Voices of Play: Miskitu Children's Speech and Song on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua

5. Power and Intertextuality in Pretend Play

105 When I appeared at the houses of young Miskitu friends on Corn Island, they often called out “Kaia pulaia!” (Let’s play!) and took advantage of my interests to engage in some pleasurable activity—song games, marbles, doll play, chasing games. These were the kinds of activities they had names for, activities whose repeated forms had crystallized into recognizable genres, a centripetal ordering force in communication, to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) term (see discussion in chapter 3). Other times, fragments of playful voices erupted into nonplay contexts, such as singing a line from a popular song in a school classroom. “Play” became a strategic frame for intervening in “reality” in a wide range of contexts. The examination of song games in chapter 4 detailed how this genre came to mediate and represent changing gender norms in the “real world.” The curious relationship between gender and genre (both translate as género in Spanish) opens up broader questions of how social differences are mediated by genres and how genres are mediated by social differences. Perhaps because gender is such a prominent discourse of difference across cultures (certainly the overwhelming favorite among Miskitu children ), it serves as a useful model for how particular forms, actions, and voices come to be associated. Elinor Ochs (1992) has described the relations between language and gender in terms of direct or indirect indexicality . Direct indexical relations are found in systems of personal pronouns or kinship terms that signal the gender of speaker, referent, or addressee, regardless of the referential topic of discourse. In Miskitu, the third-person pronoun witin is not gender specific, and Miskitu does not Chapter Five Power and Intertextuality in Pretend Play 106 · Voices of Play have a system of gendered morphology as in Spanish. However, some kinship and address terms directly index gender, and a noun such as tuktan (child) can directly index gender when followed by the modifiers waitna (male) or mairin (female). In contrast to this kind of direct reference to gender, indirect indexicality is “mediated by the relation of language to stances, social acts, social activities, and other social constructs” (Ochs 1992:337). In other words, children and other novices come to associate particular forms with particular stances and activities, and these associations then become a resource for interpreting gender and other kinds of differentiation. Genre can be viewed as an overarching form that mediates the relations among different kinds of voices, stances, and acts (Dent 2009). Pretend play is a genre that is rich with possibilities for the socialization of indirect indexical associations, as well as iconic, felt resemblances between forms and social acts. This chapter examines the interaction of voices and structures of meaning in two episodes of pretend play. Each of these episodes constituted an emic genre in the children’s discourse: the first was dal bibi pulaia (playing dolls), and the second was skul pulaia (playing school). In the metagenre of pretend play, children take on the voices of others, drawing on conventional meanings but also reinflecting them with emergent meanings (Sawyer 1995, 1997). It is a process of representation , rather than imitation, and as such, it can be interpreted as mimesis , in the sense developed by Plato and Aristotle (Sorbom 1994). Mimesis is a representation that is both similar to and different from the thing that is represented. All communicative practices depend on some kind of mimetic representation, but music, dance, and drama are often grouped together as expressive forms that are directly or indirectly embodied in performance. As mimetic practice, pretend play is part reproduction and part recreation, and it contributes to the metanarratives through which people understand and act on their societies (Goldman 1998). In Miskitu children’s dramatic play, real patterns of everyday social interaction were represented in performance, at the same time that performance provided a context for reinterpreting social norms among peers. This capacity for representation and transformation made pretend play an important site for developing subjectivities and intercultural expressive practices. In contrast to most adult dramatic genres, children’s pretend play is largely improvisatory (Sawyer 1997). It is, in essence, a participatory narrative —“a story the players tell themselves about themselves”—with an openended plot (Schwartzman 1978:237). This narrative often draws typical Power and Intertextuality in Pretend Play · 107 characters, actions, and plot structures from social texts in other realms of life, both imaginary and real. Children’s playful reenactment of activities they...