Play in Philosophy and Social Thought

Henning Eichberg, Signe Larsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429838699
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

To understand play, we need a bottom-up phenomenology of play. This phenomenology highlights the paradox that it is the players who play the game, but it is also the game which makes us players. Yet what is it that plays us, when we play? Do we play the game, or does the game play us? These questions concern the relation between the playing subject and play as something larger than the individual – play as craft, play as rhythm, play between normality and otherness, even play as religion, as a sense of spiritual play between self and other.

This goes deeper than the welfare-political or educational intention to make people play or play more, or to advise individuals to play in a correct and useful way. Exploring topics such as identity, otherness, and disability, as well as activities including skiing, yoga, dance and street sport, this interdisciplinary study continues the work of the late Henning Eichberg and sheds new light on the questions that play at the borders of philosophy, anthropology, and the sociology of sport and leisure.

Play in Philosophy and Social Thought is a fascinating resource for students of philosophy of sport, cultural studies, sport sciences and anthropological studies. It is also a thought-provoking read for sport and play philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, cultural studies scholars, and practitioners working with play.

Part I

Play and identity

Chapter 1

Laughter of the Pygmies on the racetrack, 1904

Making the “others” play¹

The Games of 1904 in St. Louis were exceptional in the series of modern Olympics, as they established a link between sport and anthropology. They displayed the problematic relationship between the Western pattern of sport and the play cultures of other people. This connection is still worth some deeper reflection in our times – and maybe more than ever before.

“Folk zoo” and the Anthropology Days of 1904

The St. Louis Games included a special “pre-Olympic” annex, called Anthropology Days, and sometimes also Tribal Games (Sullivan, 1905; Stanaland, 1981; Goksøyr, 1990; Lennartz, 2000: 7–9, 31–43; Brownell, 2008). The intention of these games was to show and to compare “indigenous” performances in competitive sports. As the term “anthropology” indicates, the event was scientifically inflected, based, as it was, on the cooperation between an anthropologist and a physical educator. William John McGee, who acted as chief of the World Fair’s Department of Anthropology, was the founding president of the newly established American Anthropological Association and former director of the federal government’s Bureau of American Ethnology. James Edward Sullivan, the head of the Fair’s Department of Physical Culture, had founded the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) in 1888 and led it for many years. These two powerful people joined together to send indigenous people from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific onto the racetrack of sport competition.

Expectations towards the “anthropologic” event were remarkable. Newspaper headlines announced: “Barbarians meet in Athletic Games” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 13 August, 1904; Stanaland, 1981: 103). The event revealed much more than a merely “scientific” character.

The Olympic Games had at that time become a side-show of the world’s fairs (Alkemeyer, 1996: 186–189). And the “ethnological zoo” was a well-established genre around 1900, linked to travelling exhibitions, circuses, and zoological gardens (Bancel, 2002). In Europe, especially in England and France, shows of Lapps, Eskimos, and Africans had been arranged since the 1820s and 1830s. One of the most famous enterprises in this field since the late nineteenth century became the Völkerschau of Tierpark Hagenbeck in Hamburg. The animal trader and owner of a private zoo, Carl Hagenbeck, made the so-called “anthropological-zoological expositions” an important branch of his affairs. He started this special show business in 1874 with a group of Lapps, which after great success was continued with Nubian caravans and Eskimos. When a whole Eskimo group, however, died because of lack of vaccinations, and several Fuegians because of consumption, pneumonia, and measles, Hagenbeck temporarily ceased business in 1882. But the market of exotic exhibitions was so attractive that Hagenbeck soon re-entered it with shows of Lapps, Kalmuks, Indians, Singhaleses from Ceylon, Nubians from Sudan, Somali, and Hottentots. The peak of his “anthropological” entertainment was reached between 1907 and 1913 when Hagenbeck organized no less than 18 Völkerschauen, some of them in Hamburg, others in Copenhagen, Rotterdam, London, and Argentina. Movement games – dances, rituals, and mock battles – played an important role in this genre, appealing to the dramatic sense of the public. The greatest success was a Wild-West show with 42 Oglala Siouxs from the Pine Ridge reservation who were especially trained in this type of entertainment. In the 1920s, the “folk zoo” arrangements of Hagenbeck were continued, but ended with a show of New Caledonians in 1931 (Thode-Arora, 1989; Gretzschel & Pelc, 1998: 36–48, 70–71, 177–187).

