Review: The Association for the Study of Play Conference

I am currently sitting in the airport on my way home from the 34th annual conference for The Association for the Study of Play (TASP), held in sunny Tempe, AZ.
I gave a presentation about how parkour is a form of grown-up freeform play, as opposed to soccer or working out at the gym. Freeform or "unstructured" play is something you see kids do all the time, but grown-ups generally stop doing it all together. Parkour does not, and instead encourages grown-ups to keep that kid spirit of finding play in every aspect of your environment, and seeing play as important as work or leisure.
But enough about me, onto the conference. Most of the conference was dominated by early childhood development researchers (0-5 years old), and how play is beneficial to them. Which is great, I'm all for it. However, that sort of meant that left the rest of us anthropologists, sociologists, pirmatologists, psychologists, older kid play specialists, and other researchers out on our own. We were heard, for sure, but the conference was truly dominated by them; there were only seven sessions out of 21 that didn't feature early childhood studies (this count includes workshops and panels).
But all moaning aside, it was a great conference, for one thing because you didn't have to explain why you were studying play, or why it was important/beneficial/worth studying/etc. I reluctantly stayed through Saturday for the session on the use of digital photography in play studies, and it was the best session of the whole event. Two of the women were doing exactly what I'd like to do as a study and research focus (namely giving people (kids) cameras as learning and research tools and see what they come up with). Unfortunately, neither of them good answer exactly what they were going to do with their research once it was done. Dr. Laurelle Phillips had expanded the use of cameras at her school to other classrooms, but the school was located on her university so they could afford to buy three cameras per classroom. Doctoral candidate Carol Borran wasn't sure what she was going to do with her work other than get her thesis. I spent the majority of Saturday talking with her and Dr. Pat Broadhead, and they were wonderful, both encouraging me to take time off from my research studies but also pursue a doctoral degree in my area of study. Dr. Broadhead said I could be Professor of Playful Spaces, which I must admit does sound cool. Usually the whole reason to go to conferences is to network, and while I regret I really didn't get into it until the very last day, I got to see some amazing research and speaking with those two women was wonderful; just to hear their attitude about things, to get an outsider's view of American attitudes to policy and pushing back against "the man."
There was a paper I wished I'd seen but was canceled, which was a study of portrayal of masculinity through MMA fighting.
I got some good sun, good experience presenting (I think this was the first time ever I wasn't really nervous going up and presenting in front of a group. I almost wondered what was wrong with me), and some good brain stimulation. So all in all good stuff.
For now I will leave you with a meditative question from the chair of the conference, Dr. David Kuschner: "If there is a toy in the woods and there is no one to play with it, is it really a toy?"

Power of communication: "In My Language"

This video, which I found on the blog neuroanthropology, was created by a woman who is severely autistic. The first three minutes show the woman interacting with her environment, and then the woman, through typing on the computer, provides a translation of what she describes as her native language. She is severely critical of people who do not understand and appreciate how she views the world and who call her non-communicative.

This video is fascinating to me on so many levels (warning: possible spoilers). Watching her behavior from a psychologists' standpoint is interesting with observing her self-stimulating behavior and how her mind is processing all this. But it also from a visual anthropology perspective. She chose to include these specific examples of her language in the movie, and even though she explicitly says they do not symbolize anything in particular, I wonder why these were chosen. Why did she choose to use a visual format to explain herself? Was this video made originally for Youtube, or some other audience? There is obvious editing, and not so much a storyline but definite parts to the movie. How did she decide on this structure, and who helped her, if anyone? Did anyone else film her (from what I can tell I don't think so). How was she aided in this project? She gives credits at the end of her film, but they're all thanks as opposed to assigned jobs.

From a communication studies and linguistics perspective, she's challenging the definition of language. She argues that she has a discourse (several, actually) with her environment, with the objects in her house; they even get a credit at the end of the film. She also uses the "dominant language," as she describes it, to explain herself and language and berate those who do not appreciate hers for what it is.

