By Hugo Calle Forrest
“When I was a child, I would quickly do my homework so I could go out to the front door and play with my friends. We would play tag, hopscotch, or chase. They were healthy games, and we had a lot of fun. Now children don’t play like that. My grandchildren spend hours and hours playing those video games, in front of the television or computer. Often alone, other times in company. I don’t like them to play much because I see that most of them are fighting games and I feel that they are rough. The games of the past have disappeared,” says Victoria Cadena, 82 years old, with three grandchildren.
This concern felt by Doña Victoria is shared by many Ecuadorians and cultural institutions in the country that have developed educational and cultural management activities through exhibitions, displays, conferences and documentaries to recover our collective memory and prevent traditional games from disappearing.
Traditional games are recreational exercises or pastimes that are subject to rules that are passed down from generation to generation, in which one wins or loses. They may or may not be specific, but they are specific to a particular place, and whose origin dates back to very distant times.
Traditional games are part of the intangible cultural heritage, due to the generational transmission of the collective memory that identifies a region, as they are linked to its history, culture and tradition. In some regions of the world, over time, traditional games have become indigenous sports related to cultural tradition.
The spinning top
The Ecuadorian coast, like the rest of the country, has a variety of traditional urban and rural games that can be rescued and spread by our cultural managers, such as perinola, hopscotch, tops, cuartas, coconuts, jumping rope, bomba, pepos, flying kites, a greased pole, rope, cocinaditas, ensacados, the ribbon tournament, the game of compliments, the game of stilts, onion juice, among others that do not require expensive materials since many of them can be made by hand.
In some foreign countries, such as Spain, cultural spaces have even been created that rescue this cultural heritage, such as the Museum of Traditional Games in the town of Campo, a municipality in the Province of Huesca, located in the autonomous region of Aragon. This museum was created with the aim of researching, preserving and disseminating a part of the cultural heritage that is in danger of disappearing or changing. It has the originality of being a museum that reconstructs traditional society through leisure, showing how men, women and children in the rural world had fun. It has a collection of around two thousand pieces belonging to 150 games, a collection that continues to increase with donations from very diverse points in Spain and Europe. A significant part of the collection corresponds to Aragonese games, but the museum has a large representation from other autonomous communities and other European countries, such as France, Belgium or England.
In our country we do not yet have a museum of traditional games as such, however, certain lifestyle museums such as the Guayaquil Historical Park, located in Samborondón, could be very well adapted to exhibit our traditional games permanently with a recreational museology and museography, since they have only been exhibited as short-term cultural programs. The rescue, dissemination and appreciation of traditional games not only leads to the strengthening of our cultural identity, recovery of our collective memory as intangible cultural heritage, but also presents itself as a resource and recreational-playful activity necessary for all human beings, because by the mere fact of being a game it is a useful tool to develop motor, intellectual and affective capacities, which require the time and space that we can give it.
FOUNTAIN: The Coaster
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