Beschreibung
The problems of games and play, a basic ontological category of thought
and action, have long occupied culture historians like Huizinga and
Caillois as well as mainstream modern philosophers from Heidegger to
Gadamer. The present volume traces the concept of the ludic in its
generative as well as in its violent and destructive potential, and
relates the traditional concepts developed in particular by Romantic
aesthetics in drama and poetry to those developed in modern times in
literary genres by Bakhtin with the emphasis on the tropes of the
performing body. In the present collection of essays, the great variety of
theoretical frameworks is grounded in and connected to empirical data on
ritual processes and mythic structures across a wide spectrum of
ethnographic evidence. The collected essays connect notions of the ludic
as framed performance (proposed by Bateson and Goffman) with the ludic as
„free play“ with the potential to possess the player, crossing
disciplinary boundaries and discourses from theatre-studies to
anthropology. Forms of ritual processes, of mythic games and of cultural
reflexivity, together with intriguing and universal tropes of myth and
literature such as the figures of the trickster and the fool, are treated
in cross-cultural perspectives. These include Indian, Greek and Germanic
mythologies, Indian ritual dance and prophetic theatre plays in Ancient
Israel, Bushmen syncretic religious services, the diverse forms of
self-reflexive play among Brazilian Kayapo Indians, and the plays and
games among the inmates of concentration camps. The volume
should appeal
to students of anthropology, of theatre and cultural studies, as well as
to culture historians and philosophers concerned with the interface
between ritual and play, or player and audience, and the larger issue of
the rules of games and the freedom of the hermeneutic interpretation of
text through performances.
Klaus-Peter Köpping is Professor for
Anthropology at the Ruprecht Karls University Heidelberg.