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Postscript: History as anthropology

2006; Routledge; Volume: 23; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09523360600639295

1743-9035

Social and Cultural Dynamics

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes [1] As This Great Symbol shows, de Coubertin and his colleagues installed into the conceptions and practices of modern Olympism a Western liberal modernist ontology of identities – one person/one nationality/one humanity – eventually constituted and performatively conveyed in the games by three sets of master symbols: the athlete's body/the national emblems, flags and anthems/the Olympic emblem, flag, anthem and flame (see MacAloon, ‘Olympic Games and Theory of Spectacle’). This ontology and its derivative Olympic ideology was, as we have seen, contested from the very beginning, whether the issue was the symbolic value of team sports, Bohemia's status as a nation or Greece's humanistic appeals for its lost territories. Controversies throughout subsequent Olympic history arrange themselves neatly around and against this paradigm: rejections and attempted transformations of hypertrophic individualism by Western socialist ideologies or Asian national cultures of ‘holistic-hierarchical’ type; assertions that gender, ethnicity or race are primary identities that cannot or should not be excluded; claims that nationalism inevitably and dangerously trumps, for example in victory ceremonies or medal count tables; or difficulties distinguishing political and cultural differences from universal human rights violations requiring intervention. [2] I also took a decision that would confront increasing numbers of athletes in ensuing decades. In 1968, I was offered steroids by a trainer in the locker room of a university I was not attending. Without them, he told me, I wouldn't get to the next level. He was right. What is the doped athletic body fit to signify? Today, it is this question, together with the increasingly transnational character of athletic labour that is most shaking the Olympic system of performative identities. [3] Three years later, I would cut my teeth in ‘processual symbolic analysis’ with a paper (‘Ritual Process and Ritual Protest’) in Victor Turner's seminar showing exactly how Smith and Carlos symbolically ‘hot-wired’ the ritual to release the affective and conative energies that have made that performance both an American civil rights and an Olympic icon to this day. That paper has never been published, but my student Douglas Hartmann drew upon it in part to produce what is now the pre-eminent text on these events: his Golden Ghettos. [4] See MacAloon, ‘Cultural Performance, Culture Theory’. [5] Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’. A boundary between classical and postmodern ethnographic practice is drawn between two essay collections: Sanjek, Fieldnotes; Gupta and Ferguson, Anthropological Locations. Since George Marcus wishes strictly to associate the appearance of multi-sited ethnography with ‘postmodern’ theoretical developments, he ignores all earlier projects in a widely cited article (‘Ethnography In/Of the World System’). That work like mine eludes his discovery is perhaps understandable, but how, for example, Clifford Geertz's comparative studies of Islam or Victor and Edith Turner's pilgrimage studies fail to win consideration in any discussion of ‘multi-sited ethnography’ beats me. [6] Colleagues today felicitate me for this turn of events. Actually, I'm more often ambivalent. While benefiting from the spatial opening up of fieldwork – including a new legitimacy for ‘studying up’, in Laura Nader's phrase, that is, of doing ethnography of elites – many students have been unwilling to accept the temporal entailments of these new spatial freedoms, that is, to extend doctoral fieldwork beyond the conventional 18 months or so. Multi-site and multi-community projects generally require longer and more discontinuous periods of field study in order for the researcher to begin to get backstage to obtain really distinctive and useful data. Some justify ignoring this reality by blaming funding agencies for not increasing the financial and temporal extent of dissertation research grants. Others try to conceal the thinness of their ethnographic results with ever-denser blankets of fashionable theoretical discourse, further blurring the boundary between anthropology and sociology and (frequently anti-empirical) cultural studies in the humanities. Others, worst of all, overtly or covertly, over-rely on ‘media discourses’ for their data. Even those who understand and accept the temporal and financial consequences of the new ethnographic openness, who commit themselves to classical standards of fieldwork and whose anthropology of history will be professional historical work with primary sources face a serious challenge. Senior anthropologists who have done no other kind of ethnography in their lives (I am speaking of myself here) may not yet understand how to teach the practices effectively to anyone else. [7] In Eugene, I spent some time around the track with Jack Scott, codifier of the so-called radical wing of the athletes' rights movement (The Athletic Revolution). The Scotts were on their way to Oberlin to begin their short-lived and ill-starred attempt to create a progressive physical education and athletics programme, including the hiring of Tommie Smith to the first of his coaching jobs. See Elcombe, ‘Reformist America: “The Oberlin Experiment”’. Jack Scott was constitutionally unfit for the task, as his subsequent tragic-comic adventures with Patti Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army were to make plain. But in the terms of a forthcoming IJHS volume (‘Muscular Christianity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds’), he and his associates, indeed most of the general movement of progressive athletes in the period, can be see as trying to return muscular Christianity to its earliest socialist forms, as represented historically by Thomas Hughes, F.D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley, and away from the militaristic, hyper-masculinist, heteronormative and neo-imperialist version that dominated the cold war and especially the Vietnam era. [8] I noted this lesson carefully, and IOC staff have remained among my most valuable informants throughout my subsequent research career. This would not have been the case had I not carefully cultivated my independence from any Olympic sports organizations and most especially from the United States Olympic Committee. National identities are so representationally strong in Olympic circles that I was continuously inspected on this point. The USOC, save in all matters but money, has been nearly anathema in Eurocentric Olympic centres across the entire period of my career. Rare exceptions such as Barron Pittenger and George Miller notwithstanding, successive USOC leaderships have been seen abroad as under-educated, monolingual, chauvinistic, imperialistic, unrepresentatively right-wing, uninterested in Olympism, hypocritical on doping and with no agenda (once the cold war was over) other than a bigger cut of the pie. It was sometimes inconvenient but never personally difficult to hold myself aloof from my own country's National Olympic Committee. In time, this was widely enough known and I'd become familiar enough as a researcher around the Olympic world for IOC officials to comfortably have me present as they appeared deferential to USOC leaders and then chuckled behind their hands as the Americans left the room. Indeed, it was probably I who taught senior officials in the Samaranch years to think of the IOC's relationship with the USOC as ‘neo-colonial.’ During the Salt Lake City bribery scandals, the USOC under William Hybl – in his day job president of the right-wing Republican El Pomar Foundation of Colorado Springs, home both to the USOC and prominent evangelical political groups – exacted a measure of revenge by conspiring backstage with members of the US Congress to deflect investigative attentions away from the USOC and onto the IOC, and particularly its president. My appointment to the executive committee of the IOC 2000 Reform Commission caused particular apoplexy in Colorado Springs, as Samaranch may well have intended. Today, after its own series of scandals and reforms, there is renewed hope for the USOC under Peter Ueberroth's leadership. Ueberroth came into Olympic affairs through an OCOG (Los Angeles 1984), and it is an important point in the sociology of Olympic organizations that OCOGs are in principle regarded by the IOC centre as an extension of itself, as ‘franchisees’ in the marketing parlance. In the course of studying them, I began over the years to provide educational, advisory, and diplomatic services to OCOGs, and these activities have not been considered problematic by my informants at the centre. On condition – so I have always believed and so I insist today for researchers starting in on this kind of work – that no money beyond travel expenses ever changes hands. I do not pretend it has not been hard to stick with this principle, particularly in recent years when so much money flows through Olympic sport and when Olympic Games candidature and organizing committees waste so many funds on so-called ‘Olympic experts’. But I have found it to be absolutely essential to my credibility both as a scholar and as an advocate for the Olympic movement as against the Olympic sports/media industry. Freely providing knowledge and advice to interested and responsible parties has been my way of answering the anthropologist's concern with ‘giving back to the field’, and travel expenses to meetings and events, together with my own university's generosity, have proved sufficient to keep me in that field without spending much time on grant proposals. This way of working has also enabled me to get a number of young Olympic scholars backstage much faster than it took me. For more detailed reflections on what I call ‘the spiral of access and service’ and the real moral quandaries so entailed, see MacAloon, ‘Humanism as Political Necessity?’ [9] Through the 1990s, the Research Council had the task of bringing the Olympic Museum and Studies Centre staff into sustained contact with high-level university researchers in the human sciences, of managing a small grants programme to allow doctoral students easier access to the Olympic archives, of advising and supporting museum professionals on various publication and documentation projects and of coordinating relations with university-based Olympic studies centres in Germany, Korea, Spain, Canada and Australia. Miquel de Moragas, who inaugurated one such centre, also brought into being with the IOC an International Chair of Olympic Studies at the Autonomous University of Barcelona as well as an important series of seminars bringing academics and Olympic administrators together at the museum. As I write, the administration of IOC President Jacques Rogge has eliminated or is in the process of eliminating all of these bodies and programmes. The Rogge regime has taken the Olympic Studies Centre away from the museum and placed it under the IOC public relations department, thus causing the departure of some of the IOCs most accomplished archivists and documentarians. Today's IOC leadership does not regard scholarly research on the Olympic movement, at least not independent scholarship, as contributing anything to its ‘core business’. As destructive as these developments are, at least they have not returned the IOC to conditions in the 1960s and 1970s. [10] Cohn, An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays. Raymond Fogelson, James Fernandez, John and Jean Comaroff and Marshall Sahlins were other influential figures, both in the creation of this Chicago anthropology of history and, over the years, on my own practice of it. [11] See MacAloon, General Education in the Social Sciences. [12] And which delusion still today appears as gospel in writers about de Coubertin and Olympism, including some promoted by the IOC, who never bother to check the facts for themselves or to read the scholarly literature. Indeed, it is a reliable diagnostic of general incompetence for any writer to follow de Coubertin in suggesting that Thomas Arnold brought educational sport to the public schools. [13] Thomas Hughes died in Brighton as the 1896 Athens Olympics were getting under way. [14] De Coubertin did not simply and consciously suppress Thomas Hughes, and his displacement figure of Arnold is a complex imago not an alibi (and rather French, too, in transforming the bottom-up muscular Christianity of Hughes's boys into the top-down genius of Arnold). Therefore, in saying these things, I could not be farther from the cartoon portrait of De Coubertin offered by David Young (‘The Origins of the Modern Olympics’ and The Modern Olympics), who presents him as a devious, intentional, jealous, even egomaniacal suppressor of the contributions of anyone else to the Olympic revival. It could simply be said that I entertain the presence of complex non-conscious factors and the constitutive agency of symbolic forms in composing a person's life and career, while Young does not. We might leave it at that, but for the fact that Young extends his tendentious picture of de Coubertin to everyone who has written about him, creating generalized, categorical straw men such as ‘Coubertin biographers’ and ‘Olympic historians’ which Young then proceeds to beat with the stick of selective quotation. He cites incompetent writers and ignores scholarly ones on the points central to his polemic. Readers of this book can judge for themselves whether I always take de Coubertin at his word, fail to note where he has exaggerated or selectively re-imagined his role, believe he independently invented the whole Olympic idea in his head without any influence from all the other Olympic Games projects surrounding him and in particular whether I suppress W.P. Brookes and the Much Wenlock Games, as de Coubertin is said by Young to have done. (The reader is invited to consult, for example, ‘The Olympic Idea’, pp. 513–6 in this work, where, among other things I judge that Wenlock provided a dominant model for de Coubertin's Olympic ceremonies.) Young has subsequently moved on from Wenlock to defending Zappas and his Greek Games from de Coubertin's supposed predations and suppressions. Here, as befits a former classicist and given the years that have passed, Young does contribute new information that develops (without fundamentally altering) the Zappas story that I tell here. For a fuller, more contextualized, less polemical treatment, the reader is, however, better served by Georgiadis, Olympic Revival. Both writers unfortunately grasp at the few shreds of fantasy in the Wenlock and Zappas records that