Duke University Press Log

Fernando, the Peruvian Neymar by Orin Starn

Our final World Cup guest post is by Orin Starn, author of The Passion of Tiger Woods and co-editor of The Peru Reader, as well as series editor for The Latin America Readers and The World Readers. He is Professor and Chair of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University.

I’ve  watched the World Cup from a shantytown in desert Peru.  

I’m here doing intensive ethnographic research—well, actually just hanging out—with my two-year old, Lucien. We’re living with a family I’ve known for almost thirty years. Back when I arrived in their village as a young anthropologist, the Córdovas lived in a mud farmhouse up in the Andes. They later followed the great Peruvian migrant trail, a million Joads, down to the big coastal cites. Their hot sandy slum is just a circle removed from hell, at least by regulation American standards. It’s a place of burning garbage piles and swirling dust storms where turkey buzzards, rats and scabrous dogs everywhere patrol for scraps. Life is still much better for the Córdovas. Now they live in a tin-rooved shanty with real matresses, a gas stove, running water, electricity, and internet pirated from a relative next door. There’s also a television that grabs the World Cup with only some good old-fashioned squiggly static.  I’ve found caring for a two-year old here to be sport in itself without the changing table, diaper wipes, and the Babies-R-Us rest, and an extreme one at that. But Lucien is a celebrity with his little blonde curls in a universe of black straight hair. And he gets passed around between houses and relatives in this world where people do not shut themselves off from each other as we so often do in the United States. 

Few here care all that much about the World Cup, contrary to the stereotype of a soccer-crazed subcontinent. Peru hasn’t made it to the World Cups for two decades. You see high shantytown skills in the fulbito, or mini-football,  played in the concrete schoolyard and sandy streets.  But poverty, league corruption, and bad facilities have kept the country from developing any real top-flight players since Teofilo Cubillas, the graceful Afro-Peruvian star who scored eight World Cup goals. Nor is Peru really much of a sports culture. Its genius lies in music, the arts, history, and, now food, with three Peruvian chefs ranked among the world’s top twenty. And then there’s also the gift and curse of Peru’s spectacular outsized geography of tropical jungles, Saharan deserts, and Himalayan peaks.

That doesn’t mean that soccer doesn’t matter. Consider the Neymar haircut of Fernando, a Córdova nephew:

 

                                                 

Fernando wanted to dye the floppy top blonde for the full Neymar effect.  “But my parents wouldn’t let me.”   He’s still only ten. He’d had the straight line cut of Daddy Yankee, the reggaeton superstar, the year before:

 

Now, Fernando says, four or five other boys in his fifth grade class have also gone Neymar. A  little Peruvian boy with the doo of a Nuyorican music idol and now the fallen Brazilian soccer superstar?  Hair has gone global like everything else.  

I ask Fernando why he likes Neymar. “I saw him in some games. He’s fatal, great – he always makes his team win.”   It’s television and the Internet, of course, that led Fernando to Neymar, the great enablers of global celebrity and sports circuits. “I found his pictures on Google. My Dad showed the barber on his phone.”

Hair, as the old school anthropologists liked to remind us, can stand for many things. Status: the Manchu queue and Sun King’s curly wigs. Rebellion: Cromwell’s roundheads, the Rasta’s dreadlocks, and the punk’s mohawk. Religion: the monk’s tonsure and Sikh’s uncut turbanned hair. And even, by its absence, the darkest human suffering,  as in the chemotherapy patient’s baldness or the concentration camp prisoner’s shaved head. Hair may be the most flexible and polysemous sign in the cabinet of body politics.

But for Fernando, hair is as much as anything about idol worship, the little boy’s eternal copycat desire to be like the mythical Olympians.  He was rooting for Brazil, but mostly for Neymar, though he didn’t seem too distraught about his hero’s injury. The day after, he came to show me this meme on his cousin’s laptop.  It had gone viral in Latin America:

 

The rhyme that makes the meme funny, at least to non-Brazilian fans, only works in Spanish—between ardilla, squirrel, and rodilla, knee. 

