Dressing up play: Rethinking play and playfulness from socio-cultural perspectives

Abstract

Play is complex, contradictory, and sometimes chaotic. It has been described in such contrary ways as: both work and fun, pleasurable, purposeful and also without purpose, intrinsically motivated, yet socially and biologically driven and without predetermined outcomes (Lemke, 1995). Children playing together are engaging their emotional, cognitive, physical, social, spiritual selves in ways which transcend boundaries between these traditional psychological domains. Feelings, thoughts, and bodies are connected, and may be perceived and represented aesthetically in children’s play where “aesthetic experience encourages consciousness to engage in a form of reflection that does not restrict it in any way. This highly unusual experience opens up for consciousness new and previously unrealized possibilities” (Bubner, 1997, p. 169).