Cricket, Culture and Identity: an Ethnographic Analysis of the Significance of Sport within Black Communities

Abstract

As a number of commentators have noted (for example see Hargreaves, 1986; Williams, 1994) little is known about the social significance and meanings associated with sport within black communities in Britain, and sport’s role in the construction of black identities. The critical study of aspects of sport and ‘race’ has been neglected as the subject-matter has fallen between a number of disciplines; the sociology of sport has yet to develop a critical theorization of ‘race’; mainstream sociology, and even cultural studies, have tended to overlook sport as a cultural practice; and black cultural studies, whilst significantly advancing our understandings of many aspects of black popular culture, have also suffered from a form of cultural amnesia when it has come to the question of sport.1 Similarly, the recent ‘explosion’ (Hall, 1996a) of studies and research on aspects of cultural identity, and the related concerns with questions of hybridity, ‘difference’ and multiculturalism, within sociology and particularly within cultural studies, has tended to remain at a frustratingly theoretical and abstract level with too few grounded empirical studies. This chapter attempts, therefore, to redress some of these concerns by providing an account, based on ethnographic research, of a how a black men’s cricket club in the north of England is used as a symbolic marker in the construction of cultural identities.