Why We Play: An Anthropological Study

370 Pages·2017·6.25 MB·English

ROBERTE HAMAYON
WHY WE PLAY
An Anthropological Study
translated by damien simon
foreword by michael puett
ON KINGS
DAVID GRAEBER & MARSHALL SAHLINS
WHY WE PLAY
Hau
BOOKS
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Giovanni da Col

Managing Editor
Sean M. Dowdy
Editorial Board
Anne-Christine Taylor
Carlos Fausto
Danilyn Rutherford
Ilana Gershon
Jason Throop
Joel Robbins
Jonathan Parry
Michael Lempert
Stephan Palmié
www.haubooks.com
WHY WE PLAY
AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY
Roberte Hamayon
Enlarged Edition

Translated by Damien Simon

Foreword by Michael Puett
Hau Books
Chicago
English Translation © 2016 Hau Books and Roberte Hamayon
Original French Edition, Jouer: Une Étude Anthropologique, © 2012 Éditions La
Découverte
Cover Image: Detail of M. C. Escher’s (1898–1972), “The Encounter,”
© May 1944, 13 7/16 x 18 5/16 in. (34.1 x 46.5 cm) sheet: 16 x 21 7/8 in.
(40.6 x 55.6 cm), Lithograph.
Cover and layout design: Sheehan Moore
Typesetting: Prepress Plus (www.prepressplus.in)
ISBN: 978-0-9861325-6-8
LCCN: 2016902726
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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xiii
Foreword: “In praise of play” by Michael Puett xv
Introduction: “Playing”: A bundle of paradoxes 1
Chronicle of evidence 2
Outline of my approach 6
PART I: FROM GAMES TO PLAY
1. Can play be an object of research? 13
Contemporary anthropology’s curious lack of interest 15
Upstream and downstream 18
Transversal notions 18
First axis: Sport as a regulated activity 18
Second axis: Ritual as an interactional structure 20
Toward cognitive studies 23
From child psychology as a cognitive structure 24
. . . and in educational and learning theories 24
Variety of terminological division 26
Brief etymological history 27
Breaking up or unifying? 29
Scarcity of generalizing theories 29
vi WHY WE PLAY
Defining, classifying: Of questionable use 30
Return to a unity of play 36
2. Play in the West: From condemnation to recycling 37
Christian condemnation 37
Tertullian and the “Public Games” or “shows” 39
Giving the blood of the living to the dead 39
Representation is deceitful 41
Pleasure of man, displeasure of God 43
Ten centuries of “taming” the body 45
Numerous attacks, numerous targets 45
Of good and bad uses of bodily parts 46
Feet are not made for jumping 46
Body and soul, man and animal 48
Drama lies 50
Games dissociated and redirected 50
Art of war, art of love 54
Pleasure, boredom, rest 56
What is at stake in play: Guessing, winning 56
Divination lies 57
Chance, time, and money 59
Redistribution and lottery 60
Have games killed play? 62
3. Play defined in negative terms: A discrepant
modality of action 63
But what is a “non-play frame”? 66
A fictional frame reflecting an empirical reality 66
Another way of doing: doing something else, elsewhere,
otherwise 67
A bundle of interdependent dimensions
68
Expecting an “effect” 69
The recurrence of a gap or a distance
69
4. Buryat play: A case in point 73
Sources 74
The Buryat people: A brief overview 74
TABLE OF CONTENTS vii
The Buryat notion of play 75
Collective Games 76
The Bride’s Games prepare for love: Emphasis on
the hopping dance 77
They trigger the heroic trajectory in the epic narrative 77
From the hen party to married life 78
They disappear with the expansion of pastoralism
and Buddhism 79
Head-butts and . . . head-butts! 80
The shamanic ritual instills a double virility: Emphasis on
bouncing fights 80
The shaman’s task: Making youth “play” 81
The shaman’s gestures: Loving approach and combat 83
The shaman’s other task: “Head-butting” married men 85
What remains of this today? 85
5. Lively rhythmical movements creating
a fictional frame 87
The close association of two types of movement and
the creation of a play frame 89
These movements draw their inspiration from certain
animal species 89
For the species chosen as role models, the male repels his rivals
in order to beguile the female 90
What are the human implications of associating these two
types of movement? 90
Limits of functional explanations 92
Limits of the notion of agôn 92
Opponent and partner, partner and opponent 94
The solitary player 95
The notion of internal sanction 95
When the association of the two types of games dissolves 96
Involving the body in internalizing ideals 97
Formalization 98
From movement to sound 98
The frame’s constraint: The Games remain even though
the games change 99
viii WHY WE PLAY
PART II: PLAY AND ITS MULTIPLE DIMENSIONS
6. Bodily involvement and the creation of other
dimensions 103
7. Imitation: Doing “likewise,” doing “as if” 107
Doing “like” the other: Playing among humans 108
As time goes by, imitation wanes and the Games remain 109
Doing “as if” we were the other: Simulating, playing to be
the other 110
Ritual imitates hunting, hunting imitates ritual 112
Toward nongestural imitations 115
Imitation in Tungusic ritual play 115
Imitation in Yakut ritual play 118
Imitation in Saami ritual play 120
Imitation and substitution in Koryak ritual play 120
Comparative remarks 120
The fictional frame: Common point between play and ritual 121
The many merits of imitation 123
8. Foreshadowing: An indirect mode of preparation 125
On the proper use of fiction 127
Three fictional frames and three types of preparation 129
Recent reconfigurations and preparation at a national level 130
The preparatory aspect of the Mongol Naadam 132
Everything (or almost everything) can be an opportunity
to play in private; every informal game can “prepare” 133
The double notion of sanction: Shooting straight 134
The hunter’s ideal 136
Gestures and sounds, and from gesture to sound 139
What is the basis of the preparatory “effect” attributed
to nonplay forms? 140
“Small-scale model” 142
9. The cognitive process: Identity and alterity,
opposition and complementarity 143
TABLE OF CONTENTS ix
The notion of community: Physical reproduction, social
reproduction 144
The very frequent association of wrestling and dancing games 145
Construction of the self as an individual subject by the
experience of alterity 146
Construction of the other by “playing” and the role
of “animation” 148
Building social relations on the model of physical games 148
Everything can be an opportunity to compete 151
Sexual dissymmetry and male privilege 152
The role of internal sanctions 152
Progressive marginalization of dance-type games 153
Faced with animal species, mankind is male and “plays” 155
Taking the risk of sanction also gives the advantage in the
epic song 157
Play’s cognitive properties are also based on its shape 157
10. Interaction: Humans and their “others” 159
Acting through animal models 160
“Rejoice” immaterial beings 162
“Rejoice” to divert, create a diversion 163
“Rejoicing” dead humans to revitalize them 165
Interactions causing alternation between life and death 167
Spilling blood as the price for life 168
11. Dramatization: Representing and generating
an “effect” 173
“Representing” 175
Representing beings, representing acts 177
Representing an action in the very process of its execution 180
Dramatic representations which are not called play 181
The impossibility of embodying a transcendent god 182
Epilogue: Contemporary dramatization of interactions
with invisible entities 183