A more serious introduction: a critique of the inherent racism in early comparative play theory

Comparative cultural analyses pose problems methodologically and ethically. Three years ago, the International Journal of Play was offered the opportunity to publish a chapter of an early twentieth-century work, Play and Art by the Finnish art historian Yrjö Hirn, which had yet to appear in print in English. Predating Homo Ludens (1938), the much-celebrated history of play and culture written by Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, the Hirn chapter presented in this issue was originally published in Swedish in 1916. Joel Lehtonen's Finnish translation appeared in 1918 as ‘Lasten leikeistä,' the fourth chapter of Leikkiä ja taidetta, Play and Art. The editors recognized the historical value of the Hirn translation of ‘Barnlek'/‘Lasten leikeistä' or ‘Children's Games' and saw immediately the problematic, antiquated, harmful racist language in the Hirn chapter – words describing games of ‘savages,’ ‘primitives,’ and comparing them to those of ‘civilization.’ We felt that the work could only be published alongside critical scholarship, and to pass on this opportunity is to miss, as educators say, a teachable moment.

Chris Bateman, game philosopher graciously secured the attached historical essay by two Finnish game scholars, Olli Sotamaa and Jaako Stenros. Their work places Hirn’s study of games within the historical frame of Hirn’s work The Origins of Art, or the Origins of Primitive Art, depending on the translation. Yet this editor and her colleague read the work presented here with new eyes as their city and cities around the world exploded in protest over the racist police brutalization and murder of George Floyd. This essay attempts to take a hard look at the early racist history of play theory, particularly the anthropology of art and of play, and how it and we have grown and must grow farther from a racist lens. Play is not always pretty, nor is scholarship, but close examination of both reveals sets of values that must not be overlooked as something long ago or irrelevant.

The translator of this previously untranslated piece into English offered a simple header:

Keeping in mind that the original text was published in 1916 and the Finnish version on which this translation is largely based in 1918, I have chosen not to modify or tone down expressions such as ‘savages’ or ‘barbarian nations,’ with respect to anachronism.

This serious IJP introduction wishes to make three points:

• No such language should be published without critical discussion.

• Scholars need to have carefully collected data before they write about other cultures in a comparative work.

• The comparative language of social science study has changed, but latent racism has not disappeared. How we teach what we teach, and the scholarship we write or endorse, must take a hard look at the origins of scholarship itself.

Folklorist Alan Dundes writes in his essay, ‘Anthropology and The Comparative Method:’

Anthropology in its beginnings was unmistakeably comparative. If one were to consider Herodotus as a precursor of anthropologists, it is clear that he evinced a keen interest in comparing Greek customs with those of other peoples … . If we place the comparative method as practiced by Tyler, Frazer and others at the end of the nineteenth century in intellectual context, we can see that the rationale was not really so unsystematic. The critical underlying premise was that of unilinear evolution, in which it was all assumed that all peoples had progressed or were progressing from initial savagery through barbarism to the final stage of civilization. Inasmuch as it was (wrongly) understood that all forms of savagery were absolutely identical—and that the ancestors of “civilized” Englishmen and Frenchmen were equivalent to present day savages and primitives–it made perfect sense to evoke the comparative method. (1986, pp. 125–126)

Hirn aligned himself with E. B. Tyler, one of the most well-known armchair anthropologists of his day, a term created years later describing those who did fieldwork in the comfort – and limitations – of their library armchairs.

These and other varieties of the comparative method were formulated by nineteenth-century armchair theorists who had little or no actual contact with so-called primitive peoples. The onset of rigorous fieldwork dealt a deathblow to such highly speculative comparative musings. (Dundes, 1986, p. 127)

The research of the much-celebrated American anthropologist Franz Boas was considered the first to challenge generalized, dangerous racist comparisons. Boas and his students – Sapir, Mead, Hurston, and Benedict showed the actual cultural complexities of cultures both near and far through direct observation and ethnographic fieldwork (Anderson, 2019; Baker, 1998; Boas, 1911, 1928; King, 2019; Stocking Jr., 1966). Particularly relevant for readers of this journal, Boas’ protégé Margaret Mead was herself known to tell her Columbia University students that if they wished to study cultural processes, it was there for all to see in their local American playground. Like bias, culture is here as well as ‘over there’ (MacClancy, 2002).

