Play Reconsidered Quotes

“Of course, Huizinga’s sensibilities can be fitted within an elitist view of social order that reaches back to Plato and beyond. By such accounts, society needs its cadres of talented, privileged people. Such individuals must have the time, resources, and freedom to explore and otherwise comport themselves graciously within the world. They must have liberty in the older medieval sense of special privileges granted to some but not to others; however, they must also express liberality.”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“Instead, the sporting world has developed as an essentially profane diversion, guided by the technical and economic requirements of its sponsors.”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“As he (p. 18) puts it: “The ritual act has all the formal and essential characteristics of play which we enumerated above, particularly in so far as it transports the participants to another world. This identity of ritual and play was unreservedly recognized by Plato as a given fact.”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“Thus, ordinary people were ever in the process of developing and repairing their relationships with spiritual forces. In that light, a key function of public events was the building of bridges between the supernatural realm and the world of ordinary affairs.”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“In that sense, wisdom traditions were, at some level, collective theater. And, perhaps most profoundly, the contemplative dimension of life was not isolated from the world of action.”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“Furthermore, the relationship of the person to the group was different from our current conceptions. Individualism as a concept was not well developed. Rather, people were members of social bodies that not only preceded them in time but also defined most aspects of their identity. And the leaders of those groups spoke for their members with a confidence perhaps lost to the modern world. Because of the tight connection between people and the groups that defined them, beliefs about honor, shame, and duty were felt profoundly.”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“Although Huizinga does not systematically describe the transformation to the modern world, some of those changes can be pieced together in roughly the following way. Earlier societies were smaller and more local and anchored by patterns of oral communication. They were, to use modern sociological parlance, less “differentiated.” That is, the different institutional spheres (economy, politics, education, religion, family, etc.) had not yet been separated—each with its distinctive organizations, personnel, and codes of conduct—as they are now. As a consequence, the relevant social bodies of the times (families, clans, tribes, village communities, etc.) were expected to handle most of the personal and social requirements of their members.”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“Indeed, in its more stable forms, it frequently expresses itself as “a contest for something” of social value or, alternately, as a “representation of something” (p. 13).”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“Playful activities may be structured into the conduct of public institutions or they may simply erupt, thereby stopping and transforming ordinary affairs. In that regard, play is often connected to ordinary life.”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“Thus, Huizinga’s final characteristic of play is this quality of secrecy, the fact that some are “in the know” and others are not.”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“To play together is to commit to one another, to affirm that these moments spent together (in what are often the silliest of endeavors) are valuable.”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“As Huizinga (p. 10) puts it, “The arena, the card table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., all are in form and function playgrounds, i.e., forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, within which special rules obtain.”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“Play is started with new notions of pace and pattern and continues until it reaches its own type of conclusion. However, Huizinga emphasizes, play displays a curious tension between the momentary and the eternal.”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“In play, people are aware that they are doing something temporary and different. Even for children, play has a strong “only pretending” quality.”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“It is not only that we are able to play but also that we are able to know when we are playing.”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“Rather play is driven by interior, phenomenological satisfactions. In “this intensity, this absorption, this power of maddening, lies the essence, the primordial quality of play” (p. 2). In this sense, play is an aesthetic event, a time when experience is gathered and evaluated in terms of its emotional resonance. Play is marked typically by mirth, fun, and tension. For such reasons, play must not be understood as a demonstration of human rationality, a careful calculus of the effects of thought and action. However, as he (p. 3) famously puts it, “play only becomes possible, thinkable, and understandable when an influx of mind breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“Said differently, play is an occasion when creatures transcend the immediate needs of life and impart instead a symbolic or relational significance to their actions.”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“In Huizinga’s view, the capacity of human beings to play is primordial; that is, it precedes the development of society or culture.”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“Huizinga first defines play and then attempts to show how this activity was institutionalized in such aspects of early social life as language, games, law, war, philosophy, poetry, mythopoeisis, and art. In his view, the previous centuries of world history were marked by socially fixed occasions in which people competed with one another publicly. Such high-spirited and symbolically charged wrangling by prominent individuals was the way in which significant ideas were tried out, refuted, and reformed. In Huizinga’s judgment, history is not only the accounting of technological progress or political and economic movements but also the analysis of cultural interchange and development. Thus, tennis courts, courts of law, debating and scientific societies, song duels, parliaments, potlatch festivals, and philosophical bantering find their places as crucibles of social change. For Huizinga play is not to be sought within some separate institution of society. Rather it is a distinctive form of relationship that stands at the center of public imagination and conduct.”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“Social psychology focuses on relationships between the personal and social; anthropology comments extensively on socio-cultural issues; and educational scholars are experts at describing the various social systems of playground and school.”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“In such ways, play is seen as the triumph of personal motivation over public constraint. Individual disposition and urgency are both instigators and sounding boards for a complicated chain of events.”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“In this context, playful children are thought to acquire intellectual and social skills, stimulate their own creativity, and develop mastery of the object-world more quickly than their less playful peers.”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“Nevertheless, the future development of play studies seems limited by the deficiencies of the multi-disciplinary model used within academia as a whole and by the interests of the specialists who heretofore have gathered at the table. In what is probably the most important work on the nature of play in recent years, Sutton-Smith (1997) has argued that the play studies literature can be organized in terms of seven major “rhetorics” or “ideologies,” each with its own characteristic way of approaching the subject. For example, certain researchers have focused on play as “progress,” as creative or recreational activity that promotes the personal growth of players. Other researchers, he argues, have focused on play as “power,” emphasizing forms of social contest or confrontation that may be functional for society as whole. Still other scholars have seen play as an exploration of chance or fate, as an occasion for social bonding, as imaginative manipulation, as a special pattern of personal experience or selfhood, and as a pattern of foolery and status inversion. Scholars focusing on ancient and traditional societies frequently highlight the rhetorics of power, community identity, frivolity, and fate. Students of the modern world tend to favor the rhetorics of progress, imagination, and the self.”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“Perhaps play, like those other topics listed above, is simply too broad and evanescent a concept to be contained by any one field.”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“play is indeed the triumph of present over past and future, it should be noted that this present can quickly take the shape of a fully developed world. Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, we find ourselves suddenly in a place where customary logic no longer applies. Space and time take on radically new meanings. Language confounds us. People—and ideas—scurry about. We are surprised at every turn. In such ways, the play world is a kind of puzzlement. Like Alice, we are drawn in deeper and deeper, at each moment learning something curious about the universe and about ourselves.”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“Players hit and shout and run about as if possessed. Bedclothes become royal garments; heroic personalities are fashioned; boundary lines are drawn between rocks and trees. New purposes—seemingly of the most artificial or trivial character—are adopted and then pursued with a fascinated intensity. Likewise, relationships feel fresh and alive. People become parents and children, deadly enemies, blood brothers, firefighters, and lovers in new ways. To play deeply is to cut oneself off from the continuities and complexities of life. Reality, at that point, becomes a kid and a ball. Eventfulness reigns.”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“Selectively, players take the objects and ideas of routine life and hold them aloft. Like willful children, they unscrew reality or rub it on their bodies or toss it across the room. Things are dismantled and built anew. Such reckless manipulation is customary only for kings and gods. But in play, all of us are granted a certain dispensation from the normal consequences of action.”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“To play fully and imaginatively is to step sideways into another reality, between the cracks of ordinary life. Although”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“Two other teachers, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Victor Turner, pushed forward my curiosities about play.”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

“Brian Sutton-Smith, who is, to my mind at least, the modern authority on the nature and significance of play. Because”
― Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression