Children and play in Mayurbhanj District, Odisha

Abstract

This thesis is an ethnographic and conceptual examination of peer play among school-aged children in rural North Odisha, India in 2008. In contrast to theorizations of play as socialization and transformation, this thesis develops a view of play as 'interaction', or dynamic exchange, with implications for cross-cultural ethnographies of play.

Despite the unbiquity of play scholarship, play remains an ambiguous concept. Anthropologists are particularly interested in play as either a modality of socialization, i.e, as children's enculturalizaton into adult social and economic roles for their own future adult roles (thus perpetuating existing social structural/cultural paradigms); or as transformative performances that either actualize social change, or present a plethora of possibilities for cultural transformation and foster flexibility of cultural adaptive potential. However, the present ethnography provides evidence for a synthesis: play as a mode of interaction/dyamic change with context. The ethnography suggests that the socialization model represents children as too passive and the transformation model inadequately accounts for external processses and structures that shape children at play. The synthesis suggests that children at play are involved in dynamic exchanges with context: they imbibe their contexts through sensory-motor exchanges; they are constrained by their environment and micro and macro forces which shape them and their play performances; they make autonomous sense (and nonsense) of their lived experiences and circumstances; and they do in fact shape and transform context. This model of play as interaction is supported by insights from a combination of Sutton Smith's theory of play as performance and from enactivism (a cognitive development theory).

In the Santal and Ho dominated block of my research in Mayurbhanj district, play is central to children's peer sociality and interactions with local landscapes. This thesis examines the relations between children's play acts and the contexts in which they are performed. In particular it draws connections between young people's enactments of play and rural Odishan senses of spatiality, village sociality, sacred/festival performances, gendered identities, conceptual paradigms, schooling and children's work.

The thesis also focuses on interactions between local contexts and state policy and administration. In tribally dominated areas such as Mayurbhanj, recently invirgorated state and international projects of rural development emphasise schooling as never before, increasingly impinging on children's lives. Mayurbhanj children have also long been important participants in the socio-economies of their home villages, where agri-forestry is both the predominant economic livelihood and encompasses a sacred complex of beliefs and practices and village social relations. This thesis treats Mayurbhanj children's autonomous peer play as a special mode of social and socio-spatial interaction and individiual - collective sense making, taking account of interactions between changes and continuities in conditions of their lives. This study has critical and practical implications for the current macro-economic project of schooling. In rural schools, the schooling project emphasizes the transmission of bodies of knowledge/texts, particularly through rote learning and under-emphasizes student-centred sense-making processes and the playfulness that exists and is quite characteristic of children's autonomous enthusiastic sense-making and innovation in rural settings outside of schools. The notion of play as interaction thus has critical and practical applications: for cross-cultural play ethnographies; for understanding children's play as both experience and social cognition; and for rural school learning strategies.