Games and Their Rhetorics: An Idiosyncratic Appreciation of The Contributions of Brian Sutton-Smith
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Abstract
Brian Sutton-Smith left a legacy of more than 40 books and 300 articles published, along with numerous conference presentations, television appearances and projects, and speaking engagements around the world over a 60-plus year career. While not all of these directly engaged play, this corpus surely makes Sutton-Smith history’s most prolific scholar and advocate of play. The majority of his research on play was directed at children and psychological in nature but he was deeply eclectic and bridged a variety of other disciplines including anthropology, sociology, folklore, history, philosophy, biology, ethology, and neurology, among others. In addition to several of the essays in this special issue, his work has been reviewed and summarized by others (see Meckley 2015) and by himself (Sutton-Smith 1995; 2008). I edited two issues of the journal Play & Culture, plus part of a third in 1991, as a Festschrift for Sutton-Smith while Anthony Pellegrini edited another in 1995. Sutton-Smith further cemented his legacy with the publication of his classic book The Ambiguity of Play (1997). In this book, he convincingly showed that how we have thought about and conducted research on play has been based in a series of underlying cultural and ideological values and that understanding them may lead to a more unified discussion of the phenomenon.
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