She also points out that most of us would probably not look at her on the street, or deliberately look away, which is absolutely correct, which makes a great statement about humans' fear of the different, "disabled," and unknown.
(end spoilers)

So a really interesting video on many levels, and I'm sorry my visual anthropology class is essentially over this quarter because I think it'd be great to show to the class and have them discuss it.

More remote sensing

A new collection of Mayan ruins has been discovered deep in the Guatemalan jungles thanks to satellite imaging. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23282045/?GT1=10856

And you were using it to watch T.V.

Technology: old and new

Where does the time go? Not into sleeping, I'll tell you that much. Here are a few of the lovely tidbits I've picked up in the past month, all with a technology/innovation theme:

First pair of ice skates discovered.

A 2300-year-old shipwreck carrying wine cargo was also discovered.

The Lemelson center for the study of innovation and invention. Makes the argument that science, technology, innovation, invention, and play are all connected (we've established this already, but for all the slow-learning, non-innovators out there, there is this). I actually found a whole bunch of groups that were working on this same idea - a collection of sci tech museums, conferences, and several academic groups. There is definitely a trend to combine computer science studies with creativity.

Time to Get Opinionated

Nothing worth doing an entire blog about, but just some stuff I needed to get off my chest:

Discourse analysis and semiotic analysis for that matter are much, much, much too broad and loosey goosey to be of much use. If you believe Foucault that EVERYTHING can be a discourse, then you'll spend your entire life trying to determine if every thought you share or action you take is your own creation or just another discourse that has been ingrained into you. Semiotics is a different story in that you can say anything symbolizes anything, but you end up in the same pickle.

Power DOES exist, thank you very much.

There needs to be a word that describes the study of Family Structure in Archaeology. Maybe I just coined it, I'll have to look it up.

Graduate school is very time consuming, and while I love it, I wish I could afford to be a starving college student so I had more time to work on my schoolwork (I say this while writing in my blog instead of doing my reading), because they expect you read (ahem *skim*) so freakin' much! And fit in research papers and thesis work at the same time.

Anthropology needs to be a more holistic approach. There, I said it. Maybe I'm taking too much of a "four fields" approach, maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, maybe I'm oversimplifying, whatever, but I say that the study of human beings needs to be an integrated study, looking at all aspects of being human, bones to brains, and separation of biological from cultural from physical from linguistic anthropology is going about things all wrong. We need integration of the disciplines, we're supposed to be studying human beings as a whole, not looking at bits and pieces and then arguing about how these bits and pieces are the one truth, or how they obviously don't fit together, so the other bits and pieces must be wrong. ACK!

The U.S. Government is making it harder and harder to leave, visit, work, or even share ideas with the U.S. So much for freedom and liberty and international ambassador-ness and all that.

Man single-handedly building replica of Stonehenge

This guy in Michigan is successfully experimenting with ways of moving several ton blocks into a Stonehenge-like formation.

http://j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/posts/moving_big_rocks.

Some links to get your brain churning in the new year

First is an interesting blog I stumbled upon, and it may become part of my list: http://neuroanthropology.wordpress.com/

Next is an article that by itself isn't so wow-zowy, but the fact that they are addressing the issue of just how important movement is to children's development is wonderful.

Finally, I stumbled upon this program whose soul purpose is to get teachers to use puppets more in their teaching arsenal. Too cool!

Gene Expression's take on Diamond vs. the Cultural Anthropologists

I'm not sure why this argument has flared up again, but both popular anthropology blogs Gene Expression and Savage Minds are talking about Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel, and some cultural anthropologists' reaction to it. I say some, because while I agree with a lot of Gene Expression's post and what they have to say, I feel they over-generalize what "cultural anthropologists" think, feel, and say about the book and their philosophy and approach to the sciences in general. Or maybe I just live in a bubble where everyone uses the scientific method and can deal with messy or generalized answers. Probably the latter, from the feedback I've heard from others.

