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- Convenors:
-
Chika Watanabe
(University of Manchester)
Carrie Ryan (University College London)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
-
Kellynn Wee
(University College London)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 24 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
Fun is arguably an important aspect of human experience. Yet, ‘fun’ as an anthropological topic is under-theorised, and it raises methodological dilemmas, as explanations can kill the fun. This panel explores the challenges and possibilities for doing and undoing an anthropology of fun and play.
Long Abstract:
Games and playful methods are on the rise, from climate-related policy making and disaster risk reduction (IFRC Climate Centre n.d.) to health interventions for older people (Kletzel et al. 2021). Anthropologists and theorists of play have long argued that play is serious, as intent commitment and adherence to rules is an important part of the dynamics of play (Bogost 2016; Kalshoven 2012). This does not preclude fun; the seriousness of play is often what makes it fun. Similarly, a ‘serious’ action such as in one’s professional work can also be fun. Yet, if conveying our interlocutors’ experiences faithfully is one aim of ethnographic analysis, fun presents an anthropological challenge as it seems to resist verbalization. How do we know if people are having fun? Asking interlocutors in the moment of play often kills the fun (Csikzentmihalyi 1990). Can fun only be analysed retrospectively and at a distance, and is that a problem for anthropology? Could fun be observed phenomenologically, and if so, how? Is fun an emotion or affect if we tend to ‘have fun’ but not ‘feel fun’? What is the temporality of fun? Why has anthropology generally avoided the topic of fun, and of pleasure more generally? This panel explores the methodological challenges of and experimentations in studying fun and play, and what new anthropological theorizing becomes possible in the process. A ‘fun’ activity (like a bingo game!) will be part of the session and we welcome alternative forms of presentation.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 24 July, 2024, -Josiah Lulham (University of Melbourne)
Paper short abstract:
In theorising fun and play, it can be useful to experience playfulness. Based on workshops run for a live action role playing (LARP) community in Melbourne, Australia, this presentation invites attendees to participate in and reflect on a movement activity: an experiential offering to think with.
Paper long abstract:
Live Action Role Playing (LARP) games involve players dressing up and inhabiting a character and their world, embodying that character for the duration of a LARP event (see: Harviainen et al 2018). Role playing events are not sustained exclusively by LARP events, however, but by communities of role players committed to the enterprise of playing characters: a play community (see: De Koven 2013 [1983]). LARP is an activity that makes its participants vulnerable. The narrative situations in LARP can involve interpersonal conflicts as a source of dramatic yet playful action, and as such role playing communities go to great lengths to create play that is safe and consensual (Maersk et al 2019; Brown 2017). As part of my ethnographic fieldwork with role players in Australia I participated in and then organised LARP games. As an organiser, I ran three workshops with between forty and eighty role players in the lead up to a three day LARP event. The workshops my organising team and I ran were aimed at building a play community by inviting role players to embody a set of play principles that could undergird their role playing activities during the three days of play. In this short workshop, I will speak a little about the vulnerable fun of LARP, followed by running a movement exercise from our LARP workshops. The exercise will be followed by a reflexive discussion with participants. Consider this a playful offering for further theorising.
Susannah Crockford (University of Exeter)
Paper short abstract:
A theorisation of fun, drawing from long term fieldwork in Northern Arizona learning flow arts, such as hooping, juggling, and fire spinning. With live demonstrations, this paper elaborates a phenomenology of fun, and evaluates some methodological problems from having too much fun in the field.
Paper long abstract:
During my fieldwork undertaken in Northern Arizona since 2012, I learned the practice of flow arts. A contemporary form of circus arts, using hoops, staffs, juggling balls and other props (or toys), flow arts were a common feature of the new age spiritual scene I studied in Sedona - and I had a lot of fun in the field. Enlivened with live demonstrations (space permitting) and video, this paper elaborates how flow arts can express and embody a phenomenology of fun. Using ethnographic accounts of fire spinners, people who incorporated fire into their flow, as well as my own experiences of learning how to spin, I theorise fun together with play, fire, and spirituality using Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's work on flow states and Alfred Gell's on art. Fun is contrasted to work (or labour) to consider its fuzzy boundaries. It will then be characterised as flow, another amorphous mood that emerges from spontaneous, consensual, even magical action. However, fun also needs limits, otherwise too much fun can become risky, even harmful, to participants. This theoretical work will lead to a consideration of some methodological concerns that the interiority of the practice produces. Having fun in the field imbricates assumptions about what constitutes ‘real ethnography’, which I analyse with reference to the historical problematisation of the ‘suffering subject’ in anthropology. However, accepting fun can inhere yet more problems, and the paper concludes by considering various critiques of flow arts and spirituality, such as appropriation, colonialist universalism, and co-occurrence with conspiracy theories.
Dalia Iskander (University College London (UCL))
Paper short abstract:
I offer reflections on the use of photovoice to visually document fun as it unfolds as an embodied, sensorial, and intersubjective set of relationships. Fun, I argue, ‘opens’ children up to bodily (not just cognitive) attentiveness and participation, enabling them to 'do' their health differently.
