Tag: Sports

Summer anthropologies #2: Leslie White goes to a baseball game (Part 3)

By Ryan | October 13, 2023

In the last post of this installment of the summer anthropologies series, I ended with the point that major league baseball (MLB) is an annual demonstration of autocratic corporate power. If that’s the case, I asked, why would anyone go? Well, humans are complicated. Take my case. I grew up playing baseball since I was about four or five years old. I played it all the time, went to MLB games when I had the chance, collected baseball cards, played {+}

Summer anthropologies: beaches and baseball

By Ryan | June 26, 2023

All the grades are in, summer is here, and we can all start ‘relaxing’ by lining up a bunch of unrealistic work expectations. Finally. One of my goals is to get back to short form writing that is not owned, controlled, moderated, or in any way beneficial to or complicit with the once functional platform known as Twitter. Recently, someone on that platform said something along the lines of ‘If you start writing more than a few lines here, write {+}

Hooligans, Aggression, and the FIFA World Cup: How Football Reflects upon Race/Class/Gender/Power

By Uzma Z. Rizvi | June 8, 2018

The 2018 FIFA World Cup starts on June 14, 2018. This year it is being hosted by Russia. And in case you haven’t heard: we have a Russian ‘hooligan’ problem on our hands. The organized form of this practice falls along the lines of a Fight Club (1999) situation in which young (and not so young men) get together and fight. For those of us unused to the visuality of such consensual violence, it remains jarring, disconcerting and sometimes upsetting. But for those {+}