Tackle this: football as an American ritual

Guest post by Peter Wogan

In preparation for Super Bowl Sunday, there is something we should stock up on, along with the nachos and beer: anthropological analysis. Yes, it is a great time to step back and ask ourselves how football reflects American culture. Such an extremely popular sport must resonate with some underlying aspects of our culture. Otherwise, we could be getting ready right now to watch Super Shot-Put Sunday or the Big Badminton Bowl (BBB).

Football action. Photo credit: JSmith, Creative Commons, Flickr
Football action. Photo credit: JSmith, Creative Commons, Flickr

The best way to understand American football is to compare it with basketball. The comparative perspective should induce culture shock and throw football’s essential qualities into relief.

In football, players dress in Superhero outfits.
In basketball, players dress in bathing suits.

In football, it’s so cold you see steam coming out of the players, as if they’re scaling Mt. Everest.
In basketball, it’s so hot you see sweat pouring off players, as if they’re mowing the lawn.

But the ultimate difference lies in spatial orientation.

Football is all about lines: Lining up on lines, measuring lines, crossing lines. The central objective of the game, in fact, is to cross a line: the goal line.

Basketball, on the other hand, is all about circles: putting a rubber circle inside a slightly larger, metal circle (the ball and the hoop). Instead of yard lines, the basketball court is divided up into circles: the center circle (which contains a circle within a circle), the 3-point line (which is a semi-circle), and the foul circle at the top of the key. Not to mention all the players running around in circles, trying to get open for a pass. Lines vs. circles—that’s the key difference.

Blazers Court. Photo credit: Tom Langston, Creative Commons, Flickr
Empty Redskins Field; Photo credit: squidpants, Creative Commons, Flickr

How, though, do these micro aspects of football and basketball reflect American culture? Warning: I’d rather risk overstating the case than stating the obvious, and I would never say there’s only one reason we love and play these sports, nor that one is better than the other.

Basically, football reflects a hierarchical model of authority. Coaches, quarterbacks, and coordinators control every play. Basketball comes out of a more democratic model based on spontaneous teamwork. The basketball coach cannot even intervene in most plays.

Football is about masterful strategies, specialized roles (punter, receiver, linebacker, etc.), and strict lines of authority (have you ever heard anyone call it “circles of authority”?). Basketball is about role flexibility (every player shoots, passes, plays defense) and fast-paced improvisation.

Football comes out of America’s hierarchical, industrial economy and military strategizing, whereas basketball emerges from the more recent knowledge economy. Lines and circles.

It’s not just about political economy, however. Basketball, with its sweaty players in bathing suits, matches the growing informality and bare-all impulses of post-1960’s, mass media culture (casual Fridays, confessional memoirs, reality TV, Facebook, etc.). An ethos of social openness also plays a role. Circles are more associated than lines in American culture with equality and togetherness. Not coincidentally, basketball, the Circle Game, has skyrocketed in popularity at the same time that there’s been a push toward greater multiculturalism and gender equality. Circles and lines.

No matter what, though, much of the country comes together to watch the Super Bowl. Maybe that is because football does more than just reflect contemporary American culture, including longings and ambivalence. It also exquisitely embodies The Thrill of The Chase. The heart of football is The Chase: players frantically trying to get a few steps ahead of their pursuers. As anthropologists can tell you, that’s how homo sapiens and our hominid ancestors spent much of their time: chasing and being chased. So let the beer flow and The Great Chase begin.

Peter Wogan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Willamette University, co-author of Hollywood Blockbusters: The Anthropology of Popular Movies (2009), and author of blockbusteranthropology.blogspot.com, where he tries to make sense of sharks (“Jaws”), baseball (“Field of Dreams”), and model families (“The Godfather”), among other things. Peter thanks David Sutton for comments on a draft of this post.

For further reading:

Arens, W. “Professional Football: An American Symbol and Ritual.” In The American Dimension, Arens and Montague, eds., Alfred Publishing, 1976. A wonderful, early anthropological essay on football, with insight into things like football’s resonance with labor specialization in postwar America.

Continue reading “Tackle this: football as an American ritual” →

Anthro connection: for all the gold in Colombia

An article in the Economist reports that the FARC is turning to gold. Literally. Apparently some FARC groups are financing their efforts through illegal gold mining.

The story of digging for gold in Colombia is not a pretty one and it is not a new one.

Cultural anthropologist Michael Taussig has written a powerful book about gold in Colombia, from before Columbus got there to the stunning displays in the Museo del Oro, a living tribute to the beauty of gold.

