Paper Short Abstract:

I show how the notion of ‘control’ affects the ideas of change held by amateur cricketers in Sri Lanka. Though modernist discourses of cricket maintain the status quo, the nature of repetition and invention within cricket indicates a route towards an anthropology centred on prognosis.

Paper Abstract:

Understanding cricketers’ concepts of change is important in Sri Lanka, where the sport has been promoted as a reconciliatory tool post- civil-war. Engrained modernist discourses present sport as a force for change, enabling individual development and promoting group unity. Intrinsically, each sporting encounter carries potential for moments of repetition and invention, yet the modernist discourses discourage invention. Sri Lankan cricketers are still taught to exercise ‘control’. Movement drills, self-discipline, and risk aversion bring success, while minimising individuality limits threats to team unity. Hence, understandings of change are individually centred, with cricketers working to ensure continuity within the group. While my interlocutors thought cultivating ‘control’ made them better people, they learned how to navigate their social constraints, rather than challenge them. Cricket in its current form is hegemonic: it does not encourage cricketers to confront the status quo, and therefore cannot promote reconciliation in the future.

While cricket’s modernist form limits social change, exploring the intrinsic tension between repetition and invention could illuminate a method for anthropological prediction. If sporting action oscillates between repetition and invention, change is constant, iterative, and moves slowly. Because traditionally cricketers also exercise control – limiting their invention – then trajectories of change could be traced from past into the future, at least in the short term. For this anthropologists must follow Yael Navaro’s ‘negative’ approach (2020), working backwards to delimit the bounds of these trajectories. Rather than attempting discrete, disputable predictions, an anthropology grounded in prognosis would establish a delimited range of probable futures.