Brian Sutton-Smith (1924–2015)

Brian Sutton-Smith, one of the leading scholars of play studies for more than half a century, passed away March 7, 2015, in White River Junction, Vermont, at the age of 90. From his active childhood to his highly productive career and retirement, Brian took play very seriously. After identifying the “triviality barrier” that keeps adults from taking children’s play seriously, he put a huge amount of energy into breaking down that barrier. Like the anthropologist Margaret Mead, he achieved remarkable success in reaching both the public and scholars across the disciplines: folklorists, psychologists, anthropologists, and others. He was also an extremely kind, generous colleague whose sheer exuberance made interdisciplinary play studies great fun.

Brian’s publications include The Folkgames of Children (1972), The Folkstories of Children (1981), Toys as Culture (1986), and The Ambiguity of Play (1997). He authored 50 books, including three novels for children, and about 350 scholarly articles. In addition to creating these impressive scholarly publications, he lectured around the world, made films about toys and games, did play surveys for UNESCO, and served as a consultant for children’s television, including Nickelodeon, Murdoch Children’s Television, and the show Captain Kangaroo.

Born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1924, Brian first learned about folklore from his father, a postmaster who loved to tell stories. Brian enjoyed stories but liked sports and games best; he chose to attend Wellington Teachers College because it gave students Wednesday afternoons off for athletics. Later, working on his doctorate in education at the University of New Zealand, he set off on a strenuous two-year journey to collect games from schoolchildren. Sleeping in his car and on couches during his travels, he worked tirelessly to record children’s games. The result was a 900-page dissertation.

Brian received a Fulbright fellowship to study at the University of California at Berkeley in 1952. On his way to California, he became friends with Peter Opie; his correspondence with Peter and Iona Opie, Dorothy Howard, Ian Turner, and other folklorists of childhood became an important part of his work. Brian moved to the United States permanently in 1956. His distinguished teaching career began at Bowling Green State University, continued at Columbia, and culminated at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he retired in 1990.

As an active member of the American Folklore Society and the Anthropological Association for the Study of Play, Brian had a strongly positive influence on conferences and publications. One of his greatest contributions was the Children’s Folklore Section of AFS, founded in 1977, which continues to thrive today. Without Brian, we would not have had Children’s Folklore Review, the Newell Prize, the Opie Prize, and the Aesop Prize, all of which have heightened people’s awareness and appreciation of children’s folklore.

Brian was an inspiring teacher and mentor who did much to support his students’ success. Although he was not one of my professors, he taught me important lessons about play theory, childlore, teaching, and mentoring. “This is good!,” he told me after reading one of my early papers on children’s folklore. He encouraged me to delve deeply into the kinds of play I wanted to explore, including levitation rituals and choking games. Not everyone wanted to hear about that kind of dark play, but Brian did, and he supported my eagerness to learn more.

Some of Brian’s most far-reaching thinking had to do with play’s role in the natural selection process of evolution. Play, he suggested, creates a kind of quirkiness and variation that facilitates natural selection. It also makes life better, more tolerable, and more fun. In The Ambiguity of Play, he observes: “We constantly seek to manage the variable contingencies of our lives for success over failure, for life over death. Play itself may be a model of just this everyday existentialism” (Sutton-Smith 1997:228). In his article “Cultivating Courage through Play,” he suggests that children “create situations of pleasurable mild stress, which they can master through play” (Sutton-Smith 2013:86). His research provides an important foundation for further analysis of play by evolutionary theorists.

Fortunately, we...