Brian Sutton-Smith - Böcker

Every child knows what it means to play, but the rest of us can merely speculate. Is it a kind of adaptation, teaching us skills, inducting us into certain communities? Is it power, pursued in games of prowess? Fate, deployed in games of chance? Daydreaming, enacted in art? Or is it just frivolity? Brian Sutton-Smith, a leading proponent of play theory, considers each possibility as it has been proposed, elaborated, and debated in disciplines from biology, psychology, and education to metaphysics, mathematics, and sociology.Sutton-Smith focuses on play theories rooted in seven distinct “rhetorics”—the ancient discourses of Fate, Power, Communal Identity, and Frivolity and the modern discourses of Progress, the Imaginary, and the Self. In a sweeping analysis that moves from the question of play in child development to the implications of play for the Western work ethic, he explores the values, historical sources, and interests that have dictated the terms and forms of play put forth in each discourse’s “objective” theory.This work reveals more distinctions and disjunctions than affinities, with one striking exception: however different their descriptions and interpretations of play, each rhetoric reveals a quirkiness, redundancy, and flexibility. In light of this, Sutton-Smith suggests that play might provide a model of the variability that allows for “natural” selection. As a form of mental feedback, play might nullify the rigidity that sets in after successful adaption, thus reinforcing animal and human variability. Further, he shows how these discourses, despite their differences, might offer the components for a new social science of play.

Play: An Interdisciplinary Synthesis is co-published with the Association for the Study of Play (TASP), an interdisciplinary, international organization of play-research scholars. This volume, the sixth in the Play and Culture TASP series, synthesizes biological, anthropological, educational, and psychological approaches to play. It is a valuable book with chapters from premier researchers such as Robert Fagen and Carolyn Pope Edwards of the United States, Arne Trageton of Norway, Paola de Sanctis Ricciardone of Italy, and Jean Paul Rossie of Morocco. Also included is an interstitial book-within-the-book by Brian Sutton-Smith.

Play has been presented as the ideal intervention for almost every conceivable kind of problem experienced by children: emotional problems, attention disorders, learning difficulties, and social isolation. In this ground-breaking book, leading play theorists, researchers, and practitioners present their opinions and research results about the influence of play and of special play programs on different aspects of child development.The first section explores why play therapy is used and what play's specific role is in the classical play therapy approach. The second part is devoted to experimental play programs for different types of children with special needs. In the last section, the effects of modern play approaches in primary schools are discussed as well as the influence of these play interventions on cognitive and social skills. This is a book for practitioners and theorists in the field of play, who are not just uncritical consumers or idealizers of play, but who are concerned in searching for the real value of play in various therapeutic and educational settings.

Play has been presented as the ideal intervention for almost every conceivable kind of problem experienced by children: emotional problems, attention disorders, learning difficulties, and social isolation. In this ground-breaking book, leading play theorists, researchers, and practitioners present their opinions and research results about the influence of play and of special play programs on different aspects of child development.The first section explores why play therapy is used and what play's specific role is in the classical play therapy approach. The second part is devoted to experimental play programs for different types of children with special needs. In the last section, the effects of modern play approaches in primary schools are discussed as well as the influence of these play interventions on cognitive and social skills. This is a book for practitioners and theorists in the field of play, who are not just uncritical consumers or idealizers of play, but who are concerned in searching for the real value of play in various therapeutic and educational settings.

What prompts children to tell stories? What does the word "story" mean to a child at two or five years of age? The Folkstories of Children, first published in 1981, features nearly five hundred stories that were volunteered by fifty children between the ages of two and ten and transcribed word for word. The stories are organized chronologically by the age of the teller, revealing the progression of verbal competence and the gradual emergence of staging and plot organization. Many stories told by two-year-olds, for example, have only beginnings with no middle or end; the "narrative" is held together by rhyme or alliteration. After the age of three or four, the same children tell stories that feature a central character and a narrative arc. The stories also exhibit each child's growing awareness and management of his or her environment and life concerns. Some children see their stories as dialogues between teller and audience, others as monologues expressing concerns about fate and the forces of good and evil.Brian Sutton-Smith discusses the possible origins of the stories themselves: folktales, parent and teacher reading, media, required writing of stories in school, dreams, and play. The notes to each chapter draw on this context as well as folktale analysis and child development theory to consider why and how the stories take their particular forms. The Folkstories of Children provides valuable evidence and insight into the ways children actively and inventively engage language as they grow.

New Zealand children from 1840 to 1890 were subjected to an unusual combination of agrarian existence and an industrial social philosophy in the newly formed schools. When schools became more universal in the expanding industrial society, a new emphasis on the control of children developed, and from 1920 onward, adult supervision in the form of heavily organized sports and playgrounds encroached more and more on the untrammeled freedom of the rural environment.Returning to his home country of New Zealand, Brian Sutton-Smith documents the relationship between children's play and the actual process of history. Drawing on interviews with hundreds of informants from every province and school district of New Zealand, the author illuminates for the first time the various social, cultural, historical, and psychological context in which children's play occurs. He treats both formal and informal play, as well as the play of both boys and girls.

A groundbreaking collection of essays on a hitherto underexplored subject that challenges the existing stereotypical views of the trivial and innocent nature of children's culture, this work reveals for the first time the artistic and complex interactions among children. Based on research of scholars from such diverse fields as American studies, anthropology, education, folklore, psychology, and sociology, this volume represents a radical new attempt to redefine and reinterpret the expressive behaviors of children. The book is divided into four major sections: history, methodology, genres, and setting, with a concluding chapter on theory. Each section is introduced by an overview by Brian Sutton-Smith. The accompanying bibliography lists historical references through the present, representing works by scholars for over 100 years.

First published in 1982. Since the emergence of developmental psychology early this century, theorists and researchers have emphasized the family’s role in shaping the child’s emergent social style, personality, and cognitive competence. In so doing, however, psychologists have implicitly adopted a fairly idiosyncratic definition of the family— one that focuses almost exclusively on parents and mostly on mothers. The realization that most families contain two parents and at least two children has occurred slowly, and has brought with it recognition that children develop in the context of a diverse network of social relationships within which each person may affect every other both directly (through their interactions) and indirectly (i.e., through A ’s effect on B, who in turn influences C). The family is such a social network, itself embedded in a broader network of relations with neighbors, relatives, and social institutions. Within the family, relationships among siblings have received little attention until fairly recently. In this volume, the goal is to review the existing empirical and theoretical literature concerning the nature and importance of sibling relationships.