Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture

The ritual act, or an important part of it, will always remain within the play category, but in this seeming subordination the recognition of its holiness is not lost.

We express the relationship between him and the animal he “identifies” himself with, as a “being” for him but a “playing” for us. He has taken on the “essence” of the kangaroo, says the savage; he is playing the kangaroo, say we. The savage, however, knows nothing of the conceptual distinctions between “being” and “playing”; he knows nothing of “identity”, “image” or “symbol”. Hence it remains an open question whether we do not come nearest to the mental attitude of the savage performing a ritual act, by adhering to this primary, universally understandable term “play”.

All we can study is a ritualistic community which receives its religious imagery as traditional material just as “ready-made” as the child does, and responds to it similarly. Secondly, even if we ignore this, the process of “interpreting” the natural surroundings, of “grasping” them and “representing” them in a ritual image remains altogether inaccessible to our observation. It is only by fanciful metaphors that Frobenius and Jensen force an approach to it. The most we can say of the function that is operative in the process of image-making or imagination is that it is a poetic function; and we define it best of all by calling it a function of play—the ludic function, in fact.