Title: Trip Leader Prank—Roasting Jellybeans

General Information about Item:

• Customary folklore: practical joke/trick
• Language: English
• Country: USA

Informant Data:

• The informant is a Dartmouth ’18 female. She is active in the Native American Community on campus, SPCSA, and Sigma Delta. She is a Government and Native American Studies modified with Anthropology double major from Martha’s Vineyard. She went on cabin camping in September 2014, but never led a trip or was on a croo.

Contextual Data:

• Social Context: Dartmouth trip leaders frequently play harmless pranks on students during trips. There are certain pranks that trip leaders classically pull such as Robert Frost’s Ashes or Canadian Ground Fruit (see corresponding entries). However, trip leaders also will sometimes pull a prank that they thought of. In this case, the informant’s trip leaders pulled this prank on the students while they were on their cabin camping trip.
• Cultural Context: Pulling a prank on students while they are on their trip is meant to be in the spirit of fun. It has the effect of getting students to not take themselves (or in the case of common pranks such as Frost’s ashes to take the corresponding reverence for tradition) too seriously. It also serves to bond tripees on a group level as they all have a common experience of them believing or going along with something that their trip leaders told them and calls attention to their shared position of not knowing everything about Dartmouth.

Item:

• This prank consisted of trip leaders telling students that it was a tradition to roast the jellybeans left over from the jellybean game. They had students get sticks, roasted the jellybeans, and had them eat them.

Transcript of Informant Interview:

They told us it was a Dartmouth tradition to roast jellybeans on your trips experience. So they told us to go find sticks. So we’re all searching for small sticks small enough to needle through a jellybean. Then they make us roast them. It was the most disgusting thing you’ve ever tasted. As we were looking for sticks they started laughing at us. By the end of it they told us we were so dumb.

Informant’s Comments:

• The informant did not think this was a particularly good prank, she thought their prank was kind of dumb.

Collector’s Comments:

• I think its interesting that when trip leaders do not pull the classic pranks such as Frost’s ashes or Canadian ground fruit, the ability for students to bond with other students who were not on their trip over their shared naivety is lost. However, the immediate effects within that specific trip group appear to be the same. This is an example of variability within the more general practice of trip leader pranks.

Collector’s Name: Clara Silvanic

Tags/Keywords:

• DOC Trips, Trip leader pranks, jellybeans