I hope the answer lies somewhere in the middle; that while there are many vocal cultural anthropologists that are completely relativist, there are others who are objective and don't balk at information that doesn't fit into their schema. Or maybe that's just me and I'm in the wrong graduate program.

Journalism vs. Anthropology

A friend asked me the other day why I was changing my career goals from being a journalist to an anthropologist. I couldn’t give her a good answer at the time. I mumbled something about low pay and a competitive drive that I just seemed to lack when it came to the written word.

But it got me wondering and really looking at my reasons why I was switching gears, and now even though the moment is passed, I’d like to answer her question in full:

Being a good journalist and a good anthropologist are actually very similar. You have to find a good question and try to answer it. You must do hours of background research and familiarize yourself with the subject. You must figure out who to ask and what questions to ask them. Then there are more hours of research and compiling your information into one cohesive picture. When you finally think you have enough information to give your readers the right message, you must write it all up in a readable, thought-provoking way, and even then only if you’re lucky will your work be published—unless you’ve been asked by your boss to do this work in which case there’s probably a ridiculously short deadline and it’s not something you particularly care about and you just slap something together and call it a day.

My Journalism teacher in college had his doctorate in Anthropology, and he was one of the best journalists I met, if however also one of the most jaded. Anthropology is the perfect accessory to an aware, mindful journalist, just as journalism and writing are essential skills for an anthropologist who wants to get their findings across to their audience.

Where the line is drawn for me, however, is somewhere among the details. The depth with which you explore the subject matter. The reasons behind why this research is being done. The pace and attitude behind the work. With Anthropology, you are (in theory) painstakingly recording people’s minute behavior and details about their situations. With Journalism you must sum up an entire world event in 1200 words or less (this is a skill, by the way, which is being taught more and more often by social science teachers). Anthropology is more interactive; you have to get to know the people you’re researching. In Journalism you are expected to keep your objective distance and not get involved in your story. To even acknowledge in the story that you were there is considered a bit tacky.

Anthropology seems to emphasize the journey, whereas Journalism emphasizes the destination. For me, an MA in Anthropology offers me the chance to study different topics I love in greater detail, and to apply them to different areas of life, not just in print or other forms of media. An MA in Journalism would have given me a better idea on how to hunt, capture, and skin the story, and not much else. For some, that’s enough. For me, the academic side of me won over the practical side and decided to give the whole researcher gig a shot.

That to me is the final kicker. I remember so often sitting at my computer, typing up all the wonderful stories I’d heard from researchers and scientists into an abbreviated article, and how I kept thinking to myself that I would much rather be the one out there doing the research and being interviewed about it than the other way around. That was why I made the leap. To get out there into the world and see what I could do, not just sit back and write about it.

Chinese Authorities Execute 10 Million...Toys

Not really, just an awesome story from the Onion (what? It's cultural commentary!)

Communities and Brains

This was interesting article about how living in larger households, or in this specific study living as a couple versus living separately after a divorce, consumes less resources overall and is better for the environment. Communes for the environment!

Speaking of groups, I found this an interesting use of group loyalty and playing with America's usual perceptions of two supposedly polar opposite institutions, or just a cheap way for the military to get some publicity: Miss Utah, who is also an active member of the military, will be competing for the title of Miss America. What's interesting is the military is actually paying for her training and travel to the competition.

On to brains.

One study has found that a high fever ( > 100.4) reduces symptoms of autism in children. Apparently the fever connects or stimulates nerve cells in the child's brain. I'm curious why they only studied children (2-18) and not grown-ups. Perhaps because grown-ups don't go to the hospital when they have a high fever.

And finally, 5-year-old chimps have better short term memories than college students, according to one study series done by researchers at Kyoto University. What was amazing to me was that the chimps were memorizing things in less than 3/10 of a second sometimes. That seems a) impossible for a human brain, and b) an adaptation to living in a setting of constant potential predation (baby chimps are tasty!). However, and even the researchers admit this, the real test would be to see how the young chimps fare against human kids.