Paper long abstract:
Fun is often mentioned in studies that use the participatory-action-research methodology of photovoice, and more generally in research with young people (Fournier et al. 2014). For example, Moletsane et al. (2007) acknowledge the significance of “having fun” in enabling young people in their photovoice project to identify, understand and interpret the serious issue of HIV/AIDS. As such, when mentioned, fun is often described as if it were a universal, taken-for-granted, and easily recognisable outcome of other processes, that helps sustain cognitive attention and involvement in other things. In contrast, in this paper, I show how photovoice is a useful methodology, for not only engendering fun, but for also visually documenting it as it processually unfolds, rather than after the fact. Photographs taken by me and 45 indigenous Pälawan children in the Philippines conducting a 3-month project designed to explore and alter related health practices depict fun, not as an outcome, but as an embodied, sensorial, and intersubjective set of unfolding relationships that ‘open’ children up to bodily (not just cognitive) attentiveness and participation. Rather than simply being an outcome of other processes that enables people to think differently, bodily participation that is fun emerges as a significant transformative mode of being that, in of itself, opens bodies up to ‘doing’ things differently, including, in this context, their health.
Akanksha Awal (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
Based on two separate accounts of humour and play in Uttar Pradesh, northern India: with young women and the police, this paper delves into the ethics of writing about fun. It questions how the anthropological focus on “story-telling” (McGranahan 2020; Mathur 2022) is reductive for anthropology.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is based on two separate accounts of humour and play in Uttar Pradesh, northern India. The first set draws on young women, with whom I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in 2015-16, who have invented a new form of love that they call “enjoying”. This form of love involves jokes, naughty gestures that bring fun and play into women’s lives. The second set include the policemen, during fieldwork in 2022-23, who tell jokes caricaturising people’s distress. These moments of jokes, police told me, were to lighten the mood, as the police tried to get a laugh from the distressed party. Trying to parse the jokes in these two sets of “fun”, relaying the context, and making the readers see and even experience the fun in writing seemed ethically palpable in the first case, but morally dubious in the case of the policemen. By drawing on the ethics of writing about fun, I ask how an anthropological focus on “story-telling” or the outputs of the research (McGranahan 2020; Mathur 2022) deflects from the difficult task of deep hanging out in the field. Hanging out in the field, developing empathy in the contexts where “fun” is inappropriate, points at how the presence of the ethnographer shifts power. Ethnographic fieldwork, therefore, is a politically powerful way for anthropologists to engage in the world, that should also be considered as one of the outputs of ethnographic research.
Julis Koch (IHEID)
Paper short abstract:
In this speculative paper, I reflect on players’ instances of ‘critical humour' and ‘senseless fun’ as a meaningful byproduct of a game simulation gone wrong. I ask what role does ‘fun’ obtain in a simulated, but serious humanitarian context? Fun for whom, created with whom, and about what?
Paper long abstract:
The educational practice that has been established in law enforcement and foreign affairs departments since Prussia’s Kriegsspiel the 19th century, has found its way to the humanitarian sector: serious games. They are designed to explore helpful behaviours in the use of data collection and collation; created to develop analytical mindsets; and employed to train and ‘try out’ emergency responders for the ground. But ‘it’s not all fun and games anymore’, as one of my interlocutors commented on innovative practice in the sector. On the basis of six months of field work with serious game designers, humanitarian practitioners and aspiring emergency responders, this paper explores the serious implications of ‘fun’ games: at what point does a simulation turn into a serious reality albeit removed from its original purpose and design? What role does the imitation and recreation of context play in such a game? What are the implications of a game simulation gone wrong, expressed by participants’ in instances of ‘critical humour’ to process ‘meaningless fun’?
Drawing on critical humanitarian studies and the sociology of creativity and play, this paper seeks to contribute to these literatures by reflecting on ‘fun’ in its serious humanitarian context: fun created by whom, with whom, and about what? By asking this question, it seeks to problematise the notion of ‘simulation’ as representing a ‘real’ emergency for all participants (players, designers and game observers) to the same degree. What role do abstractions and simplifications in game mechanics play in defining notions of its success or failure?
Jamie Coates (University of Sheffield)
Paper short abstract:
Using case examples among young Chinese people in Japan, I explore how the anthropology of play helps us theorise togetherness among migrants beyond standard representational signifiers, such as community, family, and ethnicity
Paper long abstract:
Within this paper I explore how the anthropology of play helps us theorise togetherness beyond its standard representational signifiers, such as community, family, and ethnicity. Drawing inspiration from play and enactment theory, I argue that dominant theories of identity and togetherness often assume too much sincerity and stability in the collective labels people use to describe their affinities with one another. To provide a counterpoint, I trace the enactment and spread of ‘in-jokes’, such as one about ‘the God of LED/LSD’, during ethnographic fieldwork with young Chinese migrants in Tokyo. These jokes, I argue, despite their seemingly insincere and nonsensical nature, afford a playful way to create new affinities and share them with differing networks of people. I extend my analysis to examine the ways play and joking can help us better navigate the paradoxical qualities of migrant sociality more generally. As many scholars of play contend, the ‘as if’ qualities of play help us better understand social life because it moves away from questions of whether experiences or identities are ‘authentic’ or ‘sincere’ (Seligman et al. 2008). Jokes and play can represent ways in which insincere and non-indexical forms of communication might be more salient performances of togetherness than other supposedly meaningful expressions of community. This focus helps us move away from many associations made with migrants, whether as ‘suffering subjects’ (Robbins 2013) or people constantly squeezed through an ‘ethnic frame’ (Caglar and Glick Schiller 2018).
