Sport, Dance and Embodied Identities

Description

Sport and dance command the passions and devotion of countless athletes, dancers and fans worldwide. Although conventionally thought to reside within separate social realms, these two embodied cultural forms are revealed in this benchmark volume to share a vital capacity to constitute and express identities through their practiced movements and scripted forms. Thus, the work of choreographers and coaches along with the performances of dancers and athletes offer not merely entertainment and aesthetic accomplishment but also powerful means for celebrating existing social arrangements and cultural ideals or, alternately, for imagining and advocating new ones. Drawing on a wide selection of sport and dance activities from around the world, this book elucidates the ways in which embodied performances both mirror and reshape social life. It traces, for example, how football, salsa and tango can each be employed to articulate or rewrite national and gender identities. Also examined are children's sport and the dynamics by which immigration and cultural integration, along with the socialization of children and youth, may be directed through the organization of community sport. The volume investigates the marshalling of sport and dance in settings from Africa to Ireland as vehicles for framing moral issues that revolve around the appropriate use, protection and exhibition of the body. This innovative study establishes the paradoxical fashion in which dance and sport can unite certain people and communities while at the same time serving exclusionary and nationalistic purposes.

Noel Dyck Professor of Social Anthropology,Simon Fraser University Eduardo P. Archetti Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo

'This volume makes a welcome contribution to the field by bringing studies of sport and dance to the fore and theorising them as fields of social and political negotiation and struggle.' Nicolas Argenti, Brunel University 'Because a good proportion of the chapters link sport and dance to such diverse but core issues as nationalism, memory, political violence, modernity, transnational flows and post-colonial and post-modern identities, this book will interest a much wider audience than specialists in embodied practice' Nicolas Argenti (Brunel University) - Social Anthropology Journal 'Sport, dance, and embodied identities, a collection of theoretically sophisticated and ethnographically rich essays, serves as a welcome addition to the burgeoning fields of the anthropology of sport, body, and dance.' Laura Spielvogel, The Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute