The Search for Cultural Continuities in Studies of Modern Greek Children’s Play and Games: Some Theoretical and Methodological Questions
p. 315-327
Résumés
Un fragment de la Quenouille d’Érinna et un passage de l’Onomasticon de Pollux donnent une description du jeu de la torti-tortue (chelichelônê) réservé aux jeunes filles encore non mariées (parthenoi) qui doivent recevoir une instruction avant le mariage. Au sujet de la fille-tortue, l’étude des rites ludiques modernes tirés du folklore grec tels que la Petite Hélène, le Loup et l’Agneau, la Boîte, et d’autres encore destinés aux jeunes filles, montre les correspondances qui existent entre la culture grecque moderne et les jeux anciens.
A fragment of Erinna’s Distaff and a passage of Pollux’ Onomasticon describe the torti-tortoise-game (chelichelônê) which is played by unmarried girls (parthenoi) who must be instructed before wedding. About the tortoise-girl, the study of modern play rites drawn from Greek folklore, such as Little Helen, The Wolf and the Lamb, The Kneading-Trough, and others destined to young girls show correspondances between ancient and modern Greek culture.
Texte intégral
Introduction: Continuity and change in play and games. What are we comparing?
1Any discussion on issues of transmission, continuity and change in children’s play should first deal with the question of definitions. If play and games are understood in terms of mimicry of adult life (pretend play) or of rule bound action aiming towards uneven outcomes (games),1 a typical method of comparison would be to compare scenarios (pretend play) play instruments (toys) and rules (games), i.e. to examine the content or the formal aspects of play and games. If however play and games are defined as situated activities,2 the context of play and games, that is questions regarding actors, actions, intentions, interactions, instruments and performances, becomes crucial in comparing play forms across different regions or historical periods in the same culture or across different cultures. A second methodological point therefore relates to questions regarding uniformity or variation of children’s play within a particular society and historical period. Continuity arguments often rely on the assumption of uniformity of children’s culture within a particular era in a given region an argument which Mark Golden with regard to classical antiquity and a great number of contemporary scholars within the field of modern childhood studies have repetitively criticized.3
2Let us look for example at Easter swings, a popular form of ritual play and recreation around many regions in Greece that has been recorded by folklorists from the 19th century until 1960, approximately, as performed on two Dodecanesian islands Karpathos and Kastellorizo during the first half of the 20th century.4 Vasiliki Chrysanthopoulou5 who has conducted fieldwork among Greek migrants in Australia reports that despite superficial similarities of Easter swings on the two islands there are important differences resulting from the different social position of unmarried girls on the two islands. Easter swings on Karpathos constituted an occasion for legal flirting in a society where gender relations were managed and regulated in the context of a complex property transmission system privileging first born daughters.6 By contrast on Kastellorizo, a society practicing female adolescent seclusion until marriage, swings were a strictly female form of ritual play that reproduced the social status of the male line of the family, as the content of the accompanying songs praising the fathers and brothers of the swinging girls suggests. One should therefore be careful in drawing conclusions on continuity in time, given the variations in meaning of a ludic ritual practice within a small geographical area even during the same period.
1. Greek Folklore Studies of Play and the doctrine of cultural continuity (19th century-1950)
3Examples of ethnographic descriptions of play (or ritual) practices such as the cited work of V. Chrysanthopoulou are rare in the literature on traditional play, games and toys in Greece. Traditional games and toys in Greece from the 19th century to the present have been mainly studied by folklorists and physical education teachers. The majority of these studies has been characterized by and still —to some extent— operates within an evolutionist theoretical framework. This was not a uniquely Greek phenomenon of course, as evolutionism was the dominant theoretical paradigm (in Thomas Kuhn’s sense)7 of the social sciences from the 19th century to the 1920s. The hegemonic persistence of this perspective in Greek folklore studies until 1970s approximately can be attributed to the specific role of the discipline in the formation of the Greek Nation-State in the 19th century.
