THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF SPORT: Bodies, Borders, Biopolitics

摘要

"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.