Title: Camp Shirt

General Information about Item:

• Superstition
• Language: English
• Origin: Dartmouth College
• Informant: Leigh Steinberg
• Date Collected: February 24, 2018

Informant Data:

• The informant is from the suburbs of Philadelphia. Her father is a lawyer and her mother is wealth adviser. She has attended private school for her entire life.

Contextual Data:

• Social Context: Academics are again very important to the parents of this informant. She is a younger sister so growing up she observed how her parents dealt with her older sister who was intelligent, but struggled with motivation. In order to avoid these confrontations with her parents regarding her schoolwork she was a hard worker and a high achiever.  This folklore is performed the day or night before the exam.
• Cultural Context: This informant has always cared about her academics and needs to feel like she has some sort of control over the outcome of each exam.

Item:

• This informant annotates all her notes for the exam again the night before. She also goes to sleep in a specific camp shirt the night before every exam. During the exam, she always has at least two pens or pencils out so she does not have to go back into her backpack. She feels that this will be distracting if she has to break her focus from the exam to grab another writing utensil.

Informant’s Comments:

• The camp shirt is something I have been wearing before an exam for many years. It holds a certain amount of luck at this point, as it has served me well so far on exams.

Collector’s Comments:

• The camp shirt, although a superstition, can also act as contagious magic, as she believes sleeping in it transfers some sort of success to her during tests.

Collector’s Name: Abigeal Aboaba

Tags/Keywords:

• Superstition
• Camp