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.
Outdoor Sports, Part 1
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Do curso por Duke University
Sports and Society
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Na lição
Outdoor Sports, Extreme Sports, and the Search for Adventure
Conheça os instrutores
Orin StarnProfessor
Cultural Anthropology
[MUSIC]
Hey there and welcome back.
Today's lecture is about outdoor sports, and
I thought I'd begin here outside of our office building here on the Duke
campus to give just a little demonstration of one outdoor sport, fishing.
I'm here in my dorky little fishing vest,
I'm actually not that great a fisherman myself, but what the heck.
And as many of you know, at least those of you who are fishermen know,
there's an archetypal distinction in fishing.
So on the one hand bait fishing and on the other hand fly fishing.
Now bait fishing is done with a rod like this, a spinning rod.
And here you put a worm or a grub or a grasshopper or
a little fish on the end of your hook.
This is actually a fake plastic one but you don't have to know that.
And you take your rod and you look out into the water and you throw it out.
And the weight, there's usually a lead weight at the end of the line,
leaves it out there, and then it's out there, and you just sit.
Maybe have a beer and talk to your kids and hang out, fall asleep, but
then you get the fish and
you reel it in, and that's the excitement that fishermen live for.
But bait fishing, this is bait fishing, is quite different from fly fishing.
Here you can see the fly fishing rod is much longer than the bait fishing rod.
And what you do in fly fishing is you pick a little fake artificial fly or
nymph and you tie it to the end of your line.
And in fly fishing there's no weight to help you get the fly out there.
You have to use this whip-like technique with your casting, something like this.
And you throw it out there, and you wait to see if you get a fish, the line drifts,
and if you don't get anything you throw again, and then you get one.
Fishing can be very exciting, although actually most of it
involves a lot of waiting and frustration and not catching fish.
But enough of me outside giving my little fishing demonstration here.
Let's go back upstairs to my office and do this lecture about outdoor sports.
We've talked some already in the class about how our choices in fitness and
sports activities say something about us and our social status.
Remember what the great Roger Callois said, tell me what you play and
I'll tell you who you are.
And in fact, what kind of fishing you like says something about you.
Bait fishing tends to be more a plebeian, ordinary Joe activity.
Something you do at a muddy reservoir off the ocean pier, maybe with your kids.
By contrast, fly fishing is a more specialized endeavor.
And it can get really upper crust expensive with $1,000 rods,
fancy trips to Wyoming and Alaska.
A certain feeling of superiority to bait and other more common forms of fishing.
Now what I want to explore in this lecture is the general topic of outdoor sports,
like fishing, hiking, backpacking, kayaking, and mountain climbing.
Historically outdoor sports really only first began to get popular in
the late 1800s.
With growing urbanization and industrialization,
people wanted more to get outdoors, and you also had the 19th century romantic
movement in the arts which celebrated nature as this mystical, wonderful place.
By the early 1900s you see a big growth in outdoor activities like
hiking and archery.
And now outdoor sports have become a really big thing,
raising all kinds of interesting issues.
And a first issue that I'd like to raise is the way that outdoor sports
are always only a partial escape into nature.
The reality is that in our world today there is no
pure and uncontaminated nature.
There is no place anywhere on the planet that hasn't been effected even if
only in small ways by human activity, by technology,
by our population growth, by all the rest.
So you'll sometimes hear stories about of sailors way out on the ocean who
come across clumps of plastic bags or
other garbage that have drifted somewhere that were produced by human beings.
Or if you go to climb Mount Everest now, there too you'll find trash and
cans and all this stuff that were left behind by climbers, so
you go to the top of the world, or you go far out into the ocean and
you come back into seeing face to face with the evidence of human activity.
So there is no more nature in the pure sense of the word,
there are only degrees of the natural at now.
And this is true when you think about outdoor sports.
So with golf you're going outside to play golf, breathe the air,
get the sunshine, enjoy yourself.
And it's a natural environment in the sense that the grass is a living thing
that's photosynthesizing and the rest, but at the same time, this golf course,
this turf grass is artificially engineered as we've talked about.
It's the agronomous and turf grass specialists and the seed companies and
the fertilizer companies and the herbicide companies.
So we're escaping outdoors into nature, but it's a partial escape.
It's an escape into what Bruno Latour, the French philosopher called nature culture,
the concept that we also introduced earlier.
Or think also about fishing.
When we go out and fish and catch a fish, excitement, excitement, what we're often,
not always, but often catching is not a fish that grew up in that creek,
or river, or lake, but rather a so-called planted fish.
In other words, a fish that was raised in a fish hatchery
using a lot of technology and knowledge that scientists have developed.
And that then these fish are brought and released into these bodies of water so
that fisherman can catch them and have the pleasure of catching fish.
So that when we go out we're not encountering these pure fish.
We're encountering nature culture fish that are both the product of
artificial operations of human activity and
also natural living beings that feed on insects as fish do.
Think also, one more example from fishing, of the kinds of fish that we catch.
I often in the spring go fishing here in North Carolina and the rivers not so
far from here for fish called the white bass.
The white bass is actually a child of the laboratory.
It's a cross that scientists invented between striped bass and
largemouth bass that's particularly well adapted to these waters.
So my point is, and this first point that I wanna leave you with
about outdoor sports is that our escape is always a partial one.
The idea of an untouched nature,
an untouched outdoors, is a lovely fantasy, but it's a fantasy.
Some geologists now actually use the concept of the Anthropocene,
anthropo meaning human to describe our present day geological age.
The term Anthropocene is a way to suggest how every corner of the planet
has been changed by the activity of our rapidly growing human population.
Global warming, acid rain, oil spills, and all the rest.
Now, just because there's no absolutely untouched nature doesn't mean that
we shouldn't try to protect our parks and wilderness areas and so forth, we should.
But we do need to recognize that when we're rock climbing, or backpacking, or
doing any other outdoor activity, we never really
are getting out into a wholly pristine, absolutely untouched nature.
And I want us to explore a couple more issues around outdoor sports in the second
part of the lecture.
[MUSIC]
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