History as Ritual and Play

Title: History as Ritual and Play
Description: History- as all anthropologists now accept, and as historians have no trouble acknowledging- is not the exclusive patrimony of some peoples, compared with which other societies figure as peoples without history. This is not because all societies are within time, within diachrony, but because all societies produce differential margins between diachrony and synchrony; in all societies, what we have here called ritual and play work to establish signifying relations between diachrony and synchrony. Far from being identified with the diachronic continuum, from this perspective history is nothing other than the result of the relation between diachronic signifiers and synchronic signifiers produced incessantly by ritual and play- the 'play', as we could say, using a mechanical value of the term, which is found in many languages, between diachrony and synchrony.
Creator: Agamben, Giorgio
Date: 1978
Source: In Playland: Reflections on History and Play ; Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience
Bibliographic Citation: Agamben, Giorgio. 1993 "In Playland: Reflections on History and Play." In Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience. Translated by Liz Heron. Verson. Pages 76-77. ;;
Agamben, Giorgio. 1978 lnfanzia e storia. Giulio Einandi Editore