#2 Utopia of Play: Playing with the gods

(Post 2 in the series: Utopia of Play)

In my previous post, i shared my experience in the Covid19 pandemic - how my relationship to work, time, and play shifted, and how i started to question whether the pace of our lives serves anything human at all. i hinted towards something i increasingly believe to be the case - that most work is theatrical, serving no purpose at all but to uphold a system and culture that is destroying us.

The pandemic made me ask things i hadn’t dared to before: why we work so much, why we measure our value by productivity, and why play - the thing that once taught us trust, creativity, and consequence - became something we had to earn.

Remember how i said play used to be everywhere? Let me paint you a picture of how we got here - how play went from sacred practice to suspicious waste.

When the gods left the theatre

Imagine a Roman crowd gathered for the Games. Not for entertainment - for divine negotiation. Blood spilled in exchange for health, fertility, rain. The dead were watching. So were the gods. These weren't idle spectacles; fighting and dying arbitrarily - they were settling cosmic debts. They were rituals of survival. They made the world legible, bearable. They kept it turning.

The crowd, the gods, and the dead all participated in what anthropologist Marcel Mauss would call "total social phenomena" - events that are simultaneously religious, economic, political, and aesthetic. They can't be separated into neat categories because they're doing everything at once. Think of a Kwakiutl potlatch, where a chief gives away or destroys vast wealth in a public ceremony. Is it economics? Yes - wealth is moving. Is it politics? Of course - power is being claimed. Is it religion? Absolutely - ancestors are being honored. Is it art? Watch the performance and tell me it isn't. Mauss showed us that trying to isolate any one function misses the point entirely. These events are where a society becomes itself (Mauss, 1925).

In these early societies - pagan, seasonal, a little messy - play wasn't at odds with work. The two were woven together like roots in soil, they were complementary technologies for survival. People sowed, reaped, rested, danced. Play taught trust through games where you learned who would cheat and who wouldn't. It tested social bonds through festivals where real conflicts got worked out in symbolic battles. It negotiated with gods through ritual where the boundary between acting and believing disappeared. The gods were playful, the festivals frequent, the labour cyclical. Play wasn't something you "grew out of." It was something you grew through.

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz spent time in Bali watching cockfights. He noticed something strange: men would bet amounts that could bankrupt their families. The money mattered, but not in the way you'd think. These were what Geertz called "deep play" - events where the stakes transcend material exchange to create meaning itself. A man didn't just bet on a rooster; he bet on his family's honor, his village's standing, his own sense of who he was in the world. The fight became a story the society told itself about itself. Lose, and you might lose your house. But you'd also gained something: clarity about where you stood, who your allies were, what mattered (Geertz, 1973).

We play to remember.
We play to forget.
We play to become.

Roberte Hamayon’s work on the anthropology of play argues something radical: for most pre-Christian cultures, play and ritual were inseparable. Games weren’t just entertainment; they were experiments in reality. You simulated war to prepare for war. You staged a hunt to ensure a successful one. You danced death to understand mortality.

For pagans, pretending was sacred. The boundary between fiction and belief was intentionally blurred - the “as if” of play carried spiritual weight.

Then Christianity arrived, carrying with it trauma.

The epistemic break

Early Christians died as entertainment in these same arenas. Torn apart by animals while crowds cheered. Made into spectacle while the Empire watched.

When Christianity rose to power, it didn't reform the Games - it couldn't. How do you reform the place where your martyrs died? The philosopher Michel Foucault argued that certain historical moments don't just change ideas - they change what's thinkable. He called these "epistemic breaks." Before Descartes, you couldn't really separate mind from body in the way we do now. After him, you couldn't not separate them. The framework shifted (Foucault, 1970).

If it's unclear, what i am suggesting is that Covid ought to have been one of these epistemic breaks that shifted our attitudes towards the modern work culture.

Christianity performed an epistemic break on play itself. The entire framework for understanding these sacred activities shifted. The arena, once a sacred space where humans, gods, and cosmos negotiated, became a symbol of paganism, of Rome's moral corruption, of everything the new order needed to reject.

Suddenly, the pleasure of watching a gladiator die became morally dangerous. Even watching became culpable - you were accountable for what the mind thinks, not just what the body does. But it wasn't just about violence. It was about representation itself. Pagan gods could be mimicked, mocked, danced with.