This ending corresponded to the more general shift of the circus show. The circus had so far contained certain elements of popular education and contributed among others to “anthropological enlightenment.” Now, it lost this role, which was taken over by the movies (Hügel, 2003: 527–529).

At the time of the St. Louis World Fair of 1904, however, the connection between popular entertainment, science, and education was still working. Officially called the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition, the fair displayed African Pygmies, Argentine Patagonians, Japanese Ainu, “Red Indians” from Vancouver Island, Manguins, and Eskimos to Western spectators. In particular, groups of “Red Indians” from the United States were presented to the public of the Fair – Arapahos, Chippewas, Chiricahua Apaches, Kickapoos, Kiowas, Maricopas, Moquis, Navajos, Nez Perce, Pawnees, Sioux, Wichitas, and Zunis. The most prominent participant was Goyathlay (He Who Yawns), known as Geronimo, the former legendary war chief of the Apache. The new imperial aspirations of the United States in Asia were represented by tribes from the recently conquered Philippines: Bagobos, Igorots, Moros, Negritos, and Visayans. Each of these groups were exhibited with their typical utensils, weapons, clothing, materials for habitation, crafts, and objects for everyday use, as well as some animals associated with their subsistence.

Sport was regarded as a part of this set of ethno-culture. Thirteen of the represented “savage tribes” were to compete in races linked with the Olympic Games. Their “anthropological” competitions were held over two days with 18 different sport events. There were seven running events, two types of jumping, and different forms of throwing – javelin, baseball, shotput, 56-pound weight, and bolo. Further events were archery, tug-of-war, pole climbing, and mud fights. Women did not take part, just as they were excluded from the official Olympics of that time.

Most of the competitions were arranged in the pattern of Western Olympic competition and record production. They had the character of an experimental test, as they were imposed by the organizers on the colonized human beings who had no links with these practices in their own cultural tradition or self-determination. Some of the “indigenous” competitions, however, had native roots and were arranged without rivals. Bolos were thrown by Patagonians only. Pole climbing was done only by Africans and Filipinos. And in the mud fight, it was only Pygmies who participated.

What did the Games teach?

The contemporary reactions to the Anthropology Days were manifold – and contradictory. There were especially differences between how the American organizers, Pierre de Coubertin as the founder and the philosopher of the Olympics, and the newspapers looked at the competitions.

Ranking the peoples – the games as laboratory

The organizers commented that the measured results of the Anthropology Days as poor.

The ones interested were deeply disappointed (…) they certainly expected a great deal more from the savages who competed in the Anthropology Days than events proved.

(Sullivan, 1905: 249)

The official Olympic report saw the event as proof of the inferiority of the natives and ridiculed them. It was pointed out that some of the records in the running and throwing events could easily be beaten by schoolchildren, and that a result in the running long jump could be bettered by top American athletes doing the standing long jump.

There were few positive exceptions. An Igorot named Basilio gave, for instance, “the most marvellous performance of pole climbing ever witnessed in this country” (Sullivan, 1905: 253). But other records were, in contrast, regarded as really representative: 100-yard run – “very poor” results, shot putt – “a ridiculously poor performance,” shot competition – “poor” and “poorest” results, running broad jump – “really ridiculous,” throwing the baseball – “all the savages were anxious to throw,” weight throwing – “ludicrous,” and:

Never before in the history of sport in the world were such poor performances recorded for weight throwing.

(Sullivan, 1905: 253)

This remark deserves special attention, because it may be the only case in the history of modern Olympic sport that a “negative record” was recorded. In this respect, the Anthropology Days represented a remarkable exception in the development of the modern way of conceptualizing the record.

The poor results of the participants were held against what was characterized as the traditional view in anthropology:

We have for years been led to believe from statements made by those who should know and from newspaper articles and books, that the average savage was fleet on foot, strong of limb, accurate with the bow and arrow, and expert in throwing the stone.

(Sullivan, 1905: 249)

This assumption had now, in St. Louis, been proven to be incorrect. The Anthropology Days shattered the romantic myth of the “noble savage” as a natural sportsman. The measured records proved that Western Olympic athletes were just plain better.

Lecturers and authors will in the future please omit all references to the natural athletic ability of the savages, unless they can substantiate their alleged feats.

