Sports play a giant role in contemporary society worldwide. But few of us pause to think about the larger questions of money, politics, race, sex, culture, and commercialization that surround sports everywhere. This course draws on the tools of anthropology, sociology, history, and other disciplines to give you new perspectives on the games we watch and play. It's the new and improved version of Professor Orin Starn's original "Sports and Society" for Coursera, which drew more than 40,000 students. We will focus on both popular sports like soccer (or “football,” as anyone outside America calls it), basketball, and baseball, and also lesser-known ones like mountain-climbing and fishing. You will never watch or think about sports in the same way again.
The Phenomenon of the Fan, Part 2
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From the course by Duke University
Sports and Society
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From the lesson
Why Do We Care So Much about Sports?
Meet the Instructors
Orin StarnProfessor
Cultural Anthropology
[MUSIC]
So why then has sports fandom, being a sports fan,
become such a big thing all around the world?
I want to give you three reasons, three things that I think are pleasures
associated with being a fan that help explain this phenomenon of fame.
And the first of those factors is what I would call the fact that
sports are uncertain.
Uncertainty.
Now, consider for example a Shakespeare play, or
a Beethoven symphony, or a Verdi opera like Othello.
Those are things that millions of people have enjoyed watching.
I like Shakespeare, I like Verdi, I like Beethoven.
But they are works of art.
They are creative things that we know the ending and plot to.
The Shakespeare play was written, it has a certain ending.
Romeo and Juliet both kill themselves.
In Othello there's a lot of death too.
The Beethoven score may be played in a different way on different
days by the conductor, but it still always has the [SOUND], or whatever,
I guess that's the Fifth Symphony.
So these are works of art that are beautiful, that have endured for
centuries, and yet that don't exactly have any uncertainty attached to them.
Part of the pleasure of sports, I think, lies in their uncertainty.
What we like about watching a game is that we're not exactly sure how it will unfold.
Who will be the star player that day?
If one weaker team pulls an upset or whatever.
It's always that sense of, this is a drama whose conclusion and
whose way of unfolding we don't yet know, is part of the attraction of sports.
It's part of why we watch.
Nobody wants to watch a game when they already know the score.
That's why we always want a game, when we have a game TiVo-ed or
whatever, why we make sure not to look at the Internet so
we don't know the score, because we want the uncertainty.
We want to learn who wins only in the process of watching the game.
So uncertainty, I would say, is a first pleasure that attaches to sports,
and helps to explain sports fandom.
A second reason I think for sports fandom, popularity of sports,
watching sports, has to do with the beauty of sports.
Sports played especially at the highest level, are beautiful.
In sports we see the human body put into positions and
made to do things that we didn't always imagine were possible.
Sports pushes the boundaries of human expression, of what it means to be human.
Sports has parallel with dance in this sense,
in the sense that dancers too, put their bodies into sequences
of positions that we didn't imagine were possible, or that we hadn't thought about.
And again force us to rethink our very understanding of the limits and
possibilities of what it means to be human.
Now the beauty of sports is something that I think we can turn to, of all people,
Emmanuel Kant, the great enlightenment 18th century German philosopher,
who wrote a lot about beauty, not about sports to my knowledge.
And who I think can help us to think even a little bit more deeply
about this question of beauty and the attraction of sports.
So Kant said yes, beauty is always in the eye of the beholder to a degree.
Somebody that you think is beautiful, I might not always think was so beautiful.
And standards of beauty change through the ages.
300 years ago, the western ideal of female beauty was a lot chunkier.
Think of Rubens and these statuesque nudes as against standards of female beauty now,
which tend to be more anorexic and skinny.
That's a female ideal from the fashion pages nowadays.
So beauty standards can change through time, it can change from person to person,
and beauty standards also change depending on the culture.
If you ever come with me to my Andean Village in Peru, the village where I work,
you'll see that villagers will say [FOREIGN] beautiful,
when they see a plate of roast guinea pig with corn.
Cuz guinea pig, they're pets in the United States and a lot of the west.
In Peru,
in the Andes, they're a traditional food that people love to eat on special days,
and I've acquired something of a taste for guinea pig myself.
But s beauty, a plate of guinea pig, will not look so
beautiful to somebody who's grown up in Peoria, Illinois, or
Durham, North Carolina, or as I did, Berkley, California,
where guinea pigs were pets and not something you would think about eating.
So for all of this, the way that beauty standards can change from place to place
and over time, Kant argued that there is something transcendent and
universal also about beauty standards.
There are certain things that most, if not all,
people will recognize as incarnating forms of beauty.
And I think that this is true of sports.
Now maybe you're a fan of England and hate Diego Maradona.
But his 1986 run in the World Cup to score that second goal, slaloming his
way through five or six British defenders to score the goal, was beautiful.
It would be hard to call it anything else.
