Leslie Paris, Children's Nature : The Rise of the American Summer Camp

Leslie Paris, Children's Nature : The Rise of the American Summer Camp (NYU Press, 2009)

The first thing which strikes me as a historian of the Soviet Union during the reading of Prof. Paris’s book is how more efficient capitalist societies are in educating and disciplining, in the Foucauldian sense, their citizens in comparison to socialist ones.[1] Socialist Young Pioneer camps were to serve, in theory, to the same purposes as American ones – that is, to secure the imposition of “right” norms and values on younger generations through adult supervision and group cooperation. By the late Soviet period, however, Young Pioneer camps had largely failed to perform cultural and ideological functions of educating the “right” Soviet youth. Personal accounts of trips to these camps in the 1970s and especially 1980s evidence that children often (although not always) experienced practices varying from ethnic conflicts to rather wide-spread sexual experiences (Soviet camps were designed for both boys and girls), which was drastically different from those visions which early enthusiasts of summer camp movement in the Soviet Union tried to embody in this institute. In this respect, the story of the US summer camps is, reversely, a story of how the institute of summer camp grew in prominence, securing the transfer and transformation of social meanings and relations. From Prof. Paris’s book, one of the causes of this seems to be in the fact that whereas American camps were an instrument of both social homogenization (through pedagogical practices emanating from similar principles of summer camp enthusiasts and managers, as in the case of Camp Directors Association) and social differentiation, which made them appealing to most social groups, in the Soviet Union state-run camps generally failed in the second role and performed the first one notable less effective than their private American counterparts.

I found the narrative, argumentation and evidence used in Children's Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp strong and convincing, especially Prof. Paris’s use of the conceptual language of social history, which seems very appropriate for interpretation of the evidence presented in the book. Ironically, my questions are still addressed to the same aspects of this book – narrative, argumentation and conceptual language.

Narrative: the beginnings of all sections (including Introduction, all chapters and Conclusion) are built in a similar way where first a case is presented which is then followed by more general argumentation. This seems to ritualize, to a certain extent, the narrative of the book. Since narrative in social sciences plays an important explanatory function, I wonder to what degree this structure was chosen by Prof. Paris intentionally and what role it plays in structuring of the book’s material.

Argumentation: the book is built around the phenomenon of the American summer camp and explores its history, its social, political and cultural environment, evolution of its practices, visions of progress, etc. The very subject of Prof. Paris’s narration is changed several times: from conceptions of the childhood envisioned in summer camps to their social uses by different groups and back. As the result, there is no single line of argumentation or a single focal point in the book, rather than the research topic itself (the rise of American summer camps) which is a priori too broad to be examined in one book-length research. I do regard this not as a disadvantage, but rather as a specificity of the chosen genre, so the question is: was this genre chosen intentionally or, instead, it was the genre that chose how to build the argumentation and narrative.

Conceptual language: In Chapter 2, Prof. Paris rather often (e.g., on pp. 63-64, 75, 80) refers to practices and experiences of summer camps as those of “consumerism” and “consumption.” This adds another angle on the institute of camping, but the theoretical framing for such an approach is lacking in the book: these statements are made in passing, without analyzing the forms, patterns, practices of consumption in the case of summer camps. This, as it seems to me, undermines the explanatory force of this concept. Since camps concentrated on family relations, explication of mechanisms which made family relations into a commodity could be helpful, particularly for someone like me who has no insider knowledge of the American culture.

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[1] This was not the only socio-cultural phenomenon in which bourgeois societies proved much more effective than socialist. Roland Barthes was, e.g., very sceptical about the socialist mythology in general, which he regarded as deeply inferior in comparison to bourgeois myths, see the essay “Myth on the Left” in: Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: The Noonday Press, 1972), 146-149.