4During the turbulent period of the Ottoman Question the newly founded Greek State was striving to expand its boundaries to comprise all Greek speaking communities that were still part of the Ottoman Empire. This nationalist vision that was bound to dominate Greek foreign policy for a long time was known as the “Great idea”, a policy that demanded the projection of unity of the Greek nation in the dimension of time, while also claiming the unity in the dimension of geographical space. In terms of politics, this tenet was expressed in recurrent uprises and liberation movements of the Greeks throughout the 19th century. In terms of cultural practice, projecting the unity in time meant the study of customs and practices of the “unfreed” areas.8
5When the German historian Jakob Phillip Fallmerayer attacked this nationalist claim in 1830 by rejecting the very notion of Greeks as Europeans, in the context of a biological understanding of ethnicity as blood descent, folklorists undertook the task of refuting Fallmerayer’s theory on the basis of ethnographic evidence. Hence a campaign started for the collection of survivals of classical antiquity in the customs and lore of the “simple people of rural areas”. These survivals were widely known as “living monuments of Greek Antiquity” and by the middle of the 19th century a huge campaign started for their location and collection. The campaign was run by the State, voluntary organizations and societies. It consisted in circulars and calls for related publications, philological contests with money prizes etc.9
6This campaign mainly addressed educationalists and primary school teachers. School teachers were considered ideal for providing proofs of cultural continuity with ancient Greece, as they were physically present not only in the most remote areas of the Greek State but also in Greek speaking communities in “unfreed” areas of the Ottoman Empire. Play was part of this “patriotic” campaign since its inception.10 However, the fact that the first play folklorists were also teachers played a decisive role in the content of these studies, as the second half of the 19th century was also a period when Greek intellectuals developed a discourse on physical and moral education of the youth that had been present in other European countries since the Enlightenment.11
7While the first years following the foundation of the Greek State were characterized by an “intellectualist” attitude towards education, during the years of the Bavarian rule of King Otto and his environment, a gymnastic movement developed that was heavily influenced by the German Turnbewegung in the 19th century. The first Greek gym teachers were educated in Germany and brought with them the conviction of the pedagogical character of ancient Greek games and pastimes. A movement for the inclusion of physical education based on games and exercises developed, which was further stimulated by the various attempts to resurrect the Olympic Games. In the aftermath of the 1896 organization of the first modern Olympics in Athens, physical education was eventually introduced in the National Educational Curriculum in 1899.12
8It is against this background that the first publications on Greek children’s play should be looked at. In terms of educational practice this movement meant — among other things— publications of physical education manuals, which included descriptions of ancient Greek games.13
9How did the ideological grid of the folklorists that were influenced by the archaeological model of Greekness function in their reports on children’s play and playthings? What was left out of this grid?
10The overriding majority of the folk play collections from 1850 to 1970 approximately is predominantly oriented to games with rules. This tendency, which also characterizes folklore studies conducted in other countries is due to the dominant trend —both in local and to a great extent also in international terms— of viewing children’s playful pursuits as texts rather than contexts.14 Studies of Greek folk games conducted during this period followed the example set by the founder of Greek folklore, Nikolaos Politis, who introduced a lexicographic model of studying Greek culture that served first and foremost in providing a sense of unity underpinned by the fictive category of panhellenic customs and mores which overlooked regional differences and social change in its endeavour to establish historical continuity with the glorious ancestors.15 As studies of games treated the latter as proofs of cultural continuity between ancient and modern Greece, these works were furthermore ahistorical and timeless constructions — despite their preoccupation with time. They were based on adult informants’ decontextualized descriptions of static rules rather than synchronic accounts of contemporary children’s play and therefore cannot be very helpful as historical sources of information on children’s play. Three types of studies fall more or less into the archaeological model of modern Greek children’s play: a) Panhellenic studies of games, b) physical education manuals and c) articles on regional children’s games or “topographies”, i.e. books dealing with the history, folklore and geography of a particular locality, which included a section on children’s play, games and toys.16
1.1. Panhellenic Studies of Games
11One of the pioneering publications in this respect is the Hellenic Archaeology by Grigorios Paliouritis published in 1815,17 a piece of work inspired by the universal histories of the Enlightenment, which included a section on children’s games of Epirus, homeland of the author. G. Paliouritis used the catalogue and description of games mentioned in volume IX of the Onomasticon by Pollux and other ancient Greek sources as a starting point of his collection of modern Greek games, noting which of these games had survived to his time.
