Brian Sutton-Smith

Brian Sutton Smith (July 15, 1924 – March 7, 2015), better known as Brian Sutton-Smith, was a play theorist who spent his lifetime attempting to discover the cultural significance of play in human life, arguing that any useful definition of play must apply to both adults and children. He demonstrated that children are not innocent in their play and that adults are indeed guilty in theirs. In both cases play pretends to assist them in surmounting their Darwinian struggles for survival. His forthcoming book is entitled Play As Emotional Survival, which is a response to his own deconstruction of play theories in his work, The Ambiguity of Play (1997, Harvard University Press). Sutton-Smith's interdisciplinary approach included research into play history and cross cultural studies of play, as well as research in psychology, education, and folklore. He maintained that the interpretation of play must involve all of its forms, from child's play to gambling, sports, festivals, imagination, and nonsense. 2Biography Brian Sutton-Smith was born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1924. He trained as a teacher, completed a BA and MA, and was then awarded the first Education PhD in New Zealand in 1954. Following the completion of his PhD, Sutton-Smith travelled to the USA on grant from the Fulbright Program, where he began an academic career with a focus on children's games, adult games, children's play, children's drama, films and narratives, as well as children's gender issues and sibling position. Sutton-Smith was the author of some 50 books, the most recent of which is The Ambiguity of Play, and some 350 scholarly article