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In my Anthropology of Childhood and Education class today, we opened with musical chairs.
Our topic was early childhood and preschool, and one of the threshold concepts that I am trying to inculcate is the idea of culture, and the idea that while there are universals, there are also cultural specificities that get taught—without teachers—from the very beginning.
I am lucky enough to teach in a room with very flexible seating, so when the students came in, they did not go to their tables as usual, but I had a big hodgepodge of chairs in the middle of the room. One of the students immediately joked that maybe we were playing musical chairs.
In fact, we were. But it had seemed impossible, ludicrous, out of the realm of the possibility, that we would do such a thing in a SERIOUS college class.
I counted the students, and put the chairs back to back. I’d found a video that played musical chairs exactly right, with the music stopping arbitrarily and unpredictably. I made sure to take away one chair.
You have to understand that fully one half of the students in my class, ten out of twenty, are official athletes. So they understand competition. We played till the bitter end, with one student in the final triumphant chair.
They asked if there was a prize; in fact I had some candy in my nearby office, and I gave some to the champion. Then I gave the rest of them “participation prizes,” if they wanted some.
I asked them to process this experience with me, and they commented on the fact that it was fun, and they were focused. One student contrasted this activity with her other classes, where they were having tests. I observed that I saw several of the students really strategizing carefully in a calm but focused way.
I asked if they felt bad when they lost. And several of them said it was momentary but they got over it.
I told them a story: When our elder daughter was four years old, we had a birthday party for her in the basement of our house, and I set up for musical chairs, because all I knew at the time was what I had been raised with. (Though I was an anthropologist, I was not yet an anthropologist of childhood.) And musical chairs was a staple of my childhood.
So we set up the chairs and, this being an era of cassettes, we had a cassette player ready to start and stop. I explained the rules: we would have enough chairs for everybody but one, and the children would run around and the music would stop and everybody would get a chair except for one child.
And one of our daughter’s friends, someone with whom she is still friends, more than thirty years later, a year younger than the other kids, looked at me and said, “Why?”
Why indeed?
It was assumed that competition was the purpose of play.
And one of the things that I wanted my students today to get, deeply in their body, not to forget, was the fact that the cultural message was: only one person could win. The message was that they were individuals, out for themselves, and that this was not fun for its own sake, but fun for the purpose of winning.
This embodied learning exercise got across the message about the cultural nature of play, the early inculcation of cultural values, and the fact that this is all done without direct instruction or preaching.
It did also allow me to mention that there are societies where the dominant form of play is cooperative. (The academic formulation states that “games serve as training grounds for group-specific norms and values and thereby have an important function in enculturation during childhood,” according to Sarah M. Leisterer-Peoples, Cody T. Ross, Simon J. Greenhill, Susanne Hardecker, and Daniel B. M. Haun.)
We had spoken on Monday about the fact that play and curiosity are natural endowments of mammals. We watched a brief video of crows playing, and of monkeys playing. One of the potential readings was Gregory Bateson’s “A Theory of Play and Fantasy” and others chose to read Benny Karpatschof’s article “Play, But Not Simply Play: The Anthropology of Play” in which he detailed some of the classical attempts to define play.
At some level all humans are the same, in contrast, say, to fish. And at other levels we vary as individuals, one of whom loves purple and another of whom loves yellow. But that middle level, the level of social meaning, is where we tend to differ as groups, and that is the message I tried to convey today.
I hope they are talking about this experience one day, long in the future, and that they remember that once in their college class they played musical chairs like young children.
If it sticks, then learning happened.
So many lessons.
We can’t always control what is learned, but something always is being conveyed.
