Abstract

Johan Huizinga, in Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture , was the first to attempt to define play and its role in culture, politics, and warfare. Play, he stated, is an activity which exists outside serious life routines, but which immerses the individual totally within its unique boundaries of time and space. The motivation for play is fun rather than material profit. Critics questioned how the higher forms of cultural experience could be at once playful and serious as Huizinga had claimed. Jacques Ehrmann and Eugen Fink concluded that play is not an Urphänomen distinct from reality. Rather, it is symbolic re-enactment of the world in which men can at once become the subjects and the objects of their activity. We can learn the meaning of existence for a particular society from its play.