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.
Golf, Part 2
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En provenance du cours de Duke University
Sports and Society
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Orin StarnProfessor
Cultural Anthropology
[MUSIC]
Let's explore some of the other issues that golf raises now.
And one of those issues is commodity fetishism.
Commodity fetishism is a term coined by Karl Marx.
And he uses it, Marx uses it.
To describe the almost magical quality that the goods that we go out and
buy in stores come to assume.
So when we see something on the shelf of a store,
we see a watch, or a t-shirt, or a piece of fruit,
we think that it has just somehow gotten there for us to buy.
We tend not to think about the labor and
the work that went into producing that thing.
If it was a tomato to planting it, and to growing it, to shipping it,
to putting it on display.
We tend to assume that almost magically these things are just there for
us to buy and enjoy.
So fetish means magical object, and commodity are goods,
so Marx is arguing that the things that we buy have this kind of magical
property of seeming just to have materialized for us, for
our availability, for our consuming pleasure.
Now the reality, what commodity fetishism always conceals
is all of the work that goes into producing this particular good.
And you can think about this around golf equipment.
Two of the major brands of gold equipment right now, and
we could talk about others, are Callaway and TaylorMade driver.
I use a TaylorMade driver and I will say drivers now are so much better than 40,
50 years ago I grew up in the age when you still used wood headed clubs for
drivers and it was much harder to play the game than it is with these super high
tech big drivers with heads the size of a VW bug.
So few people really stop to think about where these drivers come from.
You go to a big golf discount store or you push a button on the Internet and
the driver appears for you, and you go out and play and have fun with it.
But as I discovered a few years ago when I made a trip to Asia,
actually Callaway, TaylorMade and most of the big golf club manufacturers,
including all the ones based in the United States,
do almost all of their production outsourced to Asia, like many other goods.
So in Callaway and TaylorMade's cases,
you have companies in Taiwan that are providing the clubs.
But they often are doing extra outsourcing,
they have companies or factories in China or
sometimes in Cambodia or Vietnam to produce these clubs.
And I had no idea until I made this trip.
How much work goes into making these golf clubs?
You have engineers designing them, you have these Vulcan-like
iron smiths pouring the hot metal into forges and pulling it out.
And you have other workers filing down the metal heads, and
then they have to be disassembled and painted and checked and the shaft.
It's an extremely time consuming process.
I'm naively thought well there was just a robotic assembly line [SOUND] and
you got a driver.
No, it's a labor intensive process.
But golf clubs become, when they come to the U.S., A, or
when you buy them at the pro shop or wherever, a commodity fetish in the sense
that a magical object that seemed to have appeared to us and for
us, and with us not having any sense of just what it took to make them.
So commodity fetishism is something that one can think through that
very prosaic thing, the golf club.
Golf also helps to think about another concept,
the concept of so-called nature/culture.
This is a concept coined by the French science studies
Philosopher, social theorist Bruno Latour.
And Latour argues that increasingly in a high tech modern world
that we live in a universe of hybrids.
Where what's part of nature?
What's an organic thing?
And what's a human made technically produced object where
that border has become increasingly blurred and sometimes indistinguishable?
So an example might be the case of oncomouse.
Oncomouse or oncomice are mice that have been genetically engineered for
cancer testing.
Onco, oncology, cancer so oncomouse is a scientifically
manufactured product but oncomice are also living beings.
They're mice so they're both nature, and they're both nature and culture.
They're both artificial and organic.
All of the same time.
And one can think I think interesting ways about golf and
golf courses in particular as an example of nature culture.
Because golf courses as we all know are all about the grass.
And in particular, the grass that we tend to focus on is the grass of the putting
green where the hole is.
Now, what many people don't know is that a huge amount of science,
and agronomical research, and money, and
engineering goes into producing grass on golf courses to get it to look so
perfect,and so nice, and without any weeds and every blade of grass in place.
And putting greens, in particular, are a particular kind of agronomical,
biochemical engineering challenge.
Because every golfer ends up at each hole walking onto
the putting green because they have to get their ball in the hole.
And so the putting greens are walked on more than any part of the course.
And at the same time they have to be mowed very short so
that the ball will roll nice and fast like we expect, like we see on television.
We want our putting greens to roll fast and true.
But cutting grass stresses a plant and
they have the added stress of having all these feet pounding on them all day.
So it's taken tons of research
to be able to engineer grasses that can stand up to this cutting.
And to this traffic and not turn brown and decide I'm giving up, I'm gonna die.
So there are whole research sections of universities,
whole divisions in turf grass companies, that figure out
how to manufacture the seed and how to grow putting greens that will work.
And putting greens then are an example of nature culture because they're both
these engineered products of all kinds of experimentation and science and
yet still living green things.
So golf teaches us or tells us something about nature culture.
Then finally, I think golf raises the issue and returns us to the issue
of pleasure and what it is that we like to, why we like to play sports.
And as I've emphasized in the class.
Now that sports, why we like a particular sport is different depending on the sport.
Mountain climbing as a different kind of appeal than shuffle board.
And golf in particular has some,
I would say quite a range of pleasures that it satisfies.
There's certainly that Freudian eros, that sense of mastery that I talked about,
that you get a few times in a round where you hit a shot that ends up just going
exactly where you want it, this illusion of mastery over a complex universe.
But then golf also Is a sport that gets us outdoors.
And so many of us work indoors now, where most of us are not villagers or
world people anymore, it gets us outdoors.
We get to be in the sun and under the big, blue sky.
Golf also can give particular kinds of pleasures to particular kinds of people.
If you're a kind of techno geek who likes building stuff and
collecting all kinds of gadgets, golf is a great sport for you.
Because there's always these different clubs, and devices, and balls,
and measurements.
And in your garage you can set up, and some people I'm afraid do, these whole
workshops where they tinker and experiment in search of the perfect golf club.
Golf is a sport that's great for loners, if you like to be alone you can go out
late in the day and play with only your thoughts to trouble you.
But golf also can be a social sport where you play with your foursome,
your four hours outside chit chatting between shots.
Golf can also answer the pleasures to those.
Or can satisfy those who like to bet, who like gambling,
cuz there's all kinds of golf gambling games that you you can play as your
skins in different kinds of scrambles and
ways to bet money and have fun doing that if that's the thing that you like.
And then golf finally is something that
you don't have to be physically strong to play.
Golf is a sport that you can play regardless of your age or
body type, men and women, young people.
But it's a sport that the old can play, something that is not true of all sports.
So we see in golf, and I think this is part of the reason that it remains popular
even though it's certainly not soccer or basketball, is that it answers and
produces these different kinds of pleasures for different kinds of people.
And I wanna leave you with the thought that you know, we shouldn't just think
about- I'm telling you about golf and the specifics of golf but
any sport once you start to look at it's histories and the pleasures and
the social vectors that it connects to ends up telling a very complex story.
A story that goes way beyond just who won this tournament or
what the standings are or what player is performing well.
Each sport tells an interesting story about society and history.
I'll see you next time.
[MUSIC]
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