The God of Abraham didn't welcome imitation. To play at divinity became blasphemy. As anthropologist Roberte Hamayon puts it: “Play pleases the spirits but displeases God.” To pretend became dangerous. To mimic God, to perform divinity, to act “as if” - suddenly these were sins.

This wasn't theological housekeeping. It was ideological warfare.

Christianity's opposition to play led to a reclassification of human behaviour.
- Combat games got rebranded as military training or sports.
- Games of chance became tools of the Devil.
- Everything else? Childish, frivolous, or leisurely.

The imagination - once the birthplace of ritual, myth, and meaning - was told to prove its worth or disappear.

It's also worth noting that play has been systematically neglected even in anthropological literature compared to ritual, kinship, or dance. Hamayon traces this directly back to Christianity's rejection of the Roman Games. Once games were removed from their secular or sacred institutions, their loss of political and religious significance resulted in degradation of their social value.

'Play pleases the spirits but displeases God'

And with the arena went something deeper: the idea that play could be sacred at all.

Work becomes salvation

The real transformation came with Protestantism. Max Weber traced how religious anxiety, particularly Calvinist theology, transformed labour from necessity to virtue and funnelled salvation into work. Luther taught that fulfilling duty in worldly affairs was "the highest form which the moral activity of the individual could assume." The baker wasn't just making bread - he was serving God.

The Calvinists took it further. They believed in predestination - God had already decided who was saved. Nothing you did could change that. Imagine that anxiety. It's a psychological trap: you desperately wanted to know if you were chosen but how could you tell?

The answer became your work. Success in your calling might be a sign of grace. Industry became evidence. Rest became suspicious. As Weber noted, Protestant thinking "works with all its force against the uninhibited enjoyment of possessions" (Weber, 1905). You could make money, but you couldn't enjoy it. You could work, but you couldn't rest without guilt.

Weber called this the "Protestant work ethic" - the idea that constant work was morally good while pleasure was dangerous. But Weber missed something anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes captures in her work on structural violence: how systems make their logic feel natural, even biological. How many work places have you been in that made their toxic cultures seem inherent?

But this wasn't just ideology; it was what Pierre Bourdieu calls "habitus"-dispositions so deeply embedded they feel like personality rather than programming. Bourdieu studied how Algerian peasants moved through space, how they held their bodies, how they understood time. These weren't conscious choices. They were inherited scripts written so deep they felt like nature itself (Bourdieu, 1977).

Watch how you feel when you sit down to do nothing on a Tuesday afternoon. That knot in your stomach? That voice saying you should be productive? That's not you. That's habitus. That's centuries of protestant work ethic speaking through your nervous system.

The industrial revolution brought factory bells, weeks divided into shifts, days divided into work hours. Play, with its improvisation and unpredictability, no longer fit. Work became scheduled, measurable. Serious.

The genius of all this wasn't theological but economic. As E.P. Thompson showed in "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," factory owners needed workers who'd internalised time-discipline. Cottage weavers worked in bursts - intense labor followed by rest, shaped by seasons and need. Factory owners needed steady, predictable, timed labor. Protestant guilt provided the perfect technology. Workers who believed laziness was sin didn't need surveillance - they surveilled themselves (Thompson, 1967).

i have no doubt you know exactly what i am referring to. It's not even the panoptican of the office where busybodies snitch on perceived wrongdoings of others, but the self-censoring, internalised guilt we carry when giving our time to anything not deemed productive or serving ambition. i could sit down to watch a film and immediately become distracted with planning or solving or producing. The factory is closed and we're all still showing up for our shifts.

Somatic inheritance

We've inherited a system that doesn't need God to survive. Modern capitalism gradually took on a life of its own and now binds people to its rules. We no longer need to believe in God to worship work. We've inherited the anxiety without the promised salvation.

And this inheritance isn’t just cultural - it’s somatic. Echoing Scheper-Hughes Gabor Maté tells us, chronic stress rewires the nervous system, normalising hypervigilance and guilt until they feel like personality traits rather than adaptations to systemic pressure. We carry their cage in our bodies.

Maté's research on trauma shows how chronic stress becomes intergenerational - children of stressed parents show altered stress responses before birth. The Holocaust survivors' grandchildren show measurable physiological changes they never experienced directly. The body remembers what the mind thinks it's forgotten (Maté, 2003).

The Protestant work ethic isn't just cultural; it's epigenetic. It's in our cortisol responses, our sleep patterns, our capacity to rest. At least the Protestants thought they were earning heaven. We're just earning anxiety and trauma.

