In Foreign Fields: The Politics and Experiences of Transnational Sport Migration

Abstract

Thomas Carter's In Foreign Fields offers a novel understanding of sport migrants' transnational experiences as well as insights into the power relations inhering in place-based migratory practices. Within scholarship on globalization and sport labor migration, Carter's book stands in a unique location, theoretically and empirically, making a number of strong contributions to the literature. First, its methodological breadth and depth are unique in the sport migration literature. The book is based on 12 years of observational fieldwork including ethnographic interviews and self-narrated life histories with more than 200 migrants in various sports. In addition, the research participants include not only sport celebrities but also lesser known athletes, their families, and other sport-related laborers. Carter explains the reason for this diverse group of research participants and data sources by arguing that not all sport migrants are athletes, not all migrant athletes are rich celebrities, and migration is rarely an individual act but instead it requires social support (see also Carter's [2011] journal article critiquing the current literature on sport migration). While the predominant data sources in the sport migration literature rely on governing agents and the news media, Carter takes the voices of migrants (according to his expanded definition of sport migrants rather than the more narrow definition typically used in sport migration literature) into account as he describes the process of transnational sport migration. He then rounds out his research design with media sources and interviews that provide social context and analytical detail.This complex methodology gains analytic potency through Carter's anthropological approach to the study of transnational sport migration. For example, he utilizes an anthropological concept of culture that is "both wide-ranging and situated" (p. 9) and, therefore, multiply experienced, moving, and changing rather than fixed. Further, he treats the concepts 'field' and 'fieldwork' as part of the ethnographic enterprise. He perceives fieldwork as momentary encounters that produce partial truths, and he treats transnational migration as varied and heterogeneous. These approaches result in rich explanations throughout this book and provide a distinctive tone to his storytelling.Carter demonstrates the analytic potential of a transnational perspective in studies of sport labor migration. In sport studies literature, the use of transnationalism as theory and methodology has remained, for the most part, at the descriptive level, and the term is often used interchangeably with globalization. While Carter recognizes the contributions of other scholars, he critiques globalization theorists of sport migration who focus on individual agents (often celebrity athletes), noting