Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter G. Stromberg is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tulsa. He is the author of Language and Self-Transformation: A Study of the Christian Conversion Narrative (1993) and Symbols of Community: The Cultural Systems of a Swedish Church (1986).

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Caught in Play

Stanford University Press

Contents

Foreword by Bradd Shore.................................................viiAcknowledgments.........................................................xi1. Caught Up in the Game................................................12. Romantic Realism.....................................................213. Romanticism and the Birth of Consumer Culture........................354. Role Playing.........................................................535. Looking Under the Hood...............................................766. Meta-Action (the Bird's-Eye View)....................................977. Romance and the Romantic.............................................1108. Play and Agency in Legal Drug Use....................................1269. The Oscillation Between Boredom and Stimulation......................14010. Entertainment and Our Understanding of the Self.....................160Conclusion..............................................................174Notes...................................................................179References..............................................................199Index...................................................................211

Chapter One

SKIP CRACKS HIS KNUCKLES as he prepares to roll the dice. With his bulky body, his unkempt, cascading hair, and his pharaoh-style beard, he looks like an imposing warrior from a bygone age. Indeed, Skip is currently engaged in battle, hand-to-hand combat with an upstart who has issued a challenge to fight. Raising the left side of his body out of his seat, he grimaces and bellows "wham" as he kicks out with his left leg, contacting his enemy in the stomach.

Some of Skip's friends are focused on the fight; one shouts "Stay down!" as the kick is completed. Others seem oblivious to this altercation, which has been going on now for six or seven minutes. The latter chat with one another and help themselves to repeated servings from an enormous receptacle containing malted milk balls. Skip himself looks proud of his kick, for an instant, and then slightly anxious as he returns to the task of his next dice roll. The game continues with further powerful strikes by Skip and loud grunts of pain, also issued by Skip as he acts the part of his imaginary opponent.

Skip is participating in a role-playing game, a form of entertainment in which players pretend to be characters in imaginary worlds. Players might, for example, imagine themselves to be the crew of a spaceship or a group of adventurers seeking a treasure. Although the kick described here seems a natural part of playing the game and might pass unnoticed, something about it strikes me as peculiar. My question is this: If Skip is really just imagining the character he is representing in the game, why does he kick with such obvious emotional intensity? An even more basic question: Why does he kick at all?

Some might answer by saying something like, "Well, he's playing a game and when he pretends to kick the guy he's fighting, he's just really getting into it." But "getting into it" is a matter that deserves some thought. This kick is really sort of odd: as he strikes out with his leg Skip is not only imagining himself to be his character but going a step beyond that-he is doing what his character would do.

Anecdotes circulating among Skip's peers make frequent reference to over-the-edge role players who lose track of the line between fantasy and reality, who become the characters they portray (see Fine 1983: 211ff). "Role players are scary," says Chris, who off and on has immersed himself deeply in these fantasy games. He goes on to say that he has discovered there are two sorts of players: "There's the people that are self-aware, and understand. And then there are the people who literally aren't aware of what reality is."

Skip doesn't seem to belong to the latter group. He is well aware that he is sitting in a shabby room with a group of male friends, the acrid odors of fast food-today's and last week's-permeating the atmosphere. Skip would smile at the suggestion that he or any of his friends ever lose track of the fact that the high-tech outer space setting of the game is imaginary.

But, then, there's the kick. I have been able to study it carefully because I made a film of the game in which this occurred. Anyone who sees the kick would probably agree that it is a spontaneous gesture, unrehearsed, and certainly not presented to the group as "this is the sort of thing my character would do." Everything points to the conclusion that Skip does not make a conscious decision to kick. Put it this way: Skip is playing a game, and he knows it is a game, but sometimes his body seems to forget that it's a game, and at those moments what Skip is imagining is made incarnate; it assumes the status of a reality in the world.

Getting Caught Up in Entertainment

One way of labeling Skip's kick is to see it as evidence he is very caught up in the game he's playing. Of course, this is only one example of becoming caught up. There are dozens of other in-character gestures and speech on that tape, and they are all testimony to the players' deep immersion in the game. Johan Huizinga (1955: 14), the author of what is arguably our most influential study of play in Western culture, captures this sort of immersion in his description of a child engaged in pretending: "The child is quite literally 'beside himself ' with delight, transported beyond himself to such an extent that he almost believes he actually is such and such a thing, without, however, wholly losing consciousness of 'ordinary reality'."