Hirn’s main claim to fame in the study of play is two-fold. One – he predates the much-referenced Johan Huizinga as a broad thinking play theorist, both of whom link art and play as fundamentally paired. Huizinga’s writings, still quoted at conferences as recently as last year, themselves contain similar racist language, comparing those who were considered civilized and those who were not.

Yet, ironically, Huizinga argued for tolerance and acceptance, particularly in the shadow of World War II. Hirn’s second claim to fame is his careful description of toys and game genres. For those interested in understanding such material culture, it makes sense to seek out his works, although at this writing, the entirety of Barnlek has itself yet to be translated into English.

Huizinga, like Boas, can be seen as a transitional phase in the study of comparative humanity (Darnell, 1998; Simpson, 2018) yet Huizinga too used the racist language found in Hirn:

in this sphere of sacred play, the child and the poet are at home with the savage. His aesthetic sensibility has brought the modern man closer to this sphere than the “enlightened” man of the 18th century ever was. (Huizinga, 1938/1950, 26)

This celebration of the aesthetic, historical value of play hides more cringe-worthy language. Should we throw such theorists out? Should we ignore Heidegger in his anti-Semitism (Mitchell & Trawny, 2017)? Piaget in his far-reaching sexism (Piaget, 1965)? What of Darwin’s own ignorance of human variation in his search for The Descent of Man and also in The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals? (Darwin, 1871, 1872; Rose, 2009)

Paul Ekman writes of Darwin’s Expression:

It is without a doubt a brilliant book, forecasting many of the fundamentals of not just facial expression but emotion itself. Expression is the first pioneering study of emotion and in my view should be considered the book that began the science of psychology. (Ekman, 2009, p. 3449)

The danger in academic writing is that threads of research are often picked up as a lost ball and then carried into different more dangerous games. From Darwin’s useful and scientifically documentable connection of humanity to our animal cousins, Herbert Spencer expanded upon the notion of culture itself as unilinear and evolutionary. This idea, long since disproven, resonated with those who saw evolution as evidence for racial inferiority. For a recent discussion on the social invention of the idea of race, along with a fine educational curriculum, see the American Anthropological Association website for its exhibit on the invention of race. (https://www.americananthro.org/LearnAndTeach/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=2062).

Somehow misunderstanding Boas and Malinowski, Huizinga, too, uses language of cultures progressing and regressing, of civilization itself as a unilinear thing. Calling his third chapter, ‘Play and Contest as Civilizing Functions’ he goes on to connect the idea of law itself to play, and play to war. At Huizinga’s best, he relies on his extensive knowledge of etymology and multiple languages, seeking the universal in a non-hierarchical form. Like their contemporary Arnold van Gennep, Huizinga and Hirn seek to find big patterns, to understand life and socialization and play and art (van Gennep, 1909). Yet it is not the impulse, but the method that reflects power and racist ideology with its roots in the rationalization of slavery.

In From Boas to Black Power, Mark Anderson writes ‘race is best seen as a discursive and social mechanism of differentiating humanity rather than as a means of describing human difference. It is thus intimately imbricated with power relations, providing a modality for their articulation, development and naturalization’ (2019, p. 19).

In Huizinga’s Conclusion: The Play Element in Contemporary Civilization he writes:

The club is a very ancient institution, but it is a disaster when whole nations turn into clubs, for these, besides promoting the precious qualities of friendship and loyalty, are also hotbeds of sectarianism, intolerance, suspicion, superciliousness and quick to defend any illusion that flatters self-love or group-consciousness. We have seen great nations losing every shred of honour, all sense of humour, the very idea of decency and fair play. (p. 205)

Our own club of play research has avoided directly addressing the racism hidden in plain sight. Sociologist Thomas Henricks writes:

In my view, Homo Ludens remains, after more than sixty years, the greatest treatment of the socio-cultural implications of play. (Henricks, 2006, p. 10)

Perhaps the second most famous comparative theorist of play following Huizinga, Roger Caillois critiques not the omission of racism, but the omission of certain types of play, namely individualized play and dizziness (ilynx) and an undervaluing of games of chance. Caillois notes that for Hirn play contains obsolete culture, rituals no longer relevant but hiding in plain sight, as contrasted to Huizinga, who emphasizes how play generates culture itself (1958, p. 58).

