Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 The rules of baseball
- 2 Baseball in literature, baseball as literature
- 3 Babe Ruth, sabermetrics, and baseball’s politics of greatness
- 4 Not the major leagues: Japanese and Mexican Americans and the national pastime
- 5 Baseball and the color line: from the Negro Leagues to the major leagues
- 6 Baseball and war
- 7 Baseball and the American city
- 8 Baseball at the movies
- 9 The baseball fan
- 10 Baseball and material culture
- 11 Global baseball: Japan and East Asia
- 12 Global baseball: Latin America
- 13 Cheating in baseball
- 14 Baseball’s economic development
- 15 Baseball and mass media
- A guide to further reading
- Index
10 - Baseball and material culture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2011
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 The rules of baseball
- 2 Baseball in literature, baseball as literature
- 3 Babe Ruth, sabermetrics, and baseball’s politics of greatness
- 4 Not the major leagues: Japanese and Mexican Americans and the national pastime
- 5 Baseball and the color line: from the Negro Leagues to the major leagues
- 6 Baseball and war
- 7 Baseball and the American city
- 8 Baseball at the movies
- 9 The baseball fan
- 10 Baseball and material culture
- 11 Global baseball: Japan and East Asia
- 12 Global baseball: Latin America
- 13 Cheating in baseball
- 14 Baseball’s economic development
- 15 Baseball and mass media
- A guide to further reading
- Index
Summary
How things are made, used, and valued (economically, morally, aesthetically, and culturally) and what they signify concern material culturists. According to Jules D. Prown, material culturists tend to fall into one of two categories – hard or soft – depending on how they read or interpret objects: the “hard material culturist focuses on the reality of the object itself, its material, configuration, [and] articulation.” By contrast, “soft material culturist[s] [read] the artifact as part of a language through which culture speaks its mind.” That is, the “quest is not to gather information about the object itself and the activities and practices of the society that produced it, but rather to discover underlying cultural beliefs.” One might say that historians gravitate to the “hard,” and anthropologists to the “soft,” but both form part of a continuum.
This chapter, which is more “hard” than “soft,” and, given the scope of the subject, suggestive rather than definitive, enumerates the extraordinary range and diversity of baseball artifacts, as well as inventions and technologies that have influenced the game. Then, it briefly examines, in order to provide insight into the development of baseball and its relation to the surrounding culture, a number of baseball's most significant objects.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Baseball , pp. 138 - 154Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011