It is not only children and role players who become caught up in play. Presumably, most of us have at some point become immersed in a book or game or movie such that-on the cognitive and emotional levels-the activity temporarily assumes a profound significance and the importance of the outside world begins to fade. Other authors have used their own terms to designate this experience; Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (1990) talks of "flow," for example, while Diane Ackerman (1999: 12) has described "the ecstatic form of play" as deep play. Although I have learned much from these authors, I have not adopted their terminology, because even though their formulations overlap with my own, they are not the same. Most significantly, both Csikszentmihalyi and Ackerman place a moral value on this sort of play, stressing that this is a form of activity human beings everywhere should cultivate for reasons of personal growth. They may be right, but I prefer to remain agnostic on moral questions of this type. In this book, I look instead at the social role of this sort of play. My question is not whether we should seek to engage in this sort of play, but rather what happens when we do so.

This brings me to another difference between my approach to the subject and those of previous authors. Both Ackerman and Csikszentmihalyi extend their terms to cover ecstatic experiences that occur in such domains as skilled work or religious experience. Although I would not deny that one can become deeply absorbed in many activities, for my purposes it is not useful to lump them all together, and in this book for the most part I confine myself to the possibility of becoming caught up in play.

For me, becoming caught up in play is worth our notice because this phenomenon can be the basis for an approach to understanding "entertainment," a broad term that in my usage includes parts of consumption and advertising as well. Entertainment is by now so thoroughly woven into the fabric of our existence that we rarely stop to think about our relentless quest to be entertained, and if we try to do so the appropriate language and concepts seem elusive. This difficulty is one hint that entertainment is at the hub of our culture. Of course, its importance extends well beyond the Americas and Europe. For its effect on contemporary human life and especially for its sheer exotic weirdness, the culture of entertainment is arguably the most influential ideological system on the planet. Yet precisely because it is so pervasive and close to us, entertainment is difficult to understand, and even to talk about.

Some readers might find this last statement odd, because there is a nearly incomprehensible volume of written material, in both scholarly and popular discourses, about entertainment. Simply reviewing the literature on entertainment in all social science and humanities disciplines would itself entail a multivolume work. But much of the laudable work that has been carried out in sociology, communications, cultural studies, and related fields has focused primarily on questions of aesthetics, politics, technique, and so on, while for the most part avoiding the kinds of general cultural analysis that anthropologists have pulled off in distant lands. How does entertainment fit with other parts of our culture? That is, how is it part of a pattern integrated with our world view, our ethics, and our concept of person? For all that has been written on individual pop icons and sitcoms and the liberating (or oppressive) power of popular culture, such basic questions remain for the most part unanswered.

Think of it this way: What do we know about the overall effect of living in a society in which entertainment is so central? What do we know about how entertainment affects society and the people who participate in it? Consider a contrast to religion: although there remains much to be learned, social scientists have a solid and reasonably consensual understanding of such matters as how religious rituals support values and social norms, how religion can be called on to facilitate social change, how it helps believers face life's difficulties. Scholars interested in specific issues such as sacrifice or religious language can build on a solid foundation of broadly accepted work and attempt to offer refinements or extensions of our knowledge.

There is, sad to say, no parallel foundation in the study of entertainment. One could unearth authors from the Frankfurt school who sought to demonstrate the importance of the "culture industry" in maintaining the domination of the capitalist class in industrial and postindustrial democracies. One can cite somewhat inflated claims, most famously associated with the French sociologist Baudrillard (1981), that we now live in a cultural climate of hyperreality, in which the boundaries between reality and image are blurred or even indistinguishable. Or one could turn to more recent work, mostly in cultural studies, that sees entertainment as a site for creative and heroic resistance to dominant discourses. One will search in vain for any consensus, among the social science disciplines or anthropology in particular.

There are any number of reasons this might be so in anthropology. Among the more important: first, in spite of much effort, cultural anthropology has yet to completely exorcise its increasingly covert agenda of focusing on the "exotic." Hence a study of television in Nigeria seems somehow less prestigious than one of a religious tradition that has survived in a rural region. But either one carries more panache than a study of how people respond to sitcoms in Bakersfield. Faye Ginsburg (2005: 17), admitting that until recently the study of mass media was "almost a taboo topic for anthropology," sees the end of such attitudes in recent work. I am less optimistic. As she goes on to note, entertainment has become less off-putting for anthropologists now because it has increasingly penetrated non- Western settings. However, it would seem to me that a strong theoretical framework for interpreting the cultural effects of entertainment would require first of all an understanding of its place and significance in the societies that have led the way in the development of entertainment.

Second, in recent decades much of cultural anthropology has been gripped by a neoromantic fervor in which coherent explanations and generalizations are regarded as oppressive imposition of a rationality that is simply one culturally determined form of understanding the world. From this perspective, a gradual accumulation of consensual knowledge about a topic such as entertainment is not a goal to be pursued.

