Word: trobriand
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...talking about the Democratic Primaries, but whether to mute the ads or the game during the Super Bowl), we might take a moment to ponder the ways in which football really is America?s game. With apologies to Bronislaw Malinowski - whose pioneering treatise on the Trobriand Islands off New Guinea led to studies of the ways in which the islanders appropriated cricket and turned it into a native ritual - let?s explore how we Americans took over the primitive sports of soccer and rugby and adapted them to our belief system...
...Americans have ?optimized? rugby according to our notions of progress, there are still things many team owners might like to import from Trobriand cricket. While in football, the home team wins most of the time, in the Trobriand Island sport the home team always wins. There is still consolation for the visitors though, since the home team throws a feast in their honor. Huge differences remain, however. While football, with its fighter plane flyovers and other militaristic trappings often seems to celebrate war, cricket was introduced to the Trobriands in 1903 to replace war. How primitive...
Vacations may be pointless. The Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia once found themselves with an embarrassment of leisure. Their yams came up so abundantly that they had no need to work for their food. To occupy their excesses of spare time, the islanders devised the Kula, a ceremonial maritime exchange of economically worthless objects- red shell necklaces and white shell bracelets. The Kula, in formal circuit around the islands, was the vacation and vocation of the people. They became their own quaintness, their own tourist trap. It is possible, in the end, that they even took American Express...
...gimmick is that anthropologists, after decades of following Margaret Mead to Samoa and Bronislaw Malinowski to the Trobriand Islands, have staked out new territory-the nonexotic cities and rural byways of the U.S. Indeed, scores of sessions at last month's American Anthropological Association's annual meeting in Mexico City were devoted to the problems and rewards of studying U.S. subcultures. These may range from Greek-Americans and company towns to female athletes and Appalachian snake cultists...
...Myra Breckinridge, whom no man will ever possess. Clad only in garter belt and one dress shield, I held off the entire elite of the Trobriand Islanders, a race who possess no words for "why" or "because." I am the New Woman whose astonishing history is a poignant amalgam of vulgar dreams and knife-sharp realities. Soon, by an extreme gesture, I shall cease altogether to be human and become legend like Jesus, Buddha, Cybele...