[MUSIC] Hey there and welcome back. This time I wanna talk about the globalization of sports. Namely the way that sports links into global forces, histories and connections. And let's start with the fact that there is a huge variety of games all the way around the world. In Afghanistan for example, there's a game called buzkashi that's played on horseback with a sheep's stomach for a ball. In the United States, we have our own strange games. Hotdog eating contests have become a televised spectacle now on ESPN. I think the champ can eat something like more than 100 hotdogs in a couple of minutes. So we have games of all kinds all around the world and we have some games that once existed and that no longer do. People that I've studied called the Yahweh in California, were a native American tribe and they played, I brought a couple sticks here. They played a game called the stick game, we know this from the work of old anthropologists. And the stick game was played something like this. Each team would be facing each other and one team would have these sticks. They would start to exchange the sticks back and forth, can you see it? We have a brown stick and a yellow stick. Brown, yellow, brown, yellow. And some of the other players on the same team would be singing these songs. To hey, you're getting confused, keep your eye on the sticks. And they go back and forth and back and forth. Brown, brown, yellow, brown, yellow, brown. Where is the brown stick? And the other team would have to guess where the brown stick was and where the yellow stick was. So here we have the yellow stick, here we have the brown stick. If you guessed right, you win the Yahweh stick game. Now the Yahweh in California were wiped out by white bounty hunters and by disease. They're no longer a living people in California, unlike a lot of tribes that did survive in California to this day. Now the disappearance of the Yahweh stick game highlights a basic principle of the relationship between sports and power. Namely that if your society is wiped out, is destroyed, your games are like, they gonna die with you just as the Yahweh stick game did. And if your society is weak and marginal, the chances are that you're not gonna be exporting your games to other places. But conversely, inversely societies and cultures and nations that are powerful and imperial. Will often in fact be able to bring their games to other places around the world where they sometimes take root. Imperial power means the power often to bring your sport to a particular place. And so take the example, for example of Britain and cricket. Well, where is cricket played? Cricket is played, it's a very popular sport in India obviously, in Pakistan and Australia, in New Zealand. What do all those places have in common? They were all colonies of the British empire. The British brought cricket to those places. Or consider the example of baseball. Where is baseball played? United States, Cuba, Nicaragua, Japan, the Dominican Republic. What do all those countries have in common? Besides the United States? They were all conquered by the United States at one point or another. All of those Caribbean countries that I mention were occupied militarily at one time or another by the United States. As was Japan after World War 2. And the United States brings its sport, its then national sport of baseball to these places. So what we see, it's an interesting phenomenon. Is that the map of where sports are played in particular places today. Reflects the longer geopolitics, the longer history of imperialism, conquest and colonialism. And if a sport is popular in a particular place, it's often because, not always. But it's often because that place was once colonized by one of the great world powers who brought that sport to that particular place. Let me give you one other example of this phenomenon. Think about bullfighting. Bullfighting, we all know, Spain. There's actually a big debate now in Spain about bullfighting and whether it should be banned on animal rights grounds or not. There's also some bullfighting in France, but it's really associated with and most popular in Spain. But where else do you see bullfights? The places where you can go to see bull fights are Columbia, Mexico, Peru, maybe a couple of other countries in Latin America. These are all countries that were colonized by the Spanish. So again, what's popular now in terms of games and sports reflects these older histories of colonization and empire. But having another level of complexity and interest to this story. Is that, as games and sports are brought from one part of the world to another, they're often transformed in the process. And here I wanna introduce a key concept from anthropology, namely the concept of transculturation. Transculturation is a term for the way that cultural things are changed as they travel across the world. And let me give you a classic example. Pasta, the Italian food par excellence. Well, the way pasta got to be pasta and came to be such a big thing in Italy has to do with a much older history. Going back to the 12 and 1300s to Marco Polo's journey to China. Marco Polo eats and likes these things called noodles when he goes to China. And he likes them so much that he brings them back to Italy. Which hadn't really known about noodles and some of the other things that he brought back from China like fireworks. But once brought back from China, the Italians take up noodles, they like