Reflection
In reading the above two paragraphs, I find it interesting that the words beginning each paragraph are "Human life" and "Human play", and I wonder at the difference between the two.
Given my last reflection on the connections between identity and performance, it is no surprise that when reading remainder of Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds I became engaged in the conversation surrounding children and their mastery over play.
The text seems to engage in the idea of children's play as the precursor to adult social constructions and organized behavior, yet the idea of play has links to culture, which causes me to wonder at the origin of children's play and even further, children's culture. If children's play is related to the engagements of adult life, where does the seed of imagination originate?
I am also interested in the ideas about children's play and their "magical" ability to construct meaning from symbols and scenarios. It is interesting how humans exist in categorical "institutions" like that-- kids will play "House" where they act out being a family unit of one kind or another or "School" where someone is the teacher and the others are the students. And when we grow up, we "play" school or "work" in a work environment or "House"...and people who do not act as players in these kinds of figured worlds in our society are considered to be doing something "different" or maybe "wrong"...like someone who drops out of high school *should* have gone to college and someone who marries but never has kids *should* have had children or someone *should* get a job. Very interesting points here. :)
ReplyDeleteHey Hannah,
DeleteThanks for your comment/feedback!
I'm curious. I felt like it was a bit unclear from our text, but I keep coming back to the "unknown" origins of children's play. While Holland and our other authors indicate that children's play is a precursor to our adult "institutions" or organized systems of meaning, I didn't leave with the sense that they addressed the origins of children's play.
That is, if adults are continuing the model presented by child's play (i.e. playing "House" or playing "School") then does it negate the idea that children are informing adult social "institutions" through observation? What I'm trying to get at is where does the desire (if we can even call it that) to engage in an organized social system come from?
Why are we engaging in our adult "play"?
I think Holland et al would argue that children's play is social just like language is; so through play we learn who we are and how to be in the world and then as we grow older we continue to act in those ways, playing socially constructed ways of being (relational and situated identities) and making/remaking them each day. Just as language comes from the social (from outside into our beings), who we are comes from the social, from history and from the material practices that being in social relationships. Play is acting "as if."
DeleteHmm, I found myself wondering the same thing-- about the origins of children's play. It could be a "which came first-- the chicken or the egg?" kind of thing, because children enact adult institutions which they observe, but adults have "practiced" acting in social institutions like "School" and "House" as children. I suppose the question of where this (apparently?) innate desire to engage in social institutions with certain systems of meaning comes from addresses the fundamentals of human psychology/sociology.
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