Not Just Child's Play: Emerging Tradition and the Lost Boys of Sudan
The winner of the Chicago Folklore Prize for 2008 is a gripping, fully theorized first-person narrative by a folklorist who, mindful of the cultural risks involved, has worked for several years with members of a culturally endangered group, Sudanese Di Dinga war refugees who relocated to the United States. Felicia McMahon'sNot Just Child's Play:  Emerging Tradition and the Lost Boys of Sudan, published in 2007 by the University Press of Mississippi, shows that because of the dislocations of war in Sudan, The Lost Boys, though now grown, were never properly initiated into manhood according to tribal custom and so are caught in a state of cultural childhood. McMahon's work with the group in western New York State has been in large measure devoted to helping the refugees encompass that loss through recovery of remembered tribal dance and ritual enacted in public performances. The reader cheers the group on, honoring the Lost Boys' dance and ritual--transnational, cobbled-together, hybrid, but absolutely and authentically theirs.American Folklore Society Chicago Folklore Prize 2008 Award Citation