William W Kelly
Biographic Data
| ID | 81196 |
|---|---|
| NAME | William W Kelly |
| GIVEN NAMES | William W |
| FAMILY NAME | Kelly |
| SIGNATURE | KELLY W W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Yale University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 65 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 162 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 65 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1961 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Sport and the artifice of nature and technology
This essay turns to an anthropology of science and technology to propose that elite athletes, such as those who will compete in 2020 at the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games must be conceptualized as bio-technological entities. For well over a century, modern sports, its participants, spectators, organizers, and commentators, have tried strenuously but unsuccessfully to define and defend strict categorical differences among the athletes. These d…
Reconnecting to Home, Redefining Risks, and Imagining a Future
Regional Japan
No longer does Japan have agrarian communities where full-time farmers labor in pastoral tranquillity. There are only regions, the necessary reserves of metropolitan Japan. A look at one rural Japanese family reveals the vast changes that took place in these regions during the Showa period, as urban middle-class values and agricultural subsidies influenced farming areas
Bringing the Circus to Town
The Summer Olympic Games is the most watched sports mega-event in the world. It is also the costliest, the most politically precarious, and the most strangely constructed sports mega-event on the planet. At the 2020 Games in Tokyo, athletes and spectators alike will be focused on the elite bodies in motion, in agonistic contests and aesthetic displays of excellence and effort. Behind the scenes, however, is a less apparent but deeply powerful ins…
M alinowski, B ronisław (1884–1942)
Bronisław Kaspar Malinowski was a founding figure in twentieth‐century British social anthropology. Best known for his intensive research and prolific writings about the Trobriand Islands in Melanesia, his legacies are in defining a new role of the scholar‐fieldworker, in demonstrating rigorous standards of field record keeping, in interweaving the literary and the analytical in his exemplary ethnographic representations, and in reorienting the d…
Pan-Asian Sports and the Emergence of Modern Asia, 1913–1974, written by Stefan Huebner
Bodies in Motion
The bodies in motion in this special set of articles are those of athletes in stadiums, ballet dancers on stage, and chefs in restaurant kitchens. The articles are first concerned with how such bod
The ubiquitous baseball cap
The baseball cap completes the T-shirt, blue jeans, and sneakers as the common kit of late modern life, the recent decades when consumption, as acquisition, display, and deployment, has become preeminent in asserting self-identity and negotiating social placement. This essay traces the codification and commercialization of the baseball cap within that sport and its adoption by other sports and spectators. It argues that for fans the cap within th…
Allen Guttmann, Cross-Disciplinary Champion of an Interdisciplinary Field
With erudite scholarship, lively writing, and daring leaps across topics, eras, and disciplines, Allen Guttmann has earned a champion’s laurels in global sports studies. This essay is an appreciation of but one of his many accomplishments, his weaving together the multiple strands of Japanese sporting practices into a historical tapestry of indigenization and sportification. His coauthored book with Lee Thompson, Japanese Sports (2001), is an ori…
Harold W. Scheffler (1932-2015)
License to Play
Reviewed by: License to Play: The Ludic in Japanese Culture by Michal Daliot-Bul, and: Marathon Japan: Distance Racing and Civic Culture by Thomas R. H. Havens William W. Kelly (bio) License to Play: The Ludic in Japanese Culture. By Michal Daliot-Bul. University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2014. xii, 186 pages. $45.00, cloth. Marathon Japan: Distance Racing and Civic Culture. By Thomas R. H. Havens. University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2015. x…
The sportscape of contemporary Japan
Sport Fans and Fandoms
This chapter outlines the long-standing and highly developed sociology of sport fandom, which itself is a core field of sport sociology. The debates in sport sociology and sport history about the utility of sharply demarcating modern sport from those sport-like physical contests in eras before has generated similar debates about spectators and fans. Fans represent the fondest hopes and worst fears of a sport capitalist. Unfortunately, little atte…
Japan's Embrace of Soccer
Baseball and sumo were Japan's twentieth-century centre sports, but soccer is likely to replace them in the new century. This article outlines several reasons for Japan's embrace of the sport, focusing on how ethnicity and nationality are expressed and confirmed in the world of soccer. It proposes that the Japanese sports world has moved through three eras of ‘sports citizenship’ over the last century. The first four decades of the twentieth cent…
East Asian Olympics, Beijing 2008, and the globalisation of sport
The IOC bidding process has become a long, expensive, bureaucratically complex process among competing cities. However rather than tracing this ongoing narrative among what is, in 2009, four anointed candidate cities – Tokyo, Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, and Madrid, I emphasise here the embeddedness of the Tokyo 2016 bid in East Asian regional politics and in the more subtle if equally contentious jockeying for global city pre-eminence. There is a co…
The American game
