Pigskins for the Ancestors

Bolivian medical anthropologist Isadore Nabi recently visited Minnesota. With his permission we reproduce an excerpt of a draft report he is preparing.

Despite constructing sprawling monasteries dedicated to positivist empiricism, imperatives of magical thinking are strictly enforced here even in what are ostensibly the most leisurely of cultural practices.

Take the popular sport of American football, an anomalous mix of tableau vivant–wherein players pose together in different combinations looking up at a scoreboard while pulling on their uncomfortable costumes–and an explosive brutality that, in the course of carrying a pig bladder toward an opponent’s distal zone, leaves even the strongest participants bloodied, broken-boned, concussed, and, repeated studies show, brain damaged. Dementia is a lucrative trade here.