The Birth of the Basketball Court: Bodies in Time and Space Dr. Craig Cook
Woodstock School
Abstract
This paper addresses bodies in time and space, namely, in describing the processes of constructing playgrounds and basketball courts during the American occupation of the Philippines in the first half of the twentieth century. Using a culturalist approach to bodies in time and space from Henning Eichberg, and Foucaldian perspectives on the body within institutions, I seek to show how the American body politic sought to construct the corporeal Filipino body, with its prime tool being the basketball court. Today, basketball courts are ubiquitous around the Philippine Archipelago. In doing a history of the present, my aim as a researcher is to make explicit the processes and material conditions in which Filipino bodies were made visible and to be regulated by the American colonial regime. Among the questions I seek to address are: How was the body shaped by these emergent technologies? How did local culture shape these processes and outcomes? What meanings, both local and trans-local were constructed around these new forms of leisure, play, and the body?
