.png){kind=icon}
Chapter Summary
Play is a generalized form of behavioural openness: the ability to think about, discuss, and do different things in the same way or the same thing in different ways. Play can also be thought of as a way of organizing activities. In addition, play permits reflexivity and consideration of alternative realities by setting up a separate reality and suggesting that the perspective of ordinary life is only one way to make sense of experience. The functions of play include exercise, practice for the real world, increased creativity in children, and commentary on the real world. Play is likely linked to our evolution as modern humans capable of creativity and symbolic thought.
Art is a kind of play that is subject to certain culturally appropriate restrictions on form and content. It aims to evoke an aesthetic response from the artist and the observer. It succeeds when the form is culturally appropriate for the content and technically perfect in its realization. Aesthetic evaluations are culturally shaped value judgments. We recognize art in other cultures because of its family resemblance to what we call art in our own culture. Although people with other cultural understandings may not have produced art by intention, we can often successfully appreciate what they have created as art by appropriation. These issues are addressed in ethnographic studies that call into question received ideas about what counts as “authentic” art.
Most cultures have myths, which are stories that integrate personal experiences with a wider set of assumptions about the way the world works. Myths make life meaningful for those who accept them. As stories, myths are the products of high verbal art. A full understanding of myth requires ethnographic background information.
Ritual is a repetitive social practice composed of sequences of symbolic activities such as speech, singing, dancing, gestures, and the manipulation of certain objects. Cultural ideas are made concrete through ritual action. Rites of passage are rituals in which members of a culture move from one position in the social structure to another. These rites are marked by periods of separation, transition, and reaggregation. During the period of transition, individuals occupy a liminal position. All those in this position frequently develop an intense comradeship and a feeling of oneness, or communitas. Ritual and play are complementary. Play is based on the premise “Let us make believe,” while ritual is based on the premise “Let us believe.”
Anthropological studies of religion tend to focus on the social institutions and meaningful processes with which it is associated. Followers of religions can address personalized forces symbolically and expect them to respond. Maintaining contact with cosmic forces is very complex, and societies have complex social practices designed to ensure that this is done properly. Two important kinds of religious specialists are shamans and priests.
Many anthropologists have attempted to display the rich, coherent tapestries of symbols, rituals, and everyday practices that make up particular world views and to demonstrate the high degree to which world views vary from one another. They have also studied the ways in which drastic changes in people’s experiences lead them to create new meanings to explain the changes and to cope with them. This can be accomplished through elaboration of the old system to fit changing times, conversion to a new world view, syncretism, revitalization, or resistance.
Learning Objectives
In this chapter, the student should learn to do the following:
- identify various types of secular and religious rites of passage;
- understand the relationship between art, cultural appropriation and authenticity;
- define, and discuss why the concept of play is important in terms of culture;
- define the various components of religious experience;
- discuss how and why revitalization movements form;
- define and discuss the importance of art cross-culturally;
- discuss how witchcraft accusations are used to reduce conflict in a society;
- define the concept of world view and outline how and why world views can change over time.