Bøger af Brian Sutton-Smith

Returning to his home country of New Zealand, Brian Sutton-smith documents the relationship between children's play and the actual process of history. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews the author illuminates for the first time the various social, cultural, historical, and psychological contexts in which children's play occurs.

The Folkstories of Children, first published in 1981, features nearly five hundred stories that were volunteered by fifty children between the ages of two and ten and transcribed word for word. The stories are organized chronologically by age of the teller, revealing the progression of the children's cognition and verbal competence.

Is play an adaptation that teaches us skills and inducts us into communities? Is it power, pursued in games of prowess, or fate, deployed in games of chance, or daydreaming, enacted in art? Sutton-Smith considers each possibility as framed in disciplines ranging from biology, psychology, and education to metaphysics, mathematics, and sociology.