Such views (which are often associated with the label postmodernism) are understandable as an attempt to come to terms with anthropology's history of rendering the lives of others as mere grist for the mill of social scientific theorizing. However, I cannot accept that the solution to such problems of exploitation is to abandon the attempt to generalize about human action. Those who have the privilege of being paid to study social and cultural life incur an obligation to the society that supports them. The obligation is to articulate in the clearest possible way useful statements about the societies they observe. These useful statements may bring injustices to light or point to more effective ways to deliver health care or increase our general fund of knowledge about human social life; there are many possibilities. Entertainment is a dominant force in contemporary life, and the more we understand about it the better off we will be.

Careful analysis of entertainment should take us a certain distance down the road toward understanding our own odd relationship to entertainment: why we find entertainment so compelling while claiming to regard it lightly, why entertainment often seems to clash with dominant moral values in the society, why so many of us come to focus on fame and celebrity as the most available models of our purpose. Entertainment, in ways that are difficult to articulate and therefore troubling, is closer to defining the meanings in our lives than we would like to admit. Any progress toward the goal of sorting out how entertainment influences us and our social life would be a contribution to our self-understanding and ultimately to our civic life.

Entertainment, Pleasure, and Play

I have said that entertainment is important and-despite its utter familiarity-somewhat mysterious. I have suggested too that getting caught up in the playful activities of entertainment might offer a useful foothold in the challenging task of beginning to grasp the most general effects of entertainment in our society. But I have not yet defined what I mean by entertainment, and before I proceed it is probably advisable to do so.

When I refer to entertainment I am talking at once about a kind of activity and a social context in which the activity occurs. If this seems abstract, consider a simple example, that of playing a game. When I play a game such as tennis, I engage in certain activities, such as swinging a racket. But swinging a racket does not count as playing tennis if I am idly doing so in my living room. Rather, I need to swing my racket in a particular context that includes things like a tennis court, an opponent, and a commitment to follow the rules of the game of tennis.

Focusing for a moment just on the activity, how can we characterize it? At the core of the idea of entertainment is that it is activity that provides pleasure, especially a particular kind of pleasure my dictionary (the Oxford English Dictionary) identifies as amusement. Not all pleasure-seeking behavior is entertainment, of course. One might find pleasure in the appreciation of beauty in poetry or music, in the love of one's family, in sex. Happily, the possibilities are endless. So what is it about certain pleasurable activities that defines them as a component of entertainment?

The word amusement is helpful here, which is undoubtedly why the dictionary writers chose it. The word connotes diversion, a certain lightness; to return to my dictionary: "pleasurable occupation of the attention without seriousness." I agree that we usually do not think of entertainment as serious activity, but we should also keep in mind that seriousness may enter into entertaining pursuits. It seems to me the heart of the matter is that when one is engaged in entertainment, one's end is pleasurable amusement, and not some practical goal. I can play tennis for entertainment and diversion. I can also play tennis to practice my strokes or engage in a competition. To the extent I have the goal of winning a tennis competition, it does not seem correct to say that I am playing for purposes of entertainment; this becomes especially clear if it is a professional competition.

The word diversion is worth noticing as well. In years of discussion of the matter with hundreds of college students, I have learned it is not possible for something to be entertaining unless at least to some small extent it diverts us from our day-today reality. It is not just that we can become caught up in entertainment, it is that unless we become at least slightly caught up in something, we do not consider it to be entertainment. An activity must pull one in to be entertaining; if one observes or acts without this ever happening, one says something like "Well, some people find that entertaining, but I don't."

In sum, then, one part of entertainment is pleasure-seeking activity that diverts one's attention from the day-to-day world. But perhaps this is enough to define entertainment. Go back to me and my tennis racket: if I am just swinging my tennis racket in my living room, isn't it possible to say that I am entertaining myself? Is it really necessary to have the game of tennis to constitute what we call entertainment? Well, how long am I likely to keep up this racket swinging? If I were to do so for the length of a tennis match, and it was clear that I wasn't practicing my strokes or imagining myself in an actual game, then an observer would have good reason to think me insane. In other words, a little bit of random racket swinging might be entertaining, but we know that the "little bit" is crucial. This may seem like a trivial consideration, but it is in fact important. Even though it may be possible for a person to engage in an entertaining activity with little or no larger context framing the activity-no show, or game, or fantasy-we acknowledge that this is an unusual situation. When we think of entertainment, we think in the first instance of a person acting in concert with something stimulating the action or imagination so that the person is engaged, responding to something that has independent form.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Caught in Playby Peter G. Stromberg Copyright © 2009 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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