Playing at Home: Fenway Park and Cultural Performance
By: Bo Clay '15
Advising Faculty: Christopher B. Steiner
This thesis explores the many ways in which baseball fans and other communities use Fenway Park to perform their culture, which, in turn, has built and continues to build an imagined Fenway Park. Opposite to its physical quirkiness, the imagined Fenway is the ballpark that houses a multitude of meanings, beliefs, and is the Fenway that is “America’s most beloved.”
It is the ballpark whose image and name are recycled through material culture and it is the ballpark that garners fond praise. While the imagined and physical Fenway are indeed intricately linked, the imagined Fenway was constructed through personal and collective memory. There are many facets of the imagined Fenway Park and of how it is used to perform Red Sox and American baseball culture.
This honors thesis may be read in its entirety at Digital Commons @ Connecticut College.
http://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/anthrohp/12/
Related Fields: Anthropology