Sons of Samoa: The Corporeal Economy of American Samoa Gridiron Football

Abstract

The United States territory of American Samoa produces more National Football League (NFL) gridiron players per capita than any other place in the world, and it is estimated that a young boy born to Samoan parents is as much as 56 times more likely to ‘make it’ to the NFL. With some notable exceptions, conventional explanations in the literature and popular news media have sought to explain the phenomenon of American Samoan gridiron football according to three dominant understandings of gridiron football expertise: Samoans are naturally big and possess a physiological and genetic predispositions to football expertise (biological); the cultural values and traditions of fa’a Samoa engenders a work ethic that results in the 10,000 hours of deliberate training on the training ground (socio-cultural); and global systems of athletic labour markets have created a set on conditions in which core nations (i.e. the U.S.) exploit economically depressed and underserved populations in peripheral nation-states (i.e. American Samoa) of human capital and labour (economic). This interdisciplinary study of the active body offers an empirically-driven, theoretically informed, and methodologically rigorous investigation of the ways and extents to which governance structures (economic, cultural, and political) operate upon, and are negotiated within, the lived experiences of aspirant high school gridiron football players in American Samoa. Drawing upon interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, narrative analysis, and multiple secondary data sources (including demographic and population data, labour economics data, popular media discourses and texts, and historical documents and oral histories), I aim to reconstruct the conjunctural relations within which the Samoan athletic body is constituted by, and constitutive of, broader political formations and asymmetrical power relations. I develop a theory of the corporeal economy of American Samoan football in which the active Samoan footballing body is triangulated at the broad intersection of the dialectic interplay(s) between biopolitical, geopolitical, and cultural political structures, discourses, and formations of power that influence upon on how the body is: 1) produced on the field through regimes of discipline and technologies of power (the kinesthetic body); 2) becomes economically and socially mobile through exchanges in global athletic labour markets (the labouring body) and; 3) is understood in the making of the self and a expressions of identity, citizenship, and cultural belonging (the mediated body). In the process, I provide a more complex, nuanced, and interdisciplinary rejoinder to the question of the phenomenon of American Samoan gridiron football, and in a broader sense, I articulate a more complex, critical, and experiential study of the of the interactions and interrelationship between the biological, the cultural, and the economic in the development of athletic talent expertise. In turn, this project provides a contextual analysis of American Samoan culture, history, and society within, and through, a conjunctural and interdisciplinary reading of the Samoan gridiron football body.