Read Taussig’s My Cocaine Museum and think about gold, slavery, violence and the pretty little bits of it that we (speaking for myself) attach to ourselves. And the billionaires who trade in gold. And the poor who work for pitiful wages sifting gold from the earth. Beyond gold, Taussig draws connections to cocaine and more.

I love this book: it is deep and dark and bright and memorable from page one to the end. Here is chapter 2 as a teaser.

Photo: Piece of gold from the Museo del Oro; Courtesy of dariorana, Creative Commons license on Flickr

WAPA February 2011 Meeting

The Faith and Organizations Project:  Findings and Process

When: Tuesday, February 1st, 7:00 pm
Where: Charles Sumner School
2101 17th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20036

Presenters: Jo Anne Schneider, Isaac Morrison, Laura Polk

The Faith and Organizations Project is a trans-disciplinary, multi-methods ethnographic project looking at the relationship between faith based organizations and their founding communities (see faithandorganizations.umd.edu). The project just completed a Lilly Endowment-funded project comparing 81 faith communities and organizations from Catholic, Mainline Protestant, Jewish, Evangelical, Quaker and African American Christian traditions. The project model involves agency hosts and practitioners as active participants in all aspects of the project, creating products for a variety of audiences. This presentation will briefly outline key findings, talk about project process, and discuss experience working on anthropologist-led, trans-disciplinary projects in the career paths of project researchers.

Continue reading “WAPA February 2011 Meeting” →

Anthro in the news 1/31/11

• What a turn off
In an article about Egypt’s unprecedented shut-down of the Internet this past week, the LA Times quotes Charles Hirschkind, associate professor of cultural anthropology at UC Berkeley: “The Web, and in particular social media sites, have been an invaluable tool for activists seeking political and social reforms in Egypt…The Egyptian government [is] hoping that cutting off access will help to stopping the demonstrations…But it’s also apparent from the number of people in the street that people have plenty of ways to communication outside of the Internet.”

• A very strong army and more
MSNBC covered support by Minnesotans with ties to Egypt for the street demonstrations expressing political discontent. The article quotes William Beeman, professor of cultural anthropology and chair of the anthropology department at the University of Minnesota: “Mubarak has been trying to install his son as the next ruler of the country and that would continue essentially a dictatorship…The population is rebelling against him personally, but in a way against the whole super structure that he’s trying to build to secure his legacy.” Beeman also comments that it cannot be assumed that Egypt, like Tunisia, will succeed in ousting the regime: “The Mubarak Regime has a very strong army and a very strong police force. And they’ve been repressing protests for 30 years.” Beeman goes on to discuss the prospects of Mohamed ElBaradei as a replacement for Mubarak and the future of U.S.-Egypt relations.

• Securing antiquities in Egypt
The Washington Post quoted three archaeologists in an article about damage to the Cairo Museum and possible looting in sites outside Cairo. Zahi Hawass, head of the Egyptian Council on Antiquities reported that no antiquities have been stolen from the Cairo Museum. Sarah Parcak, an Egyptologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham suggested the likelihood of looting at Saqqara and other sites. Brian Rose of the University of Pennsylvania implored the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to watch out for possible smuggling of antiquities into the United States.

• From anthropology to “radical art”
London-based “radical artist” Susan Hiller is profiled in the Guardian. She comments on her studies in anthropology and her disillusionment with it during the American-Vietnam war: “The Vietnam War showed me that anthropology was not an innocent practice…” She turned to art as a “value-free” medium. Blogger’s note: I have no idea what “radical art” is, but my sense is that Hiller is still an anthropologist at heart, and one with her “values” front and center. Listen to what she says: “Artists have a function. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here. We’re part of a conversation. It’s our job to represent and mirror back the values of the culture in a way that people haven’t seen before…I don’t aim for my work to be comforting to people who are already comfortable with themselves.” It could be that Hiller went to graduate school in anthropology ahead of her time.

• Newly found old tools and the “escape from Africa”
In contrast to the news-roiling stories of political protests in the Arab world last week, the big story in anthro-land was about very old stone tools in what is now the United Arab Emirates. A team of researchers have found stone tools in eastern Arabia that look like they were made by early modern humans. The fact that they are dated to over 100,000 years ago puts to question the view that modern humans left Africa around 60,000 years ago. Dozens of media outlets covered the story, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR. The list goes on. Several archaeologists are quoted to provide interpretations of the tools’ significance. Blogger’s note #1: isn’t archaeology all about new finds, better dating methods, and “push back” when it comes to dates? Blogger’s note #2: The first article I read about the discovery was by Nicholas Wade, in the New York Times. As I read it, I wondered if some disaster had occurred in Africa around 100,000 years ago. Here’s why: para 1, Wade refers to when and how modern humans “escaped from…Africa;” in para 2, he uses the verb “escape” again; para 3, he uses the phrase “got out of Africa;” and para 8, again: “…escape from Africa.” Other accounts use less dramatic terms such as: migrated from, moved, travelled, spread, ventured out, forayed. Does Wade have a problem with Africa?

