Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. xi, 321 pp. (B&W photos.) US$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-520-28901-7.
“Croquet set for sale. Catholics need not apply.” A notorious classified from The Irish Times in the early 1900s—two sentences, eight words that sum up much of this book—the interconnections of sport, economics, and nationalist division along religious lines. All that’s missing, for its time, is gender.
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. In order, we get sport and: history; colonialism; health; social class, race, ethnicity; sex, gender, sexuality; cultural performance, mega-events; nations, nationalism; and the world system. Hence, the book fits well with the format for a semester-long module in this subfield.
The trio’s prose is not pretentious, but pellucid. Little learning, other than a basic grounding in anthropology, is assumed. Major thinkers and concepts are introduced in a deliberated, easy-to-understand manner. I did not spot any gross intellectual distortion in the process. Painstaking clarification is the key tone here, rather than an attention-grabbing oversimplification. Bourdieu is not bowdlerized, Foucault is not fumbled with.
Like their predecessors (including myself, twenty-two years ago), the trio bewail the persistent marginality of sport within our discipline. Maybe, just maybe, that tide is finally turning as neoliberal economics in a globalizing world advance soft power agendas, and the salience of sport as a multimoded vehicle serving diverse purpose. The consequences of this shift are already patent, at least in UK academia: the seeming rise and rise of sports studies in universities across the land, which usually include some social science component. As far as I can judge, over the years the number of my dissertation students choosing to research sport-related phenomena increases, slowly, steadily.
The trio (one a former Olympian) are keen to be contemporary. Perhaps this explains why study of the Olympic Games looms large throughout the book, and why any discussion of local sports tends to be relatively brief. An accompanying tension, common to all textbooks, is figuring the balance between illuminating generalizations and illustrative ethnography. Since many anthropological generalities can overlap with their sociological counterparts, a strong way to argue the power of our discipline is to provide the ethnographic details which undercut others’ precipitate generalizations. A valuable section in the book is the trio’s demolition of the sport/religion equation: “religion” is far too Eurocentric to be of much use in cross-cultural comparison; better to see if, how, practitioners give sporting and spiritual practices similar ends.
The chapter on health and the environment is equally informative. Besides underlining the very different ways some imagine the relations between physical practice, well-being, and their place in the cosmos, the trio also emphasize that the concept of health is too often neglected, as though unworthy of study. As a novelist (I forget whom) once said about his protagonist, “His health was so good, he wasn’t aware of it.” Yet health, and its cognates in other cultures, are complex concepts, in real need of sensitive unpacking.
On sex, the trio promote the argument that human bodies are so diverse and their structures so intricate that it is impossible to differentiate all individuals conclusively into either side of a binary code. So far, clinical science is just not up to the job; it cannot provide the requisite degree of classificatory exactitude. Instead sports administrators rely on an arbitrary ideology which will most likely appear increasingly out of place.
Co-authoring comes with its own benefits and challenges—three know more, and have experienced more than one—but, like any academic book, a co-authored one requires consistency of tone and argument. Maybe this accounts for the occasional striking change of tone in the text, e.g. Romans were “somewhat prudish” (24); a Jew, who fled the Nazis, “should have known better” than research “racial” difference in the 1952 Olympics (83); “simple farmers” (130); “religion” is deconstructed, then revived later as a worthwhile term (184, 198). Also, as the son of a proud Irishman who became a labour migrant to the UK, I was not happy to be instructed that “the status of Ireland as a colony is somewhat debatable” (62).
The trio conclude their useful text with, “More than any other form of human activity, [emphasis mine] sport embodies some of the fundamental questions that anthropology poses” (258): more than sexual congress and sentimental entanglement? Last year, I gave a talk on communication at a teacher-trainer college in a north Argentinian frontier town. When I finished, a student raised her hand, and asked, “What about love?”
Jeremy MacClancy
Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, United Kingdom