Getting into the Game: Anthropological Perspectives on Sport: Introduction

Abstract

Keywords: sports, games, play, body, performance, aestheticsConceptual walls that once cloistered scholars from even contemplating that games and sports might be legitimate and significant matters for intellectual inquiry have in recent years been intrepidly scaled. Political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, literary critics, historians, geographers, economists and philosophers have mounted inquiries into sundry aspects of sport participation and spectatorship, past and present. Anthropologists too have been tempted to rethink their disciplinary habit of steering clear of the study of games and sports and to speculate concerning the intellectual challenges that may be embraced within previously forbidden fields of play. Ethnographers who venture into arenas of sport may risk incurring larger or smaller measures of professional indifference or prejudice, but they also tend to return with vivid accounts and intriguing theoretical insights.Sources of the lingering anthropological reluctance to afford games and sports serious and sustained attention have been probed in various writings (e.g., Archetti, 1998; Bourdieu, 1990; Dyck, 2000b) and are subjected to further critical analysis by King in this issue. What also needs to be noted here is the ethnographic breadth and analytical depth of a nascent and pulsing anthropological literature on sport. In fact, ethnographic fieldworkers have been intermittently reporting the popularity of games and sports of many types since the founding of the discipline in the 19th century. James Mooney published an article on the Cherokee ball game (1890) in the same year that he conducted research into the Ghost Dance religion. Shortly after this came Culin's (1907) comprehensive study of the morphology and religious significance of the games of North American Indians. Additional accounts of the traditional games and athletic contests of the Americas have been issued in the last two decades (Nabokov, 1987; Oxendine, 1988; Scarborough and Wilcox, 1991; Veenum, 1994). At various times eminent anthropologists have matter of factly identified sport practices as salient features of their investigations (i.e., Appadurai, 1995; Firth 1931; Fox 1961; Geertz 1972; Gluckman and Guckman, 1977; MacAloon, 1981). Paradoxically, although several generations of undergraduate anthropology students were introduced to the filmed intricacies of Trobriand cricket while their teachers puzzled over the implications of the Balinese cock fight, the notion that games and sports might comprise appropriate objects of systematic and comparative anthropological investigation tended to be smothered by a preference for exoticism.Since the 1980s, however, a set of finely crafted anthropological monographs that explicitly target the study of specific sports in particular settings has appeared. It includes works on masculinity, ideology and wrestling in India (Alter, 1992), sports in the moral order of the Peoples' Republic of China (Brownell, 1995), baseball on the border between Mexico and Texas (Klein, 1997) and of football (i.e., soccer) cultures worldwide (Archetti, 1999; Armstrong and Giulianotti, 1997; Armstrong, 1998). These and other ethnographies have been supplemented by a revised introductory text (Blanchard, 1995) and edited volumes that examine a broad range of fieldwork settings and theoretical concerns pertinent to the anthropology of sport (Dyck, 2000a; MacClancy, 1996; Sands, 1999). In conjunction with these developments a distinctively anthropological literature on children's involvement in sport has materialized (Anderson, 2001, 2003; Beyer Broch, 2003; Dyck, 1995, 2000c, 2000d, 2003; Lithman, 2000; Weiss, 2000). The anthropology of sport now boasts a small but rapidly growing literature that suffices to demonstrate the potential of both what the study of sport has to offer to anthropology and what, in turn, anthropology can reveal about sport as a facet of social life.What await anthropologists who choose to look into the sporting pastimes so enthusiastically partaken of by people within our fieldwork locales are familiar components of ethnographic inquiry. …