In 1883, in his essay 'The Right to be Lazy' Paul Lafargue argues that “man was intended to work up to three hours a day” - the rest devoted to idleness, leisure, and collective joy. Far from frivolous, he saw leisure as essential to the human experience - the soil from which art, thought, and imagination grow.

This was not a radical view in antiquity. In Greek and Roman texts, physical labour was often seen as unworthy of free men. Male aristocrats delegated it to women and enslaved people. Aristotle's concept of "scholē" - often mistranslated as leisure- actually meant the time necessary for contemplation, politics, and human flourishing. Without scholē, humans couldn't develop what he called "eudaimonia." You couldn't become fully human while exhausted (Aristotle, 350 BCE).

If that sounds familiar, think about how often we neglect our civic, relational, even personal responsibilities because of work - or the exhaustion inherited from it. i’ve seen this up close: parents struggling to be present with their children after ten-hour days, colleagues breaking under return-to-office mandates that ignored caregiving entirely. When time itself is colonised by work, care becomes the first casualty.

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins documented how hunter-gatherers worked 15-20 hours weekly, calling them "the original affluent society." Not because they had so much, but because they needed so little and trusted the world to provide. They had what we've lost: confidence that rest wasn't earned but given, that play was how humans learned to be human (Sahlins, 1972).

In both ancient and modern contexts, then, leisure was never just about rest - it was a space for meaning-making, identity, connection and power. Which makes today’s suspicion of play not natural, but political - a shift in how we control time, value, and bodies.

When i think about those 15 hours i then think about my 50 hours in the various corporate jobs i have had. And then i think about how we call ourselves advanced.

Craving childhood

Roger Caillois traced how sacred rituals became children's games once stripped of institutional power. The Maypole dances that once ensured spring's return became playground activities. The masks that once held gods became Halloween costumes (Caillois, 1961).

The Yoruba used to have a practice at their funerals - mourners improvise, joke, play. These aren't separate from grief - they're technologies for processing it. The more play, the more power for the departing spirit. Joy and mourning aren't opposites; they dance together. The funeral is where the community remakes itself around absence, and play is the tool that makes remaking possible (Thompson, 1974).

Or take the kite.

In Korea, entire villages would gather for its construction - carefully painted paper, bamboo selected for flexibility, string measured precisely. The owner's soul would be held aloft by community hands, evil absorbed into bright fabric against sky. Everyone would hold their breath as it rose, carrying away illness, misfortune, death itself. Then - release. The string cut. Evil scattered to wind. The village exhaling together, cleansed.

Now it's plastic, made in factories by people who can't afford to fly them. The sacred drained out somewhere between the supply chain and the self-checkout.

This is what happens when play is untethered from meaning. Children imitate adults indiscriminately - washing invisible dishes with the same intensity they slay invisible dragons. They make no distinction between work and play in games of make-believe. We had to teach them the difference. We had to teach them which joy was acceptable.

Play and ritual, united.
Meaning, made together.

When you have time to think and to play, you not only have time to reinforce and understand your world, but you create space to imagine and reimagine the world. Western modernity didn’t just lose this - it dismantled it. We took the sacred and made it sinful. Then we took the sinful and made it productive. And somewhere in that double translation, we lost the thing itself.

i wonder what something so all encompassing as work as we know it today, what would become of it if we untethered it from meaning in our society? If we no longer assigned it a role in our identities, in our social structures, in our hierarchies. If we re-examined its role entirely. But first, there's one more historical chapter we need to examine.

Twin engines of extraction - the factory and the plantation

Protestant guilt alone couldn't build the modern world. It needed an economic system that could extract value at industrial scale. And this is where the story gets darker: the same violence that severed Europeans from their ancestral cultures created the psychological conditions for two seemingly separate systems - factory discipline at home and colonial extraction abroad.

They were the same system of violence applied to different bodies.

Sidney Mintz's Sweetness and Power traces how Caribbean sugar plantations pioneered what would become factory logic. The plantation wasn't just agriculture- it was proto-industrial: regimented time, specialised tasks, bodies reduced to units of production. The sugar mill ran 24 hours during harvest. Enslaved people worked in shifts. Overseers measured output. The factory didn't invent this - it imported it (Mintz, 1985). This type of work culture, in its perpetuity was new.

