Sandwork • Jay Mechling For Sigmund Freud, the terms “dreamwork” and “jokework” denoted the process by which the mind displaces social and psychological anxieties and permits them to emerge disguised in dreams and jokes. This article posits a similar process for “sandwork.” Examining the ways people play with sand in its three basic states—dry sand, wet sand, and mud—the author looks at photographic evidence and makes direct observations on California beaches and at lake beaches in the Sierra Nevada mountains. There, the author reads what he calls sand play “texts” for their coded meanings, most fundamentally in the contrast between clean and dirty. Among his findings, the author notes gender differences in the ways individuals play with sand. Key words: beaches; gender; mud; photography; sand; sandwork; World Technique S and is the perfect plaything for humans; we are lucky there is so much of it. Dry sand, whether wild on a beach or tamed in a sandbox, has a sensuous feel, especially when warmed by the sun. Add water and the wet sand lends itself to shaping, constructing. On the wettest extreme is mud, usually dark, full of organic matter, often redolent with the earthy, fecund smells of a primor- dial ooze. Dry sand can feel clean; wet sand can feel clean but clingy; mud feels dirty. What better material is there for creating complex symbolizations of the body, of “clean” and “dirty” as fruitful categories for our thinking about purity and pollution, about good and evil (Douglas 1966; Babcock-Abrahams 1975)? Playing with sand in its various states is so universal that the play has become nearly invisible to us, so taken-for-granted that it bumps up against what Brian Sutton-Smith (1970) called the “triviality barrier” of children’s play. Of course, it is the invisible power of play and culture that we should hurry to examine. So, while I describe and categorize here play with sand and mud, I have a more serious, nontrivial analysis in mind. Hence my title, “sandwork,” echoing Freud’s “dreamwork” (1965) and “jokework” (1960), his words for the processes 19 American Journal of Play, volume 9, number 1 © The Strong Contact Jay Mechling at [email protected] 20 AMERICAN jOuRNAL OF PLAY • fall 2016 by which the mind takes repressed material, displaces it, and brings it back to the surface in a disguised form, including dreams, jokes, and other manifesta- tions. It turns out that sand and mud provide perfect material for using play to address some of the social and psychological anxieties that plague individuals. Doubtless every reader has played with sand or mud at one time or another. Those experiences help me communicate playing with sand that I cannot express satisfactorily with words. I rely here on the reader’s experiences and my own, as a player and as an observer of others’ play. I grew up in Miami Beach, Florida, a mile from the Atlantic Ocean. More recently, every summer for many years now, my family has spent weeks at a beach house rental in Santa Cruz, California, and at least once a day I take long walks on the beach observing, jotting down notes, and snapping an occasional photograph. I also have a number of photographs of individuals playing in sand and mud. Some are recent, and some are vintage. Most children seem to be drawn naturally to playing with sand, while adults tend to view beaches (for example) as sites for leisure activity, from simple sunbathing to beach volleyball, more play on sand than with sand. Adults with children, however, often join the young ones in digging and building structures in the sand, and (as we shall see) some young adults delight as much as children do at playing in the mud. Let me begin with discussions of these three states of sand and the play common in each—dry sand, wet sand, and mud. Dry Sand Play with dry sand is a very sensual experience, and, in part, the sensory quali- ties of sand provide the basis for its use in therapy and education. Margaret Lowenfeld, a British pediatrician and child psychiatrist, began using play with figures on trays of sand in her practice as early as 1928. Recalling H. G. Wells’s Floor Games (1911) and the pleasures he reported of creating miniature play worlds with figures and blocks, Lowenfeld in her clinical work with children used a sand play box she called her “Wonder Box.” She called her method the World Technique. Carl Jung saw the technique demonstrated at a conference in Paris in 1937 and recognized its potential for the psychoanalysis of children (Bowyer 1970). The 1940s and 1950s saw the widespread development of the World Technique and variations of it as diagnostic tools in working with children. Soon child psychiatrists and devel- Sandwork 21 opmental psychologists employed sand play as a therapeutic tool, especially for Jungian approaches to the symbolic play of children (Kalff 2004; Bradway 2006). Beyond the Jungian depth psychology, other developmental theories rec- ognize the therapeutic and developmental values of sand play. Both Jean Piaget (1945) and Maria Montessori (2009), for example, emphasize the importance of giving children tactile experiences, especially with substances like sand. And in humanistic psychology, a variety of sand-play therapy has emerged. Called “sandtray therapy” by its practitioners, the therapy is less interested in the sym- bolic