might suggest international aspirations, this in a vain attempt to get around the fact that de Coubertin's Olympics were thoroughly, that is ideologically and organizationally, international from the beginning. This was their difference, not just from Wenlock and Zappas but also from all the other local and infra-national ‘Olympics’ that have come to light. The real problem here is an old-fashioned cultural history seeking absolute, point source origins and priority placement on a unilineal time and narrative line. Though disguised in a crab-dance of ‘originality’ and ‘influences’, post-hoc, propter hoc is the fallacy to which all such writing is eventually doomed. Though superficially political – the English and Greek heritages must be protected from those continental Europeans! – this sort of historiography is really without ideas. Chroniclers most certainly serve a purpose, but it is rarely a critically interpretive one. For example, it is not accidental in my opinion that the fact-checkers of the International Society of Olympic Historians have never enjoyed greater IOC patronage than they do today at the very time when the IOC is reverting to an earlier anti-intellectual habitus. [15] Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage; Turner, The Ritual Process; MacAloon, ‘Religious Themes and Structures’. With only hockey as a distraction, Canadian sports scholars, unlike their United States counterparts, gave more of a focus to Olympic sport than to professional or college sport. In the context of Montreal, I met Fernand Landry and Bruce Kidd, who would become close colleagues and friends in subsequent years. At Landry's Olympic Scientific Congress, I received my strongest early exposure to the cold war reality that some people appearing internationally as ‘Olympic experts’ had other identities. As Commonwealth Games champion and 5,000 and 10,000 metres finalist in Tokyo, Bruce Kidd was my athletic hero as an adolescent. When I met him, he was already the leading athletes' rights activist in Canada and had advocated intensively for the Olympic arts festival and for educational programmes for athletes at the Montreal Games. Unlike other North American sports ‘radicals’ at the time (the case of Jack Scott was mentioned earlier), Kidd actually effected major progressive changes as long-time head of the Canadian Olympic Association's Educational Council and today as Dean of the School of Physical Education at the University of Toronto. I owe a very great deal to his inspiration, as I do to the late Fernand Landry's collaboration. [16] MacAloon, ‘Games’; Huizinga, Homo Ludens. [17] See MacAloon, ‘Theory of Spectacle’. [18] Hans Kung and Jurgen Moltmann contributed to his memorial volume, which contains a bibliography of his publications. Grigoris, Nicos Nissiotis. [19] MacAloon, ‘Humanism as Political Necessity’. [20] At that time, such a broad spectrum of comparative information was almost unavailable to university sociologists of sport anywhere in the world. My former student Laurence Chalip, who earned the University of Chicago's first Ph.D. in public policy in 1988 with a dissertation on the US Amateur and Olympic Sports Act, followed me to the IOA and used its sessions to develop his own more sophisticated comparative organizational and policy analyses: Chalip et al., National Sports Policies. [21] As developed by Fermor and elaborated anthropologically and historically by Herzfeld, ellenismos refers to an ideological assertion of direct continuity between the ancient and contemporary Greeks, while the rival ideology of romeiismos highlights the roles of Byzantium, Christianity and the Ottoman occupation in Greek history. The former dominates whenever it is a matter of currying favour with outsiders, notably the European powers: Fermor, Roumeli; Herzfeld, Ours Once More. Years later, I arranged for Prof. Herzfeld to lecture at the IOA. Even his presence had no discernible impact on the curriculum, so normative and normalized is the neo-Hellenism of the IOA. [22] Which is not to say that my contact with NOC officials at the IOA was not practically important for my ethnographic work. Over the years, invitations to lecture at national Olympic academies in Uruguay, Brazil, Japan, Canada and elsewhere made it possible for me to carry out additional preliminary studies of various national organizations of sport. My engagements with the Olympic Academy in Canada, then under Bruce Kidd's leadership, were particularly important in allowing me to recognize striking cultural and political differences from the neighbouring US, otherwise so close in so many ways. MacAloon, ‘Intercultural Education and Olympic Sport’; ‘Popular Cultures of Olympic Sport in Canada and the US’. [23] A few days before the public announcement of the American-led boycott of the Moscow games, I received a call from Martin Kaplan, an old friend from our Danforth Fellow days and then a top staffer in the US vice-president's office. ‘Don't think, John, just answer. If the US boycotts Moscow, how many countries will join us?’ I tried to hem and haw, but he was having none of it, so I spat out a number. ‘State and the intelligence community say it will be at least three times as many as that.’ Our government, I said, was internationally famous for knowing little about the Olympic movement. My number turned out to be low by a little bit; his number was wildly off the mark. In 1980, I did an ethnography of the Lake Placid winter games, but the project I had planned for Moscow – travelling with and studying the interpretations of a group of ordinary American track and field fans – fell through at the last minute because of the boycott. [24] MacAloon, ‘La Pitada Olímpica’. [25] I had by this time already become aware that Soviet and Eastern European delegates were wary of speaking with me at Olympia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a Russian ‘journalist’ I knew from the 1980s told me that Soviet security officials suspected me because I ‘didn't have a degree or an appointment in sports studies and the University of Chicago didn't even have a sports department’. (Absent a Russian translation, This Great Symbol had obviously proved inadequate to protect my reputation!) I tried to be careful with ordinary delegates from the state socialist countries, but with the Olympic champions, especially in 1984, this situation could lead to some humorous moments. One afternoon, I found myself chatting about athletics in the cafeteria line with the great gold-medallist sprinter and current IOC member Valery Borzov. He asked me where I was from and when I said Chicago, he snatched his tray and literally dashed down the line and out to his table. Fear of being observed speaking privately to me had, so I liked to jest thereafter, put Borzov back into sprinting. Ludmilla Bragina was not so easily cowed. One afternoon we met walking across campus and I told how much I admired her career and how I had seen her great run in Madison Square Garden. As we chatted, we passed the room of one of the Soviet security agents – a young fellow who affected the laid-back cosmopolitan style of the time, aviator glasses and low cut-off jeans – its door standing open as he shaved in the sunlight. We saw him, and Ludmilla didn't alter a beat; he saw us and became flummoxed, wiping at the shaving cream on his face and zipping up so precipitously that over our shoulders we heard a pained shriek. For the next several days, Ludmilla and I would catch one another's eye and share an inward smile across the lecture hall. [26] Ekaterina Didaskalou, who would become a key consultant and good friend during and after her flame-lighting and relay duties at the Seoul Olympic flame rituals in 1988. See MacAloon and Shin-pyo Kang, ‘Uri Nara’. [27] In his Republican National Convention Speech accepting re-nomination as US presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan used the Los Angeles Olympic flame relay as the chief metaphor for the Republican vision for the country. Given the outrage and near disaster it provoked in Greece, this was ironic…or perhaps not. [28] Those involved included Laurence and Pamela Chalip, Roberto Da Matta, Don Handelman and Leah Shomgar-Handelman, Bruce Kapferer and James Peacock. [29] The main principle is that if you only have published or broadcast texts, you have very little indeed that is particularly valuable for cultural analysis. It is necessary to know what got left on the editor's desk or the cutting-room floor. Only then can the right follow-up questions be asked. For example, in Los Angeles a production team from the famous American Public Television Macneil-Lehrer news programme followed our team around and produced a long broadcast segment on our activities. We had very carefully steered them to all the religious action, the proselytizing and the counter-proselytizing on the plaza surrounding the LA Coliseum. We put a range of ‘good television’ from the softest to the wildest and most confrontational into their cameras. Yet not a hint of this topic made the final programme. ‘Covering religion as news is one thing,’ the producer told me, ‘showing religious practice is quite another. The complaints we'd get and claims on equal time make it not worth it.’ This widespread taboo in mainstream American broadcast media, in combination with other evidence, helped me explain why American audiences, even public television audiences, have never seen any more than a snippet of the Olympic flame-lighting ceremony, despite the fact that ruins, priestesses and fire from heaven make for some pretty ‘good television’, as the broadcast practices of other nations clearly show. [30] I stress that it was the IOC at issue here, not OCOGs or NOCs who had been at more liberty on this point. [31] See MacAloon, ‘Anthropology at the Olympic Games’. [32] Nissiotis, ‘L'Actualité de Pierre de Coubertin’. [33] Ueberroth, Made in America.