Malaby, Anthropology and Play: The Contours of Playful Experience

Anthropology and Play: The Contours of Playful Experience

Malaby T. M.

New Literary History 40(1):205-18 (2009)

This history of the anthropology of play argues that in the past play has been seen as an activity, particularly as an activity distinct from work (Caillois) or as a representation of . A more productive vision of play sees it as a disposition ("playfulness?"). In particular, this is a disposition that recognizes the world as inherently contingent, and play becomes an ability to improvise, denying a transcendent order.

Malaby begins by placing the earliest studies of Anthro of play in a 'Marxian' materialist context as opposed to a 'Geertzian' representational context. In the Marxian context, play is defined by being unproductive. In the Geertzian context, play is a way to create meaning. However, both approaches lack a key component of games, indeterminancy. The Marxian mode is too mechanically materialistic. Geertz's representations are ahistorical and are reflections of an unchanging underlying culture.

Malaby's approach questions the work/play dichotomy and uses pragmatic philosophy and practice/praxis approaches. The current trend is to see play as a mode of experience that is distinct from a cultural form (ie. 'playfulness' vs. 'play'). Pragmatists see the world as contingent, not absolute.

He offers a more nuanced reading of Huizinga, that recognizes the subtitle of Homo Ludens  - referring to the 'Play Element' in culture as opposed to just play event.

This article offers an excellent bibliography of the high points in anthropology of play and some of the challenges of the field. I think there might be a parallel with the old idea of work vs. play and my interest in 'serious play' vs 'griefing' (and other contentious behaviors). Grief play could be seen as more playful, since it toys with the contingencies of games and refuses to take them on their own terms.

Sahlins, M. "Goodbye to Triste Tropes"

Goodby to Triste Tropes: Ethnography in the Context of World History. in Culture in Practice

Sahlins M.

Zome Books, New York (2002)

Sahlins writes in opposition to several schools of thought, 'reflexive anthropology', 'post-modernism', 'post-structuralism', and 'World Systems' in different sections of the article, but what these schools of thought seem to have in common is a tendency to render indigenous culture as something that is corrupted by global modernity. As an alternative to this, he proposes historical ethnography and archive work as a way to see how culture and tradition have been constants through a people's history and are actually the method of social change, rather than its victim. Lots of good examples of indigenizing modernity. He sees historical ethnography as a response to 'reflexive anthropology' that believes it cannot understand the Other. The "triste tropes" of the title come down to idea that global capital/modernity is coherent and powerful and indigenous cultures are incoherent and weak.

"World Systems": (see Sahlins "Cosmologies of Capitalism" in the same book.)

From Eric Wolf's Europe and the People without History, the World System is the global expansion of Western capitalism. Wolf argues against seeing the world as one system of Western capitalist domination; this makes indigenous populations into historyless subjects without their own systems. Agreeing with Wolf's argument against One World System, Sahlins' issue with Wolf is his use of Marxian materialism and culture as a 'mode of production' that ultimately has the same consequence of turning indigenous peoples into bourgeois subjects. Instead, Sahlins argues that we need to take indigenous understandings of the world as something with equal weight as Western theories.

A recent movement of 'culturalism' goes beyond distinct culture and tradition to political rights in opposition to foreign imperial presence (474-5).

I loved the use of the Renaissance as an example of a culture reinventing itself based on the perceived values of other cultures. Perhaps a parallel could be drawn with the Cultural Revolution, or more broadly China's constant project of integrating foreign conquerers into its self-conception.

It is unfortunate that Sahlins' opponents in this piece remain mostly generalized strawmen. I would like to see him engage more directly with the statements of the 'post-structuralists' and 'post-modernists' and 'reflexive anthropologists' and 'World Systematists' (he goes into 'World Systems' more specifically in "Cosmologies of Capitalism." While it is good to acknowledge the strength of indigenous culture, I think it would be a hazard to ignore the very real differences in power between colonizer and colonized, especially when it is measured in guns and lives. Sahlins recognizes this as well. What Sahlins is saying, I think, is that cultural hegemony does not have a total destructive power, and it is not anthropologists' business to declare cultures in jeopardy or destroyed when they are actually changing and reinventing themselves.

This fits with two aspects of my work. One, the historical perspective. I could use this article to justify my historical perspective as a way of avoiding instead of enabling essentializing the Chinese experience. Contemporary work on China is often very concerned with the State and the influence of the State, as well as a modernizing, urbanizing, capitalizing China that is increasingly at the center of global issues. Instead of turning "China" into "the Chinese State and its challengers", my approach acknowledges the continuing traditions of China as a set of consistencies that enable and guide change. Rather than talking about Confucianism or "China" vs. "the West" becoming a way of creating an essential 'Chinese character', the historical perspective deepens my analysis of contemporary China by looking at what endures through modernity.

