1st Edition
Questioning Play What play can tell us about social life
Part I: Cases of movement play
1. Soccer, crisis, and grace: how round is the Danish ball?
2. Wandering, winding, wondering: what is happening in the labyrinth?
Part II: Critical questions to some play-philosophical commonplaces
3. Colonial and relativistic approaches to the cultural anthropology of play: do we need a definition of play?
4. Unproductive play? What is productivity?
5. Play, learning, and progress: but what about the elderly in play?
6. Innocent play, war games, playing with fire: what about dark play?
Part III: Play as diversity and question
7. Play, game, display, sport: how does language differentiate the understanding of concepts?
8. Play and curiousness: what is the question?
Part IV: Socio-political dimensions of play
9. Folk sports, popular games: who is the folk, who are the people?
10. Play and acceleration: play as an opposite to alienation?
Biography
Henning Eichberg is an historian, cultural sociologist, and philosopher. As Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern Denmark, he works in the Centre for Sports, Health and Civil Society at the Department of Sports Science and Clinical Biomechanics
"Questioning Play is questioning a phenomenon, which is a question itself and as such prone for doing philosophy of interrogation. Eichberg is practicing his own “bottom-up way of philosophy” and succeeds in demonstrating an immense empirical knowledge of play and games put together in a peculiar, differential, “phenomenological” way. Thereby, he leaves a legacy of far-reaching significance for further critical socio-cultural studies, as well as personal imprints of a curious character with much vitality (despite a ailing physical body in later years) and an adventurous courage resembling the zeal and daring of mountain climbers." - Ejgil Jespersen, idrottsforum.org (2017)
