Child’s Play: A Multidisciplinary Perspective1

Competition obscures the realities and significance of play, in particular, the bodily play originating in infancy and typical of young children. A multidisciplinary perspective on child’s play elucidates the nature of child’s play and validates the distinction between competition and play. The article begins with a consideration of ethological research on play in young human and nonhuman animals, proceeds to a consideration of psychological research on laughter as a primary kinetic marker of play, and ends with a philosophical examination of the foundational moral significances of child’s play. I would like to set the stage for this essay by citing two passages from the writings of physician-psychiatrist Stuart Brown. The first passage is from an in-depth psychobiological study of Charles Whitman, the Texas tower mass murderer of the late 1960s, a study commissioned by then governor of Texas, John Connally. In Brown’s words, “We had originally expected to discover a brain tumor and drugs as primary causal agents, but our intensive investigation weighted abuse and playlessness as the major factors placing him and his future victims at risk” (Brown, 1998, p. 248). The second passage is from an unpublished manuscript on play and concerns a Little League player who could make or break the game. The coach did not tell him to “Go out there and by God make the point or else!” but told him that whatever happened, they’d all go out for pizza after the game. Where competition drowns out play, in particular, the bodily play originating in infancy and typical of young children, it undermines its own foundations, foundations that are phylogenetic as well as ontogenetic. In so doing, it transforms its otherwise low-profile place in early life and gives rise to an altogether other social activity, an activity whose ethos is driven by a premature aggression and whose asocial end is one-dimensionally self-serving. Competition in such instances is not a matter of play become serious, but a matter of no play at all. The motivations and meaning of movement have changed. The name of the game is win, and win at all costs. I hope to make good on this complex claim, first by considering ethological research on both rough and tumble play and locomotor-rotational play in young human and nonhuman animals; second by examining laughter ontogenetically as a kinetic marker of play and noting its phylogenetic correlates; and third by specifying the foundational moral significances that come to light 410 MAXINE SHEETS-JOHNSTONE when child’s play is examined in multidisciplinary perspective. My abiding aim in the course of these substantiations – in essence, this exploration of the nature and import of early play without objects – is to provide a deeper appreciation of the significance of child’s play and the consequent need to preserve its integrity against the premature ingress of adult competition, which, in proportion to its presence, is a perversion of play. Indeed, to discourage, curtail, or otherwise suppress the natural disposition of young humans to play is not only a morally questionable act, but, as the first cited passage from Brown indicates, an act that can have sizable moral consequences for both the deprived individual and for society. 1. Rough and Tumble Play Rough and tumble play was first put on the ethological map by Blurton Jones in his study of three to five year-old nursery-school children in London. Taking the descriptive term ‘rough and tumble play’ from the Harlows who used it in their study of social deprivation in monkeys, Blurton Jones found this kind of play to be distinguished by “seven movement patterns which tend to occur at the same time as each other and not to occur with other movements,” such as those involved when a child paints, for example, or works with clay (Blurton Jones, 1969, p. 450). The distinctive movements are: running, chasing and fleeing; wrestling; jumping up and down with both feet together; beating at each other with an open hand without actually hitting; beating at each other with an object but not hitting; laughing. Blurton Jones also mentions that falling “seems to be a regular part of this behaviour,” and that, “if there is anything soft to land on children spend much time throwing themselves and each other on to it” (ibid.). It is of interest to note that the seven movements – what I would call the kinetic markers of rough and tumble play – have received comparatively little attention, though ironically, just such observed movements would seem to have influenced both earlier adultist definitions of play as purposeless, irrational activity, and later functionalist explanations of play as motor training and as practice for adult behavior. Earlier researchers