An explorer in a cardboard land: emotion, memory, and the embodied experience of doing jigsaw puzzles

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how playing a game or engaging in a leisure activity provides the participant with an experience which integrates physical, mental, and emotional elements. I use an autoethnographic approach to study the process of completing jigsaw puzzles. The main focal point of the paper is the connection between engagement in a physical activity (completing a puzzle) and how the mind works and where it goes during the performance of that activity. The goal of the paper is to illustrate the connections between action and thought, and to show how one of the benefits, pleasures or rewards of engagement in leisure activities is the way these activities facilitate the wandering of our minds toward productive thoughts, images, insights, memories, and emotions. These findings may aid our understanding of the nature and appeal of playing games or participating in various types of leisure activities.

KEYWORDS:

• Leisure activities
• play
• jigsaw puzzles
• autoethnography
• emotion
• memory

Acknowledgements

This paper was originally constructed as a performance ethnography and was presented at the Canadian Qualitatives 2008 conference in New Brunswick, Canada, May 2008. Some of the work for this project was supported through a fellowship from the Jeanne & Dan Valente Center for the Arts & Sciences at Bentley University. I would like to thank the reviewers for their extremely helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Angela Cora Garcia is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Bentley University, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Global Studies. She conducts conversation analytic research on mediation, emergency phone calls, and computer-mediated communication, and ethnographic and interview studies of animal rescue organizations, sports, and leisure activities. She is the author of the 2013 textbook on conversation analysis, An Introduction to Interaction: Understanding Talk in Formal and Informal Settings published by Bloomsbury Academic Press.