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Bowen, Z. (2015). Play on the mother-ground: children's games in rural Odisha. South Asian History and Culture: Childhoods in India: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives, 6(3), pp.330–347.

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Bowen, Z. (2015). Play on the mother-ground: children's games in rural Odisha. South Asian History and Culture: Childhoods in India: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives, 6(3), pp.330–347.

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I recommend this article as it explores play-environment connection by analysing how school-aged children in rural Odisha give a specific generational meaning to their surroundings through peer play and adult-determined activity. Bowen(2015) regards play as a form of social interaction with landscapes that acknowledges the ways players are shaped by, as well as shape the landscapes they inhabit. Children's play can both be an index and a site of transformation within the place as a site of symbolic continuity.

What attracts me specifically is the discussing of hidden maps of village play as favoured play spots by young people and form the strongest memories even among adults. It reminds me of my experience of discovering those hidden spots when I played outside with my peers. The illustration of hidden map shows that children’s play, the natural environment and cherished spaces are inevitably connected and are a fundamental core of human experience.

In addition, I have learned from the concept of magic circles of play and games is also that external geo-spatiality and cultural milieu of what exists outside the circle infiltrates the porous borders of the circle, while what goes on inside a circle impacts on its social and spatial context. Readers can better understand it through the example of the cemetery of a Ho sahi shows how two players’ rules and a wider context of local meanings interacted with each other.

Besides, you can know about the linkages between spatial resources, technologies and core symbolic resources outside of games and their influence on games by reading the article.

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Remorini, C., & Rende, M.(2014) Play and Child Development, The Oriental Anthropologist, 14, 2,  pp.241-266

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Remorini, C., & Rende, M.(2014) Play and Child Development, The Oriental Anthropologist, 14, 2,  pp.241-266

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This is an ethnographic research with comparative analysis of playful activities in two contrasting ecological contexts of rural Argentine. With systematic and in-depth description of routine activity, play is analysed as part of children's formative experiences in the context of their participation in household activities and their relationships with adults and peers.

The main differences observed in the play behavior between the two contexts (Molinos communities and Mbya-Guarani communities) show the differences in the parents' ethnotheories as regards the activities, knowledge and skills children should develop for their present and future. As a result, children have a sound knowledge of the environment, their resources and the way to use them thanks to their early participation in household sustenance activities.

The authors also discuss the value of observation as a method for learning and differences between two communities. In Mbya, adults rarely speak to young children as they think observation is a method for children to learn many physical skills and also vocabulary related with different activities. In Molinos, adults tend to give a  prominent place to verbal and intentional teaching, using 'didactic' expressions as well as 'childish expressions' since mothers have a  higher education level. The common phenomenon in both places is that little children's playmates are usually their elder siblings and their mothers in the first place, children from other households and hardly ever fathers or other adults. Therefore, it can be learned that children aprehend knowledge about the world from adults, peers and from their participation in concrete experiences.

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Jirata, T. (2012). LEARNING THROUGH PLAY: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY OF CHILDREN'S RIDDLING IN ETHIOPIA. Africa, 82(2), 272-286. doi:10.1017/S0001972012000058

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Jirata, T. (2012). LEARNING THROUGH PLAY: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY OF CHILDREN'S RIDDLING IN ETHIOPIA. Africa, 82(2), 272-286. doi:10.1017/S0001972012000058

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Jiarata introduces riddling— one of the popular children’s play practices in the repertoire of the Guji people's oral tradition— as as a sphere for children's autonomous entertainment and knowledge acquisition through ethnographic fieldwork there. In the ethnography, she views children as social actors and construct riddling as a critical element of their cultural practice through which they produce informal social networks and learn about the physical and social phenomena in the local environment.

She mainly suggested that children riddle for entertaining and learning from their immediate social and natural environment through discrete peer networks. While riddling differentiates Guji children’s culture from the adult’s culture as children’s own play practice, it has unique social value. It also exposes children to situations that enhance their problem-solving skills and ability to interpret metaphorical images by associating them with social and natural phenomena.  As a result, readers can learn how riddling as a form of child-friendly play provides informal learning situations in the article.

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DeMarrais, K., Nelson, P., & Baker, J. (1992). Meaning in Mud: Yup'ik Eskimo Girls at Play. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 23(2), 120-144.

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DeMarrais, K., Nelson, P., & Baker, J. (1992). Meaning in Mud: Yup'ik Eskimo Girls at Play. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 23(2), 120-144.

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The authors introduce a daily game/activity in Yup'ik villages names storyknifing and illustrate how it aided in development of cultural, communicative, and cognitive skills in Eskimo children by describing the utensils, symbols, and stories used in storyknifing, and the historical role storyknifing has played in traditional Eskimo culture.

storyknifing worked as a meaning to transmit culture from elders to the children in past generations. These activities can practice and reinforce the core values, folklore, and behaviours of the community.

Although the small village in southwestern Alaska has gone through tremendous Westernization of the culture, storyknifing continues to serve as a means for young girls to know their culture and themselves. This special play activity in Yup'ik villages is no longer part of the daily lives of children because of technology like television and videotape players. This is also happening in most of the places of the world. However, the articles suggested that the stories on television and videotapes also provide the children with material for their storyknife play. From the ethnography, we can learn from the storyknife play as a traditional form of play activity in one place as well as how children learn from it while it might also similar to our own experience of play and the form of games in our own culture.

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Malaby, T. M. (2009). Anthropology and play: The contours of playful experience. New Literary History, 40(1), 205-219. 

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Malaby, T. M. (2009). Anthropology and play: The contours of playful experience. New Literary History, 40(1), 205-219. 

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I recommend this article because it rethinks play through the tendencies of anthropological work on play, and offers readers a comprehensive understanding on the theme of play in anthropological perspectives.

Malaby suggests that the field of sociocultural anthropology in twentieth-century can recognize a better model for thinking about play by departing from stressing only two possibilities: play as nonwork(materialist) and play as representation(representationalst). He argues that the vital element of understanding the experience of play is the indeterminacy of games. As a few anthropological works have concentrated on situating the cultural form of games in specific cultural historical moments recently, Malaby suggests that we can begin to forge a useful concept of play that will inform our understanding of experience in a uncertain world. With the recognitions of the contingent nature of experience in the world, the elements of an approach that enables us to confront play’s greater prominence include the attention to practice, the pragmatist’s claims about the open-endedness of the world, and the study of ritual as decoupled from religious experience, which can be well connected by anthropology. In the end, he also discusses the attempts to use games by institutions and show the difference between the cultural forms of ritual and game. He argues that the current challenge is that how the explosion of thoroughly digitised games prompts us to confront the play element and its powerful yet indeterminate relationship to the emergent cultural form of computerized games.