Hey there, everybody, and welcome to Sports and Society. My name is Orin Starn and I'm a Professor of Cultural Anthropology here at lovely Duke University. We're out today on this beautiful sunny day on Duke's East Campus, on the lawn here. And I'm gonna be giving the lectures for this class in my office, which is right on the second floor up here and we're going to get started right away. We're going to go and I'm going to give a couple of lectures, the next couple of lectures about the role of play and games and human experience. Big questions, big issues. And then we're going to move for the rest of the class into examining the whole wacky, intriguing, wild landscape of modern sports, so let's go. [MUSIC] Let's begin with some very basic facts about play, games, and sports. And one of those facts is that we human beings play at every stage in our life. Little babies play from a very young ago, these little funny little games with their hands and feet. Children play a huge variety of games as we know. There's hide and seek, and tag, and follow the leader, and jacks. A bunch of other games. And adults play sports. We grown-ups love to play soccer and basketball and football and cricket and whatever else. And old people too. They play bridge. They play games that their bodies may still allow. Bocee, I'm getting a little older, I play golf now. Shuffleboard. So play is something that human beings do at all stages of their life. Now a second fact is that play is something that you find throughout human history and in all cultures around the world. So the ancient Mayans in Central America for example. Had this ball game that they played in the ancient citadel of Chichen Itza, where supposedly the losing team would be sacrificed to the hero twin gods. The Romans had their gladiatorial spectacles. The gruesome entertainment of Christians getting ripped apart by lions and gladiators. And every culture, be it Japan with go, the British with cricket, Americans with baseball, invent and have invented their own games. So basic facts. We play at all stages in life and people have always played throughout history and play in cultures all around the world. So play then is something universal. It's a universal part of our experience on this planet. So this fact, the universality of play leads us to a key foundational canonical thinker in the history of play and sport studies. A historian named Johan Huizinga. Now, Huizinga was Dutch. He was, it should be said a, a very courageous man. When the Nazis invaded, the Netherlands, during World War II, he refused to collaborate, to do the things that they wanted him to do in the university. And for that he was sent to a Nazi death camp, where he died in 1942. His own original specialty was the middle ages. And he became interested in the games and play because of the prominence of nightly, courtly games in the middle ages. Jousting, archery and all the rest. And he went on to write a book about play which he called Homo Ludens. It's an important text for those interested in play to read. And then homo hudens Housinger makes the argument that we human beings are homo sapiens. We are knowing, reasoning beings. We are a smart species most of the time, except when we're doing stupid things, which we do now and then. We animals can think but human beings think in more elaborate, Byzantine, worked out ways. We are Homo sapiens, Houssinger said, we are also Homo faber. Faber means tool makers, tool makers, tools. And from the very beginning, two million years ago at Olduvai Gorge, Homo habilis is already figuring out how to make projectile points to hunt and to cook and to do other jobs and tool making, making tools is a fundamental part of all the life of our species. To this day computers, technologies, cars and all of the rest of things we manufacture Homo faber Homo sapiens, but also, and this was the original insight of Huizinga, we are also Homo ludens. Ludens means play. And Huizinga argues that play, playing, is not some frivolous, incidental now and then thing that human beings do. But rather, as much as thinking or tool making, a fundamental part of the human experience. So, Huizinga's contribution is to establish that play is a central part of being human. But this point, the centrality of play, is really just a starting point for us in our course. In our time together we're gonna be opening up a whole lot of bigger, more complicated questions about the world of games and play and sports in society. And I wanna turn in the second part of this lecture to the particular issue of the types and categories of games that we humans have invented across the world. [MUSIC]
