(Re)presenting Experience:A Comparison of Australian Aboriginal Children's Sand Play in Two Settings

摘要

This paper examines how Australian Aboriginal children present and re-presentexperience in their symbolic play. Based on anthropological field research in one loca-tion and therapeutic work in another, it reports from a psychodynamic perspectivehow the Indigenous children create meaning on the personal and social level in twodistinctive play forms. These are a traditional sand story game played by AnanguPitjantjatjara girls in a remote Western Desert community in Central Australia, andthe European sand play therapy that was introduced as part of an interventionprogram in a Tiwi Islands community off the northern coast. In phenomenologicalterms, both techniques draw on the symbolizing activity of the lived body (Schilder,1950, 1951; Merleau-Ponty, 1961; Scheler, 1973) or, in the language of organismic-developmental theory, physiognomizing processes (Werner and Kaplan, 1984). Theseprocesses are seen to rest on the primary human capacity for imagination (Castoriadis,1987). However, the schematizing activity that creates a meaningful relationshipbetween symbol and referent (Werner and Kaplan, 1984) is specific to each play form.Set up retrospectively as a comparison, the discussion leads to the observation thatthe self-directed play in the natural social setting is of a higher symbolic order (re-presentational) than the externally induced play in the artificial social setting thatindicates spontaneous linkages between symbol and referent (presentational). It issuggested that this raises certain questions about the potentially therapeutic effect ofchildren's symbolic play.