Few activities bring together physicality, emotions, politics, money, and morality as dramatically as sport. In Brazil’s stadiums or China’s parks, on Cuba’s baseball diamonds or Fiji’s rugby fields, human beings test their physical limits, invest emotional energy, bet money, perform witchcraft, and ingest substances. Sport is a microcosm of what life is about. The Anthropology of Sport explores how sport both shapes and is shaped by the social, cultural, political, and historical contexts in which we live. Core themes discussed in this book include the body, modernity, nationalism, the state, citizenship, transnationalism, globalization, and gender and sexuality.

About the Author

Niko Besnier is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. He has written extensively on gender, sexuality, migration, economic relations, language, and sport. He is editor-in-chief of American Ethnologist.

Susan Brownell is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. She is an expert on sports and Olympic Games in China, Olympic history, and world’s fairs. She is the author of Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People’s Republic.

Thomas F. Carter is an anthropologist and the director of the Centre of Sport, Tourism, and Leisure Studies at the University of Brighton. He has written on Cuban sport, labor migration, governance, sport for development, and the politics of spectacle. His most recent book is In Foreign Fields: The Politics and Experiences of Transnational Sport Migration.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction
1 • Sport, Anthropology, and History
2 • Sport, Colonialism, and Imperialism
3 • Sport, Health, and the Environment
4 • Sport, Social Class, Race, and Ethnicity
5 • Sport and Sex, Gender, and Sexuality
6 • Sport, Cultural Performance, and Mega-events
7 • Sport, Nation, and Nationalism
8 • Sport in the World System
Epilogue: Sport for Anthropology

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Reviews

"The three authors of The Anthropology of Sport have written their up-to-date survey of anthropology and sport in the style of an introductory textbook. The trio covers a basic range of topics in eight chapters, each of which could function as the essential reading for a lecture . . . Major thinkers and concepts are introduced in a deliberated, easy-to-understand manner."
— Pacific Affairs

"Brownell, Besnier, and Carter’s work is a new text in a yet undefined field – it may be the start of something new. If interested in the global nature of sport today, The Anthropology of Sport is a necessary read."
— Foucault News

"Besnier, Brownell and Carter . . . follow a distinct anthropological line of thinking, advocating a wide application of the term 'sport' that takes into account its various local, daily and emic conceptions in the context of globalization."
— Paideuma

"This is a well-written and accessible text. . . . The book can stimulate new research in a highly fertile but understudied area of anthropology."
— American Ethnologist

"A foundational text. . . . The writing is clear, the style consistent, and the presentation informative and absorbing."
— Journal of Anthropological Research

"Deeply insightful. . . . This volume can function as an important point of reference and source of inspiration for myriad anthropological research projects to come."
— Social Anthropology

"Sports offer excitement, triumphs, tragedies—and escape from the routines of modernity. But sports also reach into the world, and the world reaches into sports. This expert trio of authors shows how this emergent field of research promises to contribute in exciting ways to the growth of global anthropological knowledge."—Ulf Hannerz, author of Writing Future Worlds

"One could not hope for a better trio of scholars to produce such an absorbing and instructive critical survey of sports for anthropology. It is comprehensive and lucid, inspiring and field-defining. Read this book and never again will you be able to deny the centrality of sport to our core anthropological concerns of body dynamics, gender, ritual, nationalism, globality, media, and more."—William W. Kelly, Professor of Anthropology, Yale University

Awards

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Titles 2019 2019, Choice

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews

Awards