Kraft, form, transformationer. Om kinestetisk musikalitet och kroppsvärldande i pojkars krigslek

Force, form, transformations : Kinesthetic musicality and body-worlding in boy´s war play

War play has generally been studied with violence as a central perspective, investigating its impact on children’s aggression, both in a positive and negative sense. Some research results have claimed that war play can contribute to normalising or even encouraging violent behavior amongst children, while other results have claimed that children can develop important physical, cognitive or social skills through war play. However, this study examines the aesthetic dimensions that children create and explore in war play in their early childhood, above all by placing their movement at the foreground. The phenomenon of war play is here reframed and analysed, mainly through a dance theoretical framework. This framework embraces phenomenology with a focus on the body-subject´s movement in the world–a focus which is further displaced towards movement in the world with the help of process philosophy.The research data is mainly based on ethnographic field studies and art film, but also of interviews with the participants who are boys aged three to nine years old. The structure and organisation of the analysis is inspired by the principles of Grounded Theory. Six main categories emerged as the result of the study: rhythm, orchestrating space, fictional characters as spaces for exploring movement-quality, the movement canon of war play, phrases and aesthetic attention. Concluding, the results of the thesis are discussed with a focus on the core category, kinesthetic musicality, that connects all the categories found in the research data. Kinesthetic musicality also constitutes the core of an emerging theory that can be further tested and developed in future research. This emerging theory can be described as capturing a dimension of how children in their early childhood understand, explore and create the world.