I am currently sitting in the airport on my way home from the 34th annual conference for The Association for the Study of Play (TASP), held in sunny Tempe, AZ.
I gave a presentation about how parkour is a form of grown-up freeform play, as opposed to soccer or working out at the gym. Freeform or “unstructured” play is something you see kids do all the time, but grown-ups generally stop doing it all together. Parkour does not, and instead encourages grown-ups to keep that kid spirit of finding play in every aspect of your environment, and seeing play as important as work or leisure.
But enough about me, onto the conference. Most of the conference was dominated by early childhood development researchers (0-5 years old), and how play is beneficial to them. Which is great, I’m all for it. However, that sort of meant that left the rest of us anthropologists, sociologists, pirmatologists, psychologists, older kid play specialists, and other researchers out on our own. We were heard, for sure, but the conference was truly dominated by them; there were only seven sessions out of 21 that didn’t feature early childhood studies (this count includes workshops and panels).
But all moaning aside, it was a great conference, for one thing because you didn’t have to explain why you were studying play, or why it was important/beneficial/worth studying/etc. I reluctantly stayed through Saturday for the session on the use of digital photography in play studies, and it was the best session of the whole event. Two of the women were doing exactly what I’d like to do as a study and research focus (namely giving people (kids) cameras as learning and research tools and see what they come up with). Unfortunately, neither of them good answer exactly what they were going to do with their research once it was done. Dr. Laurelle Phillips had expanded the use of cameras at her school to other classrooms, but the school was located on her university so they could afford to buy three cameras per classroom. Doctoral candidate Carol Borran wasn’t sure what she was going to do with her work other than get her thesis. I spent the majority of Saturday talking with her and Dr. Pat Broadhead, and they were wonderful, both encouraging me to take time off from my research studies but also pursue a doctoral degree in my area of study. Dr. Broadhead said I could be Professor of Playful Spaces, which I must admit does sound cool. Usually the whole reason to go to conferences is to network, and while I regret I really didn’t get into it until the very last day, I got to see some amazing research and speaking with those two women was wonderful; just to hear their attitude about things, to get an outsider’s view of American attitudes to policy and pushing back against “the man.”
There was a paper I wished I’d seen but was canceled, which was a study of portrayal of masculinity through MMA fighting.
I got some good sun, good experience presenting (I think this was the first time ever I wasn’t really nervous going up and presenting in front of a group. I almost wondered what was wrong with me), and some good brain stimulation. So all in all good stuff.
For now I will leave you with a meditative question from the chair of the conference, Dr. David Kuschner: “If there is a toy in the woods and there is no one to play with it, is it really a toy?”
Tag: play
Man single-handedly building replica of Stonehenge
This guy in Michigan is successfully experimenting with ways of moving several ton blocks into a Stonehenge-like formation.
http://j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/posts/moving_big_rocks.
Some links to get your brain churning in the new year
First is an interesting blog I stumbled upon, and it may become part of my list: http://neuroanthropology.wordpress.com/
Next is an article that by itself isn’t so wow-zowy, but the fact that they are addressing the issue of just how important movement is to children’s development is wonderful.
Finally, I stumbled upon this program whose soul purpose is to get teachers to use puppets more in their teaching arsenal. Too cool!
Chinese Authorities Execute 10 Million…Toys
Not really, just an awesome story from the Onion (what? It’s cultural commentary!)
My teddy bear was named Meano
I am curious to see how other people feel about the controversy surrounding the woman in Sudan who allowed her students to vote for the name “Muhammed” for the class teddy bear. People were calling for her execution, and frankly she was lucky to make it out of Sudan.
First off, I agree that it was culturally insensitive to name the teddy bear, an animal and an icon, after the prophet. However, I think the Sudanese people’s reaction to this has been completely overblown and should not have escalated as far as it did. It reminds me a lot of the Netherlands cartoon fiasco that happened a little over a year ago.
Just a random thought here, but what I find interesting is that the students didn’t seem to think naming the bear Muhammed was all that offensive. Is it possible that they did not see the teddy bear as an animal or a simple icon but as something a little more real? Kids have the amazing ability to have a gray area of reality/pretend where teddy bears can have feelings, the child is a super-hero, there really is a dragon they have to kill everyday on the way home from school, etc. This aspect of childhood is one we cherish looking back on as grown-ups, and yet at the same time scold children for “pretending” and not seeing things “as they are,” and then there are events like this that take something very innocent and playful and – pardon my impartiality here – completely trash it! It’s just sad that childhood has become so charged with grown-up problems. Don’t even get me started on the poor kids who can’t play outside for fear of being shot.
Who cares
This thought process originally started with me feeling sorry for myself, but then it lead to a really interesting question:
I’m fascinated with the things I’ve been learning and studying lately about play and all the different tendrils it has in other elements of human life, otherwise I wouldn’t be pursuing it. And obviously somebody cared enough to study it and write about it, and somebody at a publishing company thought it was worth publishing. But who really cares about this stuff?
Honestly.
