Playing by whose rules? Social life as an interdisciplinary playground

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Notes

1. This seems in keeping with the spirit of the Playgrounds and Battlefields project. Indeed this review might be viewed as one such ‘afterword’, and though not written on the blank pages of my copy of the book, it is nevertheless both a response to the book which is beyond editorial control and an addition to the conversations begun therein.

2. As is suggested by the phrase: ‘For all temporal and spatial dimensions of social settings’ (p. 57).

3. As is suggested when the authors write of play that it ‘is only possible if a break with the absolute determinism of rules and rulers take place’ (p. 61).

4. As Kattago explains: ‘The idea of the Murti-Bing pill comes from a Polish novel, Insatiability, in which people are unhappy and lead lives of decadence in the shadow of the advancing Sino-Mongolian Army. [Czeslaw] Milosz uses the analogy of the Murti-Bing pill as one that soothes and calms individual anxiety. Named after a supposed Mongolian philosopher, Murti-Bing, the pills promised a philosophy of life. They took away worries and made the person serene and happy’ (p. 80).