When music exempts us: Clapping games as an activity of cultural negotiation

Abstract

Clapping games are recreational, motor-skill, musical activities that have been highly present in schools for many years, particularly in groups of girls. Two first-person narratives have been recreated using age-groups interviews and complementary observations made in a school playground located in a small city near Barcelona. These narratives come from two different periods (1940s-1950s and the present) and show how this activity establishes a female space of enculturation but also transgresses the canonical ways of regarding the prevailing sociocultural context in each period.