Book Reviews

The Handbook of theStudy of PlayJames E. Johnson, Scott G. Eberle, ThomasS. Henricks, and David Kuschner, eds.
New York: Rowman & Littlefield; andRochester, NY: The Strong, 2015. Notes,
epilogue, index. 528 pp. $175.00 cloth.
ISBN: 9781475807943
This two-volume publication finally fills
a void that play scholars—and those
who recognize the primacy of play as afundamental expression of humanity—
have been anticipating with a tremendous sense of urgency for many years.
The Handbook of the Study of Play unites
the diverse academic disciplines thattheorize, research, or apply play—ranging from cognitive, developmental andpositive psychology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, ethology, sociology, philosophy, cultural and intellectual history,
neuroscience, education, performance,and folklore studies to psychotherapy.
Many of these disciplines have traditionally only implicitly devoted themselvesto play, such as sociology, which hasresearched play under the guise of leisurestudies. Others, such as psychology, havefocused only on children’s play, although
we as humans distinguish ourselves asneotenous and retain juvenile characteristics, such as our capacity for play,throughout adulthood—a biological trait
we do not share even with chimpanzees.
This handbook consists of thirtythree concise and extensively referenced
chapters divided into four broad sections,
Disciplines and Influential Minds in volume 1, and Applications and Challenges
in the second volume. As editor James E.
Johnson points out in the introduction,
the organizational structure is based on
Ernest Boyer’s influential four-fold modelof scholarship: discovery, integration,application, and teaching. This handbook
certainly accomplishes its aim with tremendous sophistication. Although written by researchers and practitioners fromdiverse backgrounds, there is a consistency
in terms of vocabulary and theoreticalframing even in the highly specialized
contributions, which not only allows thesegregated body of play research to emerge
as an interdisciplinary corpus of research
but also distills the interdisciplinary char-129

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acter of play with great clarity.
“Come sail with me through a life
spent fishing the waters of play theory,”
Brian Sutton-Smith opens with in chapter15, titled “Play Theory: A Personal Journey and New Thoughts” (p. 239). It is aninvitation that might just as well refer tothe entire handbook, for the seamless andpleasurable sequential logic of its chapters, each stocked with academic curiosities and fascinating anecdotes, allow thereader to fly-fish in this vast pool of exciting knowledge.
In chapter 1, for example, the evolutionary biologist Gordon M. Burghardt
points to the importance of low-stresssettings as fundamental for the initiationof play—a point that historian Jon-Paul C.
Dyson refers to when explaining the suppression of play by Puritans and Pilgrims,
whose colonies were, certainly in the seventeenth century, genuinely struggling
for survival (chapter 2). Anthropologist
Garry Chick surveys cross-cultural playresearch (chapter 4) and demonstrates
how children’s play is very commonly
imitative and serves a preparatory function for adulthood, to which Sutton-Smith(chapter 15) adds that adult-oriented childplay is prevalent in traditional societies.
These anthropological findings cast asimilarly fresh perspective on other areasof play research. For instance, education
researchers David Kuschner (chapter 17)
and Olga Jarrett (chapter 18), and therapeutic playworker Fraser Brown (chapter19), discuss the twentieth- and twentyfirst-centuries debates among educatorsand play practitioners about the role ofplay as a didactic tool, both within andoutside the classroom, and the extent towhich it ought to be supervised.

This handbook does not merely
point to potential historical and culturalbiases, such as the notion of “free play,” butcharts the extent to which play has been ascholarly topic for at least fifteen hundredyears, beginning with Hellenic philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, as discussed by Wendy Russell and Emily Ryall
in a chapter titled “Philosophizing Play.”Gwen Gordon’s contribution manages tobridge the most ancient theories of play
to neurobiology, one of the most exciting
and recent fields of play research (chapter32). The ancient Greek conception of “thegood life” comprised both eudaimonia,
or actualizing one’s unique potential, andhedonia, or pleasure and positive affect,an old distinction Gordon persuasively
reconciles by pointing to the discreet, butinterrelated neural substrates of the PLAY,
CARE, and SEEKING system.
It is most fitting that the final chapter
is written by Jaak Panksepp, the pioneerof affective neuroscience whose work
demonstrates that real social play is anunassailable necessity for healthy brain
maturation and prosocial behavior andthat the increasingly diminishing opportunities to engage in play pose a genuine
crisis that will not only have a negative
impact on the well-being of individuals
but also on the flourishing of society itself.
—Phillip A. Prager, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Becoming Human: The Matterof the Medieval ChildJ. Allan Mitchell
Minneapolis, MN: University ofMinnesota Press, 2014. Notes, index,