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Only one Mayweather: a critique of hope from the hopeful

Hopkinson, Leo

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Authors



Abstract

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.

Citation

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 Mar 29, 2024
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

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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.





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