Contest, Contestant

Definition: As used herein, Contest refers to Situations or Crises where Individuals, Households, Groups, or Organizations - also known as the Contestants - are in opposition to one another along a spectrum from irenic play to violent warfare. A Contest is "a struggle, earnest, possibly but not at all necessarily lethal or even unfriendly, between sentient beings [e.g., two stags], and at peak between reflectively conscious intelligent beings, that is, human beings, entered into to determine dominance of one or another sort. The dominance can be purely ludic, as in a game of amateur sport, or existentially real, as in a lawcase or in war."*

• Quoted material is from Fighting for Life, Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness by Walter J. Ong, Cornell University Press, p44-45.