Research Spotlight: Mario Bick on the Meaning of Baseball
“As an anthropologist and a teacher, my most difficult problem has been to explain to myself and to my students how one could extend the concept of culture from the small-scale societies traditionally studied by anthropologists to our own society [...] Seeing myself reflected in the mirror of my immigrant parents, in the experience of travel and field work, has made it difficult to give up a sense of cultural identity, and has led me to pursue my intuition that there is an American culture in some definable sense. My quest has led me to the subject of this paper, baseball. I will argue that baseball, not as a ritual, not as a social structure, not as a set of multivocalic symbols, but as a system of shared knowledge and experience, may provide a key to the thorny problem of cultural identity and continuity in a complex nation state.
What I am suggesting is not a definition of, or delineation of American culture or culture as a concept. Though I may occasionally lapse into the murkiness of national character, I do so inadvertently. [....] I see the ability of members of a society to communicate through a common idiom and shared system of experience and related knowledge as central to the issue of identity”
Page 37 in Bick, Mario (1978). "Double Play: Notes on American Baseball." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 318(1): 37-49.
Post Date: 08-15-1994
What I am suggesting is not a definition of, or delineation of American culture or culture as a concept. Though I may occasionally lapse into the murkiness of national character, I do so inadvertently. [....] I see the ability of members of a society to communicate through a common idiom and shared system of experience and related knowledge as central to the issue of identity”
Page 37 in Bick, Mario (1978). "Double Play: Notes on American Baseball." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 318(1): 37-49.
Post Date: 08-15-1994