12The most influential study however, which served as a yardstick for scholarly competence of game collectors, was a speech delivered in 1854 by the academic Georgios Papasliotis on the occasion of a prize award for the best student of the Hellenic Educational Institute at the end of the academic year. Children’s play in this work is considered as a means for approaching and understanding ancient Greek civilization. Learning in the 19th century during the period of classicism, was associated with imitation of the ancient Greek civilization and this imitation in the G. Papasliotis speech was supposed to start from scratch i.e., “from the toys, games and pastimes of our glorious ancestors”.18 G. Papasliotis went through all known —in his era— ancient Greek references to toys and games trying to locate modern Greek analogies, wherever possible. His starting point however and his main interest was the antiquity, so he proceeded in the classification of all modern Greek games and toys under the generic names of their supposed ancient Greek counterparts. G. Papasliotis was used as a standard point of reference in instruction manuals and reports on the results of contests for the best collection of customs and mores: of the Greeks and his classification system functioned as a self-fulfilled prophecy on continuity between ancient and modern Greek cultures. After the publication of G. Papasliotis’ work most modern Greek games were either classified under ancient Greek labels or explicitly aimed to achieve this type of classification. As consensus on the exact correspondence of ancient and modern games was not always possible, many modern Greek games appeared under various ancient Greek names in different studies.
13As time passed, the hesitant comparison between ancient and modern Greek games that G. Papasliotis attempted in 1854 became a conviction. This led several authors, such as I. K. Pagounis,19 to limit their descriptions of the ways some games and toys were played by modern Greek children to a verbatim citation from Pollux, Aristophanes or Plato.
14In the 20th century the influential works of the academics Ioannis Kakridis and Faedon Koukoules20 served as models for the comparison between ancient and modern Greek games as the dominant method of studying modern Greek children’s play and thus contributed to the reproduction of the doctrine of cultural continuity.21 The work of F. Koukoules in particular introduced the play of Byzantine children as the missing link between ancient and modern Greek Children’s play culture.
15Despite its obvious shortcomings this model at least turned scholarly attention to children’s play and toys. Attention to detail in comparison with ancient Greek counterparts further yielded some interesting drawings of 19th century toys such as tops, bows, spears (figs 1-3) and a few diagrams of popular games such as εννεάρα (Nine men’s Morris).
1.2. Gymnastic Manuals and Educational Game Anthologies
16In 1899 games were included in the national curriculum of primary school education. The most effective proponent of games was Ioannis Chrysafis who introduced the Swedish system of physical education in Greece.22 I. Chrysafis published a great number of manuals on the topic and contributed to the establishment of physical education as a subject in all school levels. I. Chrysafis was a proponent of the ancient Greek spirit of physical education that placed games at the heart of young children’s physical, moral and intellectual development. He also promoted the collection of contemporary children’s local games and from the position of General Inspector of Physical Education at the Ministry of Education he issued a circular in 1916 which asked physical education teachers to collect folk games.23
17Gymnastic manuals were published before 1899 in the same classicist spirit that characterized the anthologies and panhellenic studies of games, however the discourse of continuity was particularly influential in manuals published thereafter. As the manuals focused on the general spirit of the ancient Greek educational system, there was scope for the inclusion of modern Greek local games and pastimes, while descriptions of self-made toys associated with popular games of physical skill (e.g. kites or paper constructions and even fad toys such as the diabolo) also appeared in some manuals such as the work published by Ioannis Kyvernitakis in 1938 (fig. 4).24
18An exception to the panhellenic model of gymnastic manuals is the publication of a number of descriptions of local children’s games in Agrinion by the physical education teacher Kostas Cheimaras in the journal Ελληνική Αγωγή. The pedagogical interest in folk games, which was influenced by the gradual development of a child-centered education in the last decade of the 19th century, yielded a number of anthologies of folk games which followed the same ahistorical model of continuity with the exception of two important anthologies published during the 1920s by Dimitris Loukopoulos and Evdokia Athanasoula.25 D. Loukopoulos was the only folklorist in his time who interviewed young students of the Maraslion Academy for his collection of games played in different regions of Greece and used a descriptive child-centered system of classification that is close to the model followed by contemporary folklorists in the UK.26 Both D. Loukopoulos and E. Athanasoula were members of the “Educational Club” (Εκπαιδευτικός Όμιλος)27, an educational movement consisting of teachers who supported the introduction of modern Demotic Greek in public education and were proponents of child-centered pedagogical methods which used contemporary children’s folk culture as a source for urban children’s playful learning. Although E. Athanasoula did not include a foreword to her anthology, her collection of well-known traditional nursery songs, riddles, tongue twisters and games illustrated with drawings of rural children in traditional costumes (figs 5-6), obviously targeted both mothers and young children. The pedagogical potential of the anthology for middle class children was especially praised by the former director of the Hellenic Folklore Archives, and at the time University professor Stilpon Kyriakidis in his review of the book published in the journal Λαογραφία in 1926.28
Fig. 1 Drawing of γυριστάρι, a wooden whip-top made by turners in Ainos, Eastern Thrace (W. Turkey), 1874. The pointed tip was fitted with a needle. One of the games played with tops consisted in “travelling” the top from one side of the street to the other. A top that stopped turning was a “ship wreck”. The gender of the players is not specified. After Μανασσείδης (1874), p. 573.

