Adventures in the Play-Ritual Continuum

The junctions between play and ritual are many and complex. Play is for fun and joy, but it also demands a total commitment and serious respect for rules. Rituals involve nearly endless varieties of social arrangements and can truly transform people, but they also include improvisation, testing, and pretending.

Adventures in the Play-Ritual Continuum explores the connectivity between the playful and the ritualized through a fresh theoretical perspective, highlighting the creative messiness and the cultural paradoxes such intersections allow. The chapters span topics such as hen parties, marriage proposals, ash scatterings, extreme sports races, football fans, computer game festivals, celebrations of fandom, migration heritages, and antiracist protests. While the case studies are selected to show a range of diversity with various mergings of play, game, ritual, ceremony, rite, and ritualizing, the introductory and concluding discussions offer sharpened perspectives on common aspects.

Following these excursions through the play-ritual continuum will be enjoyable for readers interested in how people make sense of their own existence and profitable for scholars in folklore, anthropology, religion, pedagogy, cultural studies, and social sciences and humanities more generally.

Audun Kjus is senior curator at the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History and editor/coeditor of several collected volumes and special issues. He has published on life-cycle celebrations, capital punishment, and the history of folklore research.

Clíona O’Carroll is lecturer in folklore and ethnology at University College Cork and research director with the Cork Folklore Project. She has published on public folklore, material culture, and tradition archives.

Simon Poole is associate professor of cultural education at the University of Chester, trustee of the Mythstories museum, and director of the Centre for Research into Education, Creativity, and Arts through Practice. He has published on creativity, pedagogy, and storytelling.

Jakob Löfgren is assistant professor in ethnology and folklore at Uppsala University. He has published on workplace conflicts, fan culture, and childhood memories.

Ida Tolgensbakk is senior curator at the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History. She has published on migration, internet memes, and the history of the kebab.