them, but they start to do all these funky new things. They make them into tortellini and ravioli and eau de quete. And they learn how to make and they create these great sauces like pesto and au lo bolognese. And all of these other things that we or at least I love to eat. So noodles are transculturated, they're transformed as they're brought from China to Italy. And this is true for any other form of cultural expression, think about language too. The British, when they colonized North America, bring British English. But if you go and travel in the United States now, American English doesn't sound very much like British English at all. All these new words have been invented, borrowing from Native American languages, from Spanish and other influences, a different accent. English is transculturated in its journey from the mother country, Britain, to the United States. Now this process of transculturation also happens with sports and I already gave you a couple of examples. One, is the rather obscure example of what's called Trobriand cricket. The Trobriand Islands are these islands in the South Sea, they're famous for us anthropologists. Cuz this well-known anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski in the early 20th century did all these books and studies about the Trobriand islanders. And the Trobriands were colonized by the British in the late 1800s. And the British, as was their want, brought cricket to the Trobriands. But what happened was the Trobrianders got really into cricket. But they turned it into something radically different from the village cricket you'd see on an English country green. For one thing, they played with war paint and ceremonial paint on. They played using war chants. They allowed any number of players onto the field and they linked it up to Trobriand magic and ceremony and dancing. So that Trobriand cricket is really cricket, but cricket of a completely different kind from the original cricket. So this is an example of transculturation, of how sports in the process of getting globalized. Turn into something different, in this case really with different rules, with a whole different way of playing it. Another example of transculturation brings us to the world's most popular sport, soccer or football as it's more properly called. Soccer is a British invention, like cricket, the 1800s. And the British are at the apogee of empire in the 1800s, it's their Victorian age. Their commerce and empire is dominant in many parts of the world. And the British brings soccer, their game, to Latin America and in particular to Brazil and Argentina in the late 1800s and early 1900s. And it becomes very popular in those two countries. But it becomes popular with a difference. Think about Brazil and Argentina, these are countries with fantastic dance traditions. The Samba Carnivale in Brazil, Tango and all its dangerous romance in Argentina. So these are peoples that know how to do incredibly graceful, skillful, creative, improvisational things in small spaces with their bodies. And these are also places, especially then, that are poor, where you don't have big, beautiful, green fields. But people, well kids have to play in a little bit of a park or in a parking lot or in an alley where there's just a little bit of room to play a game. And as a result of this, small spaces, people who know how to dance. You get what the famous Uruguayan author, journalist, Eduardo Galeano calls the tropicalization of soccer. And this is the transformation of soccer from its more traditional British style which was back then. All about long passes and running and trying to create goals with headers. Two, what the Brazilians call jogo bonito. Which is this creative, improvisational dance-like soccer with fancy cuts and little moments of spectacular beauty interspersed throughout the game. Famous exponents of jogo bonito in Brazil or the great Pele, probably the greatest athlete of all time. The classic golden age of Brazilian soccer with the great winger Garrincha for example. And as a sidelight here, it's fascinating and beautiful to me about soccer. That you don't have to be this gigantic, physical freak of a specimen to be the greatest soccer player in the world. Pele and Garrincha were talented athletes, but they were pretty short guys. They were only 5'8", 5'9", they used to smoke in the locker room at halftime. They weren't the hyper trained athletes of today. Think also about Diego, Armando Maradona, this small guy who got fat fast after he retired. Or Lionel Messi maybe the greatest player of the modern age. Who had to be given growth hormones because he was such a shrimp as a kid and is still if you saw him on the street. You'd never think that he was this incredibly gifted superstar athlete. So, soccer is interesting in the sense that you don't have to have the giant trained body. You just have to have been given that divine gift that comes from somewhere else. So getting back to my point, soccer is tropicalized as it's brought to Brazil and Argentina. It's transculturated and turned into something different. So just to sum up what I've been talking about today. We've talked about the way that sports is linked up to globalization. And how powerful countries often bring their sports to other places where they then take root. But then, how sports are also transformed or transculturated in the process of being brought to different parts of the world. I'll see you next time. [MUSIC]