content of the play with sand than in the process and the empathetic, supportive role of the therapist (Armstrong 2008). Whatever the approach, play with sand in a therapeutic setting stimulates creativity, memories, and emotions. A common way to play in dry sand in the natural, nontherapeutic setting is to bury a companion in the sand with only his or her head visible. Photo- graphic evidence from the nineteenth century confirms the widespread use of this play tradition, and doubtless it extends farther back in time than the photographic evidence (figure 1). But this simple play turns out to have great psychological complexity. First, the weight of the warm, dry sand on the body simply feels good to most people. Although some psychologists dispute the effectiveness of weighted-blanket therapy (Gringas et al. 2014), others believe it has become an effective way to calm and comfort children who fall on the autism scale from mild to severe. The physical and psychological comfort of weighted blankets for some adults has also encouraged retailers to offer them com- mercially (Hochman 2014). Simultaneous with the feeling of comfort in the weight of the sand, though, can be paradoxical feelings of helplessness. This helplessness taps a different sort of pleasure. In a series of nonfiction essays collected in Danse Macabre (1980), novelist Stephen King poses and tries to answer the questions: Why do we humans like to be frightened so much? How and why do we take pleasure in being frightened by horror stories, from campfire stories of monsters in the dark woods to horror novels and Hollywood films? In part King’s answer is that the old, more primitive part of our brain responds, perhaps with primal memory of when we mammals were small and more often prey than predator. In any case, we do like to be frightened when the fright is carefully framed as play (Bateson 1972). Being buried in sand on the beach doubtless taps our fears of being buried alive. Heads above the sand, we are still just a few inches away from being buried 22 AMERICAN jOuRNAL OF PLAY • fall 2016 Figure 1. Burying a companion in the sand completely, and that has to spark in our animal brains chemicals of some kind. Second, the companions of the one buried have some fun with their buried friend. They might concoct some of the fun for the camera and produce trick shots like those of a head and feet separated by some distance (figure 2). In other instances, the buried person’s companions might tease their helpless friend. Despite how risky it might be to psychoanalyze the motives and meanings of those captured in a snapshot, I suspect that the feeling of helplessness implied by the images here bring some masochistic pleasure to the nearly buried. I also have in my collection a vintage photograph of friends performing a funeral service over a buried friend and a Real Photo Postcard (RPPC) of a fake funeral for a buried man: which brings me to the next point. Third, being buried in sand resonates with burial at death. This may seem like a strange pleasure, but imagining our own death and even observing our own funeral—elsewhere, I have called it the “Tom Sawyer effect” (Mechling 2008)—has some psychological pleasures and benefits. Susan Sontag, in specu- lating on why we like to imagine our own deaths while watching science fiction and apocalyptic, nuclear-bomb films, notes that reexperiencing our own deaths Sandwork 23 Figure 2. Burying companions in the sand for the photographic illusion repeatedly in the fantasy (dream) world of film actually takes power from death and our fear of death (Sontag 1966). First-person video games often deliver the same experience of dying and being reborn. Consider burial in sand a low-tech version of these experiences. Play with dry sand, then, provides all sorts of pleasures, both expected and unexpected. Add water and the possibilities expand. Wet Sand The wet sand on ocean, lake, and river beaches provides an irresistible material for play. Children add water to sand in sandboxes, but they more commonly experience play in wet sand at the water’s edge. As everyone must know, the right ratio of water to sand makes the sand stick together and makes possible the sand castles and other sand sculptures so familiar on beaches. The beach offers a significant zone for this play, a liminal space between water and dry land (Stilgoe 1994). Like most liminal zones, the beach proves both dangerous and exciting—dangerous because people drown and exciting, 24 AMERICAN jOuRNAL OF PLAY • fall 2016 in part, because of the danger of the sensory overload of sounds (rolling surf at the ocean), smells, sights, and the feel of sun, wind, and sand on the body. Play- ing in the wet sand at the beach (as opposed to playing in the dry sand farther from the water) intensifies all these experiences. Moreover, building sand castles, sand sculptures, or even the most rudi- mentary construction in the wet sand plunges the player into reflections on permanence and impermanence. In Western culture, the Bible establishes the foolishness of constructing buildings on shifting sand rather than on solid rock, and proverbs reinforce this wisdom. In fact, this wisdom provides a metaphor for literature and song lyrics, such as the 1931 song, “Love Letters in the Sand” (music by J. Fred Coots, lyrics by Nick