Fig. 2 Drawing of τζιρίτι, a self-constructed spear made from elderberry wood with a launching device made from the same material by Greek children in Ainos, Eastern Thrace (W. Turkey), 1874. The gender of the players is not specified. After Μανασσείδης (1874), p. 578.

Fig. 3 Drawing of δοξάρι, a self-constructed bow and arrow made from wooden planks by Greek children in Ainos, Eastern Thrace (W. Turkey), 1874. The gender of the players is not specified. After Μανασσείδης (1874), p. 578.

Fig. 4 Examples of kites in Kyvernitakis’ anthology of ancient and modern Greek games with detailed instructions for their construction. Kites were considered by Kyvernitakis as useful -among other benefits-for training children to trust airplanes, a novel means of transport in his era. The section also referred to the presence of kites in ancient Greece. After Κυβερνητάκης (1938), p. 112, figs 14-15.

1.3. Topographies and local studies of play
19Works in this category have the most interesting descriptions of games and include in many cases symbolic play themes with self-constructed and commercial toys. The content of these accounts seems to be closely linked to the author’s relationship to the particular area (e.g. descent or professional affiliation) and to the degree of their commitment to the Papasliotis archaeological model mentioned above. In fact, the richness of the descriptions is inversely related to the depth of the author’s archaeological knowledge. The distortion of contemporary reality that the archaeological lens provided to the authors is exemplified by Georgios Loukas’s work Philological Visits of the Ancient Greek Monuments in the Life of Modern Cypriots. In his introduction to the book G. Loukas, stages an imaginary dialogue between the ghosts29 of the Greek Enlightenment scholar Adamantios Korais, the linguist, philologist and University professor Dimitrios Mavrofrydis and the historian Jakob Phillip Fallmerayer, who argue for the historical continuity between ancient and modern Greek culture, as they watch Greek Cypriot children of 19th century Nikosia play at ball games they identify as Ourania, Episkyros and Aporraxis.30
20The less informed the author of the collection is on the archaeological findings and the classical texts, the more vivid his account of play.31 The gender of the authors resulted in a bias towards boys’ play but at least this category of studies yielded some interesting accounts of the play of young boys where players seem to be more present than rules. One of the liveliest descriptions of how some Thracian boys played with their hobby horses we owe to the lack of knowledge of the G. Papasliotis article by Symeon Manasseidis. S. Manasseidis compiled a collection of 46 games played by children in Ainos of Eastern Thrace during the last quarter of the 19th century where he served as a primary school teacher. The collection was published in the context of a competition on the best compilation of “living monuments” of ancient Greek culture, that is folklore material from Thrace. S. Manasseidis succeeded in getting the prize for his collection although the prize committee was critical of his “failure to consult Papasliotis”.32
Fig. 5 Drawing of children playing at τυφλόμυγα (Blind Man’s Buff). After Αθανασούλα (1926), p. 21.

Fig. 6 Drawing accompanying the verses of the popular Greek children’s song Φεγγαράκι μου λαμπρό (My bright little moon). This song has been used for the dissemination of a popular myth concerning the existence of clandestine schools operating after dark, as an act of resistance against the Ottoman rule of Greece (1453-1827). After Αθανασούλα (1926), p. 3.

