Being “The Best Ever”

Hopkinson, Leo

doi:10.4324/9780429423277-13

Cited by 3 publications

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“…During my research, the Accra boxing scene was composed predominantly of men, and the sport remains associated with particular forms of masculinity in Accra (Hopkinson, 2020, 2022). The coaches I knew, however, encouraged women's involvement in the sport, and the male boxers I knew always supported their female peers.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Punching is a sickness”

Hopkinson

2024

American Ethnologist

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Men who box professionally in Accra recognize that bouts are physically harmful and that they involve violently subordinating one another. Yet they also share a sense that bouts can be spaces of mutual becoming and affirmation. To navigate the tension between harm and affirmation, boxers and coaches couch their work between the ropes in idioms of care and mutual support. These idioms reflect their understanding that their lives and futures are mutually dependent and intertwined. Yet conflicting accounts of what constitutes appropriate care in the ring arise when boxing's violence is framed in relation to different imagined futures, and when mutual benefit is imagined to occur in the more or less distant future. In the boxing ring and beyond, divergent forms of temporal work animate the unsettled and ambiguous nature of care.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Punching is a sickness”

Hopkinson

2024

American Ethnologist

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“…Moreover, Iten is a place that complicates the dichotomy between the centre and the margins of a transnational commercialized sports industry (see also Crawley 2021; Hopkinson 2021). Modern athletics in the highlands of northwest Kenya has a history that dates back to colonial times 3.…”

Section: Figurementioning

confidence: 99%

‘A place for training, not for competition’: negotiations of competition and agency among long‐distance runners in Kenya

Kovač

2023

Royal Anthropological Inst

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Kenyan long‐distance runners have for decades famously dominated international athletic competitions. Most of the aspiring runners live and train in the highlands of northwest Kenya, in Elgeyo Marakwet County, where they have access to competitive peer groups of budding athletes and an elaborate infrastructure of camps, coaches, and managers. The most promising and successful ones travel abroad to take part in international races, only to quickly return and continue training in the ‘county of champions’. Meanwhile, Kenya is undergoing a rapid transformation, envisioned by the government's development plan, which promises to transform it into a ‘globally competitive and prosperous country’. On the surface, competition is a self‐explanatory notion that drives the transnational sports industry and the state's development plan. However, ethnography of the county's capital, Iten, and its community of athletes reveals tensions: Kenyans take up, negotiate, appropriate, and challenge meanings of competition offered by the state and the sports industry on ecological, gendered, and moral grounds. Ethnography of ideologies of competition in Iten, conceptualized as moral, aesthetic, and gendered projects, complicates accounts of competition as a tool for global neoliberal governance. It also provides an alternative to analyses of African subjects’ agency in global circulation of capital, people, and ideas, namely analyses subsumed under signs of marginality, dependence, and subjection.

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Only one Mayweather: a critique of hope from the hopeful

Hopkinson

2022

Royal Anthropological Inst

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Professional boxing offers hope of vast wealth and global mobility for aspiring athletes in Accra, hopes bolstered by the understanding that Ghanaians are particularly suited to boxing's attrition. However, when boxers become active in the global industry, they encounter power relations which locate them as cheap, subordinate labour, and stymie their championship hopes. As boxers build lives through the sport, they reflect critically on the role their hopes of 'making it big' play in perpetuating industry inequalities, recognizing what I call the ideological function of hope. Despite this, they remain committed to hopes of dramatic success. Their simultaneous optimism and cynicism complicates contemporary accounts of hope as a strategy of resilience in contexts of profound uncertainty. Building on ethnographic research with Accra boxers, I theorize hoping as a paradoxical experience of critique and optimism in equal measure, to account for the contradictory ways people act when orienting themselves towards better futures. Introduction: Aspirations forestalledAbraham 1 is a talented welterweight boxer who turned professional in 2013 at the age of 23, after representing Ghana at the World Amateur Championships. 2 If asked about his future in the sport, Abraham would explain that he planned to build up a winning record, fight abroad, win world titles, and become wealthy through boxing: a common constellation of aspirations for professional boxers in Accra. Abraham and I became close from 2014 to 2016 when we both trained at the Attoh Quarshie Boxing Gym in Accra's old centre, Ga Mashie; Abraham building his fledgeling career while I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with Accra boxers.At the time, Floyd Mayweather, a vastly wealthy and unbeaten African-American boxer, was Accra boxers' principal icon of a masculinity associated with material wealth, conspicuous generosity, and global mobility (Hopkinson 2020; cf. Esson 2013). Like others, Abraham shared images on social media of Mayweather posing beside cars, private jets, expensive clothing, jewellery, and piles of cash; wore clothing branded with Mayweather's 'TMT' ('The Money Team') logo; and extolled his slick defensive style

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Being “The Best Ever”

Cited by 3 publications

References 1 publication

“Punching is a sickness”

“Punching is a sickness”

‘A place for training, not for competition’: negotiations of competition and agency among long‐distance runners in Kenya

Only one Mayweather: a critique of hope from the hopeful

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