Paper short abstract:

Windfall male slot machine players in Papua New Guinea are bled just like anyone else. Their experience is of the joy of heavy transaction and lavish alcohol consumption, with loss as liberation from enduring obligation networks. How is this asymmetrical collaboration cordoned off as male 'play'?

Paper long abstract:

In Papua New Guinea regulators have raised the price of slot machines over the years as a deterrent (from £2.50 to £5 to £12.50 to £25), leaving only the cash-wealthy, mainly 'big men' and those men experiencing cash windfalls with access. In a country of proliferating transfers known to anthropologists as 'gift exchange,' and a pervasive card gambling culture that began with colonialism, slot machines are aspirational playthings. Having considered big men slots players in detail (Pickles 2013, forthcoming), here I think about players whose engagement with slots is sporadic and opportunistic, usually depending on seasonal cash crops. Often sophisticated card gamblers in their villages, these men have no hope of 'masterminding' the unfamiliar slots. High off their windfalls, village-based players focus on lavish alcohol consumption and forgetting their transactional responsibilities for a night.

The majority of today's computer-driven slot machines look traditional, with symbols apparently spinning and then slowing to a stop, but they now offer punters 7 different 'lines' they could win by - and often many more. Playing on many lines means disaggregating one's bet, while the singularity of the event means aggregate winnings and losses over different lines average out to a steady bleed. In an aesthetic just like their serious responsibilities back home, the slots drain their players' capital, but in this place of play, losses are untinged with the disappointed expectations of others. I argue that in spite of great personal cost, here men's play is primarily about transaction minus expectation.

Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates materiality and imaginative quality of toys as magic objects. Based on ethnographic research of physics culture, it traces the pathways of rubber ducks out of their bathtub habitat, into the outskirts of science fiction universes and the heartlands of science at CERN.

Paper long abstract:

Following Wittgenstein, to see means to "see as" (Wittgenstein 1953, Guthrie 1993). And children in secular societies imagine inanimate materialities often alive. Infants charge play things with meaning and omnipotent features, animating (Ingold 2007) exchangeable ordinary objects. Their toys can be magically charged with "voodoo powers", influencing environments through contact or contagion (Frazer 1890). The desire to control an elusive world (Nader 1996), materializes in the projected imagination of magic qualities onto mundane things (Lemonnier 1992).

The paper is dedicated to the ethnographic enquiry of this phenomenon, extending it into the realm of adults. It is taking the example of a very common toy for old and young, the rubber duck. The yellow fellow has left its usual habitat - the modernist family bathtub - setting off for a long journey. It has even reached the outskirts of science fiction in the restaurant at the end of the universe in Adams' "Hitchhiker to the Galaxy". It has served as an epistemic thing in the experiments of maritime biologists and found its permanent residency in several laboratories of technoscientific provenience, such as the control room of the ATLAS experiment at the European Centre for Nuclear Research, CERN; outliving generations of humans, guarding the acquisition of data.

Based on interviews about and participant observation of rubber ducks, I investigate how play things (time)travel back and forth between childhood and adulthood, regularly passing the borders between magic and reason, science and fiction, transgressing race, class and gender all at once.

Paper short abstract:

To develop new kinaesthesia in modern dance, the Taipei Dance Circle used baby oil to alter the friction between dancers' bodies and the floor, bringing about different sensory modes, self-imagination, aesthetic and human-object relationship.

Paper long abstract:

Baby-oiled dance as an experimental dance genre stems from a playful idea of changing the floor's friction while it is usually taken for granted by many modern dance troupes. The slippery floor as a special surface that transforms dancers' perception and technique in time and space. The dancers re-learn and develop new movements such as pull, push, roll, slide, run, jump, fall and turn with principles different from practising on the dry floor. Their new perception leads to a distinct state of being not only from their daily life but also from the life in a modern dance troupe. Furthermore, the oil-suits worn by dancers, also form alternative aesthetic and a new sense of self in the process of becoming experts. Finally, the oily floor, the dancers' bodies, the oil-suits, the movements and the performances consist of a dynamic relationship and are highly related to each other all the time.

Paper short abstract:

Reborn dolls are hyperrealistic, resembling babies. Women owners often interact with them as real babies. Reborns evoke strong reactions, positive and negative. This first large-scale study of reborn ownership explores reasons for ownership and owners' accounts of reactions to them and their dolls.