21In the 20th century, local studies of games and children’s play are first linked to the development of a new interest in topos as reconstruction of lost homelands after the expulsion of Asia Minor Greeks and Armenians from Turkey in 1922.33 The revival of interest in folk culture as expressed in the “turn to tradition” of the 1970’s resulted in the publication of topographies with sections on children’s play that depart from the panhellenic model of the games anthologies and gradually from the doctrine of cultural continuity after 1970. The resilience of axiomatic continuity between ancient Greek and modern Greek culture was so profound that many studies actually published mixed information on games from informants belonging to different generations because the authors refused to consider the possibility of intergenerational change.34 The best results concerning descriptions of children’s play are yielded again in the absence of knowledge of academic texts in recollections of local everyday life published in autobiographical material.35 Greek Academic folklore has been deeply influenced by survival theory until the 1970s, as the discipline has been especially resilient to criticism of the forefathers and revision of their methods despite the criticism raised by scholars such as Alki Kyriakidou Nestoros who repeatedly questioned the doctrine of historical continuity or Dimitrios Loukatos and Mihalis Meraklis who promoted ethnographic and sociological approaches to modern Greek folk culture.36
22The diagrams and guidelines for compilations of collections of children’s traditional play practices are deeply influenced by evolutionist theories such as Stanley Hall’s recapitulation theory.37 Furthermore, questions related to the study of games as survivals of rituals or other sociocultural structures and practices continued to fascinate the thought of academic folklorists who have occasionally published works on Greek children’s folk games, such as Mihalis Meraklis, as late as the 1980s.38 In fact the influence of the doctrine of continuity has been so strong that social anthropologist Loring Danforth argued in 1984 that very few researchers can talk about modern Greek cultural practices without referring to ancient Greece.39 L. Danforth’s remark concerned ritual studies, but it is also relevant to the study of children’s play, as we have seen throughout this chapter.
Conclusion
23Comparisons of children’s play across chronological periods and cultures should deal with the questions posed by Modern Childhood Studies40 that have relativized both childhood as a social category and children’s culture while simultaneously placing children at the centre of social action. Descriptions of game rules recorded in child or adult interviews on how a game is played have little to do with the actual performance of the game, as the work of anthropologists and socio-linguists such as Amy Kyriazis and Ann Marjory Goodwyn has shown in the case of the debate on girls’ conflict management and their understanding of rules in games.41 Children’s play is a result of the interaction between peer cultures and adult culture as William Corsaro and Ann-Carita Evaldsson have so eloquently demonstrated.42 If we continue to view games in terms of texts and determining rule structures or discuss the affordances of toys without studying their context of use, we will probably only record everlasting continuities.43 Nothing in the form of a toy can predict whether its owner or user will play at it to mimic or ridicule and resist adult authority, as the work of Helen Schwartzman or Miriam Formanek-Brunell and my own ethnographic work in Palaia Phocaea of Attica have illustrated.44 We clearly need more ethnographies of contemporary children’s play and historical ethnographies and more contributions to the fairly recent systematic dialogue between anthropology, material culture studies, archaeology and history45 that will help towards the establishment of novel methods of comparing children’s play, games and toys of different historical periods46.
Notes de bas de page
1 The presence of well-defined rules and the antagonism embedded in the uneven outcome of games as opposed to play lie at heart of many definitions of games, especially the classic studies of Caillois (1961) and Avedon and Sutton Smith (1971).
2 See Goffman (1961); Corsaro and Evaldsson (1998); Goodwin (2006), p. 5-10.
3 See Golden (1990), p. 141 on variation of attitudes towards and the experience of childhood according to age group, gender, class, social position and geographical context. For similar arguments regarding modern childhood studies, see James and Prout (1990) and James, Jenks and Prout (1998).
4 On swings rituals in ancient Greece, see V. Sabetai in this volume.
5 Χρυσανθοπουλου (1998), p. 307-331.
6 For a detailed account of the kinship and property transmission system of Karpathos, see Dascalopoulos-Capetanakis (1979); Vernier (1991).
7 According to Kuhn (1970), p. 39-40, a paradigm is a set of theories, conceptual frameworks, rules and methods that a scientific discipline takes for granted.
8 Κυριακίδου-Νέστορος (1978), p. 17.