might have observed rough and tumble play and asked: What does jumping up and down accomplish? What does laughing accomplish? What is the rational point of beating without hitting? Later researchers, in contrast, attempt to pin down the adaptive value of such movement. With respect to both earlier definitions and later explanations, however, one might well ask another question: why should early childhood social play center on rough and tumble play, in particular, on pretend attack and defense movements? William James (James [1890] 1950, p. 429n) posed a similar question when he stated, in answer to a psychologist who claimed that there is no play instinct but only an “aversion to remain 411 CHILD’S PLAY: A MULTIDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVE unoccupied,” “No doubt this is true; but why the particular forms of sham occupation?” Present-day ethologists regularly note the relationship between attack and defense movements and both human and nonhuman play, but they commonly give an adaptive explanation as above. Robert Fagen, an animal ethologist whose 1981 detailed study of animal play is a landmark volume, wrote more ambiguously on the subject. Stating early on that “The most familiar form of animal play, playfighting and play-chasing[,] consists of cooperative nonagonistic chasing, wrestling, and hitting” (Fagen, 1981, p. 5), he highlights the non-aggressive nature of play, but underscores its equally competitive aspect as well. He begins his chapter on “Biology of Social Play” by stating that “Social play at its cooperative best is a biological showpiece. Evenly matched and closely related partners cooperate in apparent mutual physical training and skill development. Their play is non-injurious. It does not harm their social relationship and may even strengthen long-term prospects for their cooperation. An older individual may play altruistically with its younger sibling. Special communicative signals and stabilizing techniques ensure that play is fair to both participants” (ibid., p. 387). But Fagen points out too that “Play between individuals is less idyllic when partners are not evenly matched, are not close genetic relatives, and can exploit play interactions for ulterior purposes. Social manipulation, cheating, bullying, and intimidation may then become the norm” (ibid.). While noting further how sociobiologists unsuccessfully insist on a view of play as “damaging competitive behavior” (damaging to others, that is, in the self-interest of reproductive success), he himself nevertheless emphasizes that play has a tactical objective, and that “The tactical objective of social play is . . . to achieve control of the opponent without being controlled,” (ibid., p. 411). On this basis, he goes on to vindicate a view of playfighting as having a winner and a loser. Yet, somewhat astoundingly, in the same context he states that “The apparent purpose of play is some form or forms of experience occurring while attempting to achieve a positional objective against a partner’s defensive moves or while defending against a partner’s attempts to achieve it” (ibid.), and proceeds to quote evolutionary anthropologist Donald Symons who, in his extended observations of rhesus monkeys (Symons, 1978), found that “‘the striving or competition’ (rather than mere achievement or defense of the goal) ‘appears to be its own reward’” (Fagen, 1981, p. 411). In sum, mixed characterizations abound, and they abound not simply because play is a complex kinetic phenomenon and Fagen’s coverage of it is extensive and meticulously detailed, but because experientialsemantic levels of discourse remain unexamined, and remaining unexamined, remain conceptually at odds with levels that are examined. Other researchers have looked along developmental lines at the relationship between attack and defense movements and rough and tumble play or playfighting, noting, for example – as Groos (1901) did long ago – that “rough 412 MAXINE SHEETS-JOHNSTONE and tumble [play] becomes rougher with age, . . . although it is still fundamentally distinct from hostile fighting” (Humphreys and Smith, 1984, p. 255). Still, other researchers have looked along sexual lines, noting, for example, that boys engage in more rough and tumble play than girls, not only in our own culture but in cultures quite different from our own. In the context of such developmental and sexual data, researchers of child behavior have noted a relationship between unpopularity and aggression: “Rejected (unpopular) boys, who lack the skills to engage in the cooperative games that build social support and status in adolescence, are much more likely than peers to express dominance and aggression in their play. More than others, rejected boys use rough and tumble to bully and victimize