October 11, 2014 - 05:54
Right now, my cat is chasing a mouse around the room. Instinctually, I’d think that he was trying to take a chomp on the little guy, since that is a cat thing. However, at least three times now, my cat cornered the mouse, picked it up in his mouth, walked over to his little den, put the mouse down, and continued chasing. This leads me to believe that he isn’t hunting the mouse—on the contrary, he’s playing with it. Yet, I’m doubtful that the mouse sees this as the same fun, lighthearted pursuit as the Himalayan.
In a prompt discussing the limitations of play, the post “Who’s Fun? Who’s playing?” by The Unknown talks about who or what controls play. They ask, “When children’s play is strictly organized, is the child’s creativity not being used or developed as much as it should be?” In this case, is it parents who dictate the dynamics of play for children?
Parents, while acting on good intentions in the safety of their children, seem to gloss over the long-term effects of their coddling. The prevailing thought on their minds is to keep the child physically safe, taking away all possible sources of pain. Similar, in the essay “Ravens at Play,” Debbie—one of the authors—feels a deep emotional urge to feed a coyote. Her friends convince her that it’s a bad idea, imploring her to see the “longer term consequences of engaging in a relationship [that they] wouldn't be there to sustain” (Rose 2). Debbie herself wonders if she’s doing this due to her own desires (which she seems to realize is an emotional response) and her idealism that there is some purity in giving a coyote some food.
Due to this increased supervision and supposed necessity for safety, institutions have taken it upon themselves to rid themselves of anything potentially harmful. For instance, the seesaws at my elementary school were taken down, presumably because a child was got hurt. The result is a safe, padded box—perfect for stuffing kids in! Arguably, this could inhibit the benefits of play, as children fail to experience a full range of scenarios that they otherwise could have experienced, given a different setting.
Contrast this with the environment set forth by Tim Edensor in “Playing in Industrial Ruins”; a dilapidated, unsupervised wreck, children must learn to scamper their way through it. They can use the ruins as an outlet for destructive and adventurous play, among other things. The industrial ruins, they say “offer opportunities for expressive physical performance and a relatively unhindered engagement with the material world” (Edensor 4). It affords players the chance to explore for themselves in an unsupervised area, giving them freedom, independence, and an inkling of adventurous curiosity as they traverse the ruins.
The relationship between parent and child, then, is an obvious example of a contact zone. When you step out of the family car and onto the blacktop, however, it becomes a different scenario. The Unknown talks about a “power struggle” between playing participants. Play provides a venue for self-created contact zones between children at play. One would, at first glance, believe that every child on the playground is on the same level; everybody’s simply a bunch of kids running on the woodchips. Thus, they shouldn’t be able to form a true contact zone in the usual sense that the zone is comprised of two people with differing power relations. However, given enough time, participants will naturally make their own differing power relations.
For example, as a kid, I and my three other friends all pretended to be horses. One friend in particular was the de facto leader of our group, deciding what we would do during recess that day down to whether we would trot, canter, or gallop. I, who knew absolutely nothing about horses, was at the bottom of the chain. In our mini contact zone, my friend had the upper hand, free to decide things that I couldn’t touch. I was fine with it, but it stands that she was the one in control.
It remains that the one who has more power in the contact zone will be the one dictating the dynamic. They’re the ones influencing the environment and course for play. What’s left is to figure out how those contact zones appear to begin with—and whether through species, generation, or personality, they always will.