So anthropology, sociology, psychology – all emerge from the comparativist colonial tradition rooted in slavery and colonialism. The impulse to compare cultures drifted away from anthropology in its focus on ethnographic small-scale study, and yet was picked up by the folklorists who focused on genres such as games, stories, jokes and material culture, how they circulated from place to place and time to time. There initially was racism lurking in folklore study as well, as early attempts tried to show superiority of one nation’s folklore over another during the competitive nationalism in the early and mid-twentieth-century (Glassie, 1989; Noyes, 2016). But fieldwork once again proved the racist/nationalist theoreticians wrong, and scholars ironically using what was known as The Finnish Method showed that tales once considered to show true national culture had traveled all over the globe. Stories, like games, moved along almost every continent, traveled with the trade routes owned by no nation.

Those in the anthropology of childhood and in children’s folklore who were brave enough to maintain a wide angle view of humanity focused on changing lenses of perception of childhood (Lancy, 2015; Schwartzman, 1979; Sutton-Smith, 1997), or did meticulous cross-cultural work comparing similar questions in fieldwork in multiple locations (Whiting & Child, 1953; Whiting & Edwards, 1992). The Human Research Area Files (HRAF), now housed at Yale University, was created to facilitate comparative ethnography, but comparative research using the HRAF files has proven to be only partly useful, raising questions rather than answering them (Sutton-Smith & Roberts, 1971).

Hirn suggested that such similarities among games reflect a pattern of learning from civilized peoples and then spreading among natives in a top down manner, but culture does not move in one direction, and trouble, like art, may reappear in new forms elsewhere. As I write this, the statues of racist leadership in the American south are being toppled, and the monument to Philadelphia’s racist former mayor has been officially removed from the city hall plaza. The statue of Teddy Roosevelt outside the Museum of Natural History in New York has been removed, as it was finally understood that the image of the former U.S. President on horseback high above the African man and Native American man on either side was iconically problematic. Some of these visual reminders of the nation’s racist past have been destroyed, and some quietly remounted elsewhere. The question emerges, what will we do with the monumentally compromised history of our scholarship? In the cultural reexamination of academic thinking in both Barnlek and Homo Ludens, we are reminded that what we are in fact studying is ‘the human seriousness of play’ (Turner, 1982). As Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote, although perhaps with a different meaning: ‘There is no such thing as western civilization’ (2016). Both words ‘western’ and ‘civilization,’ require our attention now– in the fields of play and in our wider academic discourse.

It seems fitting to open this issue with critique and hold it with critique, and place in the middle the historical contextual piece by Drs. Sotamaa and Stenros, the translation by Mr. Lauri Selonen, and a copy of the 1918 Finnish publication first translated from Swedish by Joel Lehtonen. The editor of this issue wishes to thank the following scholars who were additional readers or translators. Their collegiality is most appreciated and respected: Dr. Chris Bateman, Dr. Veli-Matti Karhulahti, Dr. Niklas Nylund, and Dr. Deborah Thomas. I also thank anthropologist Dr. Osei Alleyne who responded to the Hirn translation with an invited essay, ‘This is No Child’s Play.’

We close this collection with new Finnish scholars Ms. Nina Luostarinen and Dr. Anthony Schrag who offer ‘Rehearsing for the Future: Play, Place and Art.’ Ironically, Ms. Luostarinen writes, ‘This is quite a lovely coincidence as well: only a few months ago I borrowed the Yrjö Hirn’s book from my local library. They still have the over 100 years old original tome available.’ Lastly, Dr. Elizabeth Tucker presents Swedish Wooden Toys by Dr. Amy F. Ogata and Dr. Susan Weber as a recent book worth rereading. In small objects, and in the writing about small motifs, we see the complexities of culture writ large.

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Notes on contributors

Anna Beresin

Anna Beresin is from University of the Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.