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Can Play Be Defined? Colonial and Relativistic Approaches to the Cultural Anthropology of Play Eichberg, Henning University of Southern Denmark Can play be defined? Colonial and relativistic approaches to the cultural anthropology of play Eichberg, Henning Published in: East Asian Sport thoughts Publication date: 2015 Citation for pulished version (APA): Eichberg, H. (2015). Can play be defined? Colonial and relativistic approaches to the cultural anthropology of play. East Asian Sport thoughts, 4, 45-82. Go to publication entry in University of Southern Denmark's Research Portal Terms of use This work is brought to you by the University of Southern Denmark. Unless otherwise specified it has been shared according to the terms for self-archiving. If no other license is stated, these terms apply: • You may download this work for personal use only. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying this open access version If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details and we will investigate your claim. Please direct all enquiries to [email protected] Download date: 04. Oct. 2021 Can Play be Defined? Colonial and Relativistic Approaches to the Cultural Anthropology of Play 45 Can Play be Defined? Colonial and Relativistic Approaches to the Cultural Anthropology of Play1 Henning Eichberg University of Southern Denmark, Denmark Abstract In human studies, as we have seen in the case of play, the critical question arises: Why should there be only one definition? Definition is associated with the scholarly imagination of little boxes, which are characterized by neat limits against each other. However, this picture appears very usually in social studies, too. But can one describe by strict limits, what is historically changing, socio-culturally specific or linguistically different? The first definition of what is historical. The second definition of what is socio-culturally specific. And the third, definition of what is expressed by and different in language. The historical, socio-cultural, and linguistic dimensions of human life exclude the use of definition as a universal norm of scholarly work. There are deep differences between the two procedures of defining a certain phenomenon on one hand – and identifying or understanding phenomena in a phenomenological way on the other. Last, but not least, definition has a history in itself. In the historical course of the anthropology of play, definition became important in connection with the neo-positivistic approaches from 1930/50 onward. The older colonial interest in play and games as well as the newer relativistic understanding of play could – or even: had to – proceed without any definition. Definition is, thus, not a universal instrument of knowledge, but a culturally specific construction. Human beings can very well understand play – or whatever phenomenon in human life – without defining it. Keywords: Anthropology, Definition, Human beings, Play 46 East Asian Sport Thoughts Volume 4 Introduction An old rainforest Indian from Siberut, a Mentawai island vest of Sumatra in Indonesia, remembered an episode with a Dutch officer from colonial times: But once we were not content with him. He said that we should come down to the coast and take bow and arrows with us. There they had prepared all very beautiful and waited for us on a large place. We got meal and drinking, and then they took a coconut and asked us to shoot after it. We did so, and when one of us hit the nut they cheered and screamed, as if we had hit an ape and not a coconut. At the end we received our reward and could go home again. But what was not correct after our opinion was that we did not receive equally. Some received a lot, and others did not receive anything at all. We all became a little bit angry in our hearts. But what should we do? They are as they are… When asked who those had been who received more than the others: Yes, this is exactly what we did not understand. It was purely coincidental. It was quite independent of which clan they came from.2 Meeting the colonial “other” – universality, and progress On Siberut, two cultures were meeting in play, game, and festivity. The Mentawai people had developed great skill with bow and arrow. They were notorious for their handling of poisoned arrows in the tropical rainforest. The boys trained from childhood shooting against coconut shells as target and used their skill especially to shoot monkeys for meal. People from the Christian mission had earlier also become victims. However, the Dutch way of prize and award with its background of sport motivation was unfamiliar for Mentawai people. Colonial power came to the island with a background in European culture of competition, performance, and sport. For colonial officers, the measurement of achievement and the reward by prizes was self-understanding. The sport-free culture, which they met and upon which they by a friendly invitation tried to impose their own pattern, was unfamiliar for them. The situation of encounter