A string figure is a design formed by manipulating string on, around, and using one's fingers or sometimes between the fingers of multiple people. String figures may also involve the use of the mouth, wrist, and feet. They may consist of singular images or be created and altered as a game, known as a string game, or as part of a story involving various figures made in sequence (string story). String figures have also been used for divination, such as to predict the sex of an unborn child.
According to Camilla Gryski, a Canadian librarian and author of numerous string figure books, "We don't know when people first started playing with string, or which primitive people invented this ancient art. We do know that all primitive societies had and used string—for hunting, fishing, and weaving—and that string figures have been collected from native peoples all over the world."
"Of the games people play, string figures enjoy the reputation of being the most widespread form of amusement in the world: more cultures are familiar with string figures than with any other game. Over 2,000 individual patterns have been recorded worldwide since 1888, when anthropologist Franz Boas first described a pair of Eskimo string figures.
"String figures are probably one of humanity's oldest games, and is spread among an astonishing variety of cultures, even ones as unrelated as Europeans and the Dayaks of Indonesia; Alfred Wallace who, while traveling in Borneo in the 1800s, thought of amusing the Dayak youths with a novel game with string, was in turn very surprised when they proved to be familiar with it, and showed him some figures and transitions that he hadn't previously seen. The anthropologist Louis Leakey has also attributed string figure knowledge with saving his life and described his use of this game in the early 1900s to obtain the cooperation of Sub-Saharan African tribes otherwise unfamiliar with, and suspicious of, Europeans, having been told by his teacher A.C. Haddon, "You can travel anywhere with a smile and a piece of string."
The International String Figure Association (ISFA) was formed in 1978 with the primary goal of gathering, preserving, and distributing string figure knowledge so that future generations will continue to enjoy this ancient pastime. String figures, once thought to have proven monogenesis, appear to have arisen independently as an entertainment pastime in many societies. Many figures were collected and described from south-east Asia, Japan, South America, West Indies, Pacific Islanders, Inuit and other Native Americans. Figures have also been collected in Europe and Africa.
 The lovers Okiku and Yosuke play cat's cradle, by Eishōsai Chōki. |
Heraklas' "Plinthios Brokhos" made in a doubled cord. Resembles "A Hole in the Tree" with different crossings
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| "Osage Two Diamonds". |
H David 2015
p.269
Martha Kenney interviews Donna Harraway (author of the Chthulucene thesis)
Donna Harraway is extremely poetic in her speech and writing, and as such adds a creative perspective on the climate of an Anthropocene, pushing for primitive play and lateral thinking.
Extract from the Interview, relating to string figures and their relevance to the practical idea progression;
Donna: I love words that just won’t sit still, and once you think you’ve defined them it turns out they are like ship hulls full of barnacles. You scrape them off, but the larvae re-settle and spring up again. Figuring is a way of thinking or cogitating or meditating or hanging out with ideas. I’m interested in how figures help us avoid the deadly fantasy of the literal. Of course, the literal is another trope, but we’re going to hold the literal still for a minute, as the trope of no trope. Figures help us avoid the fantasy of “the one true meaning.” They are simultaneously visual and narrative as well as mathematical. They are very sensual.
I am interested particularly in string figures, in string games like cat’s cradle— a game played on tentacles or digits of many kinds, like fingers and toes. Cat’s cradle, as Isabelle Stengers pointed out, involves one set of digits or tentacles holding still long enough to receive a pattern passed by another set and then passing a mutated pattern back, so there is stillness and motion, giving and receiving, staying and moving. String figures are also old games; they show up all over the world. So they are an obvious figure for me in thinking about response-ability, feminist environmentalism, and science studies. String figures are SF games. SF games are science fiction, science fact, speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, soin de ficelle, so far (in that these games are ongoing and not finished). Connected to this is Ursula K. Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of fiction, where storytelling is about collecting things up into a net, a bag, a shell, a recipient, or a hollow, for sharing. SF is full of old, important feminist figures.
The training practices helped me rethink the evolutionary roots of the capacity for ethical reasoning. How do we think of evolutionary stories of our responseabilities, of our capacities to respond? Biologist Marc Bekoff developed this really wonderful theory that the roots of ethical possibilities, ethical response-ability, are in play. Critters respond to the meta-communicative apparatuses of play signalling, so that play can go on and remain inventive rather than turn into aggression or something else boringly functional. Because play is one of those activities through which critters make with each other that which didn’t exist before, it’s never merely functional; it’s propositional. Play makes possible futures out of joyful but dangerous presents. Think of the way Stengers theorizes Whitehead’s propositions. Play proposes new abstractions, new lures. Marc didn’t quite say all that, but I took what he gave me and told my stories with his; we played with each other. This is a sym-poietic telling of propositional stories about the origin of ethics— a string-figuring. It figures response-ability as becoming-with, and it’s rooted in the riskiness of play. It’s rooted in taking chances with one another, not in prohibition. Ethics is not primarily a rule-based activity, but a propositional, worlding activity.
Advocates play
I’m working with string figures a lot, for example, with the convergence and divergence of Navajo/ Diné string figures called Na’at’lo and Euro-American cat’s cradle, the ways that both tell the same stories and also tell very different stories. I’m intrigued by the question of who owns stories. Some peoples don’t get to own their stories; the question of sovereignties comes up. In my lectures and in my work in general, I try hard to have a thread of vexed questions of indigeneity in play—thinkers like Kim TallBear and James Clifford help me do that.
Use of Native variations to show their perspective of the world - GAIA ideals - and their civil war with the petrocapitalist companies?
PLAY
The fantasies of the world we inhabit and the magic of the natural phenomenons are highlighted (coral reefs / mountains / ecologies) if they can exist anything can - lateral considerations
When we tell the parabolic and spiked tales of tragic detumescence, tales of the Modern and the Traditional, we get off easy. We don’t have to do a thing. We are not urged to action, we aren’t urged to caring, we aren’t urged to decomposition and recomposition. I want non-Euclidean ruffled tales, studded with tentacles for risky tangling. Ongoing caring requires that we work with figures of re-mediation that are risky and also fun, that we work, play, live, die, that we are at risk with and as mortal critters, that we don’t give in to the techno-tragic story of self-made final death of the Anthropocene, but that we do inhabit the realities of excess mass death so as to learn to repair, and maybe even flourish without denial. MK To return to play, I was playing around with the figure of the Ood,
Noting the visual qualities of sacred geometry to this gives them great context in their visual qualities of 'perfection' and 'pattern', in circulative non-linear forms
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