Trobriand Cricket

Watching Trobriand Cricket last week got me thinking about Appadurai and global cultural flows. In the film, British cricket has obviously been indigenized by the Trobrianders with new rules of play and colorful rituals, as Jerry Leach's commentary explicitly states.

But does this flow run in the other direction, specifically in the realm of sports? In North America, we have lacrosse, a Native-American game that has been adapted for general recreation. But lacrosse, though its supporters laud its rapid growth, still lacks the ubiquity of American sports like football, basketball, and baseball and, worldwide, the universal appeal of soccer. Its influence remains relatively limited. In the U.S., we also have professional sports teams with names and mascots loosely derived from indigenous peoples: the Cleveland Indians, the Atlanta Braves, the Washington Redskins, etc. But this seems completely different from Trobriand cricket or lacrosse. The potentially offensive nature of Cleveland's red-skinned caricature of a mascot aside, this brings us back to Harindranath's reminder about the problematic implications of the word "globalization": it masks the fundamentally unequal relations between developing countries and the West. Given these circumstances, the flow of media and culture does seem blatantly unequal. The indigenous influence on American sports comes in the form of commodified stereotypes: tomahawk chops and Redskins paraphernalia.