Think football, and odds are you think tailgate party. And with good reason — the tailgate party is among the most time-honored and revered American sporting traditions, what with the festivities, the food and the fans. And the beer. Don’t forget the beer.

 

To the untrained eye, these game-day rituals appear to be little more than a wild party, a hedonistic excuse to get loaded and eat barbecue. Not at all. They are, according to Notre Dame anthropologist John Sherry, bustling microcosms of society where self-regulatory neighborhoods foster inter-generational community, nurture tradition and build the team’s brand.

 

Sherry didn’t always feel this way. There was a time when he considered tailgating a boisterous nuisance, little more than a gauntlet of unrelated and unruly celebrations to be run if he were to reach his seat in Notre Dame Stadium. But then he had an epiphany: What if there was meaning to the madness?

 

“One day I slowed down and paid attention to things that were going on that weren’t individual celebrations,” he said of research presented in A Cultural Analysis of Tailgating. “It was much more nuanced that I had thought before.”

Anthropologist Susan Brownell studies sports and the Olympics:

My question, "will the Olympics change China, or will China change the Olympics?" was really an attempt to prod my audiences to think about the bigger question of the implications for the developed West of China's rise, because Westerners seemed so concerned about the question of whether hosting the Olympics would push China toward Western-style political reforms, and no one seemed concerned about the question of whether, instead of us changing China, China might actually change us. I felt that many of my Western listeners needed to be awakened out of their self-centeredness.

China did change the Olympic Games, and since the Olympic Games are a thoroughly global event, those changes reflect the changes that China has instigated in the world order. The world financial crisis hit right after the Beijing Games, in large part due to the fact that the integration of China into the global economy, which the Olympics marked, had tipped it off balance.

Read more at The Atlantic

A New Kind of Spectacle: How China Changed the Olympics

The world went into the 2008 games asking whether the Olympics would change China, but maybe it was the other way around.

John Fox, a Harvard Ph.D. anthropologist, talked to CNN about his new book, The Ball: Discovering the Object of the Game

CNN: Your book starts with a basic question from your son, "Why do we play ball?" Did you find an answer?

Fox: I wouldn't say I found an answer. It's a philosophical question as much as a scientific one, but what I did find was a variety of answers that add up to something interesting. One of the things that surprised me was just learning about why we play in the first place and what the benefits are psychologically and cognitively.

We think of playing sports as having obvious physical rewards, but I learned that play is a way that we develop knowledge and cognitive skills about the world. The importance of playing ball for our ability in becoming intelligent, sentient beings is as important as any physical benefits.

That surprised me because I don't think we think of play as something that makes us smarter. It makes us able to think better and faster and that was a revelation.

Read the rest here:

Behind 'The Ball': Author talks about why we play

By Christian DuChateau, CNN

This interesting anthropology-related news bite appeared at ESPN:

BOGOTA, Colombia — Colombia’s top prosecutor is questioning why a shaman, or medicine man, was paid $2,000 to keep rain away from the closing ceremony of the Under-20 World Cup.

The attorney general’s office opened the investigation Tuesday after the comptroller’s office in Bogota questioned cost overruns of more than $1 million — the shaman’s charges included. The official cost of the August ceremony was $2.5 million.

Anthropologist Ana Marta de Pizarro helped organize the ceremony and says the shaman was justified.

She said: “Had it rained, the event would not have taken place. It didn’t rain on the ceremony, it was successful and I would use him again if I needed to.”

Pizarro said the shaman had been used at other outdoor events in the country.

The Under-20 World Cup was held for three weeks last year across Colombia, with Brazil winning the final.

Copyright 2012 by The Associated Press

Hiring of Shaman Questioned

The Associated Press

Type the name of Philipp Lahm into the Google search engine and the first thing its “autocomplete” feature throws up about Germany’s national football captain is “Philipp Lahm schwul” – “Philipp Lahm gay”.

[...]As elsewhere in Europe, Germany has no openly gay men in the professional leagues. Given the amount of repressive hide-and-seek going on, it’s perhaps only natural that public debate returns regularly to the issue of gay footballers.

[...]Cultural anthropologist Tatjana Eggeling, who writes regularly on the issue and advises gay footballers, suggests the issue will return on a regular basis until professional players out themselves.

She suggests the secrecy and fear of discovery is not down to outright homophobia in soccer.

“The football stadium is the last bastion of masculinity where a man can give in to his sadness if his team is relegated,” she wrote in a recent paper.

“Football is very emotional. Everything is exploited to abuse and belittle the opponent: regional and social background or physical weakness.”

In this context homosexuality is seen as the ultimate weakness to be attacked, she suggests, ensuring gay players do everything possible to remain undiscovered. Though no figures exist, she suggests there are fewer than average gay men in professional football.

Read more at The Irish Times:

Football captain tackles rumours but can’t kick gay debate into touch

DEREK SCALLY

Anthropologists discuss football/soccer and culture at The New York Times and CNN:

Beatriz Vélez, former anthropology professor at the Universidad de Antioquia in Medellín, studied the gender dynamics of football in her home city beginning in the 1990s. First, she wrote about the grudging acceptance girls received as token participants in the Football for Peace program, established after the murder of Andrés Escobar in 1994. Interviews betrayed the prejudice that girls face daily as they are pressured, subtly or directly, toward domestic life and ideals of feminine beauty. Boys in the program wanted the field clear of girls so they could play “real football.”

“In almost all Latin American countries,” Vélez writes, “the sovereignty of football among street games and leisure-time or break activities for men is absolute. All types of workers can be seen relaxing with this game.”

Read more at The New York Times: In Colombia, a Soccer Paradox By JOHN TURNBULL

Referring to Japan’s World Cup victory,

Merry White, a professor of anthropology at Boston University and an expert on Japanese culture, said the women’s performance illustrated some key qualities of Japanese society: hard work and resilience.

“It wasn’t only skills that got them close. … It’s the effort that counts,” White said.

“They believe in will,” she said, showing “when we put our minds to something we can do it.”

Read the rest at CNN: Japan’s character seen in women’s World Cup victory