Kenny and Charles Kenny), which became a hit in 1957 in a recording by Pat Boone: On a day like today We pass the time away Writing love letters in the sand How you laughed when I cried Each time I saw the tide Take our love letters from the sand. We have every reason to believe that the earliest children played in wet sand. The sketchy history of building castles and other sculptures in the sand, as put together by various historians, suggests that by the nineteenth century in Britain, the Continent, and the United States, the middle class saw the seaside as an attractive site for leisure and recreation (Lencek and Bosker 1998; Lofgren 1999). British newspapers report the building of sand castles on a beach in Wales as early as 1864 and reported in the following decades children’s building sand castles and “forts and bridges, houses, and lighthouses” (History House 2014). Near the turn of the century, Philip McCord and other sand artists apparently created sand sculptures for money at the beach in Atlantic City, New Jersey (Wierenga 2015), and early postcards from the era add visual evidence that children and adults built sand castles and other sand sculptures as part of the fun they experienced at the beach. Sand-castle–building contests apparently began in the late 1940s at seaside resorts and became more formally institu- tionalized in the early 1970s when Todd Vander Pluym and Gerry Kirk created Sand Sculptures International (Wierenga 2015). Sand-castle and sand-sculpture Sandwork 25 contests are now part of the summer fare as beachside towns lure tourists to their communities. I focus in this article on amateur, unstructured play with wet sand, and I am most interested in the play of children. Bronner (1998, 1999) discusses children’s play with sand and rocks in some of his work on children’s play and material culture, and I can build on his observations here with my own. My evidence is not systematic, but I have been observing sand play at the beach in Santa Cruz, California, for nearly forty years. Over that time, I have observed some patterns worth considering. The beaches at Santa Cruz, at the north end of Monterey Bay, are close enough to the San Francisco Bay Area cities that they have become a favorite weekend and summer destination for families. Diverse social classes and eth- nic groups seem to enjoy the beaches of Santa Cruz, a diversity reflecting the diversity of the Bay Area. The beach I walk daily is about a half mile long and often very crowded on summer weekends. I have the opportunity to watch a great many children, teens, and adults playing on the beach. Play in wet sand can result in both nonrepresentational and representa- tional constructions, and in both cases we see the fundamental folk principles behind the construction of everything from material objects to oral narratives. Aesthetic anthropologist Robert Plant Armstrong, in a trio of books (1971, 1975, 1981), coins and applies the terms “syndetic” and “synthetic” to contrast non-Western art (in the case of his expertise, Yoruba oral and material art) with Western art. He distinguishes between two “modes in which the human con- sciousness apprehends and enacts the world and the self” (1981, 13). “Synthesis” is the name of the mode familiar to Western people and their usual concepts of high art and popular art. “Synthesis,” explains Armstrong, operates “through a process of oppositions and eventuations.” The synthetic work is linear, it develops; it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, represented in its simplest form by the process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The syndetic work, in contrast, is not linear; it does not develop, at least not in the way the synthetic work develops. The central generative and organizing process characterizing syndesis is accretion, the “repetition of the same or of a small inventory of similar units” (1981, 13). Syndesis is the name of the mode that governs most non-Western works and that governs much of the folklore and folk art we find even in Western societies (see also Bronner 1999). The most rudimentary form of children’s folk play with sand usually works from the syndetic aesthetic, sand added to sand in some nonrepresentational 26 AMERICAN jOuRNAL OF PLAY • fall 2016 form. Some children use objects found at the beach, including shells and feath- ers—also following the folk aesthetic of creating an artistic object through accre- tion. As children grow older and as they have more experience with objects and narratives governed by the Western aesthetic of synthesis, their sandwork becomes more representational. The interference of older youth and adults— interference disguised as instruction or help—complicates the creative process, often trying to move the child away from the pure folk forms and processes that give children pleasure. In my own observations at the beach in Santa Cruz, children over five years and prepubescent youth commonly combine nonrepresentational and representational forms, the most common being a circular berm with a castle or other representational construction within the berm (figure 3). One can understand why, on English and European beaches at the end of the nine- teenth century, castles were popular representational constructions with wet sand; castles abound in the real