Play on the Motherground: Children’s Peer Play Lives in Mayurbhanj.
On this day (20 December) commemorating our international human solidarity, this seminar will reflect on Mayurbhanj elementary school-aged children’s peer play. Play is a dynamic and embodied way that young people interact with and make sense of the life of their social and spatial environments. It has also been referred to as an invisible domain two feet below most adults’ eyes. My methodological approach to rural Odishan young people’s peer play was to engage with it as a form of cultural expression; and in this sense as a way of better appreciating and understanding the experiences, dilemmas and interpersonal perspectives of young people in a particular time and place.
Accounting for almost half India’s population, young people are the subject of intense scrutiny in development discourse and as targets of India’s education revolution. Substantial knowledge about children (i.e., economic development and health/cognitive development discourses); and for children (curriculums, pedagogies and new technologies of education) is still poorly complemented and triangulated with children’s own knowledge. Peer play ethnography is a valuable way of engaging with young people’s embodied processes of knowledge creation.
Perhaps 2020 has highlighted with unprecedented force that human solidarity is entangled with human—non-human relationality. Mayurbhanj young people’s peer play offers insights into this entanglement. I will focus on two themes: social interactions and environmental/spatial interactions.
Bio
Zazie Bowen is an anthropologist with a special research interest in the social and cultural worlds of children and young people. A key focus of her work is on better integration of young people’s perspectives and experiences within the communities and institutions of which they are members. Bowen’s research intersects the fields of education ethnography; indigenous education and critical Indigenous studies; visual anthropology; play studies; gender studies; and research into identity and belonging. While much of her research is focused geographically on India, she has also worked on research projects within Australia, the Pacific and Indonesia. Zazie Bowen holds adjunct fellow positions at the University of the Sunshine Coast and the Australian National University.
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