose these particular exemplars of interaction? The answer lies in part with the fact that such a triangulation of phenomena permits me to display the interrelationships between pretences as acts of ‘renaming’, the wide spectrum of behavioural forms in which these inhere, and the critical links that are thereby established to the mythopoeic levels of adult culture. The following analyses of socio-dramatic play given in Chapters 3 and 4 are thus situated within a continuum of practices lying along the vector from mimesis to mythos. But there is more to the rationale than mere context-ualisation. The presentation adheres to well-established findings in socio-linguistics that implicate the modelling behaviour of nursery lore, of ‘adult-infant baby talk and dandling interaction’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1976:177), and of child peer lore, in the development of metalinguistic awareness about speech aesthetics and communicative competence. That is, such behaviours are significant in the acquisition of a culture’s structuring poetic structures.

But while speech play is more often considered with respect to its patterns of rhetorical and mnemonic efficacy, its contributory role in how language and narrative lessons are learnt - thus indexing how ‘speech play is instrumental to the acquisition of adult verbal art’ (Sanches and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1976:105; cf. Goldman 1983) - and equally as a gauge of the importance of language itself in the culture, the focus here is somewhat different. The question being addressed is how these resources manifest, and are secreted within, a pervasive set of pretence practices and rationales. Inasmuch as such speech exchanges appear anatomically focused - as both semantically and linguistically about ‘body and hand’ - they articulate (for reasons explained in the previous chapter) an ethno-ludology of ‘pretending and playing’. Children’s games, as well as the games played with children, provide the analyst with a special arena for rethinking the relationships between pretence and its role in knowledge acquisition and communication. This is not to claim that all there is to ludic pretence is enculturation, but rather to explore the manner in which it is both generative as well as expressive of Huli culture.

As an apt introduction to the ascribed values of speech in Hull it is useful to unpack from the comparison of routines cited above some further insights. As primordial symbols of fertility or familiar locations, banana and pandanus trees seem figuratively comparable to the mulberry bush or the nurturing nuances evoked by a stork carrying a sling (no doubt suggested by storks’ habit of nesting in human abodes throughout Europe). Such fecundity derives from their status as staple ancestral foods, which implicated them in a host of traditional rituals associated with a person’s physical and spiritual well-being. For example, following birth the placenta (nu to - ‘umbrella bag’) and part of the umbilical cord (lumbi - ‘one long’) were planted in a pandanus tree to ensure promotion of growth. Similarly, repossession of a lost soul involved a rite known as ‘planting the pandanus seedling’ (anga wai hangaga), in which a knotted tuft of hair known as the ‘hair umbilical’ reattached the subject to its shadow. Moreover, as we will see below, pandanus metaphorically signify ‘penis-male-fertilityîn Hull nursery lore (Table 1.1 below D.6) repeatedly figuring in mundane medical pathologies and folklore. Thus the cure for snoring (ka) involved creeping under a pandanus root system and making a false pretence; the snorer directs the snore ‘You wait here and I’ll come back soon!’ while departing in the belief that the snore is forever and hopelessly entrapped.

Table 1.1 Huli Baby-talk Lexicon

Adult Speech Term	English	Baby-Talk	Literal Meaning
A. 1 Hina	Sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas)	Amu namu	–
2 Du	Sugar cane (Saccharum officinarum)	Hambu	lips
3 Tiabu	Highland pitpit (Setaria palmifblia)	Habu
4 Anga	Pandanus	Haboli	–
5 Lini	Fruit	Haboli	–
6 Gereba	Rungia (Rungia klossi)	Abuda	–
7 Tigibi	Water dropwort (Oenanthe javanica)	Abuda
B. 1 Puya	Snake (generic)	Nē	–
2 Tia	Marsupial (generic)	Auwi	–
3 Huru	Rat	Auwi	–
4 Nogo	Pig	Ani nani
5 Wena	Fish	Mena	–
6 Yago	Frog	Gago	–
7 Gau	Lizard	Au	–
8 Haiya	Tadpole	Gagua	–
C. 1 Iba	Water	Dada	–
2 Pu	Urine/Urinate	Dada hambira	‘fetching water’
3 Ti	Excreta	Dē/Dī	–
4 Ta	Defecate	Ega bora	‘hitting birds’
5 Wali wahe/yomo	Old woman/female cognate (+1 gen.)	Bama	–
6 Agali wahe/yomo	Old man/male cognate (+1 gen.)	Mama
7 Ni	Sun	Aba	‘father’
8 Ega	Moon	One	‘wife’
9 Dange	Cowrie shell	Gange
10 Ira	Fire/anything dangerous	Nē	–
D. 1 Hale	Ears	Hale nano/ kope nainya	‘mushrooms’
2 Gi/Ge hondone	Fingers/toes	Gi/Ge goloma	‘short digits’
3 Gi	Hand	Ame/Dabi	–
4 Ngui	Nose	Iba gendo	‘water source’
5 Ge	Leg	Be gauni	‘new bamboo’
6 Wi	Penis	Anga	‘pandanus nut’
7 Hamba	Vagina	Mbare/mburu mbare	‘water insect (?)’
8 Here	Buttocks	Nanombe	‘mushroom’
9 Haguene	Head	Hubi gaiya/mambu	‘taro’
10 Manda iri	Head hair	Gulu abai	‘marsupial fur’
11 Andu/Andu ibane	Breast/breast milk	Amu	‘mother / dearest one’
12 Gi/Ge	Hands/legs	Hariagani	‘roads/tracks’
E. 1 Bira	Sit	Baba la	–
2 Palia	Sleep	Abu la	–
3 Mali	Dance	Honda handa bia	–
4 Waya	Wash	Dada bia	–
5 Ba	Hit	Ah Ah bia/da bia	–
6 Gali	Baby	Ambolo	–

Similarly, bananas are symbolically important as a source of baby nutrients as well as leaves which provide the first waist-apron (mandibu) of the child. But beyond such superficial continuities between these Hull and Western sequences there is also one quite explicit discontinuity. In Hull the newborn is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Transcription Conventions
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Naming and Gaming
• 2 Pretend Play
• 3 Changing Roles
• 4 The Ogre: A Melanesian Cyclop
• 5 The Trickster: A Melanesian Enantiomorph
• Afterword
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Bibliography
• Index