Play and Reality

Stanton Wortham (swortham who-is-at abacus.bates.edu)
Sun, 7 Jan 1996 18:13:53 -0500 (EST)

There are of course many philosophical things to be said about issues of
play and reality. In approaching the issue empirically, I have found it
productive to explore the interpenetration of the two realms. That is,
the "reality" (say, the child and the teacher's actual relationship in the
classroom) is not simply a given. It is a social product. And it turns
out that such reality is produced in part by "pretend" or "hypothetical"
events.

So in the high school classroom, I found that many "hypothetical" examples
spill over into the actual relationships among teachers and students.
They use discussion of unreal things -- in particular, hypothetical
examples that include some of the participants as characters -- as
resources to manipulate their actual relationships with each other. In
such a case the relationships between "fantasy" and reality can be
systematically studied.

We have reason to believe that, no matter how hypothetical, objective
or framed the discourse, participants' relationships are always at issue.
In other words, there are always interpersonal functions to discourse, no
matter how we might like to stamp them out. The interesting site for me
is to examine how the apparently referential or "objective" functions of
the discourse themselves contribute to the ongoing relationships among
participants.

This becomes a more interesting issue in a culture with more than two
categories for reality and fantasy. Does anyone know of any references on
Latin American (particularly Mexican) conceptions of reality and fantasy
-- which seem in some cases to involve either a more fluid boundary than
Anglo-Saxon ones, or an intermediate category?

Stanton Wortham