Inventing Tradition: Cowboy Sports in a Postmodern Age

Sociology / VDM Publishing, 2008

In what began as sport and ended as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Virginia, 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.

As America’s most celebrated farmer and father of the University of Virginia, Mr. Jefferson would surely have approved of a doctoral dissertation about a sport with its roots in agriculture—in this case, the range cattle industry.