Abstract
This book investigates a practice of intercultural education with play-based learning, precisely, with traditional games and toys. The aim is to respond to the major constrain of the field of intercultural education, namely, the limitations of its practice and its risk to fall into a culturalist representation of cultures. This risk, recurrently highlighted by the literature, resides in the tension proper of the field itself, to seek to value, at the same time, the universality of human beings and the diversity of cultures. Since this latter aspect is often overemphasised, however, the outcome is that differences among cultures are even more stressed. The result is that cultures are, involuntarily, represented as separated from each other.
I propose to overcome this contradiction by shifting the attention from diversity to similarity between cultures. The search for similarities, in fact, allows to highlight spaces where cultural elements overlaps, mix and blend, and where cultural transmission transcends borders. Furthermore, this study suggests that it is only after the recognition of similarity that it is possible to also acknowledge and appreciate cultural diversity.
An approach towards the recognition similarity requires assuming an attitude for looking at "the relation that connect" (cf. Bateson, 1972 and 1979). In this exercise – searching for similarity, in order to discover cultural in-betweens - traditional games and toys are particularly appropriated. They are present in all cultures, from the past to the present, and they surprise for both the extreme variety and the incredible resemblance. On the basis of such resemblances they can be grouped in families, like for example, the families of spinning tops, of cup and balls, of bowling, bowls games, tip cat games, ect. Hence, when they are used as the setting of an intercultural education practice, they allow to highlight the universality of the experience of play, while revealing also the variety of cultural traditions. In other words, they attain a representation of cultures that attest variety in unity. To use an image by Wittgenstein – who used games as an example for his concept of family resemblances - these games represents “the fibres” that “run through the whole thread” that holds together the experience of play of children and adults in the world (cf. Wittgenstein 1968 [1953], pp. 31-37).