September 30, 2016 - 17:50
As a child, “starfish” loved to enact elaborate scenes with the magic of make-believe. She and her playmates would adopt roles, embodying “feuding sorcerers” one day and “magical princesses” the next. Sometimes they were parents and kids, doctors and patients, or even non-human creatures who would travel through galaxies near and far. In her words, imaginative play was “rewarding” and all she needed was “nothing more than my own imagination to carry them out successfully” (starfish). However, as I explored in my previous essay, experts on play contest that imagination is unlimited and independent. Instead, imaginative play is limited to the framework of the society in which children grow up. I argued that from this framework, kids have the ability to create nuanced perspectives and activate social change by reconfiguring the norms of existing society in their play (amanda.simone).
To review, critics like Utah State University anthropologist David Lacey reject the commonly romanticized notion of imaginative play. In a NYTimes article about “Taking Play Seriously,” Lacey explains, “Despite the heartwarming rhetoric we dish out in our teacher-training classes, children do not have unlimited imagination. Their make-believe, and, by extension, other play forms, is constrained by the roles, scripts, and props of the culture they live in” (Lacey, qted in Henig). As a result, the make-believe realm does not actually lie “outside [the] power relationships” that exist in our societies (Edensor, 73). Although children can only draw from ideas within the limits their upbringings have placed on them, they can expand on those ideas by combining and hypothesizing from what they have observed. Starfish described questions such as, “Who could imagine the most engaging event?” that guided her play to the threshold of imagination. The process of creating the most imaginative, the most engaging, the craziest and most fun scenarios illustrates play scholar Brian Sutton-Smith’s principle of “phantasmagoria” in which “children’s thoughts run wild and all the chaotic bits of the real world get tumbled together and pulled haphazardly apart in new, sometimes even scarier confabulations” (qted in Henig). By reshaping prior concepts, imaginative children harness a certain power to confront social norms and power dynamics and innovatively reform them. As Edensor and his colleagues assert, the limits of make-believe do not manifest in “simply learning or copying adult roles, but playing with them, negotiating and transforming their relations to dominant power structures in the process; play is always potentially transformative or subversive of power” (Edensor, 77).
My optimistic perspective promotes exploration of new intersections of play. Through combining ideas and playing with atypical relationships, I hope that play can help the world evolve for the better. But what happens when a power relationship is explored and the effect is damaging? Deborah Bird Rose, Stuart Cooke, and Thom Van Dooren comment on one such experience in their article “Ravens at Play.” After engaging (or almost engaging) in playful exchanges with a coyote and a pair of ravens during a road trip through Death Valley, the academics come to the realization that there is a dangerous, risky side to engaging in play with a new demographic. Because feeding the coyote would disrupt the natural food chain and playing with the ravens could bolster their damage to other desert species, they realized that sometimes you must withdraw from play in order to decrease your effect on your playmates and their ecosystems: “We were struck, indeed wounded, with a need to turn away, presenting consequences that would crackle with charge far beyond the moment of our passing through through a section of a national park” (Rose, 341). The authors’ open exploration of unconventional interspecies play seems like it could be beneficial for motivating a change in the world – in fact many invaluable ideas have been inspired by non-human designs or characteristics – but instead they find that this new intersections of play has negative effects on the animals because we become intrusive and detrimental to their environment.
Returning to interhuman play, these harmful effects could still be present. It is possible that some of the experimental and transformative play I envisioned as productively confronting power dynamics could become painful or unsafe for those involved. For example, play that invokes structures of power could also invoke hurtful stereotypes that are implicated in those dynamics. The embodiment of different identities in imaginative play has the potential to be progressive, but then it also has the potential of being problematic. When we stretch outside our comfort zones to grapple with injustices, even in the context of play, it can be easy to slip. And if those slips hurt people, it will be necessary to step back like Rose, Van Dooren, and Cooke do in order to analyze who the play is benefiting.
Whether playing with wild animals or playing make-believe, it is evident that play has a huge potential for change. Rose and her colleagues make it clear that we must evaluate the effect of our play in order to prevent dangerous ecological change by asking, “Can people play?” (341). Although I contend that make-believe can be a method for maximizing change and making an impact, this attention to effect forced me to consider the possibly negative effects of imaginative play. Throughout imaginative play we should also always be questioning or noticing our effect on each other and society. In either style of play, we must be careful.