9 Κυριακίδου-Νέστορος (1978), p. 97-97; Herzfeld (1982), p. 75-81.
10 Γκουγκουλή (2000), p. 17-18, (2001), p. 60-61.
11 Κουλούρη (1997), p. 49-54.
12 Κουλούρη (1997), p. 62-69.
13 E.g. Φωκιανός (1883).
14 See Schwartzman (1978), p. 79-80.
15 Κυριακίδου-Νέστορος (1978), p. 91-110.
16 The following section is discussed in detail in Γκουγκουλή (2000, 2001).
17 Παλιουρίτης (1815).
18 Παπασλιώτης (1854), p. 5.
19 Παγούνης (1880-1881), p. 124-141. This tendency has persisted well into 20th century collections of local folk games compiled by amateur folklorists. See e.g. Μέλλιος (1985), p. 11-25.
20 Κακριδής (1925), p. 161-179; Κουκουλές (1948), p. 161-229.
21 See for example the anthologies of Δαράκη (1985) and Ταρσουλη (1979). The latter was distributed to schoolchildren in public primary schools by the Ministry of Education. See also historical approaches to Greek toys and games by toy collectors and museum curators such as Argyriadi (1991) and by researchers interested in the history of technology such as Λάζος (2002).
22 Χρυσάφης (1925), p. 53.
23 Χρυσάφης (1925), p. 125 and 177-178.
24 Κυβερνητάκης (1938).
25 See Λουκόπουλος (1926); Αθανασούλα (1926).
26 E.g. Bishop and Curtis (2001); Willett (2013), p. 27-28. The taxonomy of D. Loukopoulos is closer to the classification of British children’s games by I. and P. Opie (1984), which has formed the basis of current British taxonomies.
27 See Γκουγκουλή (2000), p. 65, n. 56.
28 See Κυριακίδης (1926), p. 296.
29 All three scholars were long dead by the time G. Loukas published this imaginary dialogue in 1874. G. Loukas is a case in point exemplifying the degree in which Fallmerayer’s ghost haunted 19th century Greek scholars’ imagination.
30 Λουκάς (1974), p. η-ζ.
31 The vast majority of folklorists were men until the 1970s.
32 Μανασσείδης (1874), p. 550-579. See the journal Ο εν Κωνσταντινουπόλει Ελληνικός Φιλολογικός Σύλλογος, 8, 1875, p. 260-282, for the critical assessment of S. Manasseidis by the committee and especially his lack of reference to the work of G. Papasliotis.
33 See Hirschon (1998), for an account of the massive refugee wave following the defeat of the Greek army in the war between Greece and Turkey in 1922 and its consequences for the construction of a refugee identity based on the lost homeland.
34 See for example the introduction to his study of Samiote Folklore of Δημητρίου (1983), p. 9-18: he confesses that he unified accounts of different generations of players in his description of Samiote folk practices (including games). Κληρίδης and Παπαχαραλάμπους (1954), p. ζ-η, are so adamant in their conviction of continuity in Greek Cypriot children’s play that they criticize late 19th century scholarly accounts which diverge from the game patterns they recorded in the 1950s as “inaccurate”.
35 See Κανδηλώρος (1906) for an excellent example of a child-centered, vivid account of children’s play in Dimitsana, Peloponnese, in the late 19th century. His account on 1880 children’s culture is especially interesting, as it depicts children’s play as a site for negotiation and questioning of adult control on playtime, play space and play materials. T. Kandiloros mentions several examples of children stealing fruit from orchards or “borrowing” tiles from neighbours’ roofs to construct their self-made toys or play at games of skill. He is one of very few authors who offer detailed descriptions of girl’s play and especially their playful reconstruction of rural wedding rituals without simply referring to the mimetic function of symbolic play. Children’s make-believe in T. Kandiloros’s work illustrates the selectiveness and subversive character of children’s playful reconstructions of the adult world. Girls seemed to focus on the spectacular aspects of a wedding such as the exchange of wreaths in church by the wedding sponsor, the feasting and dancing after the wedding and the transport of dowry items from the bride’s village by a bridled dog who represented a mule. Boys participated in the transport of the dowry and were particularly fond of adopting the role of the priest, a function which gave them plenty of scope for engaging in subversive play ridiculing the seriousness of the ceremony. See Κανδηλώρος (1906), p. 239-241.
