A myriad of organized sports and physical leisure activities took shape in the nineteenth century and spread quickly from the West to the Rest through imperial and mercantile circuits. Among them, the competitive team spectator sports of soccer, cricket, and baseball were perhaps the most consequential in reach and influence, adopted and adapted in what I have called elsewhere ‘uncanny mimicry’. The differences in the world histories of the three sports are as significant as their commonalities, and in this article I focus on some of the distinctive features of baseball's development in the USA and its move through the Caribbean and the western Pacific regions. Unlike soccer and cricket (and American football), baseball developed outside elite schools; it was fully commercialized and professionalized early on; it never had antagonisms or rivalries with amateur or school forms of the sport; and it never had very strong ideological associations with a ‘character’ ethic. On the other hand, it was quickly ‘nationalized’ as the American pastime, and in that image it was emulated and resisted in the locations in which it took root. The argument is extended through a case study of ‘samurai’ baseball in Japan and its uncanny mimicry.

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In the postwar decades, a cultural construction of Japan as a “New Middle Class” society has gained a broad orienting force in the society. New typifications of work, family, and society have provided frames of reference for the redefinition and reorganization of everyday routines. This paper illustrates how the people of one region have come to terms with such typifications in the midst of state programs for the rationalization of its agriculture and national media efforts to sentimentalize its regional culture. Rationalization and nostalgia are shown to reveal fundamental ambivalences in and about the lifeways of contemporary japan.

independent data for the construction and verification of theory, is in fact a very com plicated compound of local realities and the contingencies of metropolitan theory (5:360).A third front has recently been opened in the assault on the edifice of ethnography. Having deconstructed ethnographic form and historicized the ethnographic subject, some have now turned to regionalizing its conceptual claims. Their presumption is that all ethnography is regional, a local transposition of general disciplinary concerns. It must be read critically for the problems it highlights through the mutual adaptation of anthropological dis course and locally prominent features and issues: prestige economy in Melanesia, marriage rules in Australia, lineage in Africa, caste in South Asia. "Localizing strategies" is Fardon's felicitous phrase (81) for the complicated dialectic of region and problematic, which was illustrated so effectively in Abu-Lughod's review (2) of "zones of theory" in Arab world anthropology.Some of the work I consider in this essay may be so analyzed. I Yet I argue IThis review is limited to social-cultural anthropology (for archaeology, see 77, 109; for linguistic anthropology, see 244; for primatology, see 9, 97:244--58). I deal only with English language works. The disciplinary surveys in the periodic but misnamed Introductory Bibliogra phy for Japanese Studies provide helpful English-language reviews of anthropology in Japan (114,197, 261,262,288,289; see also 17,124, 183, and 157). Long (157) has surveyed family sociology. 395

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