Serious leisure practices and kin-making amongst trading card players in urban Gauteng, South Africa

Abstract

This dissertation examines how adult trading card players in Gauteng form kinship and friendship ties with fellow urban residents through active participation in leisure activities hosted in privately owned trading card stores and organised globally by transnational corporations. Anthropologists have shown that formulations of kinship across the world are not confined to matters of blood, marriage or biology, and have documented a variety of kin-making practices that contribute to social reproduction. At the same time, recent contributions to the anthropology of leisure and popular culture encourage anthropologists not to view leisure as a passive act and not to think of consumers of leisure only as the ‘victims’ of corporations, but view leisure - even when organised privately and through corporations - as an expressive aspect of society which also contributes to social reproduction. Anthropologists also now argue that commodity exchange can achieve what earlier anthropologists ascribed exclusively to gift exchange, that is the formation of social ties. The literature also shows that social reproduction in urban contexts requires city residents and city dwellers to create new ways to make kin with strangers, and to turn strangers into friends. As such, this dissertation draws on empirical and ethnographic research conducted in Gauteng with adult players of trading card games to document how adults learn how to play trading card games, how players navigate and use the wider leisure scene including the two privately owned stores in which I conducted participant observation, how players create friend relationships through their participation in commoditised leisure.