Author Archives: Logan Austin

About Logan Austin

Peachtree City, Georgia.

Football Culture

Informant: The interviewee in question here is a 20 year old girl studying business at USC. She hails from Austin, Texas.

Transcription:

So my family is a football family. I come from two long lines of people who went to UT (University of Texas) which is a big football school. My brother and I were born and my parents were big Houston Oilers fans, which are now the Tennessee Titans, but we don’t talk about that. The Oilers left Houston because their owner is a piece of shit and left. So for ten or twelve years, there was no football in Houston. Some people cheered for the Titans, some couldn’t. Then in 2002, it was the inaugural season of the Houston Texans. Football was back in Houston, we got the expansion team, people were so excited. Saying that in only a few years, we’d be winning the Super Bowl. That’s how well our draft went, etc. Ever since 2002 when I lived in Houston and to this day, my parents have had season tickets to the Houston Texans because my parents knew what it was like to not have football so we’re gonna make sure we go to every game we can. So growing up, we’d always have the same seats and I would get my mini Papa John’s pizza from the stadium and we’d watch the game and it was a family tradition, every single weekend and we’d tailgate with our family friends and I was introduced to this whole football culture. Then I became the bigger football fan as I got older, went to every game, and even when I go home now, we’ll still go. And my family stays connected a lot like that, texting each other about the game or what’s happening with the team. It’s great.
Tell me more about football culture.
Well before every game you tailgate. And tailgating is the best, everyone gets together, super excited. And the people who are “of age” drink and everyone’s in good spirits and it’s not even about the football. It’s about being together with your friends. You’re all on the same side, against or for something. All on the same page. And everyone hangs out, tosses around a football, talks, and walks over. And the game is more of that. It’s a whole day of socializing really, with a sports game in the center. And if it goes well, everyone’s super happy and if things don’t go well, everyone’s sad, but at least you’re sad together and you wait till next week and you talk about it and keep track of it and the injuries and the matchups and the rivalries and it’s great.

Analysis: America as a whole loves the sport of football and no region of the country loves it quite so much as the South. The game itself however is not the reason for it. The reason is for the ritualization that surrounds football, turning it from a simple win-or-lose game to a massive social occasion and cultural event. It can bond people with very little else in common. Meet a fan of the same team and you can instantly connect with them. Meet a fan of the other team and you can trash talk. Either way, a conversation has started where none existed before. And among people who are quite close already (like the family in this account) football can serve as a check-in and connection point, an excuse to talk or to celebrate.

Armadillo Hunt

Informant: The interviewee in question here is a 20 year old girl studying business at USC. She hails from Austin, Texas.

Transcription:

Okay, so another story from my lake house. Whenever we had someone new to the house, we would always hold an armadillo hunt. Our house is pretty big, and then down the road there’s a bunch of fields that are separated from the house area. So we’d pile in the golf cart or whatever with a bunch of coolers and sticks and get everyone far from the house. And you take the cooler and bang the stick on it and supposedly that’ll attract the armadillos and the armadillos will crawl right into the cooler. Everyone’s walking around banging on coolers and then the people who are in on it sneak back to the house and laugh at the people who were out there banging on coolers for no reason until they figure it out and come back and then they’re mad at you and everyone laughs. It’s fun. It’s like a snipe hunt. I heard that one from my dad too. That one was his own little invention. It’s memorable and as a kid I thought it was the best practical joke ever and I love pranks and practical jokes now and making people feel stupid.

Analysis: This story serves as an excellent example of a practical joke being used as an initiation ritual. In many cases, an initiation ritual serves as a power play to assert a hierarchy, with the older members of the particular group asserting dominance over the newer members. Practical jokes serve excellently in this purpose, making the newer, less experienced members feel foolish compared to the experienced older members. This puts the older members in a position of power over the newer members – however without sacrificing any of the camaraderie between them. Oftentimes, those older members suffered the same humilation themselves and wish to see the same thing done to them carried out on others.

The Cramatoadies

Informant: The interviewee in question here is a 20 year old girl studying business at USC. She hails from Austin, Texas.

In my family we have a story about these creatures called the Cramatoadies. At my lakehouse, there’s this little island in the lake that you can always see from the house, a rocky crag. When I was little, the adults would tell this story to us. Even to this day, if there’s a little kid, we’ll tell them this story. So these Cramatoadies live on Cramatoadie Island. And their little quirk was that they could be as big as a house or as small as the tip of a needle at will. And if you’re a bad kid walking around at night, they can grab you and take you away to your island. And we grew up with that.

