III. Play and Contest As Civilizing Functions
“The view we take in the following pages is that culture arises in the form of play, that it is played from the very beginning... Social life is endued with supra-biological forms, in the shape of play, which enhances its value.”
Huizinga does not mean that “play turns into culture”. Rather, he sets play and culture side by side, talks about their “twin union”, but insists that “play is primary”.
Read more about this topic: Homo Ludens (book)
Famous quotes containing the words iii, play, contest, civilizing and/or functions:
“The army is the true nobility of our country.”
—Napoleon Bonaparte III (1808–1873)
“I’ve come close to matching the feeling of that night in 1944 in music, when I first heard Diz and Bird, but I’ve never got there.... I’m always looking for it, listening and feeling for it, though, trying to always feel it in and through the music I play every day.”
—Miles Davis (1926–1991)
“The contest ends at midnight tonight
But you can submit again, and again.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Since civilizing children takes the better part of two decades—some twenty years of nonstop thinking, nurturing, teaching, coaxing, rewarding, forgiving, warning, punishing, sympathizing, apologizing, reminding, and repeating, not to mention deciding what to do when—I now understand that one wrong move is invariably followed by hundreds of opportunities to be wrong again.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)