Against the Run of Play

Abstract

In Argentina’s Gran Chaco, indigenous Guaraní men play football assiduously. This article explores how the game articulates with their sense of masculinity. Historical engagements in the Chaco’s extractive labor markets have shaped understandings of masculinity that emphasize strength, courage, and provision. However, the decline of the region’s extractive industries has made these forms of masculinity unattainable for young men. Games of football, including betting and drinking off the pitch, create bounded and embodied experiences that allow young men to experience fantasies of productivity and collectivity while disavowing everyday experiences of unemployment. These fantasies are particularly striking because they misrecognize women’s growing role as providers even as they sustain an illusion of autonomous masculine politics that elides ties of kinship and dependency.

Men Who Shout at Goats

“…Following the shrinking of population as well as a decrease in moments of collective effervescence like festivals (festas), there are now fewer opportunities to showcase one's capacity to be "good at being a man" (Herzfeld 1985: 16, his emphasis). I follow Agustin Diz (2022) in his argument that certain desired situations-in his case football games, in my case slaughter-permit men "to enact individual and collective forms of productivity and 'gendered agency' (High 2010) at a time when [decline] challenges their ability to embody forms of laboring masculinity" (Diz 2022: 4). Male confrontations with decline and structural change have also been shown to be accompanied by higher levels of aggression and actual violence.…”