ABSTRACT
Pelota mixteca is a handball game that originated in Mexico’s southern state of Oaxaca. Because of the extensive labour migration that has taken (indigenous) migrants from Oaxaca to areas far removed from their hometowns, today, the game is also played in different parts of Mexico and the United States. In this chapter, I describe and analyse what could be called a bottom-up, rooted cosmopolitan practice of players of pelota mixteca. Faced with the choice between the ‘museumisation’ of the game on the one hand and its ‘detraditionalisation’ on the other, the playing community has tried to popularise pelota mixteca using transnational networks and ‘global forms’. In the second part of this paper, I briefly consider the broader ethical question of how a rooted cosmopolitan mindset can help us not only better understand the processes and cultures we are studying but also move past the artificial boundaries of ‘the field site’ and its implicit connotations of ‘out there’/’exotic’/’Other’. Following Meskell’s 2009 Cosmopolitan Archaeologies , I argue that a rooted cosmopolitan approach to the study of immaterial heritage can offer a fruitful way out of the perceived exclusionary binaries of local/global and traditional/modern.