Imogen Spray (University of Auckland)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I explore how fun mooded atmospheres are produced at high school, who is drawn in and who is excluded, what kinds of performances constitute fun moods, and what it means for subjects to be affected in the right way by the right objects.
Paper long abstract:
After playing an invented basketball-badminton game with Sophie and Rebecca one afternoon during free time in PE class, where we attempted to hit shuttlecocks into the basketball nets with our badminton racquets, I wrote in my fieldnotes that, “I feel embarrassed; I feel childish.” I was “caught up” in the fun. “I feel that I completely stepped outside of an adult role. I worry about my role and my relationships with students and with staff”.
My retrospective embarrassment at the fun I had playing with the high school students reflects some of the methodological and ethnographic challenges fun presents. Drawing on a year of ethnographic research with year 10 (aged 14-15) students at a high school in Christchurch, New Zealand, I reflect on how fun emerges at school as a mooded atmosphere, a shared participatory mood. Viewing fun as a mood locates fun between selves, as something that is both felt privately, internally, and shared and “interrelational” (Trnka 2020: 146). Here arises the possibility that one may produce a fun atmosphere without feeling or having fun. Mooded performances, Emily Martin (2007) points out, may also be modalities for the emergence of particular forms of subjectivity. In this paper, I explore how fun mooded atmospheres are produced at school, who is drawn in and who is excluded, what kinds of performances constitute fun moods, and what it means for subjects to be affected in the right way by the right objects.
Yaojing Wang (The University of Edinburgh)
Paper short abstract:
Facing the challenge that fun is experienced but not acknowledged, this paper explores fun as both an ephemeral experience and a cultural representation through the case of Chinese gamers who deny fun in gaming but yearn for it in work, and thus further examines the fun in non-play situations.
Paper long abstract:
Individuals are often presumed to be faithful receptors of fun, capable of accounting for fun experiences immediately or retrospectively, albeit with diverse expressions. Yet, how fun can be captured when it is experienced but rejected from being acknowledged, described, or represented? Drawing upon my ethnographic study with Chinese working adult gamers, this paper explores this issue by seeing fun as both an ephemeral experience and a cultural representation. Building on this perspective, it proposes a potential approach to reconceptualize fun in light of its disconnection from play.
A paradox observed among many working adults in urban China is that, despite their daily engagement in videogames, they avoid discussing the fun within it. Instead, individuals dismiss the fun as unimportant and traceless, asserting that they don’t play for fun. This paradox may result from people’s strategic reconfiguration of their experience of fun in order to navigate the stigma against fun experience in an increasingly competitive and self-entrepreneurial Chinese society. However, this doesn't imply that they are not drawn by fun during play. Rather, it reveals the duality of fun – as ephemeral fun that exists solely in the moment of being experienced, and the representative fun that can only be referred to by individuals retrospectively according to their socio-cultural understanding of it. This duality of fun is crystalized not only through Chinese working adults’ denial of fun in play but also their yearning for it in work, and thus also provides an opportunity to revisit the fun appearing in non-play situations.
Pallavi Laxmikanth (Australian National University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the pleasures of eating mangoes in the face of dietary restrictions for type 2 diabetes in India, and conceptualises a means to locate fun by examining that which tries to constrain it. It situates fun as an 'overflow', a state of being taken in by the object of pleasure.
Paper long abstract:
Mangoes, whose consumption is restricted for type 2 diabetes in India, form a focal point where 'mazaa', the Hindi-Urdu lexical cousin of fun, is possessed, stolen, or arrives (Kabir 2020, Anjaria and Anjaria 2020). Restricting mangoes is akin to taking the fun out of one’s life; a tragedy that is avoided through careful calibration of medication, blood sugar measurement, and dietary austerities. In this paper, I draw upon 2 years of ethnographic research on the foods, medications, and technologies involved in type 2 diabetes care in urban, middle-class India. Using mango eating practices, I locate fun by examining the discourses and enactments of restriction, disgust, and moral disdain that try to contain and constrain it, and highlight the ruptures and fault lines from which fun re-emerges. I characterize this as an ‘overflow’ — a subjective state in which the body is performative of being taken in by the object of its pleasure and appears to lose willful control of itself. Fun possesses as it is possessed. For my participants, mango eating elicited ‘pichi’ or madness, alongside acts of ‘naughty’ thievery, rebellion, gifting, reminiscing, play, one-upmanship, and sensual engagements of slurping, licking, and handling fleshy chunks of yellow with bare hands. Between medical monitoring and madness, dietary control and the panacea of freedom lies a subjectivity of fun that both invites and threatens intervention, which I highlight as a means for us to methodologically recognize fun and its role in (de)constructing seriousness.