play
The spirit of play is also evident among Hindu holy men, such as
Rāmakrishna, a nineteenth-century Bengali saint and devotee of the god-
dess Kālī. He usurped the role of women at times by playing the role of
a nurturing mother figure and he played with the icon of the goddess Kālī
by feeding, speaking to and dancing with it. He assumed the persona of
the monkey deity Hanuman by sitting naked in a tree, eating fruit, and
tying a cloth around his waist to form a tail.
The pervasive nature of play in a cross-cultural context, and the contri-
butions of Victor Turner have inspired some anthropologists to propose
using it as a method with which to study religion. According to André
Droogers, play – methodological ludism – can operate as a mediator
between analytical and synthetic approaches that characterize the left and
right hemispheres of the brain. The method of play can help a researcher
overcome reductionism and the distinction between the insider and the
outsider because play possesses the capacity to deal simultaneously and
subjunctively with two or more ways of classifying reality. By means of
play, a researcher can enter playfully into the experience of the other
without bracketing out their religious reality and experience that reality
in an inter-subjective relationship with the people being studied. In other
words, a researcher plays with the informants in an attempt to reach under-
standing without converting to the reality of the informants. Therefore, the
subjunctiveness of play is used to develop an understanding of a different
reality, although this procedure is also subversive and connected to power,
which can be distinguished from play or merged with it in a power game.
Power can frustrate play or stimulate it, while play can articulate the ambi-
guity of reality. The liminal nature of play invites inversion, experimenta-
tion, a new mode of thinking, an inner dialogue of contrasting views that
can simultaneously embrace different orders of the normal and abnormal,
the usual and the exceptional and other opposites.
Jonathan Z. Smith, a historian of religions, is another scholar interested
in methodological aspects of play in the sense that he views religion and
the study of religion as an oscillation between play and not-play. Smith
focuses, for instance, on incongruity between elements within which reli-
gion plays rather than overcoming them. It might be the case that a
scholar of religion must attempt to reconcile two or more irreconcilable
positions. The scholar attempts to reconcile them by playing between
positions rather than seeking to overcome the differences. In this case,
play represents a boundary that manifests alternatives that it governs
itself.
Further reading: Cox (1969); Droogers (2006); Handelman and Shulman (1997);
Huizinga (1955); Kinsley (1975); Olson (1990); Smith (1978, 2004)