vulnerable lower-ranking children” (Biben, 1998, p. 175). All such empirical studies present abundant evidence for the distinction between play and competition or aggression, and abundant evidence for developmental and sexual differences in play as well, but none satisfactorily answers the question of why the social play of youngsters centers on rough and tumble play or playfighting. Deeper reflection on the kinetic markers of play is of substantial help in this regard. Blurton Jones originally noted, for example, that playfighting and aggression are facially distinct: rough and tumble play is associated with laughing; aggression with frowning and fixating (Blurton Jones, 1969, p. 451; see also Humphreys and Smith, 1984, pp. 251– 52). If we eschew the common antithesis between cooperation and competition – the first of these terms being an unelucidated cliché concept with respect to social play – and discount a concern with winners and losers as well, and if we hew instead to kinetic markers, keeping in mind even if not commenting directly upon the increasing roughness of rough and tumble play with age and the difference between girls and boys in amount of rough and tumble play, we perforce anchor attention on bodies and movement. In particular, we anchor attention on bodies and movement from the beginning and thereby have the possibility of deeper insights into rough and tumble play and early bodily play in general. As I hope to have shown elsewhere (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999), in the beginning we all learn our bodies and learn to move ourselves – without an owner’s manual and without instruction. What I have not shown elsewhere but hope to show here is that in learning our bodies and learning to move ourselves, we first learn the vulnerabilities of being a body – our own vulnerabilities and the vulnerabilities of others in our movement interactions with them. Rough and tumble play is a way of coming to grips with our vulnerabilities, indeed, of playing with them, at times literally wrestling with them in the form of another individual. In learning our bodies and learning to move ourselves in the course of rough and tumble play, we learn that we can be hurt: others can shove us too hard, kick or slap us inadvertently, and so on. Rough and tumble play is all the same a sane and safe way of putting our vulnerability on the line, 413 CHILD’S PLAY: A MULTIDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVE of experiencing first-hand the ultimately fragile bodies we are. It is a self-teaching exercise in corporeal care and survival, not only corporeal care of ourselves and our own survival, but corporeal care of others and their survival. When we learn our bodies and the bodies of others, we learn a common kinetic language, becoming as kinetically attuned to the movements of others as we are kinesthetically attuned to our own. Primatologist Stuart Altmann coined the word comsigns to designate social behavioral patterns – play signals, for example, or threat gestures – that are common to an animal species or group (Altmann 1967). Expanding his concept along experiential-semantic lines, we readily see that comsigns are part of a common kinetic language structured in common movement patterns emanating from a common body and having common experiential dynamics and common meanings. From this experiential-semantic perspective, rough and tumble play, like bodily play in general, can hardly be categorized as Johan Huizinga of otherwise well-deserved Homo ludens fame and other researchers of play have categorized it, namely, as purposeless and irrational activity. What is kinetically pervasive among individuals and has commonly experienced dynamics and commonly recognized meanings can be judged neither purposeless nor irrational. From this same perspective, neither can rough and tumble play, or bodily play in general, be adequately explained as motor training or practice for adult behavior. Indeed, adaptive scenarios are no more help than non-adaptive scenarios in understanding play, and this because play, as noted, is a complex kinetic phenomenon demanding close attention in its own right as the developmental, evolutionary, and experientially meaningful phenomenon that it is. It in fact calls for a triumvirate of perspectives: ontogenetic, phylogenetic, and philosophical. Short of the latter perspective, foundational understandings of the nature of play are short-circuited. So too are deeper significances that are concealed in the question: why these movements – running, chasing, beating without actually hitting, laughing – and not others?; and equally deeper significances that are couched in awarenesses of what it is to be the body one is and what it is like to be the body one is not. Experience and meaning