A week or so ago, I sat in my room watching a muted five-hour baseball game on ESPN while talking to my dad on the phone, and, on occasion, yelling so loud that a friend knocked on the door thinking that I'd just had a heart attack. Why? The Philadelphia Phillies were making a run for the post season, and as my team I felt a need to cheer them on - or at the least, bear witness to a potential train wreck.
Philadelphia sports fans are an odd group. We're simultaneously cynical about the present and hopeful for the future; we don't accept failure and yet we still support our teams even though they constantly and spectacularly manage to pull defeat from the jaws of victory. It's a proud culture, rooted in "Rocky" and the snowballs that Eagles fans once threw at Santa Claus on a cold December day in 1968.
Two weeks ago, The Herald printed an article about southern culture at Brown ("Southern-fried pride in the prickly Northeast," Sept. 28), which observed that many Southerners felt their connection to their home culture strengthened after arriving at Brown. While I'm not from the South, I went through a similar experience. I only became a real Philedelphia fan after coming to Brown. In high school, I followed the Phils and the Eagles and I certainly cared about them, but those cares were academic at best. I could watch my team lose and then turn off the game, forgetting the last pitch by the time I grabbed a late dinner.
But once I picked up my Brown ID, once I was no longer surrounded by people who knew what the Phillies Phanatic was, I started to read the Philadelphia Inquirer a bit more, learned how to watch a baseball game on ESPN.com and frequently treated my friends, neighbors and those just walking down the hall to rousing renditions of the Eagles fight song.
My Philly identity only became salient when I couldn't get an edible cheesesteak. I was no longer surrounded by people who shared a common collection of cuisines, anecdotes and experiences; instead, I had coffeemilk, grinders and Patriots fans. I could have adopted a Rhode Island persona, and become a full-fledged member of the town in which I now lived. But I found that I missed the little things from home and realized, in their absence, that they were genuinely important to the person I had become, and that they were a part of me in a way I couldn't easily excise.
Such experiences are, in my opinion, largely a result of the rise of globalization and increased interconnectivity in today's world. It has become much easier for a person to live in one place and have an identity rooted in another. Twenty or 30 years ago, I wouldn't have been able to watch any Phillies games in Providence, nor could I read the Philadelphia Inquirer from my dorm room. If I wanted to watch baseball, I would have had no choice but to follow the Red Sox (and quite possibly become an American League fan). Now cheering for the Phillies is just as easy opening up a Web browser.
Opponents of globalization often argue that it destroys home-grown customs and traditions and replaces them with a hegemonic culture, one that is usually American. There's some truth to this, as the near global ubiquity of McDonald's demonstrates. But just as my appreciation for the Phillies heightened only after I entered the Red Sox Nation, globalization can increase people's pride in their own locally-oriented identities.
But these identities can manifest themselves in curious ways. Last week, the New York Times had an article about baseball fans in Taiwan who followed the exploits not of local teams, but the New York Yankees and Taiwanese native Chien-Ming Wang. National pride mixes with a foreign baseball team to create a fundamentally new identity - that of a Taiwanese Yankees fan. As global connections increase, we will see many more of these "hybrid" identities.
I'm a Phillies fan, living in Providence, who just read an article about a Yankees fan living in Taiwan. I've never met her, but I know that if we ever shared a drink, we'd have something to talk about, some common way of seeing the world. Hybrid identities rooted in more than one place allow for this possibility in a way that older identities never really did. And that might just allow for some very interesting conversations.
Joey Borson '07 is West Philadelphian (suburbs) born and raised.