Paper long abstract:

Reborn dolls are individually handmade to represent a human baby as realistically as possible. The term 'reborn' reflects the conceptualisation of the doll as a real baby, brought to life, reborn from a doll. Reborns are primarily owned by adult women. Although some owners simply collect the dolls, others interact with them, sometimes mothering them as if they were real babies, cuddling them, feeding them and taking them out in public. Reborn dolls evoke strong reactions, both positive and negative. Negative reactions are expressed both to the dolls and to the women who own them. The dolls' hyperrealism is highly valued by their owners, yet the same realistic attributes often elicit revulsion and abjection in others. However, reborn dolls have been the subject of little academic research. In this paper, we present findings from the first large-scale survey of reborn doll owners. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data from an online questionnaire completed by over 500 owners, we examine their reasons for ownership and the ways they interact with their dolls. Reasons include to build a collection, to provide comfort, and to fill a gap. We also explore why reborn dolls divide opinion so strongly by examining reborn doll owners' perceptions of the benefits of ownership and how others react to their dolls and to them. Results are discussed in terms of the uncanny valley, the self, social norms and identity. We conclude by discussing questions raised by the phenomenon of adult women playing with reborn dolls.

Paper short abstract:

This paper takes the gyroscopic spinning-top as a case study to explore the ways in which playthings shape the thinking that they put into play.

Paper long abstract:

The gyroscope's historical affordance stems from particular properties of motion that its structural arrangement allows, something inherently intangible, however deeply rooted it is in the concrete.

The mismatch between the technological transparency that constitutes it and the perplexing phenomena that it performs makes the gyroscopic top a particularly evocative plaything.

This paper explores the object's affordances to action, perception and understanding under three headings: the 'go' of gyroscopic devices and operational mastery; the dynamical complexity of gyroscopic motion and paradoxical thinking; and gyroscopic metastability as a time-defying and gravity defying phenomenon.

It argues that the shape of thinking gyroscopic toys involves a particular haptic understanding, grounded in the concrete yet somehow always just beyond its reach. Both contained and projective, its concentration on an object, rather than defining it, unravels an every widening orbit around it.

Paper short abstract:

Since sound is not only able to capture the temporal and thus serve as storage of culture, playful actions can reveal this knowledge through its temporality. In the exhibition context audio exhibits can therefore give new access to collective meanings.

Paper long abstract:

Playful engagements in museums are currently in its prime, endeavoring to fulfill the challenging task to communicate historical and cultural knowledge to visitors. At the same time the implementation of sound is on its way. But while these new approaches often center on the creation of immersive and engaging spaces, sound has a hard time in an ocular-centered world where the visual plays a major role in the storage of knowledge and collective memory. As a consequence sound still remains in its role as support of the visual or as background noise.

However, sound contains a decisive intersection with play: being a time-dependent medium, sound gives access to time. Whereas the toy preserves the historical that was stored therein, the human temporality reveals itself in the reproduction of its (acoustic) recording. As Agamben points out: ‚The immediate result of [the] invasion of life by play is a change and acceleration of time' (Agamben, In Playland, p. 67) and ‚the essence of the toy […] is, then, an eminently historical thing' (ibid., p. 71). Therefore, it would be more than worthwhile to combine sound and play. New technologies and insights into the relevance of sound for our cognitive abilities create new forms of playfulness that can be used in a museum context such as concepts of situated play. Taking into account the qualities of the ephemeral, this paper discusses new approaches of more engaging museum experiences that integrate tangible and adaptive audio exhibits.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores masks and pythons as playthings among the Baining and argues that through reconfiguring one's presence in terms of visibility and invisibility, and creating a break from everyday relations of shame and respect, they shape processes of social reproduction and self-presentation.

Paper long abstract:

Masks are probably as old as mankind and they can be found in almost all cultures around the world. But what makes them so appealing? And why do people use masks instead of anything else, for example puppets, effigies, or fetishes? Is it their hiding and revealing nature that makes them interesting to 'play' with? And what kind of play are we talking about? The paper seeks to explore these questions by looking at the ways in which masks are used among the Baining of Papua New Guinea and how people's relationship to these artefacts can tell us a lot about Baining personhood and sociality. It starts from the position that masks are playthings that embody and affect the relations between wearer and observer, and can reconfigure one's presence in front of the other (i.e. being both seen and not seen). Because of this reconfiguration Baining mask dances can create a break - a variation - from everyday social life, which is immensely organised around the ethic of shame/shyness and respect. The paper then brings further into discussion this play of visibility and invisibility, hiding and showing, by examining the handling of pythons within mask dances and their meaning in Baining processes of social reproduction and self-presentation. In this way it problematises the work:play dichotomy, and shows the productive aspect of playthings.

Paper short abstract:

Are toys like icons? A paper on religious kitsch, play, and imagination.

Paper long abstract:

This paper asks how the materiality of toys relates to their capacity to engage the human imagination. I approach this by comparing toys to religious icons, which share many features (miniaturization, representation, tactile qualities) but whose purpose is usually understood to be completely distinct. Action figures and statuettes of saints both invite us into material relationships; both suggest qualities of animacy and profound meaningfulness. So how should we approach the seemingly obvious difference in their purposes? And how should we understand objects that straddle the boundary between toy and icon, such as Jesus action figures and religious kitsch? In exploring these questions I hope to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between ritual and play.