Zuñiga asks, “Neymar, did you see the squirrel?” 

“What squirrel?,” Neymar replies.

“The squirrel,” Zuñiga says, “that’s kicking you in the back.”

Fernando didn’t seem too stricken by Brazil’s black day against Germany. He got bored halfway, going out to ride his skateboard on a cracked chunk of sidewalk.

There’s little pan-Latin American solidarity in football fandom. National allegiances trump continental ones; the global south remains a term more for postcolonial academics than a felt sentiment here.  Brazilians have something the reputation of the old ugly Americans here, the arrogant tourists.  Argentina seems very far away, and it has treated its Peruvian immigrants poorly—maids and construction workers. There was a sprinkling of Brazil, Argentina, Germany, and even Dutch supporters among the Córdova clan, though no one was going to lose any sleep over the results:

 

One cousin, Cristina, did say she felt sorry for the Brazilians, a touch of human kindness.

Fernando’s sister, Made, 11, is a Messi fan, rooting for Argentina.  She was the secret weapon for her the sixth grade team at the Nuestra Señora de Lourdes school. Her coach would bring her in to play right wing when the team had to have a goal.  The other coaches complained that having a girl violated school rules, however, and Made didn’t like some of the boys shouting insults at her either. In Peru’s brand of soccer sexism, boys play soccer, and girls, if they play sports at all, play volleyball (and, it should be noted, the Peruvian women’s volleyball team took home the silver medal in the 1988 Olympics in a great underdog story of modern sports).  Made doesn’t play anymore, though with her gold-studded flatbill hat and cool funky look she’s not heading for Barbieland either.

 

I ask Fernando how long he’ll keep his Neymar cut. He’s not sure. Until, smiles his father Yonny, something new comes along from the  “fábrica de los suenos—the dream factory,” the shining online world of myth and fantasy by the gigabyte.

It seems to me enough worth recording the moment to snap one last picture of Fernando outside the house.

He holds his ball in his own little World Cup fold in time.

 

 

Super Marta and Our Own Crises by Marc Hertzman

Today's World Cup guest post is by Marc Hertzman, author of Making Samba. Hertzman is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Illinois.

When my high school soccer team played in the state finals our coach was Ann Cernicek.  Cernicek and her sister, Molly, had decorated college careers and helped push the wave that carried U.S. women’s soccer to global prominence.  Nonetheless, her presence on the sidelines of the boys’ championship was remarkable, all the more so because she was eight-months pregnant at the time. 

Coach Cernicek has been on my mind during the run-up to the World Cup, where Brazilian women will shape the competition—and be shaped by it—as never before.  People like to say that the political fortunes of Dilma Rousseff, the nation’s first female president, rest in the hands of the men’s team.  If they win the Cup, she’ll be re-elected.  If not, she stands no chance.
If the Seleção doesn’t win, some may also grumble that the roster didn’t include arguably the best soccer player ever. Marta Vieira da Silva (known simply as “Marta”) has won or finished second as FIFA’s women’s Player of the Year an amazing nine times. Like countless other extraordinary female athletes, Marta has drawn attention both for her otherworldly skills and things that have nothing to do with them, all while challenging widespread expectations about gender and sports.

During the Cup we can expect the kind of imagery and division of labor that seems to mark every big sport event.  Barely-clothed women will present awards (FIFA’s notoriously sexist president already drew criticism for the staging of the draw); at least one coach will ban “wives and girlfriends” from the team hotel; and the press will ogle female fans and print sensationalist accounts of prostitution and “sex in the tropics,” even while Brazil (like the U.S.) struggles to crack down on sex trafficking.

It’s still too early to tell what Dilma’s presidency will mean for women’s rights, writ large, but there’s little indication that even she can bring meaningful change to the world of big-money sports.  Marta and groups like GuerreirasProject have campaigned tirelessly for gender justice, funding, and respect for women’s soccer in Brazil, whose supremely talented female squad is perennially crippled by meager government support.  Whether or not sponsorship evolves in Brazil, Marta’s impact is undeniable, evident in her blog, which is full of inspiring messages not only from young women seeking guidance, sending good wishes, or recounting how Marta changed their lives, but also from boys and men who write for myriad reasons.  Marcio posted a message asking if he and his boyfriend, both homesick, could get together with her in Sweden, where she plays for a club team.  Kenedy, age 14, wanted advice about how to help his sisters launch successful careers.  José logged in just to state the obvious, leaving behind a short, straightforward message: “Best player in the world.”

As in Brazil, the future of women’s rights, gender justice, sports, and politics all hang in the balance here in the U.S.  Many in the press have already anointed Hillary as our first female president.  Meanwhile, the bloated, corrupt NCAA—a body that, like it or not, my fellow academics and I are impossibly entangled with—is simultaneously enmeshed in an overwhelming crisis of sexual violence on campus and challenged by the heady, complex prospects of “student-athlete” unionization, a project that holds tantalizing possibilities but also potentially disastrous results for women’s athletics.  As these stories play out, we will do well to think hard about our own relationship with spectacular sporting events abroad and close to home and to pay attention to Marta, Dilma, and less-known trailblazers like Cernicek, all of whom have more than a few lessons to teach us all.

Football in a Serious Country by John Gledhill

Today's World Cup guest post is by John Gledhill, co-editor (with Patience A. Schell) of New Approaches to Resistance in Brazil and Mexico. Gledhill is Max Gluckman Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. 

As the World Cup approached, British newspapers ran stories about facilities not being ready, the horrific possibility of being unable to tweet friends and family during matches because of deficiencies in Brazil’s communications infrastructure, strikes taking advantage of the moment in a Presidential election year, and most popular of all, shootouts between traffickers and police in Rio de Janeiro’s “pacified” favelas. Sporting pages warned England fans of the tropical miseries to be endured during their team’s first fixture in Manaus, and the challenges presented by Brazilian airports and public transport systems. But complementing this negative reporting was a more positive approach to protests about the Cup. That football embodies the pathologies of contemporary capitalism is hardly news to residents of Manchester, whose global sporting brand, Manchester United Plc, was taken over by the US-based Glazer family through a series of controversial loan-based share deals in 2005. Now a New York listed company incorporated in the Cayman Islands, United is currently eclipsed in the English Premier League by local rival Manchester City, 100% owned by the Sheikh of Abu Dhabi. Yet even the English could not fail to be impressed by the depth of the critiques of FIFA that emerged from Brazil’s longstanding experience of the sleazier side of the “beautiful game”.

 

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Opinion surveys now show that less than half the Brazilian population approve hosting the World Cup. We are not talking simply about an awakened generation of middle class kids but a country of continental scale denying its stereotyping and being “serious” about what kind of social future it wants and its role on the world stage. The legacies of authoritarianism and racism that haunt modern Brazil are daunting. Progress has been made on discrimination and poverty reduction. Increases in real wages and formal employment renewed social mobility. Yet in Brazil as elsewhere, wealth inequalities and the social self-segregation of the more fortunate present formidable challenges to constructing a more humane, less violent, society. The problems that have emerged in Rio’s favela pacification program show that not enough has changed since 2007, when state governor Sergio Cabral ordered the invasion and siege of the Alemão favela complex during the Pan American Games. Securitization unjustly defines favela residents as threats to the rest of society, and “proximity policing” proves difficult to implement because of deep rooted problems within the police corporations themselves. Budgets for the other side of “pacification”, investment in the social development of poor neighbourhoods that ironically preserve stronger patterns of collective sociability than the “asphalt” despite the violence, are inadequate because of spending on infrastructure for the Cup that has scant social utility and the social cost of forced relocations. Accumulation by dispossession remains the rule rather than the exception in neoliberal cities since reducing violence in poor neighbourhoods makes them apt for gentrification. Yet in triggering demands that the money be spent instead on improving public health, education and transport, this World Cup should not only convince foreigners that Brazilians understand that football, like carnival, is about profits for the few, but also put the country at the forefront of any doubts the world’s political classes may be beginning to have about the sustainability of that model. 

