What ideas about values, social structure, and the community does it express?

Please don’t plagiarize
You basketball or American football as one of the events for the project.

For anthropologists, rituals offer some of the best places to learn about the cultures we study. Rituals bring people together to focus on symbols, movements, and practices that express important ideas about who they are as a group. In many cases, they provide a place for subgroups within a culture to express their own feelings about the social structure and their place in it. They also highlight some of the key values and ideas that members of a culture share. If you can understand what’s going on in a ritual, you’re well on your way to understanding the culture that holds it.

Americans don’t often think about sporting events as rituals. But from an anthropological point of view, they fit the definition very well – they are cultural events with a high degree of formal structure and a high degree of expressive content. And indeed, the passion with which many Americans regard sports reflects the importance of the symbolic messages that they express. Sports are seen as embodying ideas like competition, fairness, equal opportunity, personal responsibility, and commitment to the group. The games themselves dramatize the tensions among such values, as players balance the value of winning against the value of fair play, the value of personal expression against the value of group harmony, the value of respect for the rules against the value of individual empowerment. As the ritual moves through its stages, it expresses and juxtaposes a range of ideas about who we are and what matters to us.
In this exercise, you will spend some time observing such a ritual. What ideas about values, social structure, and the community does it express?

Observational setting
For this assignment, you should conduct an in-person observation of a live sporting event. The event may be from any sport you choose, at any level – a little league baseball game, a high school track meet, a college soccer game, a professional hockey game, a recreational softball game, a pickup basketball game, or a league bowling competition. It should, however, have the following characteristics:
It should be a competitive game between two separate teams, rather than a practice or an intrasquad scrimmage. The players involved should be seeking to win, rather than practicing skills.
The game should be one that’s played according to clearly understood rules that determine a winner and a loser. Informal physical activities like playing catch or jogging together would not be appropriate for this assignment.
The game should be the primary purpose for which the players are gathered together. An informal game to pass the time while waiting for some other event to start would not be appropriate for this assignment.
The players should be willing to be observed. If this is a public event like a Little League game or an intercollegiate match, you don’t need to ask permission to observe it. If it is something informal, however, like a pickup hockey game, you should let the players know that you are observing the event for a class, and will be writing a short paper based on it.

Conducting the observation
Your observation should focus on the structure and the process of the ritual
Structure: observe the place that the game takes place in, and how people are arranged within it.
What surface does the game take place on? Is it marked? If so, how, and what do the markings mean? Are there any special symbols or objects there that seem to have special meaning for the participants? How are the boundaries of the game space defined? Within that space, who are the participants, and what are they like? What do they have in common, and how do they differ from one another? Are they divided into different groups? If so, what are they, and what is their significance? What roles are there outside of the players – fans, referees, coaches, cheerleaders, and so on?
Process: What happens during the game?
What are the different stages of the event? Are there rituals that precede the actual play, like a coin flip or a song? How is time divided up within the event? How do people know what to do, and when? What are the key events that get people excited, or angry, or unhappy? Do different people take on importance at different times?
Pay attention, too, to how rules are manifested. How does someone know what the rules are, and when one has been broken? If someone breaks a rule, how is that addressed? Make sure to pay attention to implicit rules as well as explicit ones. Are there things that people are or aren’t supposed to do, whether or not it’s written down?

Reflection on the observation
After you conduct your observation, take some time to think about the meaning of this ritual. What values and ideas does it emphasize or celebrate? What kinds of behaviors does it encourage and discourage? What differences and similarities among people does it draw attention to? On a larger level, what might it be saying about the culture that practices it?
Writing the paper
After you’ve done your observation and thought about it, write a paper containing the following elements:
1. Description of the structure of the ritual (1-2 pages, plus a 1-page drawing)
Briefly describe the physical structure of the event, including the playing surface and setting, the participants and their locations, and the basic rules of the game. Include a full-page drawing of the layout of the space as seen from above, indicating the location of the different participants and the placement of any special symbols or objects.
2. Description of the process of the ritual (1-2 pages)
Briefly describe the stages of the event, from the start until the end. Be sure to include any opening or closing activities surrounding the actual play, as well as rest periods or ritual interruptions. If different groups do different activities for the different stages, indicate what those are. Make sure to explain how people know when the game is over and who has won. Describe any patterns you observe in how people are expected to behave during the event, especially differences in how they react to setbacks and rules violations.
3. Discussion of the meaning of the event (1-2 pages)
Discuss the meaning of this sporting event for the people who participate in it, and what it might tell you both about this particular group of people, and about the values of the larger culture to which they belong.
Your paper should not include any names or identifying information about the people you observe. If you need to use names for diagrams or descriptions, use false ones.
The total length of the paper should be 4-7 pages, including the drawing, which should be on a separate page by itself. Text should be double-spaced, with a 12-point font. Save it as a Word or PDF document, and upload it to Moodle, using the assignment link in the “Finishing Up” section.

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