Understanding Egypt

Political protests in Egypt are ongoing at the time of this writing, mainly in Cairo, Alexandria and some other cities. Who knows what will unfold in the near future? What do cultural anthropologists offer to inform our understanding of this new social movement?

Mubarak and Regime Out by Michael Soron/Flickr.
Mubarak and Regime Out by Michael Soron/Flickr.
In order to address these issues, I turned first to my favorite electronic database available through my university library, Anthropology Plus.

I used the single search term “Egypt,” and I chose the publication dates of 2000-2010. Nearly 400 articles popped up. In scanning through them, I found that only 10 percent were related to contemporary social life. The other 90 percent of the references are dominated by archaeology with a sprinkling of biological anthropology as well as some non-anthro sources.

Clearly, you will have a better chance of finding out about early cat domestication, prehistoric ships, vessel residue analysis and even infant weaning during Roman times than you will have of learning about the social dimensions of today’s street protests.

Nonetheless, the 10 percent does offer some excellent studies. I augmented the Anthropology Plus journal references with a quick search in my university library for relevant book titles. I widened the scope to allow in several non-anthro sources because they sounded important. So, here you have a very quickly prepared reading list of mainly anthro sources along with other relevant social science studies.

As with all such “bibliographic” posts on this blog, I offer my sincere apologies to readers who do not have a way to access to the sources on this list, because most are not “open access.”

I welcome additions and comments from readers.

Reading list on culture, society and contemporary change in Egypt:

  1. Agrama, Hussein Ali. 2010. “Ethics, Tradition, Authority: Toward an Anthropology of the Fatwa.” American Ethnologist 37(1):2-18.
  2. Aishima, Hatsuki, and Armando Salvatore. 2009. “Doubt, Faith, and Knowledge: The Reconfiguration of the Intellectual Field in Post-Nasserist Cairo.” Islam, Politics, Anthropology 2009:41-56.
  3. Armburst, Walter. 2002. “Islamists in Egyptian Cinema.” American Anthropologist 104(3):922-930.
  4. _____. 2004. “Egyptian Cinema on Stage and Off.” Off stage/on Display: Intimacy and Ethnography in the Age of Public Culture: 69-98.
  5. _____. 2006 “Synchronizing Watches: The State, the Consumer, and Sacred Time in Ramadan Television.” Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere: 207-226.

    6. Continue reading “Understanding Egypt” →

Congratulations to AAAS Fellows 2010

Among the many 2010 AAAS Fellows chosen for their contributions to science and technology are eight anthropologists. Six of the eight are biological anthropologists. Two are archaeologists. They will be recognized at the Fellows Forum to be held February 19, 2011, during the AAAS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. The new Fellows will receive a certificate and a blue and gold rosette as a symbol of their distinguished accomplishments.

Anthropologyworks offers sincere congratulations to the awardees and a request to the AAAS to widen its purview in the future.

Creative commons licensed on Flickr by Mae Wells
Creative commons licensed on Flickr by Mae Wells
The AAAS awardee profile in anthropology is far too narrow. It overlooks many excellent cultural and linguistic anthropologists whose work clearly contributes to “science and technology.”

Dozens of cultural and linguistic anthropologists are working on topics such as health, violence, migration, fertility, nutrition, environmental pollution, and digital technology, to name just a few. How can it be that not one of such cultural/linguistic anthropologists was named an AAAS Fellow in 2010?

The 2010 awardees are:

Richard A. Diehl, University of Alabama. Professor Diehl is a Mesoamerican archaeologist who specializes in pre-Columbian cultures of Central Mexico and the Olmec culture of the tropical lowlands of the Mexican Gulf coast. He retired from the University of Alabama in 2006, although is currently a Professor Emeritus.

Agustín Fuentes, University of Notre Dame. Professor Fuentes is a biological anthropologist. His research and teaching interests include the evolution of social complexity in human and primate societies, cooperation and conflict negotiation, human diversity, and reproductive behavior and ecology.

