Announcement of Play

I need to keep a play Journal - its things I'm thinking about play and encountering things with play. I'm not sure if I'm going to keep it here or not but I need something "not-facebook" and this is the my dreamtime where I started to experiment with who I used to be so its here for now.

Here is the thing I am thinking about play today. I read an ethnographic study where the reason we are reading it is about multi-site structures and how they challenge the idea of distance: where distance substitutes for objectivity, and objectivity substitutes for seriousness. We constantly need to construct seriousness, and to do that we define things as un-serious.

Then we need to code play.

Introversion is not valued in men, but behaviors associated with positive extroversion in men are coded as undesirable in women. However performances of "fun" are all associated with extroversion in vacation/leisure spaces.

What is the play vs fun divide in our culture?

Is is part of colonialism? - several African cultures put a different premium on fun/jokes/lesiure. The ethnography I read has the women separating their homes from areas of "play."Play is moved from the view of men returning home.

Comedians in the west (or at least the US) seem to put a premium on the hyper masculine act of oral performance - even the construction of the term "Stand Up" seems to carry some cultural weight behind it, inherently making it political - simply because it is geared around laughter. Is it "fun" or is it protest, or comment, or critique, or making some other form of conflict relief valve.

Is comedy a social control by which those caught in the system can be recognized as "being seen" - (like "Oh look I'm not the only one who sees the thing - now I can go back into the thing even though its killing me/us and at least know I'm seen "- but the person on the stage is powerless so other than validation all they can do is observe)

Why is observation passive?

Listening is considered "active" now in business circles - observation is "active" when you are a trained actor. Observation is not taught to budding anthropologists- the way you learn observation is through playing-

Are only things "unreal" play, and because we discounted the unreal as we move towards rationalism as the new form of white (western) supremacy and social control things that ARE experientially real then have to be coded as meaningless to make them unreal and therefore play?