The Shifting Landscape of Indigenous Knowledge of Play: How Games Influence Children's Subjectivity and Cultural Transmission in Duggar/Jammu
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.56062/Keywords:
Indigenous knowledge, Consumerism, Traditional games, online games, Duggar, JammuAbstract
This study investigates children’s subjectivity through the lens of Cultural Studies, focusing on the traditional and contemporary games of the Duggar region. It digitally archives various indigenous games from Duggar in English and situates them within the broader framework of the Indigenous Knowledge System. By examining these games as cultural texts, the research explores how children’s subjectivities are shaped through play and highlights the diverse physical, cognitive, and social skills cultivated through traditional Duggar games. To analyse the transformation of this process in the digital age, the study employs the Cultural Constructivist perspective alongside the Frankfurt School’s framework to interrogate online games as ideological sites where capitalist logics reconfigure the meaning and purpose of play. Within this commodified landscape, children’s subjectivity is no longer shaped through collective folklife, but rather it is structured by the cultivation of consumer desire. The discourse of games thus becomes a powerful apparatus of interpellation, through which children are positioned as consumers from early childhood, internalising market-driven values that infiltrate their consciousness and everyday practices. As a result, the Indigenous knowledge once actively transmitted through play now survives largely as nostalgic memory; a trace of a richer, collective past overshadowed by the forces of commodification.
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