Fans and Scholars

May 8, 2008

What would it mean to study baseball in an academic setting? There are thousands of people who are baseball fans and who could reel off batting averages, ERAs, and golden glove awards without even thinking. Even casual fans have an immense amount of institutional knowledge.. and the person who really follows a team likely spends a good part of each day digesting bits and pieces of information. So what is a scholar to do?

The temptation for a scholar would be to compete with the knowledge of a diehard fan. The reason this is a temptation is because the wider public expects it from you. Try walking into a bar and mentioning that you are researching a book on the Dodgers or Brewers. Chances are you will find someone who knows a lot more than you about players and history.. and that person will feel vaguely dissatisfied to learn that you really do not know as much as he does about the team you are writing on. This person may even go home to his wife and complain that he really should be the person writing a book about the team.

The scholar can never compete with a fan in terms of general knowledge because what he/she does for fun is likely not related to the subject being studied. The amount of time a scholar has to put into baseball is far more limited than the person who goes to all the home games of a team and reads the newspaper every morning.

What the scholar has is a critical frame of reference. Because of the critical tools acquired during study and from reading other books of history, the scholar is able to bring to bear on the data of baseball a frame of reference that allows for conclusions and comparisons that are far outside the realm of possibility for a fan. Questions about marketing, about narrative construction, about relations with the press, about perceptions of athletes.. these are the sorts of things that a scholar can ask but which a fan cannot.. because a fan is by definition someone who is a participant in a system.

This same group of issues is present in many other areas of scholarship. The one that mostly concerns me is the case of teaching the Quran. There are literally millions and millions of people in the world who could better call up a Quranic verse and explain its accepted significance.. but that is not really the point. There happen to be very few people who can apply a historically informed critical framework to it, and that is why I teach the Quran while millions of other people memorize it. But it would be a false path for me to decide to compete with all these people in general knowledge of the Quran.. after all, they devote a major percentage of their time to this pursuit and since the Quran does not express my own religious views, I have only a fraction of that kind of time. If I were to compete with this kind of knowledge I would have not time for other interest.

Colleagues who study the Civil War, the Bible, film, popular music, or even cars will run into something similar. The prize for the scholar is to see cultural meaning in specific actions and social patterns, which often can be had without encyclopedic general knowledge. Fans experience social meaning but they do not have the chance to reflect upon its workings or constructed nature. Scholars lose out on social meaning.. but they do manage insight into human patterns. I'd take the latter.