are not subsidiary, empirically dispensable aspects of a behavioral package marked “play,” but non-expungeable dimensions of the phenomenon itself, and this because they in fact constitute its raison d’être. As Fagen and Symons obliquely indicate, the motivation to play and the import of play lie in the experience and meaning of play itself. In effect, when vigorous – and vigorously promoted – competition prematurely intrudes on play, it diverts the attention of children from their still growing bodies. It robs them of the space they need to explore their strengths, their weaknesses, their endurance, their agility, their capacity to think in movement in the immediacy of the moment, their kinetic ingenuity, and so on. It catapults them beyond their years and their abilities, deflecting them from testing their possibilities and recognizing their limitations in relatively risk-free ways. 414 MAXINE SHEETS-JOHNSTONE It shunts their attention from the care and survival of others in concert with their own to a quest for dominance over others. It focuses attention on something altogether different: winning. We should note that the learning of vulnerabilities is not linguistified nor is it even necessarily linguistifiable. It is not and cannot be codified into a series of rules. Neither is it nor can it be tested, measured, and quantified; it is not translatable into objective formulas. While an infant or child may be verbally admonished not to shove or hit because he or she can hurt another in doing so, the verbal admonishment only vaguely captures the desired nonlinguistic awarenesses and corporeal concepts. In this respect, nonhuman animals are one step ahead of their human counterparts. Nonhuman animals know kinetically the so-called rules of social play, and know them kinetically from the start: claws are automatically retracted, bites are not actual bites, and so on (e.g., Fagen, 1981, pp. 395-96). There is no adult individual admonishing a younger one to back off in some way or other and to think about how one can hurt another individual. We should note too that though one might insist that learning one’s vulnerabilities is adaptive (i.e., it is in the service of fitness for reproductive success), such a conception de-animates living bodies, bodies that initiate movement, that terminate movement, that can intensify efforts, expand the range of their movement, change direction, and so on. Living bodies are motivated bodies that move voluntarily in the course of learning vulnerabilities; they are neither automatons nor lumbering robots at the command of their genes. Moreover that vulnerability is learned, and learned first and foremost in the course of moving, means that it is experienced, which in turn means that corporeal-kinetic meanings resonate in living ways and become engrained in the kinetic lifestyle of the living animal, and that a kinetically discriminating intelligence, a bodily logos, is cultivated and constituted in the process. In short, to insist that learning one’s vulnerabilities is simply adaptive is to insist that learning one’s body and learning to move oneself are adaptive, which is to insist that virtually everything in the end is adaptive, the bottom line being in its ultimate formulation a reductio ad absurdum: being alive has survival value and is adaptive for reproductive success! Put in this wider philosophic-scientific perspective, it is readily apparent not only that rough and tumble play is play with the vulnerabilities of being a body – play with the fears, inhibitions, hesitations, worries, and so on, that arise in the course of learning our bodies and learning to move ourselves – but that rough and tumble play is at the same time fun – most commonly, great and overriding fun! This integral and preeminent dimension of play was actually recognized early on by researchers of play and cannot reasonably be written off in the current manner of sociobiologists who are content to claim that animals find “sweet” the activities in which they engage (Barash, 1982, p. 147). To begin with, pleasure is not a kind of background music provided 415 CHILD’S PLAY: A MULTIDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVE by wholly theoretical genes to keep us interested, focused, and on target – whether a matter of mating, hunting, or eating. Most importantly, applied to play, the purported sotto voce accompaniment is a gross distortion. Experience, in particular, kinetic/tactile-kinesthetic experience in rough and tumble play, and in bodily play generally, cannot be reduced to an accompanying sweetness no matter how much ultimate causation is pedestalled over proximate causation. Pleasure or fun in running, chasing, laughing, jumping, beating, and so on, is quite literally pleasure or fun in the flesh. It is not an accessory to a main event, but the main event itself. Close examination of locomotorrotational play will corroborate this fact precisely because, whether socially situated or not, it is a matter of individual experience. 