I. Nature and Significance of Play As A Cultural Phenomenon
“Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing.”
Huizinga begins by making it clear that animals played first.
One of the most significant (human and cultural) aspects of play is that it is fun. This fun aspect is celebrated by Brian Sutton-Smith in his book The Ambiguity of Play:
“Prime credit in play-theory terms for denying the puritanical and work contentions about play in modern times must go to Huizinga who argues that play is a most fundamental human function and has permeated all cultures from the beginning.”
Read more about this topic: Homo Ludens (book)
Famous quotes containing the words nature, significance, play, cultural and/or phenomenon:
“The poet’s, commonly, is not a logger’s path, but a woodman’s. The logger and pioneer have preceded him, like John the Baptist; eaten the wild honey, it may be, but the locusts also; banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized Nature for him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“When I play with my cat, who knows whether she isn’t amusing herself with me more than I with her.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“The sickly cultural pathos which the whole of France indulges in, that fetishism of the cultural heritage.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“Since everything in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is that the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)