Richard L. Jantz, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Professor Jantz is the Director of the Forensic Anthropology Center at the University of Tennessee. He conducts research on human variation, skeletal biology and forensic anthropology. He is primarily concerned with developing computerized data bases in these areas and how they can address a variety of research questions.

Michelle Lampl, Emory University. Professor Lampl is a biological anthropologist with a research focus on human growth and development. She investigates the mechanisms of growth and influencing factors, both genetic and environmental, and she collaborates with scientists internationally on research projects related to fetal and infant growth.

Paul W. Leslie, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Professor Leslie is a biological anthropologist. His research concerns the relationship among the demographic, socioeconomic, and biological characteristics of human populations, in an ecological context, especially in East Africa.

Fiona B. Marshall, Washington University in St. Louis. Professor Marshall is an archaeologist with an appointment in African and African-American studies. She is one of the world’s pre-eminent scholars on the origins of agriculture in Africa and on donkey domestication. In collaboration with the St. Louis Zoo, she is studying behavior of the African wild ass and the relationship of sociality to domestication processes.

Anne C. Stone, Arizona State University. Professor Stone is a biological anthropologist with a primary focus on anthropological genetics. Her regional focus is South America. Her current research is on applications of population genetics to questions concerning the origins, population history and evolution of humans and the great apes

Samuel D. Stout, Ohio State University. Professor Stout is a forensic and biological anthropologist. His research interest include skeletal biology, health, and bioarchaeology.

Anthro in the news 1/24/11

• Oprah supports Aboriginal women’s heritage
A documentary about how an Australian Aboriginal elder balanced preserving her ancestors’ heritage and revealing their sacred history is showcased on Oprah Winfrey’s website. The film is called Sprits in the Stone. Several archaeologists worked on the project which involves a 45,000 year old rock art site belonging to the Jawoyn people. The film will be released in December 2011. To view the film trailer, visit www.oprah.com

• Modernity and murder in a honeymoon paradise
The Mauritius brand as an ultimate destination for newlyweds took a sad twist after a recent murder there. Sean Carey, cultural anthropologist at the University of Roehampton, writes in the Guardian about high-end tourism, local inflation, crime, and international brand maintenance in Mauritius. He gives a shout out to British social anthropologist Ernest Gellner and his observations about on the pains of transition to modernity.

• Viagra for altitude sickness: beware of side effects
Medical anthropologist Theresa Graedon is a syndicated columnist and, with Joe Graedon, she writes a column called People’s Pharmacy. This past week, the Graedons responded in the LA Times to a question from a reader about whether or not Viagra is effective for altitude sickness. The response: check with your doctor before you travel since treating yourself for altitude sickness could have side effects. Blogger’s note: This is a great topic for Jon Stewart’s Daily Show.

• Archaeology of bunga bunga in Italy
A new archaeological project in Italy is excavating what is claimed to be the lost tomb of Caligula, the first century emperor famous for his debauchery and for appointing his favorite horse a senator. An Italian politician has been quoted as saying: “Compared with Berlusconi, Caligula was a prude.” Blogger’s note: another great topic for the Daily Show. What’s going on this week?

• Save Somaliland’s rock paintings
The Sunday Times of London carried a plea from British-Somali archaeologist Sada Mire for world heritage protection for ancient rock paintings she discovered in Somaliland. Poverty, looting, and road building are the major threats.

• In memoriam
Geoffrey Egan, archaeologist at the Museum of London, died suddenly of coronary thrombosis on December 24, 2010, at the age of 59 years. He was a noted medieval and post-medieval finds expert and was probably the first archaeologist to head one of the City of London’s guilds. His doctoral thesis was on lead seals used by London’s cloth merchants as a guarantee of provenance and quality.

Upcoming event at GW

The lecture series Museums and Antiquities – A New World presents:

“Taking the Long View: Twenty Years of Repatriation at the National Museum of Natural History”

by William Billeck, Repatriation Office Manager, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution

When: Thursday, January 27, 2011 at 6pm
Where: Funger Hall, Room 103
2201 G St. NW
The George Washington University

Free and open to the public

Dr. Billeck has been involved in more than 500 Native American repatriations at the Smithsonian including a case, which he initiated that resulted in the return of personal effects and hair to the descendants of Sitting Bull.

For more information: contact Kym Rice, kym@gwu.edu, or Jeffrey Blomster, blomster@gwu.edu.

This lecture series is a 2010-2011 George Washington University Seminar, sponsored by The Museum Studies Program & The Anthropology Department.