Ends, Means, and Galumphing: Some Leitmotifs of Play1
- 1 February 1973
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Wiley in American Anthropologist
- Vol. 75 (1) , 87-98
- https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1973.75.1.02a00050
Abstract
Two main questions are asked here about play. (1) Is it really a coherent category of activity in spite of the diverse forms it takes in man and animals? (2) Does it make sense in terms of the evolution of behavior that play should have become so ubiquitous among our activities? These questions are approached by looking at play as a way of orchestrating the ends and means of action in which the means are the center of interest, in which the economics of survival are subordinated to combinatorial flexibility.This publication has 6 references indexed in Scilit:
- Play and Its Role in the Mental Development of the ChildSoviet Psychology, 1967
- Response to Brian Sutton-Smith.Psychological Review, 1966
- The Fruits of the First Season: A Discussion of the Role of Play in ChildhoodJournal of Humanistic Psychology, 1964
- Games in CultureAmerican Anthropologist, 1959
- The play of man.Published by American Psychological Association (APA) ,1901
- The play of animals.Published by American Psychological Association (APA) ,1898