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About
Most of us have become so immersed in a book or game or movie that the activity temporarily assumed a profound significance and the outside world began to fade. Although we are likely to enjoy these experiences in the realm of entertainment, we rarely think about what effect they might be having on us. Precisely because it is so pervasive, entertainment is difficult to understand and even to talk about. To understand the social role of entertainment, Caught in Play looks closely at how we engage entertainment and at the ideas and practices it creates and sustains. Though entertainment is for fun, it does not follow that it is trivial in its effect on our lives. As this work reveals, entertainment generates commitments to values we are not always willing to acknowledge: values of pleasure, self-indulgence, and consumption. For more information, please visit www.caughtinplay.com.
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Reviews
"Overall, Stromberg's cleverly argued case for becoming caught up as a cognitive process is quite convincing, and casting play and ritual as forms of becoming caught up offers new avenues of exploration, especially for bringing together recent thinking on imagination and consumption in anthropology."
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
"The surfaces of play mask some surprising hidden dynamics of modern life. Stromberg delivers a high-flying set of reflections on what lies behind our capacity to get caught up completely in the world of entertainment. Exploring our ever-intensifying 'stimulus hunger,' his excursion into the history of modern desire provides a new way to think about the forces shaping contemporary entertainment. I
Emory University