2. Locomotor-Rotational Play Consider the following description by A.S. Einarsen (1948, p. 122), a wildlife specialist: Coming cautiously one day over a rimrock at Spanish Lake, I saw a group of seven antelope kids with their mothers on the hard shore-edge of the receding lake. The mothers were contentedly resting in the warm June sun, apparently at ease and unaware of my approach. The kids were having a great time in a quite highly organized game. Rushing away across the flat rim of the lake shore, as though started by a lifting of a barrier on a race track, they ran neck and neck, swung in a wide arc and then thundered back, their tiny hooves beating in unison as they soared rather than ran, their bodies parallel to the earth. Upon nearing the starting point they drew up to a stiff-legged stop at their mothers’ sides, gazed with dreamy eyes around the immediate vicinity, then wheeled away on another flight, with apparently enough power and enthusiasm to drive them to the summit of the Rocky Mountains 1,000 miles away. Ethologist John Byers comments that Einarsen’s description of pronghorn play emphasizes “what all ungulate young do when they play. They run” (Byers, 1984, p. 43). More broadly, Fagen notes that “The best-known locomotorrotational movements are leaping, rolling, headshaking, body-twisting, neck flexion, rearing, and kicking” (Fagen, 1981, p. 48). Fagen remarks further that “Common usage gives these lay movements special status by employing unique terms: gambol, caper, romp, scamper, frolic, rollick, frisk, jink, cavort, ragrowster, gambader (French), and balgen and tollen (German)” (ibid.). Now it would be as absurd to dismiss these “unique terms” as mere anthropomorphic, subjective, or literary glosses as to dismiss tactile-kinesthetic experience as mere behavioral gloss. Moving – running, leaping, rolling, cavorting – is clearly fun, whether you are a harbor seal, a pygmy hippopotamus, a giant panda, a caviomorph rodent, or a human child – animals who have 416 MAXINE SHEETS-JOHNSTONE all been observed by ethologists to gambol, caper, romp, frolic, and so on (ibid.). Given this ethological perspective, we can begin to appreciate how and why movement can itself be a motivating force, or correlatively from a dynamic systems perspective, how and why movement can itself be an attractor. Movement is enjoyable, pleasurable; for the moving individual, it produces a high, an elevated sense of aliveness, a delight in the kinetic dynamics that is underway. We can furthermore readily understand the regular emphasis on both the vigorous and remarkable nature of play movement. When Fagen, for example, writes that “Play is rich in brisk and lively body movements” (ibid., p. 287) and Byers (Byers, 1984, p. 47) writes that ungulate play is “often spectacular and dramatic,” and evolutionary psychologist K.R.L. Hall writes that the social play of patas monkeys is “exceedingly vigorous and spectacular in the wild, much of it being high-speed chasing – some of it mock-fighting” (1967, p. 277), each is giving voice to the fact that movement itself is compelling, compelling in both a motivating sense and in an attention-getting sense; it is itself both a sufficient reason to move and a sufficient reason for attention. In the latter sense, it is indeed a magnet, capturing the attention of human and nonhuman animals alike. Though not stopping to remark on its significance, ethologists S.M. Pellis and V.C. Pellis note the magnetic pull of movement in their observation of magpies in the midst of swarming beetles. Rather than following the behavior of adult magpies who walk slowly and catch beetles that fall to the ground, younger magpies run after a beetle, but as soon as it drops in the grass and another beetle flies by, they chase the new beetle each time. “The juveniles,” Pellis and Pellis remark “were clearly distracted by, and attracted to, movement” (Pellis and Pellis, 1998, p. 131). Their assessment agrees with the experimental findings of psychologist T. G. R. Bower who found that “infants “ignore features [of objects] to such an extent that I would suggest that they respond not to moving objects but to movements” (Bower, 1971, p. 37: italics added). In short, movement is primary in early animate life, the attractor par excellence. The doubly-compelling nature of movement is further reason why kinetic pleasure cannot be marginalized as mere sotto voce phenomenon in the lives of animals, human and nonhuman. Adult humans who cannot grasp the pleasure in bodily play may well be out of touch with themselves as