[Xmca-l] Do adults play?

[Greg Thompson]

If so, what does it look like?

I looked back at the suggestions sent to Caitlin Wubbena who had asked
about the role of play in places like academia. It seemed like very few of
the responses spoke to play in adulthood and fewer spoke to play in
academia.

So I'm wondering is the problem here that CHAT theorists are only
interested in "play" as a thing that gets the child into a more expansive
world (cf. Beth's concurrent thread on play among 1 year-olds)? Or is there
a literature on "play" across the lifespan? And to my opening question:
what would "play" look like in adolescence or adulthood?

So, does anyone have any good leads on the role of play in adulthood?

Seems like Bakhtin's work on Rabelais might be a start? But I don't know
enough about his work to know if Bakhtin was using the concept of "play."
(and other great satirists come to mind as well - Laurence Sterne's
Tristram Shandy seems a nice early example of "play" in writing that goes
beyond mere "comedy" and into a really complex form of "play", but there
must be earlier examples of this type of play).

Any ideas?
-greg


-- 
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
883 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson