Caillois's "Man, Play, and Games": An Appreciation and Evaluation.

Abstract

•This article explores the contributions of Roger Caillois to the study of human play. The initial portion of the essay focuses on Caillois’s scholarly career as a response to the public events and intellectual movements of his time. The author shows how Caillois’s responses influenced the portraits of play that he developed in such important books as Man and the Sacred and Man, Play, and Games. The article then analyzes the themes Caillois developed in these writings and compares them to Johan Huizinga’s interpretation of play in Homo Ludens. In a final section, the article shows the continued pertinence of Caillois’s approach to contemporary scholarship and offers author’s own evaluation of this theory. A half century has passed since Roger Caillois’s classic study of play, culture, and the human condition. First published in 1958 as Les Jeux et Les Hommes and then with an English translation in 1961, the book spans the concerns of many disciplines and fits neatly into none. Most prominently, perhaps, Man, Play, and Games is a kind of sociological or anthropological study, an attempt to categorize certain forms of play and to describe how these forms operate in societies. But traditional themes of history, religion, and art—of the changing character of civilization and the possibilities for human expression within that setting—abound. Even at the time of its publication, Caillois’s account was what Everett Hughes describes as “an old-fashioned book, one in which a fugue is played upon a few simple themes elaborated by material from a great variety of cultures” (1962, 254). In this sense, the work is, as Hughes continues, a “speculation about gradual, universal evolution,” a look at how play forms have both responded to the qualities of societies and made possible their development. Classic books sometimes occupy curious positions within the disciplines that honor them. Ideally, of course, the classics maintain this status because they are so filled with rich and complicated meanings that each generation profits from consulting them, and individuals learn something new at every

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