NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

American Play Conference, Rochester, New York, in April 2008

Simon J. Bronner, Penn State,Harrisburg

With the cooperation of the Strong National Museum of Play which boasts that it is the world’s only museum devoted to the study of play, over 100 scholars from myriad disciplines and countries gathered in the museum in Rochester, New York, on April 4-5, 2008, to focus on historical and cultural issues of American play. The museum also has a commitment to child studies, evident in its recent expansion making it the second largest children’s museum in the world. The conference was sponsored by two regional American studies organizations—the Middle Atlantic American Studies Association and the Great Lakes American Studies Association—and attracted participants from around the globe bringing a comparative cultural perspective to the proceedings. The conference was also an occasion to launch the new American Journal of Play edited at the museum and published by the University of Illinois Press.

The extent of exhibitions on different aspects of play, including toys (the museum is home to the Toy Hall of Fame), games, sports, drama, and arts was a reminder of the breadth of the interdisciplinary fields of American Studies and play studies merged in this conference. The approaches taken tended to fuse history, ethnography and folkloristics, popular cultural studies, sociology, and psychology, evident in the keynote address by self-described cultural historian Gary Cross who periodized changing views of public amusement from the late nineteenth century which was family oriented, he found, to the present “thrill-seeking” generations. Besides focusing on the folk categorization of play as “fun and games,” attendees provocatively understood other areas as playful and worthy of interpretation even if outside the awareness of cultural participants, including sex, dress, shopping, blogging, and eating.  Much of the discussion was on childhood because of the view that the “work of childhood is play,” although several speakers extended consideration of play into adulthood and old age to view play across the life course.  This life-course perspective raised a historiographical question of why childhood has been categorized in scholarship as “play time,” if play is a fundamental human response in all ages. Offering a relativistic perspective, Japanese attendees observed that in Japan an even stricter dividing line exists between adult concerns of work and childhood viewed as a playful as well as educational time.  It was one of several examples of a reflexive turn in which evidence of play in scholarship led to questions about how scholarship constructs its subject. A leitmotif running through many scholarly narratives was that this scholarship takes play seriously, sometimes countering social forces of popularization and romanticization, or what the “dean” of play studies, Brian Sutton-Smith (professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania), who was in attendance, dubbed “the triviality barrier.” A total of fifty-eight presentations during the two-day conference showed the significance of the subject with explorations of meaning and relevance to timely public issues such as curbing violence and abuse, achieving gender and racial equity, and varieties of educational reform—across American eras, groups, and spaces.

The conference began with the basic questions: What is Play? What is Sport? At these sessions, speakers related problems in definition in categories that are often viewed by what they are not—work and non-competitive—rather than by what they constitute. Football attracted attention in several papers as a prime example of play’s meaning. Known primarily as a spectator rather than participants’ activity, football’s rise to prominence as America’s game drew varied interpretations of the roles of fans, coaches, and players in the social construction of an American icon. A central question was why at a time when civility and domestication are emphasized in society football’s violence and brutality came to be emphasized in its popularity. Speakers considered whether football was a reflection of, or reaction to, culture, particularly in its celebration of manliness.  As a “play frame,” using Gregory Bateson’s terminology, football drew definitional debate about its rhetorical use of play in an organized business model. 

In relation to the history of childhood and youth culture, several presentations contemplated the struggle for control of play between children and adult authorities and commercial organizations. Laura Wasowicz of the American Antiquarian Society chaired a session, for example, on “The Meanings of Princess Products and Play.” Miriam Forman-Brunell, author of Made to Play House and editor of Girlhood in America led off with a historical perspective on the drama of pretending to be a princess among American girls. Independent scholar Julie Eaton discussed the commodification of what she called “princess culture” and Susan Asbury of the Strong National Museum of Play showed the varied material culture of princess play artifacts dating back to the nineteenth century.

Another session featuring works in progress was on the subject of “Child’s Play and Scientific Study” exploring the double “bind” of what scholarship can reveal of children’s behavior and the way that the teleological uses of that scholarship. Anna Beresin of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, for instance, discussed the conflicting findings of scholarship on the uses of free play that schools have applied to determine how far to control recess. Video and computer games popular among children also drew attention in a session entitled “Playful Escapes: Fantasy, Role-playing, and Cyberculture.” In lively discussion, contemporary debates about the violence and sexual stereotypes incorporated into video games explored by Rebecaa Seidel of Penn State Harrisburg  and Andrew Cocco of Temple University were compared to controversies over children’s fantasy literature presented by Alison Buchbinder of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture.  Public issues of sexuality among youth were contextualized historically and culturally in a session with the clever title of “Playing Around.” Emily Prior of California State University, Northridge, examined the intersection of youth and popular culture by suggesting that a social change occurred in the late twentieth century when sex became viewed as “play behavior.” Melanie Steimle of Penn State Harrisburg showed regional/religious folk practices as reflections of values in her interpretation of “creative dating” among youth in the Mormon cultural region of the American West.

Against the backdrop of the Strong Museum’s Toy Hall of Fame, several papers examined the material culture of play. Chris Rasmussen of Farleigh Dickinson University interpreted coin-operated games during the Great Depression as a reflection of economic scarcity and Amy Ogata of the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture considered the rise of children’s museums as centers of toy play in post-World-War-II America. The closing session of which this paper was a part, “Play on Display: The Material Culture of Toys, Costumes, and Amusements,” reminded participants “at the end of the day” of the significance of play studies as a location to bring together aging, economics, and culture into a broadly conceived field. Although the field was delimited at the conference by the American historical experience, it was clear from the presented research that connections to play extend beyond borders, such as the presentations by Ellie Sekiguchi of Doshisha Women’s College in Japan on the Japanese transformation of American Halloween and by Samantha Johnson of Rutgers University on World’s Fair motifs on the Las Vegas strip. The conference should have an afterlife with publication of several papers in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Play.