Who did you hear this from?
I got it from my parents, who got it from my dad’s dad and owned the lakehouse
Why did this story stick with you?
I really believed it when I was little. When I had friends there, I would tell them the story and we would try to kayak to the island and get scared and go back. And then the lake went down and we could just walk to it and it was just a bunch of rocks. And that kinda ruined the magic when that first happened. It never scared me though. I thought it was cool that there were little creatures living there.

Analysis:

This story serves, like many fairy tales from old Europe, as an entertaining way for parents to caution their children. When a parent wants to stop a certain action from occurring – in this case, running around in the dark at night – they create a story about fictional creatures who will punish them for it. Children respond more naturally and readily to flights of fancy such as these than they do to the more-realistic but less-engaging reasons of “falling and skinning your knees”. This story also possessed – like many family tales – an idiosyncrasy and specificity that made it more “real” to the listener  – in this case, the particularly close location of Cramatoadie Island.

Fierce Wild Beast

Informant: The interviewee in question here is a 20 year old girl studying business at USC. She hails from Austin, Texas.

Well, my high school was a private Episcopalian school that had been there for around a hundred years. And going to this school you hear a lot about the past and the traditions and a lot of them were still there. And one fun thing we did was that we had to go to chapel every day. And at chapel we’d sing all these hymns. And one of these hymns was called “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God” that I guess is just listing out the saints and they’re talking about this one saint who was slain by a fierce wild beast and at our school whenever we were singing this song, you know, usual volume blah blah blah and then you’d reach this part and everyone in the school would yell “FIERCE WILD BEAST” and it’d be this big boom and then we’d all quiet back down to usual volume. And everyone just rolled with it and that was just like one of the things.
Where’d you learn it from?
Well I went to the school from 6th to 12th grade and you would go to chapel. And the first time I went, everyone did it and I picked it up right away.
Why did this stick with you?
Everyone when they listened to the song would anticipate it. Like everyone hated singing the hymns but when that song came on everyone was down and like, you could feel it coming and we’d all come together to yell that part and laugh after. It was like a quirky thing and I have no idea how it started. And at my friend’s school they would do it too and I guess that everyone does it that way.

Analysis:

Private Christian schools can prove conflicted locations. This conflict stems from the conservative values of the generally much older teachers and administrators conflicting with the youthful rebelliousness of the students who attend it. Generally, any outlets for that spirit of youthful rebelliousness are demonized and punished by the religious teachers of the institution, but in this specific case, for whatever reason, it is allowed. Chapel, the most sanctified of any times at these institutions, would usually never allow for outbursts on the scale of the one described here. However, by not directly blaspheming in any way and by causing the congregation to become more engaged in the material being presented, this shout of “FIERCE WILD BEAST” is allowed.

The Germans and the Riverbed

Informant: The subject in question is a 20 year old girl studying screenwriting at USC. She hails from Phoenix, Arizona, while most of her extended family comes from Western Kansas.

So, I’m from Arizona and Arizona is very hot. There’s not a lot of water. Arizona likes to pretend though that it’s not hot and it has a lot of water. It likes to pretend that it’s like everywhere else and not dry. Except with Daylight Savings. This was true back in WWII and before, when they named places. Like calling them fields or valleys or rivers even though they weren’t what you’d think of as a field or valley or river. And back in WWII the U.S. government used to use a place in Arizona as a place to hold German prisoners of war. And there were three German POWs who were captured and taken to Arizona. And like anyone in Arizona, they desperately wanted to get out, in addition to the whole POW thing. And they found this map, of the Phoenix area. And they saw that there was a river that would run away. And if they went to it and took a boat they could just float away and escape. So they plan an elaborate escape and they get to where the river is. But there is no river. Just a riverbed. Or what used to be a riverbed. Or just a long dirt path. So then they were recaptured and became reprisoners of war.
Why is this story significant to you?
I just think it’s funny. And it makes my hometown memorable, like it’s never what it seems. And twists convention. Like we had a heat day. Never had a snow day, just a heat day in Arizona.                               Who did you hear this from?
I either heard it from my dad or one of my Arizona history buff friends.

Analysis:

This story serves as a sort of local flavor, something passed around a geographical community. It is inextricably tied to the location that birthed it, commenting as it does on the idiosyncratic nature of the area and exploring how that nature might have impacted somebody. In addition to these Phoenix-specific traits, the story also caters to feelings of American nationalism by portraying the Nazi characters within it as bumbling and incompetent, like characters out of Hogan’s Heroes.