Smith, Playing dirty-understanding conflicts in multiplayer games.

Smith, J. H. (2004). Playing dirty-understanding conflicts in multiplayer games. In 5Th annual conference of the association of internet researchers.

Smith's paper seeks to show that conflict in multiplayer video games extends outside the mechanics of the game. Games are systems built for conflict - however, some conflict is "extra-mechanical" rather than "intra-mechanical." He claims that some people find it strange that gamers would be "morally offended" by someone else's gameplay. Aren't games supposed to be no-holds-barred virtual contests? In explanation, Smith examines three types of conflict behavior: cheating, violating local norms, and griefing.

Gamers use "cheating" to describe behavior that give the cheater an "unfair advantage" or "runs contrary to the spirit of the game." Local norms are decided by players in concert, and are enforced by server administrators or guild leaders. Grief play directly attacks another player's enjoyment of the game, without consideration of the systemic "goals" of the game."

I did not find this distinction very helpful. It's not ethnographic enough to be a folk distinction, but not clear enough to be a worthwhile analytic distinction. Smith's example themselves bleed over into one another. Isn't the purpose of local norms in part to curb "unfair" behavior. Isn't griefing itself a violation of a norm? Can't cheating be griefing?

This article is mostly worthwhile as a response to the idea that conflict in games is inherently part of the system, or to the question "aren't gamers supposed to be in conflict"? It also provides some different examples of contentious behavior. One interesting example: cheating does not have to be confined to the game itself, but could also occur in systems related to the game, such as matchmaking software.

Kücklich: Homo Deludens : Cheating as a Methodological Tool in Digital Games Research

Kucklich, J. (2007). Homo deludens: Cheating as a methodological tool in digital games research. CONVERGENCE-LONDON-, 13(4), 355.

Kucklich's article is focused on the utility of cheating in games research, ie. cheating as a method. He is responding to some games researchers who believe cheating is not an acceptable research method.

'Cheating' in video games (and games more generally) is not clearly defined.

The article focuses on single-player games, with only a little time given to multiplayer cheating.

One objection to cheating is that it does not allow the researcher to experience the 'normal' game.

Another interesting point about cheating is its relation to the enculturation of the researcher. Kucklich points out that games researchers are generally expected to be more enculturated than other researchers, to be more 'native'. Are they resistant to cheating as part of this enculturation? or should they make use of game guides and cheat codes because these are part of the normal use of video games?

Another assumption is that the primary use of cheats in games by researchers is to make progress through the game easier. Kucklich would like to argue that there is an aesthetic component to cheating as well.

In a single-player game, cheating allows the researcher to explore the game more thoroughly and from other angles. Cheating allows the game to be 'deconstructed'. It "denaturalizes gamespace, and counteracts the manifold representational strategies used to make it appear realistic." It explores "the dialectic between exerting control and surrendering to the control of the game."

A section on genre-specific cheats references Kucklich's 'triangular matrix' for categorizing games.

Another section gives a brief overview of the literature on cheating and culture. This section includes a short discussion of MMO cheating.

The purpose of the article is to raise debate on cheating in MMOs among game studies scholars, and move the discussion away from the instrumentality of cheating to the aesthetics and culture of cheating. The article raises more questions than it answers. There are two parts I find useful: one is the bibliography on cheating, the second is Kucklich's argument that cheating is a deconstruction of the game.

I would see cheating and griefing online as behaviors that also work to 'deconstruct' the online space. This is particularly apparent among extremely self-aware groups like those out of 4chan or Something Awful. Their griefing if Anshe Chung in SL, for example, seems to point out the absurdity of making a fortune on virtual property. It refuses to take SL seriously. Similarly, goons in EVE routinely refer to the game as 'Internet spaceships' and claim to be playing not EVE but 'Something Awful'. These behaviors, like using no_clip to fly around a level of Deus Ex, seek to look at a game from outside.

One of the most interesting statements in the article was that 'cheating' "is a more fundamental form of play than playing by the rules", which Kucklich attributes to one of the contributors to his online discussion (357). However, this is not discussed further. One could see this addressed perhaps in Kucklich's assertion that cheating plays with the control inherent in the game - perhaps playing within and against rules is the more fundamental form of play that this unnamed contributor was referring to.

good citations:
Jakobsson, P. and Pargman, D. (2005) ‘Configuring the Player: Subversive Behavior in Project Entropia’, paper presented at the Changing Views, Worlds in Play Conference, Vancouver, BC (Canada), 16–20 June. URL (accessed 9 July 2007): http://www.digra.org/dl/db/06276.20328.pdf

Myers, D. (2005) ‘What’s Good About Bad Play?’, in Y. Pisan (ed.) Proceedings of the Second Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment, pp. 133–40. Sydney, Australia: Creativity and Cognition Studios Press. URL (accessed 9 July 2007): http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1109201#

Kimppa, K.K. and Bissett, A.K. (2005) ‘The Ethical Significance of Cheating in Online Computer Games’, International Review of Information Ethics 4: 31–8.