Or if you think of Michael Phelps slicing through the water
in the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
That also was beauty.
And one of the things that Kant says about beauty,
that's also true of beauty in sports, is that beauty is disinterested.
It's disinterested.
And he used the example of the sunset.
So we see a sunset and the blood orange sun setting over the mountains.
And we say, oh that looks so beautiful.
And a painter paints a beautiful picture and we take pictures of it and so forth.
We think it's beautiful.
But the sun did not set on that particular day to please us,
to give us a beautiful thing to look at.
It did it because it was obeying the principles of the cosmos and of gravity
and of everything else, and it's the same way in sports with athletes.
So athletes you know, like the rest of us, want fame and glory and
to make money, sure that's all part of being a top athlete.
But in that moment, in the moment when you're shooting that three pointer, or
the moment you're trying to make that fancy pass in field hockey, or
the moment that Diego Maradona is weaving through those English
defenders to score that goal.
The athlete is not thinking about anything but performing that action.
They are disinterested.
They are not doing that action in the very moment to please anybody, to make money.
Those things may come later for fame.
They're doing it in this disinterested fashion.
And being disinterested, the disinterestedness of
something is what Kant talks about as essential to the qualities of beauty.
Now, I could go on about Kant,
he also makes a distinction between the beautiful and the sublime.
The sublime being the hyper-beautiful in Kant's terms,
things that stand out in some particularly remarkable way for their beauty.
And I would say there are moments of the sublime in sports, too.
I think when I was a teenager of Doctor J, Julius Irving,
gliding in for a dunk like nobody ever had before and nobody ever will since.
Those seemed like moments of the sublime in basketball.
So a second to sum up the second point, the second point,
an attraction of sports has to do with beauty.
So a third aspect of the pleasures of sports fandom, has to do with belonging.
And as many people have pointed out,
there are dimensions of modern life that are pretty isolating and alienating.
We're always with our noses in our devices, and we're working away in our
cubicles, and we sometimes feel separated from other people.
And we sometimes long for a sense of being part of something bigger than ourselves,
things that would link us to other people.
And sports fandom can do this.
Sharing an allegiance, rooting for the same team,
whether at the stadium or even at a bar or on Internet chatrooms or whatever,
can create that sense of belonging that we sometimes want.
And some people have compared sports to religion in this sense.
When you think about it, religion has its particular
articles of apparel that you're expected to wear to mark your particular faith.
If you're a Jew, you wear a yarmulke on the Sabbath, or to the temple.
If you're a Boston Red Sox fan, you wear that Red Sox cap or jersey, to Fenway.
So sports and religion have articles of clothing that believers wear.
Sports and religion also have particular rituals.
Songs, for example, that are sung.
If you go to an Anglican church on Sunday you'll be expected to intone those great,
old Protestant hymns.
And if you go to a Liverpool game, you'll be expected to stand and
sing, You'll Never Walk Alone, along with all the other Liverpool faithful.
And in sports and religion too, followers of a particular faith or
of a particular team also have a common body of knowledge.
So if your a Jew you should know something about the Torah, a Muslim,
something about the Quran, and so forth.
And if you're a follower of Brazil's World Cup team, you surely know something about
the history of the [FOREIGN], Brazil's disastrous defeat In the mid 20th century
World Cup, you know about Brazil's great victories and stars and Pele and.
Unfortunately, now you also know about the 2014 performance of the Brazilian team,
which created much consternation in Brazil.
So, sports creates this sense of belonging, a little bit like religion.
Maybe one wouldn't want to push that parallel too far.
And part of that sense of belonging is the sense of what the anthropologist,
Victor Turner called comunitas.
Turner argues that in certain moments in the life of a society,
people come together in certain kinds of actions that create this moment,
this window of common feeling.
So he used the example of a rock concert or going to a church, and what happens
in those moments of communitas is that social distinctions dissolve.
It doesn't really matter if you're a billionaire or
a middle class person or what the color of you skin is or whatever.
In those moments, there's this sense of common feeling, this horizontal feeling
of communitas, and that happens in the stadium too, or being a sports fan too.
If you're in Accra, Ghana when the Black Stars are playing and
you're watching it on outdoor TV,
doesn't really matter whether you're a housewife or a janitor or a businessman.
There's a sense of commonality as you're rooting the Black Stars on to victory.
Just to sum up now, we've looked in this lecture at the phenomenon of
the massification of sports, the way that sports fandom has turned into this
really out-sized part of global living, of global society.
And we've looked more specifically at some of the reasons,
some of the attractions that sports seem to have for
us, one of the reasons why sports fandom has become such a big deal.
And we've talked in particular about the pleasures of uncertainty
in watching a game.
We talked about the beauty in sports and
we talked about the way that sports can be a form of belonging.
I'll see you next time.
[MUSIC]
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