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The Ambiguity of Play. By Brian Sutton-- Smith. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1997. Pp. xii + 276, preface, acknowledgments, table, bibliography, index.)
ELIZABETH WEIN
Independent Scholar/Writer
"An understanding of play's ambiguity requires the help of multiple disciplines" (p. vii): So begins The Ambiguity of Play, which is in many ways a sweeping review of the literature on play. Throughout this volume Brian Sutton-- Smith catalogues various approaches to play scholarship in a broad range of disciplines (biology, psychology, education, sociology, communication, mathematics, anthropology, folklore, art, and literature, to name a few). The idea behind this grand summation is that an understanding of "the rhetorics that are marginal to play ... will illuminate our understanding of it" (p. vii). Thus arises the "particular focus of the volume as a whole: the ideological underpinnings of play theories, and what an understanding of them can contribute to clearing up these confusions" (p. 3).
It should be fairly obvious where the ambiguity comes in. There is diversity and disparity in play theory not only across the disciplines but also within them. We are led to define play by defining what is not play. Mrs. Huizinga (maybe. . . ) sums it up in the epigraph to chapter 11, "Rhetorics of Frivolity": "Play is fun. Sex is fun. Jokes are fun. Writing is fun. Being funny is fun. So what is fun?" (p. 201).
To cope with this ambiguity, Sutton-Smith proposes seven "rhetorics" of play, explaining that "the word rhetoric is used here in its modern sense, as being a persuasive discourse, or an implicit narrative, wittingly or unwittingly adopted by members ofa particular affiliation to persuade others of the veracity and worthwhileness of their beliefs" (p. 8). The goal of this work is to see "how the play descriptions and play theories can be tied in with such broad patterns of...