The Changing Face of Cricket in Pakistan
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SYNOPSIS
As Pakistan’s most popular sport, cricket has played a significant role in defining the culture and history of the country, thus becoming an essential part of its post-colonial identity and national pride. In Pakistan, cricket has often been ascribed great power as a national symbol of unity, able to integrate a multi-ethnic, culturally diverse, and stratified society. Cricket therefore has come to represent Pakistan.
But cricket has also come to act as a microcosm or reflection of society—its politics, history, culture, and aspirations. In Pakistan, cricket is a metaphor for modern life—from the youthful exuberance, energy, and innovation of a young nation, to increasing religiosity, aspects of corruption, and global relations. No other sphere of life articulates Pakistan’s history, culture, society, and economy more precisely than the cultural practice of cricket. But, cricket, like other sports, is also a multi-billion-dollar industry with far reaching social and economic consequences. It is thereby able to create and communicate meaning, giving it the ability to affect the culture of the society in which it is embedded. Sport defines cultures, drives economies, and shapes politics.
A closer analysis of these dialectical discourses of cricket in Pakistan—the ability to affect society and to be affected by and represent it—consequently produces a blueprint of those important and valued behaviours that are the foundation of the larger culture in which the sport is embedded. An analysis of cricket therefore allows for a unique and privileged insight into political and sociological issues such as race, cultural change, national identity, and self realization.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Ali Khan is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Dean of the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences at LUMS. Ali Khan's book Representing Children: Power, Policy and the Discourse on Child Labour in the Football Manufacturing Industry of Pakistan was published in 2007 by Oxford University Press. He is also the General Editor for a series of seven books on Sociology and Anthropology in Pakistan. His last two projects have resulted in co-authored and edited books on cricket - Cricket Cauldron (I.B.Tauris, 2013) – and Pakistani cinema – Cinema and Society (Oxford University Press, 2016). Ali Khan has an MPhil and a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge in England.