%0 Journal Article
%T The Ocean Run: Stage, Cast, and Performance in a Public Park Basketball Scene
%A Michael DeLand
%J Journal of Contemporary Ethnography
%@ 1552-5414
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/0891241616639641
%X This article investigates the production and re-production of a recurring pickup basketball game at a public park in Santa Monica, California. I argue that it is best understood as a recurring ¡°scene¡±¡ªan ecologically shaped, biographically significant, interactionally accomplished, and narratively organized pattern of social life¡ªcolloquially known as the ¡°Ocean Run.¡± Drawing on Kenneth Burke¡¯s dramatism, I suggest that the scene is constituted by the interrelation of the park¡¯s socioecological landscape (¡°stage¡±), the diverse personal meanings that players construct through their participation (¡°cast¡±), and the practical work of re-creating the scene through situated interactions (¡°performance¡±). The park stage facilitates a sense of intimacy for players with very different personal relationships to each other and to the scene. Those players then actively mix themselves up, re-creating the scene through an ¡°improvisational¡± style of team formation. Place, people, and action are dialectically related in the patterning of public life. This method of analysis is replicable in a wide variety of public scenes and sets up concrete grounds for comparison and theoretical generalizability
%K public space
%K scene
%K symbolic interaction
%K sport
%K ethnography
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0891241616639641