One big theme I noticed in this week’s reading was the importance of competitive games to the state, at least in the Chinese state. And I can think of other situations where the competitive nature of sports between countries was incredibly important to the countries involved. As someone who mostly understands European and U.S history…
Marrow of the Nation
by cjakob •
The use of games and/or sports as a nationalistic tool is an interesting topic. While it is hard to think of a sport that the United States uses to portray national prowess to other nations, excluding the Olympics of course, sports do fit nicely into nationalistic impulses. While all of the readings for this weeks in some…
Body Culture With China?
by cgill •
I’m having a hard time understanding “body culture”. It feels like there is a bombardment of different terms for different thing about a person’s body. Brownell uses it as meaning, “Body culture reflects the internalization and incorporation of culture. Body culture is embodied culture. (Brownell, pg.11)” It brings to question, what is culture? Everyone has…
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Go Nation
by Alexina •
This was a very interesting piece and one of my favorites so far. Moskowitz introduced many different aspects of Weigi in China rather than just going over the game and its history. Weiqi is a very important teaching utinsel for children, and its a highly placed game in Chinese society.Moskowitz moves from the importance of…
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Better to lose with flair than to win?
by Alan Kloosterhof •
One interesting aspect of Moskowitz’s Go Nation is his examination of the game’s rise among older working class men who usually play in parks. Honestly, it was refreshing to see players admitting that they played the game simply because it’s an interesting, challenging game (p. 135). It’s good and well to examine complex cultural characteristics…
The Culture Around the Game
by Oliver •
This weeks reading continued on the focus of Weiqi and Go, two similar games from China and Japan respectively. Whereas last week we covered the Chinese origin of Weiqi, this week the readings focused on the Japanese adoption of the game and how they grew and evolved not the game itself, but the culture surrounding…
Go Nation
by Maria •
Games and Identity
by Patrick Anderson •
Go Nation was a fairly enlightening, but, like with many things China, really depressing to read about. Perhaps the most striking thing to me about weigi‘s use in China was its integral place within the idea of masculinity. In that, weiqi, which reflected certain ideals of culture, was also a major cultural product of China, making it…