This thesis explores the relationship between photography, play, and sound in Roy DeCarava’s photobook the sound i saw. Following the work of Peter Buse, the context for this exploration is the...Show moreThis thesis explores the relationship between photography, play, and sound in Roy DeCarava’s photobook the sound i saw. Following the work of Peter Buse, the context for this exploration is the dominant “melancholic paradigm” of photography studies. To move away from this paradigm focused on death, this article returns to the relationship between photography and theatre drawn by Roland Barthes, and goes in the direction of ‘play’, as opposed to death. It identifies three photographic sites: the photographer, the spectator, and the photograph, and argues for the presence of play at each site. By playing with the limits of the scene, the photographer embodies a playful relation to the world. Counterintuitively listening to the photograph, “seeing sound” the spectator advenes into the image as a playground of the senses. Finally, the photograph is rendered sonic through the feedback of overwhelming detail inherent to the medium. The article concludes by adjoining these three sites to see how DeCarava bridges the gap between practical and theoretical understandings of play in photography.Show less
This thesis argues that fiction and eventually play, accumulating into the interactive fiction of video games, can offer a toolset to help cultivate familiarity and understanding between cultures....Show moreThis thesis argues that fiction and eventually play, accumulating into the interactive fiction of video games, can offer a toolset to help cultivate familiarity and understanding between cultures. In a world where cultures are living closer together than before, tensions between cultures are sure to rise. These tensions stem from a lack of shared context causing misinterpretations of the other. I will refer to the works of Wilhelm Dilthey and Robin Collingwood, who have both developed theories of hermeneutics that emphasise the importance of context as meaning-giving. Similar contexts provide similar meaning between people and vice versa. A lack in familiarity thus constitutes a lack in understanding, which poses a problem for the cross-cultural encounter. They suggest a hermeneutic method based on empathy in order to increase our understanding of others. In the second chapter, I will illustrate how fiction functions as both a tool to impart knowledge and as an exercise in empathy, which aids the hermeneutic process, drawing on Suzanne Keen’s theory of narrative empathy. When engaging with fiction, audiences temporarily abandon their own context in order to step into the alternate world of fiction. This encourages open-mindedness and empathic understanding of others, which both are of vital importance to the hermeneutic process. In the third chapter, I’ll move on play, showing how it, like fiction, demands a certain openness of mind from the player so they can step into the play-world, which makes play very well-suited to learning by doing. This section on play will be largely informed by Johan Huizinga and Miguel Sicart’s work on play and playfulness respectively. In requiring participation from its audience, they are absorbed into the other, the strange, and the new, and provided with tools to make sense of it. As an immersive and interactive medium, video games thus allow players to gain an intuitive understanding of other cultures on their own terms.Show less
Master thesis | Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (MSc)
closed access
“There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes”, a Scandinavian saying, illustrating how one could live with and through weather, that is, how to weather. This visual ethnographic...Show more“There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes”, a Scandinavian saying, illustrating how one could live with and through weather, that is, how to weather. This visual ethnographic research was a way for me to live with and through the Covid-19 pandemic and the restrictions that it brought in my own country, the Netherlands. I have done fieldwork for almost three months at natural (outdoor) playground Het Woeste Westen (The Wuthering West), a place in Amsterdam where children can play with and in nature both ‘freely’ as ‘semi-organized’ with adult supervision. The study explores how children think of outdoor play as full of opportunities unavailable at home, what children do in the outdoors, and how their experiences shape their thinking about play and their relation to the material world. I have used audiovisual recordings, non-participating observations with interaction and visual elicitations. The result is a thesis in both written as ethnographic film form. The text includes both descriptions of observational video footage as written field notes, and transcribed video footage. The film aims at showing what I have seen and what I have been told by protagonists. My key research finding is that children weather by using the elements in their outdoor play. I argue that weather creates the world that they are in, which impacts how they play. Examples of this are moving more in winter weather to stay warm, jumping and sliding in mud as a fun activity and making fires to get warm and dry after a cold and rainy day.Show less
The objective of this paper is, then, to engage with the opposition between play and seriousness and the advantages of overcoming that opposition. The main question that will guide this inquiry is...Show moreThe objective of this paper is, then, to engage with the opposition between play and seriousness and the advantages of overcoming that opposition. The main question that will guide this inquiry is how and in what sense understanding reality as play and, thus, to live as players, is more advantageous over and above understanding reality in terms of seriousness. At first blush, this question is a question of hope inspired by the same aversion for violence that characterizes much of idealist seriousness. However, the question is fundamentally tragic, for it acknowledges that violence cannot be overcome. Therefore, the question is posed in terms of relative advantage, because the claim is not that the question of violence is resolved by play.Show less
What ontological changes does commercialization make to the relation of the crowd and the game played on the field? In chapter 1, I will use Johan Huizinga's ideas on sport and play from Homo...Show moreWhat ontological changes does commercialization make to the relation of the crowd and the game played on the field? In chapter 1, I will use Johan Huizinga's ideas on sport and play from Homo Ludens to prove that before we can speak of any changes brought about by commercialization, this relation must be accounted for nondualistically. In chapter 2, I will use Gadamer’s non-dualistic ontology of play and spectator that he develops in Truth and Method to prove that the spectator opens a possibility for play to transform into art, where, when the transformation is fully realized, the relation between play and spectator becomes one of “aesthetic non-differentiation”. I will also show that the proof of such a transformation having taken place in the case of football, hinges on a “perception of a meaningful whole” on the part of the spectator. In chapter 3, I will prove the existence of such a perception, by looking at the language of 'justice' surrounding football and I will prove also that these utterances point to a blockage in the transformation. In chapter 4, I will find the source of this blockage in commodification of football and its transformation into a spectacle.Show less
