Philosopher of Fun: Brian Sutton-Smith, 1924-2015
Brian Sutton-Smith. The photo is from the Strong National Museum of Play, where Sutton-Smith was a scholar in residence and which holds the archive of his research materials on play.
For the most part, life is pretty serious business. Sutton-Smith found that we could learn a thing or two from children; kids often make light of (and escape from) the adult-run world they inhabit with jokes and stories that push the boundaries their authoritative overlords put in place.
For example, Ink, dink, pen and ink, I smell a great big stink, And it comes from, Y.O.U. is one of the few poems Sutton-Smith singles out from his early work on play, which began in the late 1940s, when he studied unorganized games and play in New Zealand children. He spent three years observing and collecting data on play in primary school children from all over the country, resulting in a 900-page dissertation.
This article by Kate Wheeling first appeared at our media partner site Pacific Standard under the title “What We Can Learn From Brian Sutton-Smith.” It is reprinted here by permission.
According to Sutton-Smith, play, like sex, is “a pleasure for its own sake, but its genetic gift is perhaps the sense that life, temporarily at least, is worth living.”
In 1974, Sutton-Smith wrote How to Play With Your Children (and When Not To) with his wife, which provided advice to new parents about how to tease their children during their first year of life, such as tickling, making funny faces, or “hanging the baby upside down by the ankles.” Teasing, Sutton-Smith argued, plays an important role in the socialization of children across many cultures. Simply put, teasing is basically parent-guided play, initiating a child’s experiences with potentially threatening aspects of society (so that when they finally interact with non-family members, they don’t totally freak out). According to Sutton-Smith,”playful parent-child relationships,” and more specifically, the emotional surprises associated with these kinds of teasing, lead to flexible, friendlier, and happier children. In 2008, he wrote:
Children who grow up with early access to this kind of play and who enjoy ludic support for the whimsy of their inner lives are likely to be more sophisticated in their mature social lives and more diplomatically adept in their everyday social relations … All this is particularly true as these worlds of pretend meanings gradually take on the successive personal colorations of make believe, wishful thinking, day dreaming, primary processing, irony, allegories, bathos, parody, euphemism, innuendo, inversion, and various rhetorics. These early subjective pretences serve as a first training for the sophisticated semantics of the social world, its multitude of languages, and its ubiquitous and varied media.
When Sutton-Smith began his unique research, he was essentially the only researcher on the playground, but today his specialty is a widely studied branch of psychology. Looking back on a life dedicated to the study of play, Sutton-Smith once mused that his work may have all been an attempt to convince his mother his own “rough and tumble” play habits growing up in the windswept hills around New Zealand’s Island Bay were normal and formative. “Nice boys are allowed to act quite horribly,” he wrote, “as long as they are playing.”