Burke, “Strengths and Weaknesses in the History of Mentalities”

Burke, P. (1997). “Strengths and Weaknesses in the History of Mentalities” in Varieties of cultural history. Cornell University Press.

This is a chapter of a book about cultural history more broadly. In this later chapter, Burke addresses the “history of mentalities.” This history is not easy to define, and is related to several other distinct histories, such as intellectual history. However, the history of mentalities has three characteristics (162).

1. it is a history of collective attitudes rather than individuals, and of ordinary people not elites
2. it represents unspoken assumptions, everyday thought and ‘practical reason’
3. it is the ‘structure’ of beliefs in addition to their content. “Howe people think as well as what they think”

This approach has its roots in Durkheim, whose follower Lucien Levy-Bruhl used ‘mentality’ in this sense. However, it is a topic too large for sociologists and anthropologists, and has been addressed additionally by philosophers, psychologists, etc. (Reminded of Braudel’s desire to resolve the crisis of the human sciences in this way; this is an inherently interdisciplinary topic). Recently ‘mentalities’ has been “going out of fashion, to be replaced by ‘representations’ or ‘the collective imagination’.

The history of mentalities fills the space between intellectual and social history, to avoid “an intellectual history with the society left out and a social history with the thought left out.” (165).

This approach asks, even if two people from different places speak the same language, why is communication difficult? Why do people take different things for granted? (165).

In thinking about the ways that other people think, the concept of mentality avoids two problems: first, the problem of assuming that other people think differently because they are irrational. This steps around the need to question or defend ‘rationality’ as something that is inherent to one or more cultures, thus diminishing those cultures deemed ‘irrational’. I could see an argument that “all people are rational, but post-Enlightenment Westerners are the only ones who make a transcendent virtue of it.” Second, the problem of assuming that, while other people may appear to think differently, they really think just like us, what Burke calls “premature empathy.” Thus it is not enough to merely place ourselves in the shoes of others, but we must also see a situation through their eyes (169).

However, it also carries four problems. The first is the risk of creating homogeneity. You have to be careful not to “overestimate the degree of intellectual consensus” (170). This is not repaired by making consensus part of some group or class, since within any group there is disagreement. A “mentality” needs to be a belief “which an individual shares with a number of contemporaries.” 

The second is the problem of accounting for change. How do we move from one mentality to another? There needs to be a way for the mentality to be challenged or shifted or they become “‘prisons’ from which individuals cannot escape” (172, after Braudel).

The third is making beliefs autonomous–of allowing beliefs to have no relation to society. You can’t compare beliefs to beliefs without comparing beliefs to society. “Historians of ideologies”see thought as shaped … by social forces. … Historians of mentalities by contrast see belief systems as relatively innocent and autonomous” (173).

The fourth is an ‘evolutionism’. The mentalities approach is based on Levy-Bruhl’s contrast between ‘logical’ and ‘pre-logical’ thought, which has continued among historians like Febvre and others. We can’t draw a unilateral line between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ mentalities. “Chinese mandarins, Renaissance humanists and Breton peasants, all of whose beliefs, since they are unlike ours, have to be described as ‘traditional’.” (Wittgenstein to Frazer-”improbable … to treat an entire world view as a mistake”) (174).

The mentalities approach was rejected by early Marxists as “mere ideology.”

There are three possible adjustments that can be made to a mentalities approach to make it stronger.

1. To recognize the problem of interest. People don’t just do things because of a mentality, but also because it is in their interest. This makes the mentalities approach more multifaceted without giving up on it by saying that people of different groups cannot share a mentality.
2. Using paradigms, schemata and epistemes to examine how change occurs. Essentially, how systems or structures or filters are challenged. “The greater the emphasis on system, the more difficult it is to explain change” (178). We could see belief systems as a “bundle of schemata, which generally support one another but may sometimes be in contradiction.
3. Using metaphor to avoid the binarism of the traditional and the modern. That is to say, mentalities can be metaphorical. “the world as an organism,” “the world as a machine.”

What is the relevance of this for my research? This article could be an important part of the justification for a history of mentalities approach from an anthropological perspective. Burke writes from a culture history perspective, though, so he outlines the advantages of the mentalities perspective to history, but not to anthropology. The history of mentalities (or culture history approach in general) can relieve a more structural anthropological approach of the problem of making a culture static.

