Scouting an Anthropology of Sport

Abstract

Keywords: anthropology, sport, soccer, institutions, teaching and research Introduction(1)In pursuing the development of an anthropology of it is important that we are mindful of the connections amongst the sorts of persons, issues, institutions and powers that shape the practices and production of both and anthropology. Both and anthropology commonly produce understandings and experiences that depend on local communities but whose significances are best understood when we locate them as embedded in much broader and more complex cultural environments. Here I record my intention to write from a local perspective, as a Canadian anthropologist living and working in the antipodes; but in so doing I write to the broader concerns of an anthropology of that claims a right to deal with any sport, from anywhere and from any era.Australia has had an important role in the history and development of anthropology. While perhaps less central to many of the contemporary concerns of the discipline, anthropology in Australia remains connected to the waxing and waning of international trends in the discipline. It is certainly articulated to the larger enterprise of an anthropology of sport. Following the appearance of a few articles in Australian anthropology journals (Mewett, 1999; Palmer, 1998a, 1998b), an issue of the flagship journal of the Australian Anthropological Society, The Australian Journal of Anthropology (Palmer, 2002), was devoted to the topic. Yet this issue of the journal was not restricted to sports in Australia; it included papers on a variety of sports connected to diverse places around the world. Notably, it also included papers from a cultural historian and a human geographer. However, to fail to recognize appropriately the particular sorts of local conditions under which it is possible to write and to research from Australia is to miss, I think in a fundamental way, the particular local concerns of any more global ethnographic enterprise. We may, in some respects, all be cosmopolitans now but many of us continue to live and to work as ethnographers somewhere on the periphery. The language of this is telling. Talk of core and periphery not only identifies a recognized set of academic concerns, a set of issues and problems, but also assumes that some places or sports are more core than others, that some analytical issues are more core than others.With this in mind, I want to make three particular points before drawing them together to say something more general about the development of an anthropology of and the ways we might imagine a future for it. First, I explore the presence of what can be identified as a developing and generic sport studies focus and suggest that this must be considered in any shaping of the potential of an anthropology of sport. Second, I offer a brief account of certain aspects of one of my current research interests, pertaining to the anthropology of the soccer or the world game in Perth, Western Australia, to show how it can illuminate some of the ways that local social and academic conditions shape such an account. Finally, I suggest that teaching the anthropology of can provide an accessible and useful way of encouraging entry into anthropology, as a way of interesting some who find the traditional concerns of our discipline almost arcane and anachronistic in relation to their everyday lives.Overall, these three points come together to shape our anthropological practices in ways worth examining. It is the intersections and interconnections among these aspects of our anthropological practice that will continue to invest our particular contributions to the understanding of sports with a sense of contributing to a larger body of scholarship while retaining something of the particularity of our discipline. So in developing these points, even in the attenuated way possible here, I take seriously the notion of scouting the anthropology of signalled in my title. …