Kelly, John D . The American game: capitalism, decolonization, world domination and baseball . 175 pp., illus . Chicago : Prickly Paradigm Press , 2006 . £6.50 (paper) In February and March 2009, the second World Baseball Classic (WBC) was played among sixteen qualifying national teams. The championship was won by Japan, which had also won the first WBC in 2007 by beating Cuba in the finals. This time, it defeated South Korea, which had ousted th…
Asia Pride, China Fear, Tokyo Anxiety
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) bidding process has become a long, expensive, bureaucratically complex process among rival cities. However rather than tracing the narrative of competition for the 2016 Summer Games among the four candidate cities – Tokyo, Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, and Madrid, I emphasize here the embeddedness of the Tokyo 2016 bid in East Asian regional politics and in the more subtle if equally contentious jockeying for …
Samurai Baseball
The conventional view of Japan's national pastime, baseball, is that it is a sport misshapen from an original exuberant American game by a Japanese national propensity to slavish loyalty and uncritical adherence to form. This substantially misrepresents the trajectory of baseball in Japan by substituting an illusory appeal to national character stereotypes for a serious historical sociology of sport. Abe and Mangan, among others, have already unc…
Fish Is Our Life by Peregrine Beckman Tsukiji
Asia Pride, China Fear, Tokyo Anxiety
The logo of Tokyo's bid for the 2016 Olympics is the musubi, a traditional Japanese decorative knot. The design uses the five Olympic colors as the strands that fold over to form a simple and colorful knot. Japanese have long used the musubi to tie up gifts on auspicious and formal occasions and to signify the ties that bind people together. Thus, a Bid Committee press release explains that the musubi logo "represents Tokyo 2016's mission to unit…
Playing Politics With the East Asian Olympics, 1964-2016
The aims of the Olympic Movement are to promote the development of those fine physical and moral qualities which are the basis of amateur sport and to bring together the athletes of the world in a great quadrennial festival of sports thereby creating international respect and goodwill and thus helping to construct a better and more peaceful world." Baron de Coubertin, 1894
Is Baseball a Global Sport? America's 'National Pastime' as Global Field and International Sport
I claim that Base Ball owes its prestige as our National Game to the fact that as no other form of sport it is the exponent of American Courage, Confidence, Combativeness; American Dash, Discipline, Determination; American Energy, Eagerness, Enthusiasm; American Pluck, Persistency, Performance; American Spirit, Sagacity, Success; American Vim, Vigor, Virility
Why Is Japanese Farming Culturally Central and Economically Marginal? Rice Revolutions and Farm Families in a Tohoku Region
A longer version of this essay appeared in a volume (Thompson and Traphagen 2006) on recent scholarship about Tohoku, Japan's archetypal rural region, and the puzzle that intrigued me as I wrote it was why mine was to be the only chapter on agriculture. There are chapters about young women working and old people dying, about lacquer ware and Deer Dances and enka, and about internationalization and administrative amalgamation. But where were the f…
Doing Fieldwork in Japan (review)
Reviewed by: Doing Fieldwork in Japan William W. Kelly (bio) Doing Fieldwork in Japan. Edited by Theodore C. Bestor, Patricia G. Steinhoff, and Victoria Lyon Bestor. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2004. ix, 414 pages. $55.00, cloth; $22.95, paper. Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight..…
Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan
The debate about Japan's 'uniqueness' is central to Japanese studies. This book aims to illuminate that debate from a comparative and theoretical perspective. It also tests theories of ethnicity and cultural nationalism through the use of Japan as a case study.Yoshino examines how ideas of national distinctiveness are `produced' and `consumed' in Japanese society through a study of intellectuals, teachers and businessmen. He finds that ideas of J…
Rationalization and Nostalgia
In the postwar decades, a cultural construction of Japan as a "New Middle Class" society has gained a broad orienting force in the society. New typifications of work, family, and society have provided frames of reference for the redefinition and reorganization of everyday routines. This paper illustrates how the people of one region have come to terms with such typifications in the midst of state programs for the rationalization of its agricultur…
Fanning the Flames
Concepts in the Anthropological Study of Irrigation
Directions in the Anthropology of Contemporary Japan
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
Samurai Baseball
The conventional view of Japan's national pastime, baseball, is that it is a sport misshapen from an original exuberant American game by a Japanese national propensity to slavish loyalty and uncritical adherence to form. This substantially misrepresents the trajectory of baseball in Japan by substituting an illusory appeal to national character stereotypes for a serious historical sociology of sport. Abe and Mangan, among others, have already unc…
Japanese No-Noh
Research Article| May 01 1990 Japanese No-Noh: The Crosstalk of Public Culture in a Rural Festivity William Kelly William Kelly Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1990) 2 (2): 65–81. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2-2-65 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation William Kelly; Japanese No-Noh: The Crosstalk of Public Culture in a Rural Festivity. Public Culture 1 May 1990; 2…
Kamikaze Biker
Is Baseball a Global Sport? America's 'National Pastime' as Global Field and International Sport
