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Alessandra Miklavcic

Border games: Card playing among the elderly in the Julian region

Keywords: border, memories, playing, social suffering, language game, psychoanalysis

This article looks at card playing practices among elderly people in Koper, a town on the border between Slovenia and Italy. It foregrounds card playing as a constitutive social field where subjects share and negotiate their border identities. The ‘extrasituational context’ provides the complexity of the games invoked at the table such as the repressed memories and the stigmatized mother tongue. This article draws attention to ‘language games’ and the extent to which by changing games, dierent rules imply a shifting of roles. By suggesting that card playing is not simply a ludic activity, this article oers a psychoanalytical reading of both the importance and fragility of the Batesonian ‘it is a play’ frame.

Semiotica, Walter de Gruyter

Print ISSN: 0037-1998
Volume: 2006, 06/2006
Pages: 265 - 277

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