between those two different cultures delivers a key for understanding the relation between colonized and colonizers – not only on the level of military, political, and economical power, but also in the sphere of everyday-life and play. Can Play be Defined? Colonial and Relativistic Approaches to the Cultural Anthropology of Play 47 The meeting showed a characteristic asymmetry: There were not equal partners meeting. They were not in the same way foreign for each other and not in the same way willing to learn from each other. There were different imbalances involved. First, it were only the Mentawaians, who learned and should practice the patterns of their colonial masters. Today, they play football and volley in their villages. The Dutch never learned to play in the Mentawaian way – where people either remain equal or differentiate according to the clan system. In Amsterdam there is nobody who shoots after the Mentawaian pattern or who plays the rainforest Indians’ spin-top game. The asymmetry of colonization was – and remains? – stabile. Second, it were the Mentawaians who noticed that something “was not correct”. They obtained an experience of the others – with “a little bit anger in the hearts” – of those others who “were as they were”. One may doubt whether the colonial officer felt anything similar. Probably, he experienced the opposite: Look, Mentawaians do shooting sport, too! Indeed, ethnologists from colonial times reported about the bow-and-arrow art of the Mentawaians in just this tone of familiarity (Maass 1902, 130). And by the study of people from Sumatra, one concluded with undertones of enthusiasm: “One sees that Orient and Occident fundamentally are the same” (Moszkowski, 1909, Mittelalterlicher, 264). This expressed the world view of universalism, where the dominating (colonial) culture declared itself to represent the universal and “discovered” its own universality among the others all over the world… Third, if ever the colonial organizer of the Mentawaian sport festival had discovered that his own expectations were not identical with the feelings of the colonized, there would be an evident explanation at hand: The Mentawaians had “not yet” developed so far that they could understand a “modern” sport competition. They were still “wild primitives” or an “original natural tribe” (Karny, 1925/26). The difference could, thus, be placed on a historical time scale where the dominating culture was at the top and the others “still behind” and “underdeveloped”. This was the interpretation of evolutionism. The asymmetry was – and remains until today – temporalized (Leclerc, 1973: 16 ff; also Eichberg, 1981 Fremdes). Collecting, classifying, and conquering – early positivism Inter-cultural research of play and sport took its starting point from these patterns of interpretation, which were evolutionistic, universalistic, and in practice colonial. Earlier studies 48 East Asian Sport Thoughts Volume 4 tried since the later 19th century to register, document, and classify play and games of those foreign people. As soon as a very first phase of unstructured or un-systematical collection (Bunzendahl, 1935; Culin, 1895/1958 and 1899; Diem, 1942) was laid behind, one tried to apply a certain systematic classification to the material. It seemed evident to bring order into the games of Indonesians and other Pacific people. For the case of spin-top games, order could follow the material form of the spin-tops (Damm, 1929): A. Tops without stick in the middle, made of l. earth balls 2. snail houses 3. coconut shells 4. wood in form of cone or pear B. Tops with stick in the middle: 1. round bowl-formed body of rotation (fruits etc.) 2. plate-formed body of rotation (made of bone, stone or coco shell) 3. sounding body (humming top). This approach was in line with the contemporary interest in cranium measuring, a favorite pursuit of the colonial anthropology, which understood itself as “natural science”. Also from Mentawaian burial sites, an anthropologist stole skulls of the dead for anthropometrical measurement and museum purposes (Maass, 1902: 20-21). Similar classifications as for spin-tops were applied to the duels and martial arts of Pacific and Indonesian people, following the scheme: A. Duels without weapons 1. wrestling 2. fight of push and pull 3. boxing 4. kick fights, foot fights B. Duels with weapons, with Can Play be Defined? Colonial and Relativistic Approaches to the Cultural Anthropology of Play 49 1. close combat weapons: stick, club, sword 2. throwing weapons: primitive throwing device, javelin, bow and arrow, other weapons (Damm, 1922). Besides the concrete empirical material, a universalistic assumption was basis for such type of classification. There was no place for otherness of the larger connections. However, an order of spin-tops, having its roots in the ethnographic museums of colonial times, did not allow any insight into the play itself, its social connections, its procedure, criteria of fight, or what the whole was about.
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