Gateways to Culture: Play, Games, Metaphors, and Institutions
In this essay I develop a case for games as a primitive form of culture and an early arrival at our ancestors’ cultural gates. I analyze the modest intellectual prerequisites for game behavior including the use of metaphor, a reliance on constitutive rules, and an ability to understand the logic of...
| Auteur principal: | |
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| Type de support: | Électronique Article |
| Langue: | Anglais |
| Vérifier la disponibilité: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | En cours de chargement...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Publié: |
Brill
2018
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| Dans: |
Journal of cognition and culture
Année: 2018, Volume: 18, Numéro: 1/2, Pages: 47-65 |
| Sujets non-standardisés: | B
Play
games
boredom
evolution
culture
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| Accès en ligne: |
Volltext (Verlag) |
| Résumé: | In this essay I develop a case for games as a primitive form of culture and an early arrival at our ancestors’ cultural gates. I analyze the modest intellectual prerequisites for game behavior including the use of metaphor, a reliance on constitutive rules, and an ability to understand the logic of entailment. In arguing for its early arrival during the late Middle and Upper Paleolithic, I develop a case for its powerful adaptive qualities in terms of both natural and sexual selection. I accept ecological dominance coupled with an increasing sense of self as primary sources of selection pressure. I show how these two factors threatened homeostatic balances ranging from low arousal and atrophy to malaise, depression, and anomie. I suggest that an antidote or adaptation was found in culturally-enhanced forms of play — that is, formal, rule-governed games. The upshot of this analysis is a broadened discussion of cultural adaptation from one that often focuses on cooperation, social complexity, and language to other fundamental issues related to survival — namely, increased leisure time, enhanced arousal needs, and the health and physical skills required for a hunter-forager existence. |
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| ISSN: | 1568-5373 |
| Contient: | In: Journal of cognition and culture
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1163/15685373-12340023 |