landscape of these individuals, and middle-class vacationers and their children understandably built sand castles for fantasy play in miniature (Wells 1911; see also Stewart 1993). American youth and adults built sand castles, one supposes, because the name and the tradition was readily established. Besides, as anyone who has built a sand castle knows, wet sand is the perfect medium for building castles, moats, and bridges. The sand castle is so emblematic of figurative constructions in wet sand that current contests on beaches are still often called sand-castle contests, even though the contestants construct a range of sculptures. Searching for meaning in wet sand play, observers find it hard to overlook some gender patterns. Like Bronner (1988), I was reminded immediately of Erik Erikson’s observations of children’s play with wooden blocks. Although Erikson (1950) was a psychoanalytic therapist who often worked with children and youth, he also considered human development the interaction of biology and culture. Erikson uses Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality to understand the play of chil- dren. Briefly stated, Freud believed that libidinal energy exists in even young children, though that sexual energy focuses first on other orifices (mouth, anus) and later on genitals. Psychoanalytic anthropologists in the 1940s and 1950s built whole theories of culture and personality on the ways societies socialize these body systems (Whiting and Child 1953; Whiting and Whiting 1974). When, in the early 1940s, Erikson joined a University of California, Berke- ley, research project observing children (ages ten to twelve) playing with blocks, he was especially interested in gender patterns in the relationship between “geni- Sandwork 27 Figure 3. Building sand castles tal modes” and “spatial modes” (1950, 91). He observed, of course, what he came to call “unique elements” in the constructions, elements he could connect with individual children as he got to know them. But he was surprised to find a pattern of “organ modes” in the constructions (94–95). “The most significant sex difference,” writes Erikson, “was the tendency of boys to erect structures, building, towers, or streets; . . . the girls tended to use the play table as the inte- rior of a house, with simple, little or no use of blocks” (96–97). Erikson also expresses surprise at and interest in the ways boys’ constructions featured both high rises and “downfalls”—“ruins or fallen-down structures”—all of which 28 AMERICAN jOuRNAL OF PLAY • fall 2016 convinced him that “the variable high-low is a masculine variable” (emphasis in original, 97). In contrast, Erikson observes that “girls rarely built towers,” that if “‘high’ and ‘low’ are masculine variables, ‘open’ and ‘closed’ are feminine modalities” (97–98). Erikson then connects these observations of the block play of children with his discussion of Freud’s theory about genital modes and child development: “It is clear by now that the spatial tendencies governing these constructions are reminiscent of the genital modes discussed in this chapter, and that they, in fact, closely parallel the morphology of the sex organs: in the male, external organs, erectable and intrusive in character, conducting highly mobile sperm cells; internal organs in the female, with a vesticular access leading to statically expectant ova” (100). Erikson arrives at a conclusion later developed by Mary Douglas (1966), George Lakoff (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), and others—namely, that experience, and especially spatial experience, “is anchored in the ground plan of the body” (Erickson 1950, 102). I am tempted, of course, to bring Erikson’s observations and psychoana- lytic interpretations directly to the sand constructions I found on the beach in Santa Cruz and in the photographic record of children’s sand constructions going back at least a century (figure 3). There are reasons to be cautious, though. The women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s changed many things. Most relevantly, developmental psychologists, teachers, and parents realized that the toys purchased for girls and boys were highly gender coded, and that the ste- reotypical gender performances the women’s movement sought to change were overdetermined by commercially manufactured toys. On the other hand, the folk toys and folk play of children provided play space to resist these adult-imposed, highly gendered conditions for play with toys. As adults became more concerned about the safety of children and, accordingly, reduced the opportunities for free play, they increased their control over the play environment of children. Their children’s power to control the toys they had to play with grew ever more limited. Girls found ways to subvert the gender messages in the toys. Some of my female students reported in the 1990s appropriating their brothers’ LEGO sets and building the sorts of objects usually constructed by boys. Scholars of chil- dren’s play in the United States have noted that over time girls’ play has come to resemble boys’ play. Although one might expect nowadays to find no gender differences in the wet-sand constructions by girls and boys on the beach, it turns out that some of the patterns observed by Erikson over seventy years ago showed up in the