Lecture: The Art and Joy of Folk Games

The collective joy of playing folk games is amplified by the  social consequences the games impose on the world views of the players. In his talk M.D.Muthukumaraswamy argues to establish that folk games affect growing up, social behaviour, cultivation of taste and values, development  of  social mechanisms of decision making, and understanding of beauty and justice.   Illustrating his talk with an ample number of folk games of chance and folk games of skills in their actual ethnographic contexts he further presents that the artistic experience of folk games is layered in encountering chance and its unjustifiable ways of distributing successes and failures where the players, especially children, start looking for inner mental resources to challenge them.