I claim that Base Ball owes its prestige as our National Game to the fact that as no other form of sport it is the exponent of American Courage, Confidence, Combativeness; American Dash, Discipline, Determination; American Energy, Eagerness, Enthusiasm; American Pluck, Persistency, Performance; American Spirit, Sagacity, Success; American Vim, Vigor, Virility
Handbook of Japanese Popular Culture
Japan's Embrace of Soccer
Baseball and sumo were Japan's twentieth-century centre sports, but soccer is likely to replace them in the new century. This article outlines several reasons for Japan's embrace of the sport, focusing on how ethnicity and nationality are expressed and confirmed in the world of soccer. It proposes that the Japanese sports world has moved through three eras of ‘sports citizenship’ over the last century. The first four decades of the twentieth cent…
East Asian Olympics, Beijing 2008, and the globalisation of sport
The IOC bidding process has become a long, expensive, bureaucratically complex process among competing cities. However rather than tracing this ongoing narrative among what is, in 2009, four anointed candidate cities – Tokyo, Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, and Madrid, I emphasise here the embeddedness of the Tokyo 2016 bid in East Asian regional politics and in the more subtle if equally contentious jockeying for global city pre-eminence. There is a co…
Asia Pride, China Fear, Tokyo Anxiety
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) bidding process has become a long, expensive, bureaucratically complex process among rival cities. However rather than tracing the narrative of competition for the 2016 Summer Games among the four candidate cities – Tokyo, Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, and Madrid, I emphasize here the embeddedness of the Tokyo 2016 bid in East Asian regional politics and in the more subtle if equally contentious jockeying for …
School to Work Transition in Japan
The ubiquitous baseball cap
The baseball cap completes the T-shirt, blue jeans, and sneakers as the common kit of late modern life, the recent decades when consumption, as acquisition, display, and deployment, has become preeminent in asserting self-identity and negotiating social placement. This essay traces the codification and commercialization of the baseball cap within that sport and its adoption by other sports and spectators. It argues that for fans the cap within th…
Japanology bashing
Images of Japanese Society. ROSS MOUER and YOSHIO SUGIMOTO.Nihongo: In Defense of Japanese. ROY ANDREW MILLER.The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness. PETER N. DALE
Sociology and Society of Japan
Social Protest and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century Japan
Ellen Glasgow and the Ironic Art of Fiction
Ellen Glasgow
Ellen Glasgow
Ellen Glasgow's American Dream
Three Modes of Modern Southern Fiction
Book Review| April 01 1967 Three Modes of Modern Southern Fiction: Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe by C. Hugh Holman Three Modes of Modern Southern Fiction: Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe. By Holman, C. Hugh. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1966. Pp. xiv, 95. $3.00. William W. Kelly William W. Kelly Michigan State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1967…
Ellen Glasgow's Development as a Novelist
Irrigation Management in Japan
allocation, and conflict resolution.I use the term 'irrigation organization' to mean the configuration of roles _by which these tasks are performed.'Irrigation network,' by contrast, refers to an articulated series of facilities and environmental modifications to control, deliver, use, and drain water.I make this distinction --and avoid reference to an 'irrigation systemt 1 ---because it is im perative that we differentiate between the natural pa…
Concepts in the Anthropological Study of Irrigation
Technology and Agricultural Development in Pre-War Japan
Rationalization and Nostalgia
In the postwar decades, a cultural construction of Japan as a "New Middle Class" society has gained a broad orienting force in the society. New typifications of work, family, and society have provided frames of reference for the redefinition and reorganization of everyday routines. This paper illustrates how the people of one region have come to terms with such typifications in the midst of state programs for the rationalization of its agricultur…
Deference and Defiance in Nineteenth-Century Japan
Social Protest and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century Japan
Deference and Defiance in Nineteenth-Century Japan
Japanology bashing
Images of Japanese Society. ROSS MOUER and YOSHIO SUGIMOTO.Nihongo: In Defense of Japanese. ROY ANDREW MILLER.The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness. PETER N. DALE
Scholarly Discourse and Peasant Discontent
Imitation and Innovation
Handbook of Japanese Popular Culture
Neighborhood Tokyo
Japanese No-Noh
Research Article| May 01 1990 Japanese No-Noh: The Crosstalk of Public Culture in a Rural Festivity William Kelly William Kelly Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1990) 2 (2): 65–81. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2-2-65 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation William Kelly; Japanese No-Noh: The Crosstalk of Public Culture in a Rural Festivity. Public Culture 1 May 1990; 2…
Kamikaze Biker
Social/Cultural Anthropology
Directions in the Anthropology of Contemporary Japan
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
Changing Japanese Suburbia
Biological Anthropology
Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives
History (42 works) · Sociology (32 works) · Political science (25 works) · Japanese History and Culture (24 works) · History (23 works) · Law (21 works) · Art (17 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Media studies (13 works) · Anthropology (11 works)