Improv in the Park: The Social Organization of Pickup Basketball

• In Event: 197 - Regular Session. Ethnography/Ethnographic Studies

Abstract

Informal “pickup” basketball games present a deeply sociological challenge to explanation. As an ongoing pattern of interaction in public, these scenes cannot be reduced to a hierarchically organized group structure or to the mere aggregation of anonymous individuals. Drawing on four years of ethnographic fieldwork at one ongoing park basketball game in Santa Monica, CA this article proposes that pickup basketball games are sustained through “collective improvisation.” Improvisational use of public space describes a form of social organization characterized by close on-site collaboration between individuals who do not organize their trips together in advance, anticipate seeing one another in the future, and remain open to involving unknown participants. In order to account for the improvisational form of the basketball game in question this study examines three different kinds of processes: (1) how the park developed within its neighborhood ecology; (2) how men find significance in the basketball game as they situate it within other personally meaningful settings; and (3) how the men interactively construct the game together in situated practices of team formation. At each scale of analysis a dialectic balance between publicity and privacy contributes to the game’s improvisational character.

Author

• Michael DeLand, Yale University