Be Curious, Not Judgmental

Clifford Geertz’s analysis of a remote cockfight in a small village in Bali in 1972 remains relevant to contemporary audiences of sports entertainment at multiple levels. Geertz encourages readers to peer over the shoulder of an anthropologist, to grasp significance in seemingly straightforward behaviours of gambling and merriment and to challenge Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarian concept of ‘deep play’, where he outlines a calculus of irrational (and immoral) wagers. The deeply personal stakes of gambling for reinforcing notions of community described by Geertz challenge Bentham, and also open opportunities for sports entertainment to tell stories about communities that adhere around focusing events. ‘Deep Play’ also disarms readers by providing a humanizing narrative of an awkward outsider, whose ‘beginner’s mind’ deciphers the culture of a community, drawn together around a single, amplifying sporting event. Fifty years later, Ted Lasso introduced Apple TV+ audiences to another outsider with rookie status who struggles to ‘make meaning from an assemblage of texts’. We will show how Geertz’s narrative formula still resonates with audiences and can be seen on multiple levels within the contemporary story of an American football coach brought in to restructure an ailing British soccer team, finding ‘both in over their heads’

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