The Ambiguity of Play

A pioneer in the scholarly study of play, Brian Sutton-Smith (1924–2015) advocated throughout his long career for an expansive understanding of how children and adults play. An early president of the Anthropological Association for the Study of Play (now the Association for the Study of Play) and a founder of the Children’s Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society, Sutton-Smith demonstrated through dozens of books and more than 300 scholarly articles that play is indeed worthy of serious scholarly inquiry. In this excerpt from The Ambiguity of Play (1997), Sutton-Smith offers a counterpoint to Kaprow by surveying some of the ways in which the rhetoric of play infuses scientific and cultural discourse.…