Cultural recreations and hierarchy: a historical interplay

Abstract

Forms of cultural recreations, both their content and structure, are analyzed as important communicative conduits in transmitting values that either support or contest social hierarchical development. Cultural recreations are defined broadly, including vernacular forms of recreation (e.g. music, dance, play, games), recreation's non-referential complements (rituals and language) and recreation's opposite (work), whereas societal hierarchy is differentiated from its referent in animal communities. Additionally, the factors intrinsic to specific forms of cultural recreations that make them efficacious communication vehicles are examined, as well as non-exclusive factors that enhance their communicative viability. Once forms of cultural recreations are demarcated and defined, their historical and evolutionary relations with strains of societal hierarchy and their opposite conditions are examined. It will be argued that the leisure and recreation practices of primitive man that originally transmitted communal values have over time been appropriated by modern institutions such as organized religion and corporations to replicate and sustain the values of hierarchy, individualism and competition.