Interrogating Sport through Anthropology

Abstract (English)

Sport is, arguably, a set of practices and beliefs that are astoundingly consistent and coherent everywhere in the world. Sport's seeming hegemonic way of understanding and creating the world is one that the anthropology of sport can and should query. This panel raises questions about the critical epistemologies that drive, underpin, and justify practices, organizations, and beliefs of sport in an attempt to seek epistemic redefinitions of sport by considering ways in which sport can be altered, challenged, or otherwise embodied. Various perspectives of indigeneity, decoloniality, and marginality and more could reorder uneven power dynamics that have historically shaped sport as well as anthropological knowledge production. Papers in this panel seek to problematize the core elements and ideologies of sport to question what it is to play, to invoke one's world and simply be part of the world. Local permutations of what is presented as a globalizing force provide apt illustrations of how anthropology can respond to seeming unquestioned, overwhelming notions of what it means to be human embodied in sport.