[Xmca-l] Re: Halloween, Yale and other complications

[greg.a.thompson@gmail.com]

Stanton wortham has done interesting work on role playing in the classroom and how the identities of the roles bleed into the identities of the role players.
-Greg 


Sent from my iPhone

> On Nov 10, 2015, at 7:27 PM, Ben DeVane <ben.devane@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> David,
> 
> I have some awareness of the literature on play, and I have to object to
> your characterization. I would invite correction, but most contemporary
> literature on the anthropology or sociology does not view play as a
> complete or even thorough "suspension of the rules regulating social life".
> In fact, the rules of social life are often thoroughly embedded in play,
> albeit altered in some way. Gary Alan Fine's work on live-action role play
> does an excellent job of examining the layers of "nested identities" that
> are made manifest in such play, and my colleague Thomas Malaby explores the
> blurred lines between work and play in contemporary games in depth (drawing
> on Ortner's work on Himalayan mountaineering).
> 
> Your example of the costume party serves to illustrate the point: All rules
> are not suspended. At a costume party, one cannot crudely insult the other
> guests, abuse the furniture, be careless with one's drink, or grope the
> other guests, without being ejected for misconduct. (I include groping
> because 'in-character' sexual harassment is an infamous problem in
> live-action role-playing games). And if one were to show up with a costume
> crudely mocking a number of participants, one might expect said partygoers
> to give voice to their displeasure.
> 
> If one were to show up at a Yale housemaster's Halloween party in costume
> as an oblivious, overpaid, and unqualified residential hall administrator,
> I doubt one would be warmly received. In said example, the resulting
> lecture would likely tackle the topic of civility instead of "thinking for
> one's self".
> 
> Ben
> 
> P.S. No rules were "set up" at Yale. Only educational materials about
> cultural sensitivity were distributed.
> 
>> On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 6:58 PM, David Preiss <preiss.xmca@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Thanks for the link, Peter! I will hear it.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> It is curious how Halloween became a mirror of how difficult is to deal
>> with cultural and other differences.
>> 
>> When is a costume celebratory and when is a costume offensive? There is not
>> clear-cut line.
>> 
>> One wears a costume because one is borrowing other (living or dead)
>> person’s identity to play a game. Indeed, wearing a costume always involves
>> some sort of pretense. I pretend to be somebody else as a part of an
>> activity that intends to be non-serious and involves and agreed (or
>> collaborative) suspension of the rules regulating social life.
>> 
>> Problem is we all take our (cultural, other) identities quite seriously.
>> Yet, if we don't suspend the serious rules we adhere to build our
>> identities at some point in our daily lives there is no chance at all to
>> make a costume party. And if we can’t make a costume party, we may become
>> not only boring but eventually fundamentalist.
>> 
>> Therefore, there has to be room to play, to make a costume party, at least
>> in a society that allows for some difference.
>> 
>> Question remains, how far can we go in this game so it does not become an
>> aggression instead of a celebration of difference. If we set up rules, as
>> some people made at Yale, we kill the party. If we don’t, we risk an
>> identity conflict. There is no clear way out of this.
>> 
>> 
>>> On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 5:09 PM, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu> wrote:
>>> 
>>> In case anyone's interested, I recently was a guest on the Atlanta NPR
>>> station, talking about political correctness (the implicit theme of
>> David's
>>> article on Yale).
>>> 2015 WABE (NPR) 90.5FM Atlanta: College PC Culture: It’s Not About
>>> Offending But Respecting
>> http://news.wabe.org/post/college-pc-culture-it-s-not-about-offending-respecting
>>> 
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: xmca-l-bounces+smago=uga.edu@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:
>>> xmca-l-bounces+smago=uga.edu@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of David Preiss
>>> Sent: Tuesday, November 10, 2015 2:22 PM
>>> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>>> Subject: [Xmca-l] Halloween, Yale and other complications
>>> 
>>> And so it goes with Halloween... It seems that this holiday is becoming a
>>> college issue. Here, a college master (I never liked the term because of
>>> the slavery implications it has), got in trouble because it did something
>>> different than the other university president: she asked the students to
>>> think independently. And the students were, of course, disgusted because
>> of
>>> the request.
>> http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new-intolerance-of-student-activism-at-yale/414810/
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> ***********************
> Ben DeVane, Ph.D
> Assistant Professor
> Psychological & Quantitative Foundations
> University of Iowa
> ***********************