I don’t mean that as a sarcastic or rhetoric question. I mean, who else in the world is interested in how humans play with each other and how it effects their lives, how they work, how they love, how they are seen by society and how play lets them try on other roles and grow skills. What about how humans play with themselves (and I don’t mean that in a dirty way), and what kind of learning do we do while playing versus while studying or memorizing.
This of course leads to the more general question of what is worth studying, and why? Why are certain seemingly insignificant things given millions of dollars for research while other equally insignificant things aren’t? How and why do we place value on knowledge? What is the process? And the difference between what’s considered important knowledge by the public versus the government or the military or academics.
All of this is a bit existential, but my point is there is reasoning behind why we value knowledge, and which bits of knowledge, and certain types of knowledge. Even if it doesn’t seem like it. And while I’m certainly not going to try and tackle that particular question, and it’s important to me to ask about the knowledge I’m going after and what its applications are in the bigger scheme of things, i.e. would other people even care.
RIP Washoe
Washoe, “the first non-human to learn American Sign Language,” passed away last night, October 30 2007, at the age of 42. A long life for chimpanzees, and an interesting one for sure.
I just recently read Roger Fouts’s book Next of Kin, the primatologist who worked with Washoe from the time she was a year old, and it is amazing what Washoe and Fouts accomplished together. It is always also sad to discover someone so inspiring only to have them die shortly afterward, or to learn that they just died.
I hope Washoe’s family is doing okay with the loss of their matriarch. This only inspires me more to make the drive out to Ellensburg and visit the rest of the chimpanzees before they all pass away. I’m fascinated to see how much of their play is verbal vs. signing vs. physical. Maybe for my birthday (they just closed for the season). Rest in Peace, Washoe.
Play Anthropology
Rafe and I attended a very interesting meeting this weekend, and I hope he will put his thoughts down on this experience as well.
It was essentially a pitch for a new business and the audience was supposed to provide feedback on the idea. The meeting, however, was a little different because it was focused on Play. Yes, the fine art and discipline of play.
Frank Forencich, the guy pitching the idea, has been making a living writing books and giving classes on his philosophy of how humans don’t move enough and Americans need to start living like Exuberant Animals, and now wants to develop a camp/home base for his classes. All the people who had been invited to hear Frank’s pitch for the Exuberant Animal Retreat (the current working name for his idea) – physical therapists, physicians, primatologists, traceurs, trainers, students, artists, yogis, outdoor trip leaders, and a budding anthropologist (me) – were all interested in how people play and how to get people to play more and incorporate it into their lives, and for some had made it their job. The best example of this was Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play (technically it’s his “retirement” job, but it’s not much of a retirement).
This idea, this concept, of studying how people play, why people play, what they get out of it, and the fact that all those things should be obvious to people and yet it’s not, is a really intriguing idea to me. The idea of studying play for a living and helping to promote play has been distracting me since last Wednesday, and it’s only getting worse. I only half-joked to Rafe that I should base my master’s thesis on watching puppies play with each other.
It was so inspiring to talk to this group of people because it showed me that I could get paid to study play, or at least parts of play. A lot of work is with corporations or doing studies on education, which is fine with me. I would be more than happy to do a study that shows, once again, that kids learn better in school if they have recess, hence taking recess away is NOT going to help them do better on standardized tests! I don’t know how that study would qualify as anthropology, since I’m not really looking at any culture per say, but it could fall under human behavior and processing the world; that’s close enough. If anybody knows someone who’s looking for a play anthropologist, let me know.
What really got me starting to think about this in a cohesive way, almost serendipitously, was an assigned essay on anthropologist Victor Witter Turner. While Turner was known mostly for his work on symbolism and study of religious ritual, his theories of liminality, structure and anti-structure, everyday ritual, and play in general really struck a chord with me. He’s one of the first theorists I’ve come across who have even looked at play and ritual and pretend and considered it as important as I certainly think it is. I’m actually having a hard time with my paper and simply writing an overview of all of Turner’s work and not just talking about his ideas on play and how according to Turner play, pretend, and cutting loose is an essential part of being human and functioning in society. I’m seriously considering a paper on that particular subject for one of the anthropological conferences coming up in the Spring.
So, even though I am still stressed and sleep-deprived, even though I feel ragged and worn, the whole experience of the past week has re-instilled a purpose in me. It has reminded me why I’m putting myself through hell to go to grad school, why I fell in love with Anthropology in the first place, and where I can be useful, where I want to put my energy into the world.
“Play” is a perfect category to describe everything I’m interested in: how do people learn, the behavior and ritual in sports, performance of all types (dancing, art, story-telling), identity, photography, people adapting to new environments and technologies, and of course looking at biology and culture combined. All of these have aspects of play, or just straight up are play. Turner’s ideas can be applied to all of these cultural actions as well, and can be used to look at and dissect the meaning, the purpose, the reason why we do them.
The only sad thing is, because play is “just play” the subject probably won’t be taken seriously by many. Even I have moments of feeling silly about wanting to study the seriousness of play. But it’s not silly, it’s vital, and knowing that there are other people out there who feel the same way – Rafe, Frank, Stuart, Deborah the primatologist, the traceurs, the yogis and physical trainers – gives me strength in going forward and going after something so passionately.
Thank you!
Mental Flowers 