Review: Sport in the Making of Celtic Cutlures

Abstract

As I know to my cost, sport especially spectator sport has now so permeated our contemporary culture that to profess no great interest in any aspect of it is to encounter, particularly from males, much the same shocked reaction that might have been provoked if, in 1560s Edinburgh, you were to have casually announced your total indifference as to whether Scotland was Catholic or Protestant. To a rapidly diminishing minority of sports-agnostics like myself, this may seem a crazy state of affairs. But it's a fact nevertheless. Inevitably and rightly, therefore, it has led to the academic world in the shape, for instance, of the 14 contributors to this collection of essays and papers getting to grips with sport's social, political, literary and other dimensions. The result, in the present case at any rate, is both fascinating and illuminating not least with regard to the way in which, over the last 100 or 150 years, sport came to have a key role in the way that nationality and identity is defined in a number of those European nations or regions whose inhabitants are commonly considered Celtic.