Inventing Tradition: Cowboy Sports in a Postmodern Age
Sociology / VDM Publishing, 2008
In what began as sport and ended as a doctoral dissertation at UVA, Michael competed in dozens of cowboy contests and collected data on a group whose members (himself included) he dubbed “Old Dominion cowboys.” Through a close reading of his fieldnotes, he identified themes that emerge from a typical day of penning, sorting, and cutting cattle. He analyzes these themes in the context of frontier history, identity formation, the Western genre of entertainment, social memory studies, and sport sociology, all to situate cowboy sports in a cultural and historical context. Today, cowboy sports serve as avenues of identity formation and cultural expression in ways that are both representative of and resistant to postmodernity.