The anthropologist Eric Wolf showed the threads that weaved together how the wealth that built Europe's factories came directly from colonial extraction. The cotton mills of Manchester ran on cotton picked by enslaved people in Mississippi. The iron foundries of Birmingham were funded by profits from the slave trade. This wasn't coincidental - it was structural. As Wolf put it, "the world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes" (Wolf, 1982). You cannot understand the Industrial Revolution without understanding slavery. They are the same economic transformation.

The factory owner training English workers to internalise time-discipline and the plantation owner commodifying African bodies weren't different types of people. They were often literally the same people, or at minimum, the same class with shared economic interests. The Barclay family ran both plantations in Jamaica and banks in London. The Gladstone family (yes, that Gladstone - the "liberal" Prime Minister) owned plantations while preaching progress at home.

But in order to enact the type of violence required to sustain this system required a massive psychological shift: how do you make humans capable of treating other humans as machines?

Enter whiteness. Now, i understand that this mention of whiteness triggers a lot of people, so i would encourage you to listen to the difference between a system and an individual. Whiteness. Not as biology, but as what anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler calls "imperial debris" - the lasting damage of colonial projects. Stoler shows how racial categories weren't about describing difference; they were technologies for creating difference where none existed. "White" became a category only when it needed to justify who could be enslaved and who couldn't, who deserved rest and who deserved only labor (Stoler, 2016).

Remember those witch trials i mentioned in my post Ghosts of Empire? The burning of women who preserved herbal knowledge? That same violence was preparing European populations for what came next. Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch documents how the transition to capitalism required destroying women's autonomy over their bodies and knowledge. The witch hunts weren't medieval superstition - they were early modern economic restructuring. (Federici, 2004).

And once you've normalised that level of violence against your own people - treatment of the working class, burning women alive, criminalising folk practices, enclosing the commons - the psychological architecture exists to extend it outward. The same legal frameworks that criminalised Celtic druids were exported to criminalise African spiritual practices. The same theft of English commons became the theft of indigenous lands. The same reduction of English peasants to wage laborers became the reduction of colonised peoples to property.

David Graeber traces how many indigenous societies practiced what he calls "baseline communism" - sharing freely within intimate circles, no accounting, no debt (Graeber, 2011). European colonisers encountered this and saw only "primitiveness" that needed correcting. They introduced currency, taxes, forced labor systems. They had to - colonial extraction required converting people who trusted their communities into individuals who feared scarcity.

Okay big history lesson there, and i can only encourage you to delve deeper into some of the authors mentioned and the history the working classes in Britain while the empire was colonising the world. i know that was a lot to take in and it is impossible for me to cover the entire history of colonialism and the factory and the rise of industrial revolution but all of these threads were necessary to weave together our present day.

Now here's what i want to end on - our modern work culture is an inheritance of both cages. The factory's time-discipline lives in our inability to rest without guilt. The plantation's racial hierarchies live in whose exhaustion we notice and whose we ignore. When we talk about "work ethic," we're speaking in a dialect that came from this double violence - against European peasants forced into factories and against colonised peoples forced into slavery, or killed.

These aren't metaphors. Claude Lévi-Strauss reminded us that structures persist long after their origins are forgotten. The factory may be automated now, the plantation officially abolished, but the logic remains: human beings as units of production, time as commodity, rest as theft (Lévi-Strauss, 1963).

And play? Play had no place in this world. It couldn't be measured, couldn't be extracted, couldn't be sold. So it had to be eliminated or transformed into something useful - which is exactly what happened.

Next time, i'll show you how games replaced play - and why that difference changes everything.

Next: #3 Utopia of Play: The games we're forced to play

References
Aristotle (350 BCE). Nicomachean Ethics. (W. D. Ross, Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Caillois, R. (1961). Man, Play and Games. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn: Autonomedia.
Foucault, M. (1970). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon Books.
Geertz, C. (1973). "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." In The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn: Melville House.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963). Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books.
Maté, G. (2003). When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress. Toronto: Knopf Canada.
Mauss, M. (1925). The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Cohen & West.
Mintz, S. (1985). Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking.
Sahlins, M. (1972). "The Original Affluent Society." In Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton.
Scheper-Hughes, N. (1992). Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Stoler, A. L. (2016). Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Durham: Duke University Press.
Sutton-Smith, B. (1997). The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Thompson, E. P. (1967). "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism." Past & Present, 38, 56-97.
Thompson, R. F. (1974). African Art in Motion. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Weber, M. (1905). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Scribner's.
Wolf, E. (1982). Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.