One caution I should take to heart is the danger of autonomy. I need to also recognize the influence of society on beliefs, not just beliefs on society. So, yes China has a history of Confucian/Daoist/Buddhist ideas, but they do not persist in a vacuum. What is the influence of society?

Braudel, On history

Braudel, On History

Braudel, F. (1982). The mediterranean and the mediterranean world in the age of Philip II: Extract from preface. In On history (S. Matthews, Trans.). (pp. 3-5). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Braudel, F. (1982). History and the social sciences: The longue durée. In On history (S. Matthews, Trans.). (pp. 25-54). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

In the first excerpt, from Braudel’s longer work on the Mediterranean, he divides history into three parts. At one level is a history that is “almost changeless” (3). This is a geographical history that tells “the story of man’s contact with the inanimate” (3). On top of this is “a history of gentle rhythms” a “social history,” “deep-running currents.” The last part is the history “not so much of man in general as of men in particular.” “Surface disturbances, the waves stirred up by … tides.” This history is dangerous because it still carries the influence of those who lived it. These three times are the geographical time, the social time and the individual time. Or is this “the breaking-down of man into a succession of characters”?

The second article comes from Annales E.S.C., no. 4 (Oct.-Dec. 1958), Débats et combats. As part of the discussion section of this journal, this article is a position paper on the state of social science at the time and the direction it should take. Braudel argues that the human sciences have individually come to crises, and insists that the solution is to cross the borders of the disciplines (something that Levy-Strauss has already attempted (25). Braudel argues that social sciences do not understand the crisis in history, and that history “or rather the dialectic of duration as it arises in the exercise of our profession,” can inform the current debate. Thus, the article is from a history journal and historian’s perspective, but is intended for the other social sciences.

This article also makes the distinction between geographical, social and individual time. He clarifies that typical history is not really a history of ‘events’, which are too instantaneous, but of human lifetimes.  The new history extends beyond the period of a lifetime. It is a history of cycles. Those historians closest to Braudel’s approach were the 18th and early 19th century historians who ‘allowed the documents to carry them’ (28).

Social history as previously been seen in quantitative terms as long-term economic history. Looking at ‘secular tendencies’, or very long term economic trends, economic historians reach towards the longue durée. However, ‘structure’ is a “more useful key,” an “organization, a coherent and fairly fixed series of relationships between realities and social masses.” ‘Structure’ can be a “prison” a “hindrance” a “reality which time uses and abuses over long periods” like geographical constraints (31). Structures may also be more stable, and thus shape history. Thus, the longue durée is like geographical history - the geography shapes  history even as people modify the geography with roads and cities, etc.

“For good or ill, [structure] dominates the problems of the longue durée. By structure, observers of social questions mean an organization, a coherent and fairly fixed series of relationships between realities and social masses” (31).

The longue durée is a history of continuity and regularity. “All the cycles and intercycles and structural crises tend to mask the regularities, the permanence of particular systems that some have gone so far as to call civilizations-that is to say, all the old habits of thinking and acting, the set patterns which do not break down easily and which, however illogical, are a long time dying” (32). The example Braudel gives is of the European maritime capitalism that lasted for hundreds of years through various minor crises until the industrial revolution upended it.

There are two ways of evading historical explanation: by concentrating on the “current event” or by transcending time altogether and conjuring “timeless structures” (35). The longue duréeworks between these two extremes. However, Braudel engages primarily with how the longue durée can inform structuralism.

“the researcher occupied with the present can make out the “fine” lines of structure only by himself engaging in reconstruction, putting forward theories and explanations, not getting embroiled in reality as it appears, but truncating it, transcending it” (36).

“Each one of us can sense, over and above his own life, a mass history, though it is true he is more conscious of its power and impetus than of its laws or direction” (39).

Marx was the first to work in the longue durée.

The models cannot be removed from time; then they become unchanging laws. Rather, models must be considered in context, where there can be “changes in emphasis” or  other structures that might ‘throw into relief’ the models. Marx’s work has been ‘stymied’ by not placing it in the context of the longue durée.

One thing I like about the longue durée approach is that it is inherently interdisciplinary. 

I’m reminded of Burke’s section on the use of metaphor in the history of mentalities. Braudel’s extended ‘river’ metaphor is a great example of this, I think. Although Braudel also deals in binaries (event/structure), the ‘river’ of history is a great way of demonstrating the flows of thelongue durée. It is not an immobile structure, but there are strong currents to history that underlie the eddies, even if they do not cause them wholly. The currents can be of different strengths, and interact with each other as well, maintaining their own identities without being exclusive.

Chinese philosophy is fond of metaphor as well. I remember in Ames’ work he talks about how metaphor complicates the black and white of the yin and yang.