Dr Leo Hopkinson leo.hopkinson@durham.ac.uk
Career Development Fellow - Anthropology of Sport
Dr Leo Hopkinson leo.hopkinson@durham.ac.uk
Career Development Fellow - Anthropology of Sport
Professional boxing offers hope of vast wealth and global mobility for aspiring athletes in Accra, hopes bolstered by the understanding that Ghanaians are particularly suited to boxing's attrition. However, when boxers become active in the global industry, they encounter power relations which locate them as cheap, subordinate labour, and stymie their championship hopes. As boxers build lives through the sport, they reflect critically on the role their hopes of ‘making it big’ play in perpetuating industry inequalities, recognizing what I call the ideological function of hope. Despite this, they remain committed to hopes of dramatic success. Their simultaneous optimism and cynicism complicates contemporary accounts of hope as a strategy of resilience in contexts of profound uncertainty. Building on ethnographic research with Accra boxers, I theorize hoping as a paradoxical experience of critique and optimism in equal measure, to account for the contradictory ways people act when orienting themselves towards better futures.
Hopkinson, L. (2022). Only one Mayweather: a critique of hope from the hopeful. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 28(3), 725-745. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13762
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Online Publication Date | May 14, 2022 |
Publication Date | 2022-09 |
Deposit Date | Jun 20, 2022 |
Publicly Available Date | Jun 20, 2022 |
Journal | Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute |
Print ISSN | 1359-0987 |
Electronic ISSN | 1467-9655 |
Publisher | Wiley |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 28 |
Issue | 3 |
Pages | 725-745 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13762 |
Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1200558 |
Published Journal Article (Advanced version)
(298 Kb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Copyright Statement
Advanced version © 2022 The Authors. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Anthropological Institute. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Boxing family: Theorising competition with boxers in Accra, Ghana
(2023)
Journal Article
Introduction: What Competition Does
(2022)
Journal Article
'Stay Home, Stay Safe': Proximity as Vitality and Vulnerability Under Lockdown
(2021)
Journal Article
About Durham Research Online (DRO)
Administrator e-mail: dro.admin@durham.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2025
Advanced Search