moving bodies and therefore out of touch with the kinetic joyride that movement affords (Sheets-Johnstone, 1986, p. 242). Several of Darwin’s observations on pleasure and movement are instructive in this regard. To begin with, although Darwin speaks of “purposeless movements” in the context of pleasure, it is not with dismissive, deprecatory, or trivializing intent. He points out ([1872] 1965, p. 76) that under a transport of Joy or of vivid Pleasure, there is a strong tendency to various purposeless movements, and to the utterance of various sounds. We 417 CHILD’S PLAY: A MULTIDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVE see this in our young children, in their loud laughter, clapping of hands, and jumping for joy; in the bounding and barking of a dog when going out to walk with his master, and in the frisking of a horse when turned out into an open field. Joy quickens the circulation, and this stimulates the brain, which again reacts on the whole body. He goes on to observe that “with animals of all kinds, the acquirement of almost all their pleasures, with the exception of those of warmth and rest, are associated, and have long been associated with active movements,” and then points out, “Moreover, the mere exertion of the muscles after long rest or confinement is in itself a pleasure, as we ourselves feel, and as we see in the play of young animals” (ibid., p. 77). He concludes that “on this latter principle alone [i.e., the pleasure of bodily play] we might perhaps expect, that vivid pleasure would be apt to show itself conversely in muscular movements” (ibid. 77). Now obviously, when Darwin says that joy and pleasure are expressed in purposeless movement, he does not mean that joy and pleasure are purposeless. But neither does he mean that purposeless movement is insignificant or meaningless. On the contrary, he pointedly suggests that movement is selfstimulating when he notes that “joy quickens the circulation,” and explicitly observes that movement can itself be a source of pleasure, not only in the fact that “active movement” is associated with pleasurable activities, but in the fact that “the mere exertion of muscles” – movement – is a felt pleasure. In short, movement is in and of itself engaging, fun, and delightful, and it is engaging, fun, and delightful because it resonates in feelings of aliveness radiating dynamically through a kinetic/tactile-kinesthetic body. It is important to emphasize that one does not have to language the experience of movement to appreciate such feelings. It is quite unnecessary to think to oneself or say aloud, “Oh! Does this ever make me feel vibrant, lively, and spirited! How great it is to be alive!” One appreciates the feelings directly in the kinetic/tactile-kinesthetic experience itself; one savors the experience of kinetic fun – kinetic fun in being a body, kinetic fun in the flesh – without words. Nonhuman animals are thus experientially not at a loss for words but can in fact, in their bodily play, teach humans something basic and important about themselves, something that, as a nonlinguistic and in essence nonlinguistifiable experience, they may have trivialized or suppressed. Byers’s evolutionary view that locomotor-rotational play is the progenitor of play is relevant to consider here, though in ways that go beyond his adaptive valuation of it in terms of a “common ancestral function,” namely, motor training (Byers, 1984, p. 60). His descent with modification thesis – that more sophisticated forms of play – social play and play with objects – were spinoffs from individual locomotor-rotational play – is significant in terms not only of what we might call the complexification of fun and pleasure, but what we might call the complexification of vulnerabilities in the evolution of play. As 418 MAXINE SHEETS-JOHNSTONE indicated earlier, as corporeal-kinetic knowledge of one’s own vulnerabilities and capacities is built up and integrated, it grounds knowledge of the vulnerabilities and capacities of others in social play with them. The most basic form of social knowledge is thus from this perspective empathic in character and its foundations lie in intercorporeal understandings generated in and by corporeal-kinetic knowledge of one’s own body. More finely stated, empathic understandings of others come by way of corporeal-kinetic transfers of sense. The transfers are not reasoned out connections, but neither are they on that account what some, following scientist-turned-philosopher Michael Polanyi (1969), might call a form of “tacit knowledge.” On the contrary, by turning full attention to bodies and movement, we can trace out ways in which corporeal-kinetic understandings of the vulnerability of our own body is built up, and in being built up, is the basis of our