(Sullivan, 1905: 259)

The competitions confirmed the opposite myth, which McGee – like other dreamers of the Western supremacy – had already developed for a long time: the evolution of human history as an upward process. In a lecture about “The Trend of Human Progress,” McGee had in 1899 proposed to order the development of mankind into four stages: savagery, barbarism, civilization, and enlightenment. The last stage was led to perfection by, in racial terms, “the Caucasian”:

The burden of humanity is already in large measure the White Man’s burden – for, viewing the human world as it is, white and strong are synonymous terms.

(Quoted by Lennartz, 2000: 31–32)

The classical work about the “progress” from the “savage” stage via “barbarianism” to “civilization” had been written by Lewis Henry Morgan (1877) some decades before and had a remarkable impact on both bourgeois and Marxist theories.

All this was not only a racialist dream. It was also a matter of method. The arguments and the empirical procedures witnessed of a positivist way of obtaining knowledge. People could be classified, and their ranking should best be done on the basis of quantified data, thus trusting in the “objectivity” of “facts.” The results tell the true story. Sport could serve as an experimental laboratory for an anthropometry of bodily movement – side by side with the anthropometry of bodily structure, which was used by race science at that time. Sport as laboratory gave reason to scientific, methodological pride. One could, as McGee stated, “obtain for the first time what may be called interracial athletic records” (Lennartz, 2000: 39). Discourse on culture could be based on metric comparison – this was the progress of knowledge.

However, progress demanded sacrifices. Two Filipinos died on the way to the exposition in a freezing railroad car. To be sure, this was deplorable, but expressed in the current language of globalization, it was a “collateral damage.” Fortunately, the dead bodies could be used for scientific purposes, the “soft parts” and skeletons, as McGee proposed, for the university and the brains for the anthropologist’s museum. The corpses would, thus, serve progress, nevertheless (Lennartz, 2000: 38).

Developing the world – the games as progressive education

An opposite perspective, though in the framework of the same progressive dream, was expressed by Pierre de Coubertin, the founder and philosopher of the modern Olympics. For him, the Anthropology Days themselves were contemptible, not just their results. They were not only vulgar, offending his aristocratic taste, but they were also opposed to his fundamental conviction of progress.

As for that outrageous charade, it will of course lose its appeal when black men, red men, and yellow men learn to run, jump, and throw and leave the white man far behind them. Then we will have progress. But these races! Now tell me that the world has not advanced since then and that no progress has been made in sporting spirit.

(Quoted by Nancy Parezo; a shortened version: Coubertin, 1931: 68, 1979: 43)

The main interest of Coubertin’s Olympic idea was not to compare “savages” and “civilized” men, but to develop humanity as a whole. Coubertin’s method was evolutionist and moral-educational. Sport was a way of moral learning. Sport was part of a positive colonial process, spreading better life over the whole world – a better life according to Western patterns, of course (Alkemeyer, 1996: 178–195).

However, there were some essential features, which Coubertin had in common with the anthropologist McGee: the idea of progress, the philosophy of record and measurement, the concept of “race,” and the educational impetus. But Coubertin’s educational perspectives were different. For McGee, the anthropological parts of the St. Louis Fair had the educational value of displaying the otherness of “the others.” The exposition of other people stimulated observation and scientific inquiry into rare ethnological types. For Coubertin, in contrast, the world was not broken down into two (or more) types of human beings, “savage” and “civilized,” but it “advanced” as such: The world as a whole was in “progress,” and sport expressed this advancement in an ideal form. Thus, sport could function as the ritual of human progress – and as character building. Coubertin’s Olympism was a humanistic and a colonial project at the same time (MacAloon, 1984a; Alkemeyer, 1996).

This project had to exclude certain practices, which would not fit into this picture. Bolo, mud fights, and pole climbing should never spread from the “anthropology” section to the Olympics. Tug-of-war, a typical game from popular culture, had been adopted in the 1900 Games, but disappeared in 1920 from the Olympic program. In 1900, Coubertin also detested the inclusion of the Basque ball game pelota as vulgar and similar to tobacco juice spitting (M...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction: If the game plays the player …
• PART I: Play and identity
• PART II: Play and un-normal normality
• PART III: Play and craft
• PART IV: Critical method: the study of play and the play of study
• PART V: … and play down here
• Conclusion: The playful human being, a challenge to philosophical anthropology
• Index