WHY WE PLAY Hau BOOKS Executive Editor 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 Hau Books Chicago Distribution Center 11030 S. Langley Chicago, IL 60628 www.haubooks.com Hau Books is marketed and distributed by The University of Chicago Press. www.press.uchicago.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. Distributed Open Access under a Creative Commons License (CC-BY ND-NC 4.0) 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 x WHY WE PLAY 12. Involving psyche: Joy and emotion, conscience and belief 185 Joy and resistance to pain; laughter and appetite for risk 186 Laughter as ritualization of aggressiveness 188 Demonstrating joy, feeling desire: A cultural tradition 189 Ethics based on deliberate optimism 191 Belief, emotion, and consciousness: “Entering the game” 192 The relation between belief and object of belief 196 On the attitude of belief without object of belief 196 Optimism and movement 199 The joy of playing and preparation of the future 201 13. Indeterminacy: Luck 203 The pragmatic stake of preparatory “play” 204 “Unproducibility”: Indeterminacy factor par excellence 204 Luck: Leader of a semantic series 206 Luck has to be earned 208 Personal luck: Private games with internal sanctions 209 Playing alone 211 Once again, belief without belief content 211 From internal sanction to uncertainty 212 . and from uncertainty to relational causality 213 Luck in hunting: Its collective side and its personal side 214 Luck in all its aspects: Spatial, dynamic, and material 216 The association of love with the hunter’s luck 219 Luck materialized and shared 220 How equivalent are playing and hunting? 221 Femininity of luck-source entities 222 . their masculinization and their humanization 223 Ancestors: dispensers of grace 224 Ancestral grace kept for oneself 225 Is there a correlation between the masculinity of the giving figures and safety? 226 Other private lucks: Multipurpose, blurry, and without a giving figure 226 Luck: An obstacle to the wielding of power 227 Luck: A counterpower tool 229 Table OF CONteNTS xi 14. Strategy: Cunning 231 Dissimulation 232 Active cunning 234 Cunning on the threshold of the field of “play” 234 From cunning in games to deception beyond the game 235 The “effect” of clever play on reality or the measure of intelligence 236 Does the shaman use cunning? 238 The bedrock of selection 239 Loyalty toward the spirits of wild species 240 The spirits of wild species cannot be deceived 242 Imbecility of dead human souls (and other deities) 242 The porous border between cunning and deception 244 15. The social and political repercussions: Redistribution and hierarchization 247 Luck: Crossovers between selection and redistribution 247 The shamanic ritual: Double selective distribution of materialized luck 248 Individual luck supporting the common interest 249 The materiality of luck: A requisite for selection and redistribution 250 Other ways of combining selection and distribution, other games 251 Is redistribution a source of power? 252 Access to power through redistribution of material goods 253 Redistribution of immaterial goods: From luck to providence 255 Economic liberalism, ecology, and resorting to play 256 Obtaining power through competition 257 From competition to ranking 258 .