Seth Garfield Celebrates the 1994 World Cup with the Xavante Indians

Today's World Cup guest post is an excerpt from Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil by Seth Garfield. Garfield is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas, Austin. Garfield's latest book is In Search of the Amazon.

On the night of July 17, 1994, I joined hands with Xavante Indians in their village of Parabubure in central Brazil as they celebrated a festive occasion with song and dance. Ringed in a circle, the Indians stomped the earth at the center of the village in graceful rhythm, chanting sonorously in their Gê tongue. As men pounded their feet in one step and women in another, the gendered spheres of Xavante society were ritually enacted. The remoteness of Parabubure from Brazilian settlements shrouded the ceremony in eerie seclusion, the starlit Mato Grosso sky offering the only illumination. Had their forebears been resurrected for an instant and accompanied the performance, they might have thought that little had changed, that the Xavante remained undisputed masters of their territory, faithful preservers of ancestral custom.

But they would have been deceived.Whereas the Xavante once danced on land that extended ‘‘to where the earth touches the sky,’’ they now trod on the confines of a reservation, demarcated by the Brazilian government a decade and a half earlier. Decrepit buildings, the administrative skeletons of a defunct cattle agribusiness, marred the natural tapestry of sprawling shrub, the familiar backdrop for communal ritual. Worn-out clothing draped muscular bodies once bared publicly with neither reproach nor shame. Moreover, the Xavante were not honoring an ancient tradition nor performing a long-standing rite. They were commemorating Brazil’s victory in the World Cup.

Earlier in the day, the Xavante were not celebrating much at all. They were struggling, like other historical actors, to make the most of their circumstances. As their village lacked electricity, the Indians had hoped to view the final soccer match on the public television in the central plaza of
Campinápolis, the nearest town, which was a two-hour drive away. On the dirt road to town, the Indianswould pass a succession of cattle ranches whose fenced-off pasture land once served as hunting ground for wild pig, anteater, deer, and peccary.With shattered pride but determination, the progeny of a onetime warrior nation could take their rightful place in the Campinápolis square, brooking the racism and condescension of ranchers and townspeople.

Cirilo, the Xavante driver, planned to chauffeur many of the eighty or so members of his community in the truck that the Fundação Nacional dol ĺndio (National Indian Foundation, funai) had provided some time ago. He regularly transported fellow villagers to town to buy foodstuffs, clothes, and basic household goods, as well as to receive medical treatment and social security payments. But with each attempt by Cirilo to rev the engine, frustration mounted as the Indians sensed that the trip would
be canceled. 

The Xavante might have radioed funai regional headquarters to send a mechanic. Based on long experience, though, they knew that state assistance would not be forthcoming for days or even weeks. Besides, the radio was broken as well, informed Carlos, a Xavante who headed the funai post in the village and earned his pay as an agency employee. For the final match of the World Cup, a portable radiowould have to suffice, and we all huddled around to await the momentous showdown between Brazil and Italy. The nation’s triumph on the soccer field electrified the indigenous community. During that nighttime revelry, their cynicism (and that of other Brazilians) regarding state capacity and national potential appeared to dissipate.

Less than half a century earlier, the Xavante were as much in the dark as the countryside around them that night regarding soccer, trucks, radios, researchers, reservations, the Indian bureau, and nationalism. In short, they knew little about Brazil, whose victory they now cheered. Nor did they have very much interest, for that matter. Had my grandfather ventured off in his youth to a Xavante village to learn about the interplay between state policy and indigenous political culture, he might have witnessed a more ‘‘traditional’’ lifestyle. He also likely would not have lived to tell the tale.

From the second half of the nineteenth century to the mid–twentieth century, the Xavante defended an enormous stretch of territory in northeastern Mato Grosso against Indian and non-Indian alike. Male warriors bludgeoned interlopers to death, strewing their naked corpses as testaments to Xavante supremacy, xenophobia, and masculine prowess. A history of resistance to Portuguese and Brazilian expansionism and of sociopolitical autonomy fueled Xavante belligerence.

