Jean-Pierre Rossie, Toys, Play, Culture and Society: an anthropological approach with reference to North Africa and the Sahara. Stockholm: SITREC (pb €47 – 978 9 1974 8113 7). 1995, 256 pp. + CD.
As the broad sweep of this book's title suggests, Jean-Pierre Rossie's interests lie in children's toys and associated play as situated in their socio-cultural context. The book is part of Rossie's Saharan and North African Toy and Play Cultures series. Indeed, the other volumes – Children's Dolls and Doll Play, The Animal World in Play, Games and Toys, and an annotated bibliography on play, games and toys, also dating from 2005 – are included on a CD with this book, superseding the online versions available hitherto on the Stockholm International Toy Research Centre website (〈http://www.sitrec.kth.se〉). The inclusion of these volumes is crucial to an appreciation of the book under review, since they contain much more detail on toys and children's play with them, as well as a brief overview of the different cultural groups to which the children belong. They also document more about Rossie's fieldwork methods, including his principal focus on rural and more or less ‘traditional’ communities (though there is reference to the more popular quarters of towns), the age range of the children (3–13 years), his use of observation, directive and non-directive interviewing, photography and a small amount of videotaping, and so on.
Rossie's work is not only inherently fascinating but also unique in its range and scope for the North African and Saharan regions. His explicit aim has been to provide a systematic exploration of the play culture of these regions to complement those undertaken by others among the Bantu south of the Sahara, and in West Africa and the Mediterranean region. The data have been assembled from his own research among Ghrib children (1975–7), the subsequent research of a colleague, Gilbert J. M. Claus, with this group, and Rossie's ongoing research in Morocco from 1992. It is supplemented by published information relating to the area and extensive museum research.
The specific goal of Toys, Play, Culture and Society is to attempt a synthesis of this wealth of data. Rossie's analysis ranges widely across themes of continuity and change, notably within the wider context of the influx of Western influences in the communities under study, gender, transmission, creativity and communication. Interesting field observations, findings, interpretations and suggestions leap off each page, stimulating thought and at times a reappraisal of one's own (in my case) Western standpoint. Rossie, like the children themselves, has a wonderful eye for detail and his thoughts on toy design, the children's interaction with the environment and natural and waste materials in toy making, and the aesthetics of toy making (many of the toys being ephemeral and discarded after use), for example, are striking in their insight and for his ability to elicit and convey children's own points of view.
These observations and interpretations, then, are the strength of the book and the importance of its contribution, though one feels that more socio-cultural information is needed to truly ground Rossie's findings. His discussion of Barbie-like dolls (which have found their way into these populations, often via visiting relatives) in a Saharan and North African context, for example, elicits a fascinating comparison with the indigenous doll culture and doll play, but one suspects that the spectrum of attitudes towards girls and women, courtship and marriage, dress, and Western culture are all relevant here too and would enrich the interpretation even further. The book thus consists of wide-ranging and suggestive findings, based on a mass of ethnographic, iconographic and artefactual data from a non-Western context which Rossie examines in relation to the concerns of contemporary play and toy culture scholarship. Discussion, however, is always qualified by Rossie's modest style and tendency to shy away from an overly theoretical approach due to his being untrained as a theorist and his distrust of ‘theories built too hastily or based on too one-sided information’ (p. 49). Though he does not make much of this, it seems that his data do indeed tend to point up the Western bias of much scholarship in the relatively nascent field of toy culture.
Mention must be made of the captivating pictures with which the book is copiously illustrated. These appear in black and white in the hard copy but the colour images are available on the accompanying CD. Although they tend to reinforce (as Rossie is aware) the sense of toys as objects divorced from the context of play, they are vivid and detailed and evoke a sense of the ingenuity and imagination of the children who made them and played with them. In some cases, too, the objects are the only evidence now available.
Some of these images and also the videotaped evidence have come into their own in an applied context, as Rossie describes in his final chapter. Rossie here expresses his belief in the pedagogical value of his data and, by extension, the study of children's toy and play culture in general. He advocates its relevance in pre-school, formal school programmes and the education of teachers and others working with children. This applies to the local context and also to international intercultural education. He provides admittedly anecdotal evidence from his own experience but, like so much else in this book, it opens up intriguing possibilities with potential for development and evaluation.
This book, then, is more suggestive than definitive on the theoretical level but it undoubtedly achieves its aim of providing detailed documentation of toy play in the regions under study at a significant point in their history. It makes an important contribution to the study of children's play and growing scholarship on toys, providing a much-needed non-Western perspective, and including wonderful pictorial evidence. One hopes, with Rossie, that this will stimulate further fieldwork and analysis of children's lives and cultures of play.