understandings and appreciations of the movement possibilities and limitations – the vulnerabilities – of others in our movement interactions with them. In phenomenological terms, we can come to understand how a repertoire of ‘I cans’ and ‘I cannots’ comes literally into play in the constitution of our own bodies in experiences of play and, in turn, in the constitution of the bodies of others in our experiences of play with them. By the same token, we can trace out ways in which play opens up corporeal-kinetic possibilities and thereby opens up space for innovation, a field in which creative energies can surge. In play with others, creative energies and degrees of freedom are compounded so that play can be and often is on the verge of breaking out into something new at the same time that it is intercorporeally structured in the kinetically and kinesthetically known. Playing with others at the cutting edge of innovation complexifies the fundamental pleasure, fun, and delight of movement. 3. Play and Laughter What is commonly termed ‘display behavior’ corroborates and points up the import of experientially-resonant, semantically-laden intercorporeal awarenesses and restraints structuring the intercorporeal-kinetic bonds of rough and tumble play and playfighting, what we might broadly designate ‘play sport’, including under its aegis locomotor-rotational play as well. Social semantic understandings are of course critical to the relationships of social animals generally, but they are particularly critical to the initiation and continuance of play since what actually ensues in the interaction is contingent on the recognition of a play signal (or play-promoting signal: Pellis and Pellis, 1996). In canids (dogs, wolves, coyotes, and so on), for example, the play signal is a “play bow,” a lowering of the forelegs, and thus the forward end of the body, the hindlegs remaining upright (Bekoff, 1995). What I want to consider here, however, is a signal more closely aligned with an element of human play: 419 CHILD’S PLAY: A MULTIDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVE laughter. The relaxed open-mouthed face of most primate species – what is termed “the play face” – is homologous to human laughter (van Hooff, 1969, 1972). (The silent bared-teeth face, it might be noted, is homologous to human smiling.) The relaxed open-mouthed primate face initiates play and occurs during play, and sounds regularly emitted during its expression are glossed as “ah, ah.” Detailed phylogenetic analyses linking the nonhuman primate play face and sounds to the face and sounds of human laughter were carried out by ethologist J.A.R.A.M. van Hooff, the relationship being further commented upon by Blurton Jones in his studies of children’s rough and tumble play (Blurton Jones, 1969, 1972). Psychologist Anthony Ambrose’s study of the original bivalent affective nature of human laughter, though unconcerned with phylogeny, is relevant to the phylogenetic analysis. The aim of Ambrose’s study is to show how infant laughter is motivated by “ambivalent tendencies,” and how these ambivalent tendencies are manifest in particular patterns of behavior. On the basis of his own observations and the research studies of others, Ambrose notes first that infants commonly laugh in three types of situation: in being suddenly surprised, in being tickled, and in exploratory play or in the noticing of something new (Ambrose, 1963, p. 170). He comments that when looked at from the viewpoint of ambivalent tendencies, it is apparent that each situation “has a dual effect on the infant”: at the same time it elicits fear or anger, it is “enjoyable or relieving” (ibid., p. 171). Where fear or anger predominate, a “stimulus-terminating tendency” predominates and crying results; where enjoyment or relief predominate, a “stimulus-maintaining tendency” predominates and laughter results. Giving an example of each situation in turn, he shows how in laughter, enjoyment is “tinged” with fear (ibid.). Turning attention to differences in patterns of behavior between enjoyment and fear, he descriptively pinpoints differences in movement and posture. In the fear response of crying, “There is tenseness of muscles, the fists are often clenched, and arms and legs move and kick spasmodically”; eyes are closed, the forehead is furrowed, and “the mouth assumes a rather rectangular form.” In enjoyment – not in laughter specifically yet, but in enjoyment generally – eyes are open, there are “more or less rhythmic arm and leg movements which are free from restraint” and “movements of incipient approach rather than withdrawal” (ibid., p. 172). Most notably, there is a fundamental difference in respiration between fear and enjoyment, a difference that, as Ambrose shows, is precisely homogenized in the phenomenon of laughter: “laughter generally begins with a vigorous expiration, rarely with an inspiration,” though deep inspirations occur during laughter and usually on its termination (ibid, p. 173.). As in enjoyment, there is “heightened inspiration . . . interrupted by . . . expirations”; as in crying, there is a continuous series of expirations” (ibid.). 