Copyright Duke University Press, 2001.

Brazilian Multiculturalism and the World Cup by Jeffrey Lesser

Today's World Cup post is by Jeffrey Lesser. Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History at Emory University, is the author of Negotiating National Identity, and A Discontented Diaspora and editor of Searching for Home Abroad.

The Brazilian nature of multiculturalism is particularly apparent during World Cup years.  This international soccer championship has more viewers than any other single sporting event and in 2006, sixty million people watched Brazil defeat Croatia in the opening week of the championship. More than ten times that number watched the final game in 2010. In Brazil numerous channels broadcast the national team games simultaneously. Yet another phenomenon also takes place in Brazil, a country which has received immigrants from Asia, the Middle East, the Americas and Africa from the late nineteenth until today.

Some Brazilian fans root for the teams of their ancestors while others take a nationalist position.  Ethnic restaurants are often filled with cheering fans, many who root against the team of the country whose food they are ostensibly eating. In São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul you might go to a cantina (a Brazilian version of a trattoria) to root against Italy. When the World Cup was held in Japan in 2002, some Japanese-Brazilians began wearing a t-shirt with an image of the rising sun and the phrase “I will never visit you.” A significant number of fans of the Rio de Janeiro futebol team Flamengo, however, took a different position.  Their allegiance was to the team’s greatest player, Zico, who in 2002 was coach of the Japanese national team.  As Japanese-Brazilians roared for Brazil, Flamengo’s die-hards screamed for Japan led by their beloved player.  

 

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World Cup for Whom? by Bryan McCann

We're excited to kick off our series of World Cup guest posts with this by Bryan McCann, author of Hard Times in the Marvelous City and Hello, Hello Brazil. McCann is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University. 

I have long been skeptical of FIFA and critical of the notion of using international mega-events to stoke local economies. In the final pages of my recent book, Hard Times in the Marvelous City, I argue that preparations for the World Cup and the 2016 Olympics threaten to undermine improvements in security and popular housing underway in Rio de Janeiro over the last decade. As a result, I have not been surprised by growing resentment of the World Cup within Brazil. Even I, however, have been surprised by how bad things have gotten—World Cup planning has been inept, heavy-handed and anti-popular.

Neither FIFA, nor local organizers, nor municipal government in host cities has made any serious attempt to incorporate local populations in World Cup planning or festivities. It has been clear from the start that the games are being put on for international tourists and the executive class. Ordinary local residents are welcome to watch on TV, or at best in front of large screens in open-air plazas, but will be cordoned off from any personal interaction with the games or the players. Locals are subject to jacked-up prices of food and services, waylaid by security guards and construction barriers and, if they happen to live in the path of a Cup-related infrastructural project, to eviction. Cup organizers seem to expect them to smile and dance anyway.  A rhetorical question on banners often seen at recent protests asks Copa Para Quem? (World Cup For Whom?) The answer is clear: not for ordinary Brazilians.

There have been several problems with World Cup preparations. First, obligatory photos of favela children playing soccer notwithstanding, Brazilians don’t love soccer the way they used to. As the country has grown more culturally pluralistic, other pastimes have risen to challenge the preeminence of futebol. In terms of international success, Brazilian volleyball has far outperformed soccer over the past twenty years. Soccer is now something Brazilians love to complain about more than they love to celebrate it.

Second, Brazil won its bid to host the World Cup during a period of economic growth and rising employment, but growth has stagnated while the cost of living has continued to rise. Cup-inflated real-estate prices in host cities only exacerbate that. Brazilians are angry about the billions being spent on the World Cup while other public needs go unmet. This makes them sympathetic towards those who are truly threatened by the Cup, like favela residents subject to eviction or harrassed by police (a phenomenon exponentially intensified in Rio by Olympic preparations).

Third, Brazilians love to party but hate being told what to do, and hate even more being played for fools. As one of my friends from the Pelourinho, the vibrant neighborhood at the heart of Salvador da Bahia memorably put it to me, “no Pelourinho, ninguêm é otário,”—in the Pelourinho, no one is a sucker. It is clear that FIFA has been playing Brazilians for suckers, expecting them to foot the bill for a party they are not invited to attend.

