Football and Cockfighting: Is Football the American Cockfight?

Abstract

This paper sets out to understand what accounts for the immense popularity of football and why it is the most watched and attended team sport in America. Using anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s method of thick description and his famous study of the Balinese cockfight as a model, the paper describes and analyzes American football as a cultural form than symbolizes and concretely represents significant elements of American culture. The paper first briefly describes Geertz’s work on the Balinese cockfight, and then examines football and the manner in which football says something about something else, i.e. American culture. The focus is on three characteristics of football as a cultural form which represents core elements of American culture: violence, masculinity, and organizational discipline. The paper describes the manner in which football embodies those characteristics and then analyzes how those characteristics symbolically externalize in dramatic play form what already exists in Americans’ everyday lives.