36 See Κυριακίδου-Νέστορος (1978), Λουκάτος (1977), Μερακλής (1986).
37 On the introduction of recapitulation theory in children’s play studies by the American psychologist Stanley Hall, see Schwartzman (1978), p. 46-60. For a critical account of the evolutionary tenets and particularly of the recapitulation theory underlying the classificatory system of Greek children’s folk games developed by Μέγας (1939), see Γκουγκουλή (2001). The taxonomy introduced by G. Megas is still used by the Academy of Athens and particularly by the Hellenic Folklore Research Centre.
38 See e.g. Μερακλής (1986), p. 36.
39 Danforth (1984), p. 53-85.
40 See Corsaro (1997) and James and James (2009) for a more recent account of modern childhood studies.
41 See Goodwin (1985) and (2006) and the review article by Kyratzis (2004) for a critical assessment of works on the use of language among peer cultures including works on the negotiation of rules and identities in play encounters.
42 Corsaro and Evaldsson (1998).
43 This is not to say that a discussion on resilient structures in terms of recording possibilities of a longue durée (e.g. with regard to power issues or the performance of gender relations in play) is not possible, as recent works by Medieval historians and archaeologists e.g. Pitarakis (2009) have proposed. A fruitful theoretical discussion has also developed among anthropologists dealing with questions of change and long durée in terms of sedimentation of bodily habits in death rituals. See for example Sutton (2004). Marsh and Richards (2013), p. 18-19, have used the notion of sedimentation, introduced by the phenomenological philosophy of M. Merleau Ponty, to describe cultural continuities in British children’s play practices, alongside changing and emergent features of children’s play cultures.
44 See Schwartzman (1978); Formanek-Brunell (1993), p. 6-34; Gougoulis (1999) and (2003), p. 155-163 and the contributions in Forman-Brunell and Dawn Whitney (2015).
45 See for example the collective volumes edited by Evans-Grubbs and Parkin (2013) or by Laes and Vuolanto (2017).
46 We also need historical accounts of the role that the educational system played in the revival and dissemination of ancient Greek games and the introduction of European singing games that are commonly thought as “traditional” Greek and are often compared to ancient Greek games in search for continuities. There are reports of revivals of games such as διελκυστίνδα or οστρακίνδα that were taught in primary schools already in the first decades of the 20th century; see Κακριδής (1925), p. 176. Children are in a constant dialogue with adult culture and often appropriate elements of the school curriculum such as school games introduced by gym teachers. See Gougoulis (2003), p. 285-287, 305-306, on the incorporation of school games in children’s peer cultures in Palaia Phocaea of Attica in the late 1980s.
Auteur
cleogou@upatras.gr
Department of History and Archaeology
University of Patras, Greece
Assistant Professor of Folk and Popular Culture at the Department of History and Archaeology, University of Patras Greece. Her research interests and publications revolve around material culture studies, folklore studies, anthropology and museum studies, focusing on Greek children’s culture and the anthropology of play. She has edited an international, trilingual, interdisciplinary special volume on children’s play of the journal Ethnographica (1993) published by the Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation, and has co-edited the books Παιδί και παιχνίδι στη νεοελληνική κοινωνία.19os και 20ός αιώνας (Children and play in Modern Greek Society. 19th and 20th Centuries) [Athens Kastaniotis, 2000] with A. Kouria, and Το ελληνικό παιχνίδι. Διαδρομές στην ιστορία του (Greek Toys : Historical Trajectories) [Athens ELIA/MIET : 2008] with Despina Karakatsani. She has recently edited three special sections of the journal Archaeology and Arts on children’s play in Antiquity (132, 2020), in Byzantium (133, 2020) and in the contemporary era (134, 2020). She was awarded the BRIO prize in 2005, and she is the former President and current Treasurer of the International Toy Research Association (ITRA).
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Définition, Transmission, Réception/Definition, Transmission, Reception
Véronique Dasen et Marco Vespa (éd.)
2021
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Couverture(s) de la presse spécialisée française
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2022
Temporalités et imaginaires du jeu
Rémi Cayatte, Audrey Tuaillon Demésy et Laurent Di Filippo (éd.)
2023