 

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Porto Alegre offers an example. The Beira Rio stadium, host to several Cup games, has been beautifully refurbished, but ticket prices are beyond the reach of most residents. The other effects of Cup preparations have been negative. The enlarged stadium juts into an adjacent roadway, cutting off the sidewalk in a small but clear example of the privileging of elite convenience over public interest. Weeks before the first game, the area surrounding the stadium is a barren, muddy wasteland, as municipal government and private investors feud over who is responsible for aborted landscaping. In the meantime, residents of a nearby vila (as favelas are known in Porto Alegre) were evicted to make way for a construction staging area. Promised transportation improvements have been delayed or, worse, left half-finished, choking traffic rather than facilitating movement.

And Porto Alegre is a relatively small city with a history of participatory government, a deep love for soccer, and clear transportation corridors between the airport, the city center and the stadium that would be easy to upgrade. If Cup preparations have been a flop here, imagine Manaus, a large city of oppressive heat, negligible soccer tradition and great environmental vulnerability.

Cup organizers took it for granted that citizens in this festive, hospitable country would inevitably catch the fever and celebrate colorfully. That may still happen—if the Brazilian team goes deep into the tournament and plays with joy and passion, Brazilians will fall for them—as will I—regardless of how we denounce FIFA now. But the joy and passion will have to be real and tangible to overcome the current skepticism. In the new Brazil, ninguêm é otário.

Celebrate the World Cup with Guest Blog Posts

Olé, Olé, Olé! It's almost time for the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil! To celebrate, we've asked some of our authors who specialize in Brazil to write guest posts for our blog.

We start off the series tomorrow with Bryan McCann's critique of the idea that the World Cup will bring economic prosperity to Brazil. The following week, on June 18, Jeffrey Lesser writes about multiculturalism and football in Brazil. On June 25 we present an excerpt from Seth Garfield's book Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil, in which he remembers watching the 1994 World Cup with a group of Xavante Indians.  On July 2, John Gledhill writes about how preparations for the World Cup have affected the poor. And finally, on July 9, Marc Hertzman writes about gender and the World Cup. We hope you'll check in each week to read these posts and get a deeper understanding of how the World CUp is affecting Brazil.

The Cultural Impact of the Olympics

Over the years, several Duke University Press journal articles have addressed the cultural impact of the Olympics. Take a break from watching the 2014 Winter Games to sample these articles.

Erica Rand, "Court and Sparkle: Kye Allums, Johnny Weir, and Raced Problems in Gender Authenticity," in "The Athletic Issue," a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, volume 19 and issue 4, 2013.

Read an excerpt from the article:

At a press conference he initiated to address the gender-test incident, Weir called the terms masculine and feminine "very old fashioned," adding, "There's a whole generation of people that aren't defined by their sex or their race or by who they like to sleep with." My own paradise would not involve throwing out masculinity and femininity or sex and race all together. They can serve as sources of pleasure, strength, community, and solidarity, inside and outside the sport, in ways that do not require policing them. If people of all genders could express, present, or perform in sport in whatever gendered ways they wanted to--which might or might not match up with the way they present themselves in other contexts--that would make for a more joyous sport. But Weir's distaste for having people define others by those terms gestures to effects of gender policing beyond fitting people into categories. As he states in Welcome to My World, being called "flamboyant" instead of "athlete" is another.

To read more from "Court and Sparkle," click here. 

 

Sally Anne Duncan, "Souls Grown Deep and the Cultural Politics of the Atlanta Olympics" in "Performance, Politics, and History," a special issue of Radical History Review, number 98, Spring 2007.

