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Rooting For the Home Team
Sport, Community, and Identity
By DANIEL A. NATHAN UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2013Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09485-9
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Basketball and Magic in "Middletown"
Locating Sport and Culture in American Social Science
MARK DYRESON
Tales of "Primitive" Argonauts and Heartland Tribes
In the 1920s a team of social scientists descended on a "typical" American city. They were determined to unravel the secrets of communal identity and discover the laws that governed culture change. Using methodologies originally practiced by anthropologists to catalog the lifeways of non-Western cultures in locales far from the urban-industrial core of the twentieth-century Occident, the scientific observers settled among the heartland townsfolk and got to work. They set out to chronicle, in their words, "the life of the people in the city, selected as a unit complex of interwoven trends of behavior." Their study imitated the anthropological methods invented by Bronislaw Malinowski in Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) and Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown in The Andaman Islanders (1922). Those two pioneering works captured the imaginations of both the world's leading social scientists and the general public with tales of the exotic habits of so-called primitives and their explanations of the novel concept that something they labeled as "culture" defined human-ness. The books made their authors famous and rich.
Hoping to replicate the success of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, the Lynd-led scientific team embedded itself in a modern American tribe. The team gave the small heartland city a pseudonym, dubbing it "Middletown" to connote their assessment that the site represented an archetype with the power to explain patterns in any American community. They charted work and leisure, home and family, religion and government. The researchers analyzed coming-of-age rituals and patterns of community. The team argued that they had found a culture that had been radically transformed in just a decade by the automobile and the radio. The new technologies and the culture of consumption in which they were embedded, the researchers feared, had frayed the communal fabric of Middletown to the breaking point.
Certitude in a Capricious Universe: The Function of "Magic Middletown"
Counteracting the corrosive forces of the car and the airwaves, the scientists discovered another "technology" that built communal solidarity. That technology inhabited the largest structure on the campus of the key institution designed to transform children into adults—the high school gymnasium, where "the five boys who wear the colors of 'Magic Middletown,'" as the scientists colorfully put it, performed regular civic rituals that animated the essential "being" of the city. The anthropological interlopers contended that in this magical ritual "no distinctions divide the crowds which pack the school gymnasium for home games and which in every kind of machine crowd the roads for out-of-town games. North Side and South Side, Catholic and Kluxer, banker and machinist—their one shout is 'Eat 'em beat 'em, Bearcats!'" They reported that the denizens of "Middletown" identified the "meanest man" in town as a grouch who hated basketball.
In 1929 the research team leaders, Robert and Helen Lynd, published their findings as a book titled Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture. The first Middletown volume became an instant hit among social scientists, media pundits, and general readers. The Lynds, happily returned from their fieldwork to Manhattan, were overjoyed to discover their book on the "best seller" table at Brentano's, the New York City bookstore that served as a favorite haunt of the American intelligentsia. Over the next half-century, Middletown grew in stature. One 1970 study ranked it among the twenty-five most significant books in the history of the republic. In their study the Lynds revealed that Middletown was a real place—Muncie, Indiana. The Bearcats was the actual name of the high school basketball team at Muncie Central High School. Basketball, they marveled, captured the magical essence of Muncie. The Lynds insisted that "Magic Middletown," the cultural essence of the community, appeared more fully on the high school basketball court than in any other realm of heartland tribal life.
The Dearth of Sociological Imagination on Sport
The Lynds' work on "Magic Middletown" marked a turning point in American social science and placed the idea that sport forged community firmly into the scholarly lexicon. Before the Lynds put basketball at the center of Middletown's lifeways, a variety of American thinkers had pondered the links between sport and communal identity, but the topic had remained on the margins of social science research. That oversight reveals an astonishing lack of "sociological imagination" in the field. The concept of a "sociological imagination," a theory coined by the mid-twentieth-century American sociologist C. Wright Mills, refers to a fundamental premise in modern social science scholarship, the notion that linking large-scale social forces to the lives of real people to explain how specific social structures produce certain social outcomes rests at the heart of their intellectual endeavor. That most American sociologists failed to appreciate what many Americans had known for centuries, or at least since the founding of the Schuylkill River Colony Fishing Club in 1732, when the political leadership who inhabited William Penn's sylvan landscapes had created a sporting club to advertise their identity as the best and brightest in the American colonies, represents a serious shortcoming in the sociological imaginations of professional social scientists.
From the colonial period until the Lynds' dramatic 1929 announcement that high school basketball shaped communal identity in Indiana, Americans without doctorates in sociology had been busy creating all manner of identities through sport, as participants, spectators, and patrons. Americans forged gender, ethnic, racial, and class identities through sport. They built local, regional, and eventually national identities around their sporting pastimes, as politicians such as Theodore Roosevelt, who used sport to win favor with the masses and to outline his political ideas, and entrepreneurs such as Albert Goodwill Spalding, who used baseball to build a national community of consumers to exploit, understood innately. Some scholars outside of sociology—in theology, literature, philosophy, and the emerging disciplines of physical education and public health—had by 1929 already written extensively about the crucial role of sport in shaping national identity. Indeed, that basic idea had been the central attraction of Thomas Hughes's novel Tom Brown's School Days (1859) that in the English-speaking world stood as a literary rite of passage for a century of generations of boys.
Only an occasional social scientist had even bothered to play around the edges of the idea prior to 1929, most notably the delightfully disturbing Thorstein Veblen in his classic The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), but also the brilliant pragmatist William James, the dour laissez-faire fundamentalist William Graham Sumner, and the encyclopedic enthnographer Edward Stewart Culin. Professional sociologists came very late to sport-as-community-identity party, joining the sportswriters, journalists, politicians, and athletic boosters of all stripes who had been making such claims for more than a century. With the publication of Middletown in 1929, followed by Robert Lynd turning those parts of that project, which he supposedly wrote without wife Helen Lynd's aid, into his dissertation for a Columbia University doctorate in sociology in 1931, the idea that sport possessed the magic to conjure the mysterious
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Excerpted from Rooting For the Home Team by DANIEL A. NATHAN. Copyright © 2013 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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