Thanks to Jonathan Rutherford for sending me a copy of my review (PDF) for the forthcoming edition of Soundings, to which I contributed an essay on play a few months ago. The book was Wendy Wheeler's The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture (Lawrence and Wishart). It really focussed my thinking about the impact of what could be called the 'complexity' sciences - to which I can now add 'biosemiotics' - to my understanding of play. And what a vision of a thoroughly 'communicational' human nature might (or might not) enable politically.
Though I am critical of the social and political prescriptions the book draws from its utilisation of the science, I must give tribute to Wendy for pulling together such disparate material, in such an accessible and passionate way. Her book demands many strong responses, and is at least much more diversely sourced than most of those riding on the 'well-being' bandwagon at the moment (see below).
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