Read an excerpt from the article at the African American performance group Souls Grown Deep:

Unprecedented as it was, Souls Grown Deep was forced to the periphery of the Olympic stage. A vital opportunity was missed to give international visibility to the South’s unique community of African American self-taught artists. This essay examines the social and cultural processes that exalted a banal global art show while suppressing a landmark African American visual performance. This is a case study of the cultural politics of Atlanta, the vested interests of the fine art and folk art worlds, and, most of all, of the performative power of art exhibitions themselves. In Atlanta, the experiential knowledge embedded in the African American artists’ modes of creation and communication in Souls Grown Deep provided a potent social counterpoint to a falsely transcendent Olympic vision embodied in Rings.

To read more from "Souls Grown Deep," click here.

Amy Bass, "Objectivity Be Damned, or Why I Go to the Olympic Games: A Hands-On Lesson in Performative Nationalism," in "The Pleasure Principle: Sport for the Sake of Pleasure," a special issue of SAQ: South Atlantic Quarterly, volume 105 and issue 2, 2006.

Read an excerpt from the article:

My relationship with the Olympics continued after my dissertation was complete and I began my life as a professor at Plattsburgh State University. Within months of arriving in Plattsburgh, I audaciously asked if I could leave the following fall semester to go with NBC in a supervisor role to the Sydney Games. I was indoctrinated: I was part of a small group of highly specialized people who drop everything for several weeks during an Olympic year and gather together, working for whatever network is broadcasting the Games. It is a unique group, knowledgeable in multiple languages, geography, world politics, and specific random sports (from gymnastics to curling to judo, in which it is legal, by the way, to break your opponent's arm as a means to win). Plattsburgh graciously worked out a way for me to go, which included teaching an honors seminar--The Black Athlete--online from Sydney. I returned with more life-altering experiences: watching Marion Jones run, sitting in the bleachers as the United States beat Cuba for the baseball gold medal and listening to rumors that Castro was in the house, and again witnessing a spectacular Closing Ceremony. I reworked the dissertation after returning from Sydney, and by the time Salt Lake City rolled around I was in the final editing phases of my book, Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympic Games and the Making of the Black Athlete, more confident than ever of the viability of sports, especially the Olympics, as a fruitful site to examine how the world works, whether in terms of my own focus on exploring how ideas of race and nation are culturally manufactured, or the broader goals of determining where in the world politics exists.

To read more from "Objectivity Be Damned," click here.

Five Olympic Rings and One Blonde Halo, a Guest Post by Erica Rand

The Sochi Olympics get underway tonight. Erica Rand, author of Red Nails, Black Skates, loves figure skating but hates the way atheletes are expected to conform to race and gender norms in our Olympic narratives. She offers us this guest post.

On Sunday, January 11^th, I watched on the Jumbotron at the U.S. Figure Skating (USFS) championships as the organization’s president announced the selection of fourth-place Ashley Wagner over third-place Japanese American Mirai Nagasu to the 2014 U.S. Olympic team, making the “Ladies” contingent a contested trio of white blonds.  Ever since, I’ve been raging and sad about the sedimented and raced histories of privilege that contribute to the obfuscating image of the Olympics as an extravaganza of sports transcending politics.  I’ve forced the topic onto every polite or captive audience I could find— students, colleagues, friends, strangers on a bathroom line—complete with details can only be told long-windedly to people who don’t follow figure skating (i.e. virtually everyone I’ve mentioned): how USFS made unprecedented use of its selection policy to elevate someone who had competed badly there; how strict use of the policy might have instead booted silver medalist Polina Edmunds, an unexpected stand-out but new to the highest level of skating, or altered the men’s or pairs teams; how Wagner’s decisively lower score for a program leaden by her own account (and I saw it live!) seemed inflated besides; how even people defending the decision knew that “this never would have happened if Mirai hadn’t shown up without a coach,” suggesting insider knowledge of insider influence; and, finally, although I could go on and on (ask me for 1000 more words about that coaching situation), how USFS and NBC had an obvious predicament when Wagner blew it because they had already been promoting her as an Olympic contender—and, implicitly, as a contestant for an unofficial title that, as the cover of the latest TV Guide indicates, now has a new frontrunner in the Ladies gold medalist.  Atop one of the assembled photographs of promising (white) U.S. Olympic athletes, the caption reads “Gracie Gold: Will She be America’s Next Sweetheart?” 

