Denison: 'Toward an ethnography of soccer'

The Global Studies Seminar welcomes Veerendra Lele, associate professor of anthropology and sociology at Denison, presenting “Toward an ethnography of soccer.” In the summer of 2014, Lele conducted preliminary fieldwork in Denmark and Sweden, and taught a course, “The Anthropology of Soccer,” in Copenhagen, Denmark. As a regular part of the course, Lele and his students played soccer in public city parks, and he arranged for his students to play in a friendly match against and with a group of asylum seekers living in a town about an hour west of Copenhagen. The asylees were all men, mostly Kurdish, between the ages of 25 to 40. Lele arranged the match with the help of Claudio, a physician from Colombia who volunteered his time at a support center for asylum seekers in Copenhagen and whom Lele had met playing soccer in Norrebro, a neighborhood in Copenhagen that was home to many recent immigrants, including many from Western Asia. The match went well, and questions of identity were raised during it. A new question emerged: What can soccer, the actual playing of it, reveal, and what can it make possible? This talk will be an exploration of the ethnographic possibilities of soccer as a site for analyses of human identities. Denison University’s Global Studies Seminars are interdisciplinary intellectual forums to discuss and debate academic and policy issues of global importance.