My teddy bear was named Meano

I am curious to see how other people feel about the controversy surrounding the woman in Sudan who allowed her students to vote for the name "Muhammed" for the class teddy bear. People were calling for her execution, and frankly she was lucky to make it out of Sudan.

First off, I agree that it was culturally insensitive to name the teddy bear, an animal and an icon, after the prophet. However, I think the Sudanese people's reaction to this has been completely overblown and should not have escalated as far as it did. It reminds me a lot of the Netherlands cartoon fiasco that happened a little over a year ago.

Just a random thought here, but what I find interesting is that the students didn't seem to think naming the bear Muhammed was all that offensive. Is it possible that they did not see the teddy bear as an animal or a simple icon but as something a little more real? Kids have the amazing ability to have a gray area of reality/pretend where teddy bears can have feelings, the child is a super-hero, there really is a dragon they have to kill everyday on the way home from school, etc. This aspect of childhood is one we cherish looking back on as grown-ups, and yet at the same time scold children for "pretending" and not seeing things "as they are," and then there are events like this that take something very innocent and playful and - pardon my impartiality here - completely trash it! It's just sad that childhood has become so charged with grown-up problems. Don't even get me started on the poor kids who can't play outside for fear of being shot.

Forced symbolism

Just a little, small, teeny, tiny observation: maybe I haven't read enough interpretivist anthropologists' essays to really get a true feeling of the genre here, but it irks me to no end when such an author takes a fairly large and dominant symbol -- the body, the devil (Douglas, Limon) -- and proposes to show how the culture(s) they're studying use and embody it, then go off on other completely different tangents and every once in a while throw in sentences like "the devil comes in many forms." "It is common for such cults to dance." That is too vague to be of much use. It is an almost painful treasure hunt going through their text picking out where they explicitly examine the symbolism and metaphors.
I suspect because they are not positivists they lay their findings out for the readers and expect the reader to come to the same conclusions they did, but just to be "sure" they'll throw in a little hint now and then: "you might say it's...evil? *Dr. Evil pinky*."
Call me simple, but if an author is going to examine symbols so deeply embedded in our culture, in ourselves, they need to be a little more demonstrative in their writing and analysis of their examples.

Who cares

This thought process originally started with me feeling sorry for myself, but then it lead to a really interesting question:

I'm fascinated with the things I've been learning and studying lately about play and all the different tendrils it has in other elements of human life, otherwise I wouldn't be pursuing it. And obviously somebody cared enough to study it and write about it, and somebody at a publishing company thought it was worth publishing. But who really cares about this stuff?

Honestly.

I don't mean that as a sarcastic or rhetoric question. I mean, who else in the world is interested in how humans play with each other and how it effects their lives, how they work, how they love, how they are seen by society and how play lets them try on other roles and grow skills. What about how humans play with themselves (and I don't mean that in a dirty way), and what kind of learning do we do while playing versus while studying or memorizing.

This of course leads to the more general question of what is worth studying, and why? Why are certain seemingly insignificant things given millions of dollars for research while other equally insignificant things aren't? How and why do we place value on knowledge? What is the process? And the difference between what's considered important knowledge by the public versus the government or the military or academics.

All of this is a bit existential, but my point is there is reasoning behind why we value knowledge, and which bits of knowledge, and certain types of knowledge. Even if it doesn't seem like it. And while I'm certainly not going to try and tackle that particular question, and it's important to me to ask about the knowledge I'm going after and what its applications are in the bigger scheme of things, i.e. would other people even care.

Old is the new new

Older articles, but still interesting.

This is an older post (like a week) on how the internet is changing how people listen to, watch, and more specifically tell stories. I was a bit disappointed he focused solely on YouTube essentially, but still worth reading.

This came out awhile ago as well; a couple of scientists have found new evidence to indicate that there were red-headed Neanderthals.