For that title—sometimes known as “Darling of the Olympics” and lucrative for athletes, their sport, and the media alike—Wagner, Edmunds, and Gold have a key credential that Nagasu lacks:  the glorious glow of flowing blond hair that signals, if not always accurately, the highest echelons of whiteness and proper heterosexual femininity. That’s why the “darling” or “sweetheart” usually comes from figure skating, a sport where heterosexual-looking femininity wins medals as well as public affection.  (Stop here for a moment and ask yourself whether every single high-level female figure skater in history could possibly have been heterosexual. Ask yourself whether everyone skating as female, queer or straight, could possibly prefer to move and dress in ways that signal straight, especially when people read sexuality, badly, off gender.  Then ask yourself why all the murmuring and exposé about the figure skating “closet” is almost exclusively focused on harm to men.) At Vancouver in 2010, where NBC virtually ignored Nagasu until she came in an impressive fourth against formidable opponents and where her U.S. teammate Rachel Flatt had the pale skin but not the pizzazz, that role went to skier Lindsay Vonn.  Meanwhile, NBC upped its flowing-white-straight-girl-hair quotient through glamor shots of the female snowboarders that preceded the sight of them about to begin their half-pipe runs in baggy grunge-esque team uniforms and helmets.

I would hardly argue that USFS dumped Nagasu in order to get three shots at the Olympics’ big blond halo. Nor, clearly, does Nagasu’s situation remotely approach the Olympics’ biggest injustice.  As David Zirin well itemized in October on the 45^th anniversary of Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising theirs fists on the Olympic medal stands, we need an Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), like the one that they participated in, now as much as ever. “Host” nations displace urban poor people, compete on stolen indigenous land, harm the environment, and initiate or continue bigoted, violent, and repressive policies and practices.  The International Olympic Committee (IOC) still forces “sex-verification testing,” which, like Smith and Carlos, made its Olympic debut in 1968, on athletes in female-tagged events accused of not looking or competing female enough; tests based on bad science are thrown at racialized gender-norm policing and foul linkings of supreme athleticism with maleness.  The IOC also maintains backward criteria for the participation of transgender athletes (in a system always excluding athletes who can’t conform to gender binarism). It requires “sex-reassignment” surgeries unrelated to athletic performance and the so-called level playing field, which, of course, is largely mythical anyway when you factor in training advantages linked to money, influence, opportunity, connections, status, bias, and privilege that affect who can become a contender in the first place. I could go on and on about that, too.  But for now, I’ll stick with Mirai. 

Sports Books for the Olympics

In honor of the start of the 2012 Olympics tonight, we offer you a selection of our favorite sports books.

This subtly funny video, "What Cricket Looks Like to Americans," is going around today in honor of the Olympic's UK hosts. If Americans really want to understand cricket, both the game and its cultural context, they must read C.L.R. James's classic Beyond a Boundary, originally published in 1963. Writing in The Nation, Mark Naison called it, “a book of remarkable richness and force, which vastly expands our understanding of sports as an element of popular culture in the Western and colonial world.”

Many of the athletes competing in the games will be truly transnational citizens, playing on a team in one country, while trying for Olympic glory under the different flag of their birth. Sports like soccer, baseball, and golf have tremendous global appeal. Rachael Miyung Joo's book Transnational Sport: Gender, Media, and Global Korea looks in particular at Korean athletes and events and explores how global sport has helped shape what it means to be Korean.

The journal SAQ has published two special issues in which scholars take sports seriously. In Real Sports, scholars who are also fans write on boxing, baseball, sports radio, and father-son bonding. And in The Pleasure Principle, contributors explore the issue of sports as a form of pleasure, from the thrill of the World Cup to the hype of the Super Bowl, sport represents a singular source of social belonging and communal enjoyment—sometimes as intense as religious faith.

Finally, don't forget to read, or re-read, our previous post on anthropologist Katrina Karkazis's research on the controversial new form of sex testing of female athletes at the Olympics. Enjoy the games!