One Country, One Sport, Endless Knowledge: The Anthropological Study of Sports in South Africa

Abstract

Keywords: sport, Africa, reconciliation IntroductionThis paper describes some of the many ways that sport allows anthropologists to experience and to analyze African society. Throughout the decades of apartheid, sports served both to define and to defy White superiority. Sport continues to serve as one of the most accessible avenues for the conscious refashioning of African society. While focussing on soccer, the paper includes cricket and rugby, the other two sports that have been most important in reflecting and determining White identity, and in celebrating the nation. We aim to demonstrate both the many ways in which sport has reflected the most important issues of African history, and the ways in which the performance of sport changes that history.When men familiar with Africa find out that we study sports there, they invariably respond with some variation on You know, sport is a religion in Several scholars, too, have observed that South Africa is the most sports-mad country in the world (e.g., Farred, 1997; Nauright, 1997). Why (or if) this is unique to Africa is beyond the scope of the present paper, or whether this belief is the result or the cause of the way sports have been used to state and debate the most important issues in African society. White rule was celebrated through international sport, particularly through rugby, which has been conceptualized as the defining demonstration of White Afrikaner strength and determination. When African rugby teams won at the international level, their victory was quite consciously hailed as a justification of White rule: Countries that allow mixing of races can never field a strong enough team to beat an all-White team from a White-run country.Many fine anthropological ethnographies and analyses of sport have appeared in the last decade. Three areas of concern to anthropology in general have been brilliantly discussed as aspects of sporting practice in one or more countries: the generation of bodily meaning, the construction, maintenance, destruction and reconstruction of identity processes, and the celebration of groups and ideologies.Bodily practice has been analyzed among poor boxers in the U.S. by Wacquant (1995a, 1995b), who described their use of their bodies as a resource as an honourable way to achieve money and success, in contrast to criminal or semi-criminal activity. Archetti (e.g., 1996) studied the meanings given to different styles of play in Argentinian soccer, as Leite Lopes (1997) has done in Brazil, demonstrating the ways in which ideals thought to constitute less-valorized social classes can be read into and then derived from bodily performance. The role of the referee as director or conductor of action has been described by Dyck (2000) in his review of studies of body performance in sports.Perhaps more anthropologists have been concerned to describe identity and boundary generation, maintenance and redefinition in sport than any other area of recent interest in the discipline. Notable among these are studies of struggles in British soccer (there and elsewhere also called football) to define a particular team or style of play as characteristic of one race, social class, ethnicity, or even religion in contrast to others (e.g., Armstrong, 1998; Giulianotti and Armstrong, 1997). In Africa, conflict that centered on whether soccer should represent European or African values, traditional or modern practices, local or global discourse has been described by Stuart (1996), by Anderson (e.g., Anderson, Clarke and Perzigan, 2001), and by Farred (2000); Nauright (1997) has described the way in which rugby has been used to assert Afrikaner identity in Africa.The celebration of state or subcultural values, of hegemony and resistance, the generation and affirmation of alternative societies and relations through sport is the third area of concern to anthropologists of sport for which we will provide data from current practice in Africa. …