Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Hanshin Tigers Lecture by William Kelly

Announcement from SSJ Forum - not necessarily visual anthropology related, but it is about the Hanshin Tigers...

Contemporary Japan Group at the Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo, will have the first meeting of 2011 on Thursday, January 27 at 6:30 PM.

Speaker: William W. Kelly (Professor of Anthropology and Sumitomo Professor of Japanese Studies at Yale University)

Title: The World of the Hanshin Tigers: An Anthropology of Contemporary Sport

Date/Time: January 27 (Thu), 2011 at 6:30-8:00 PM
Location: Room 549 5th floor, Akamon Sogo Kenkyuto, Institute of Social Science, Hongo Campus, University of Tokyo

Language: English
RSVP: NOT required
Admission fee: Free

Abstract: For the last three decades of the twentieth century, the Hanshin Tigers were the heart and soul of Kansai professional sports and emblematic of a sport that was so central to the development of transportation, media, and leisure in that region. To an anthropologist, the Hanshin Tigers represent an intriguing lifeworld centered on the production and presentation of what was arguably the most important sport in twentieth-century Japan. In this talk, I will first outline the five key elements of Hanshin Tigers sports world: the stadium, the team, the management, the fans, and the media. I will then introduce four themes embodied in this sports world: the uncanny mimicry of Bushido baseball; Japanese baseball as edu-tainment; Osaka’s second-city complex and Hanshin Tigers baseball as the nobility of failure; and the Hanshin Tigers baseball as workplace melodrama.

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