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Book Review: B. Edmiston, Forming Ethical Identities in Early Childhood Play. New York: Routledge, 2008. 213 pp. ISBN 978—0-415—4358—2 (pbk)

In his description of the festivities of carnival, Bakhtin (1984) invited his readers to consider the relationship between play and identity. During these festivities, people historically donned ‘grotesque’ personas whose actions and appearances inverted rigid religious ideals. Bakhtin did not consider carnival to be separate from life, a mere frivolity to which people could resort to escape reality. Nor did he view carnival as a trivial festival from which people could return unchanged. Rather, ‘in reality, [carnival] is life itself, but shaped according to a certain pattern of play’ (p. 7). Using this pattern of play, people could question imposed moral mandates and try on new identities. They could parody themselves and the world around them, consequently enabling them to view both as being open for reinterpretation due to their ‘gay relativity’ (p. 11). Additionally, during carnival, social hierarchies were flattened when all people participated together in acts of profound playing, with no sideline spectators, which left each person with a sense of new social identity and shared humanity. In Forming Ethical Identities in Early Childhood Play, Brian Edmiston describes his participation in carnivalesque types of play with his son Michael as he was growing up. Rather than asserting power over his young son in an adult/child hierarchical relationship, and rather than firmly instructing him regarding what he should do to be moral, the author sought to share power with his son as the two co-constructed play spaces in which ethically ambiguous scenarios often emerged. The pair assumed personas of monsters, vampires, dragons, and other ‘evil’ or ‘good’ archetypal characters, and in so doing, they grappled with difficult ethical issues and they jointly co-authored identities as ethical people in relation to these issues. As his title suggests, Edmiston framed his book with three primary, interwoven concepts: play, identity, and ethics. This book review provides journal of early childhood l iteracy 9(1)