| In the summer of 2004, I began to participate in equestrian activities that fall under the rubric of "cowboy sports": team cattle penning, team cattle and ranch sorting, and cutting horse competition. These sports require riders and their horses to adhere to strict regulations as they manipulate cattle under the tyranny of a digital clock and within the confines of an arena. Most participants come from non-agricultural backgrounds and professions and have little use for cowboy skills in their daily lives.;To investigate the cowboy sport subculture in Virginia whose members I have dubbed "Old Dominion cowboys," I designed a cultural study to explore four interrelated questions: (1) In what sense do cowboy sports serve as a vehicle for identity formation and cultural expression? (2) To what extent do cowboy sports mimic other "extreme" sports and subcultural activities, and to what extent are they unique? (3) What macro social and historical forces contribute to the resilience and popularity of cowboy sports? and (4) What can cowboy sports teach us about postmodern American culture?;As an observant participant in cowboy sports and one-time working cowboy, I employed standard ethnographic research protocols to collect primary data at dozens of cowboy sporting events in Virginia. Through a close reading of my fieldnotes, I devised a coding scheme that revealed fifteen themes embedded in my units of analysis. I analyzed these themes in the context of American character formation, frontier history, the Western genre of entertainment, collective memory studies, and sport sociology, all in an effort to situate cowboy sports in a social and historical context.;Relying on Hobsbawm and Ranger's (1983) work on invented tradition, I frame cowboy sports not only as relics from the trans-Mississippi West, but also as expressions of distinctly American characteristics associated with the "cowboy type" that were appropriated and modified by turn-of-the-twentieth-century culture producers to mitigate the disruptive effects of modernity. The result is a sociology of a subculture whose members turn to cowboy sports as a means of identity formation and cultural expression in ways that are both representative of and in opposition to the postmodern paradigm. |