420 MAXINE SHEETS-JOHNSTONE Particularly in view of his bivalent characterization of infant laughter, it is odd that in his observations of respiration, Ambrose does not consider the initial gasp of fear. As Sir Charles Bell noted in his third edition of The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression published in 1844, “the first sound of fear is in drawing, not in expelling the breath; for at that instant to depress or contract the chest would be to relax the muscles of the arms and enfeeble their exertion.” In fact, to make the point more strongly, Sir Charles asks the reader to imagine two men wrestling in the dark, asking whether “the violence of their efforts” would not be apparent from the sounds they make: “The short exclamation choked in the act of exertion, the feeble and stifled sounds of their breathing, would let us know that they turned, and twisted, and were in mortal strife” (Bell, 1844, pp. 190–191). In short, while the gasp of fear is an outright response to felt vulnerability, laughter is an outright affirmation of its successful subduction in play. From the perspective of respiration, laughter is a defusion of fear: the gasp of fear is released in repeated bursts of exhalation. In effect, from the perspective of play, laughter defuses vulnerability at the same time giving voice to the edge of fear that vulnerability provokes. These deeper understandings of the relationship between respiration and fear aside, Ambrose’s empirical data and thesis make sense phylogenetically as well as ontogenetically. For example, Darwin long ago observed that tickling elicits the same response in chimpanzees as in humans: If a young chimpanzee be tickled – and the armpits are particularly sensitive to tickling, as in the case of our children, . . . [a] chuckling or laughing sound is uttered; though the laughter is sometimes noiseless. The corners of the mouth are . . . drawn backwards; and this sometimes causes the lower eyelids to be slightly wrinkled. But this wrinkling, which is so characteristic of our own laughter, is more plainly seen in some monkeys.” (Darwin [1872] 1965, p. 131) Van Hooff’s more recent descriptions of the nonhuman primate play face show that our phylogenetic ties run even deeper. In the majority of primates [the relaxed open-mouth play face display] has much in common with the aggressive staring open-mouth display. [It should be noted that “A monkey is rarely purely aggressive, without being a little fearful as well.” Thus the term “agonistic,” which designates conjoined “[a]ggressive and fearful behaviour” (Rowell, 1972, p. 93).] It is likewise characterised (sic) by a rather widely opened mouth, and lips that remain covering [sic] all or the greater part of the teeth. It differs from the staring open-mouth display by the free and easy nature of the eye and body movements and by the fact that the mouth-corners are not pulled forward.” (van Hooff, 1972, p. 217) The commonalities in mouth and body gestures that van Hooff describes between the nonhuman primate play face and fear face in fact clearly coincide 421 CHILD’S PLAY: A MULTIDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVE with the ambivalent tendencies Ambrose describes. The subducted edge of fear in primate tickling and play generally is readily explainable in terms of an inability to predict with certainty what will happen next. The inability extends in more and more complicated ways as infants mature and engage in more vigorous adult bodily play with others. Indeed, all adult social animals are at risk with respect to conspecifics who can bite them, kick them, even cripple or disfigure them. As I have elsewhere pointed out (Sheets-Johnstone, 2002), humans hurt each other bodily first and foremost. The same is obviously true of all animals. Our primary vulnerability is corporeal: our bodies are ever open to injury and to death from the violence of others. Indeed, we humans are at risk “not only by the mere fact of being alive, but in being alive among other humans” (Sheets-Johnstone, 2002, p. 52). That ethical studies do not begin with a recognition of this fundamental fact of life but are instead regularly caught up from the start in theoretical inquiries about moral agency, moral status, rights, moral obligations, and so on, is peculiar, particularly since the fundamental fact of life is evident from the beginning, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.