Sport, migration, and gender in the neoliberal age

Besnier, Niko; Calabrò, Domenica Gisella; Guinness, Daniel

doi:10.4324/9780429423277-2

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…Since the late 1980s, increasingly commercialized sporting industries have opened new paths to social and global mobility for elite athletes, and they have inspired similar dreams for scores more aspirants (Besnier et al., 2021). Pursuing these dreams, athletes follow strict training programs (Besnier, 2012; Esson, 2013; Guinness, 2018); become fervently religious in the hope of harnessing divine powers (Kovač, 2022; Rial, 2012); and co‐opt occult forces (Fanoli, 2022; Hann et al., 2021).…”

Section: Neoliberal Sporting Subjects?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“Punching is a sickness”

Hopkinson

2024

American Ethnologist

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Men who box professionally in Accra recognize that bouts are physically harmful and that they involve violently subordinating one another. Yet they also share a sense that bouts can be spaces of mutual becoming and affirmation. To navigate the tension between harm and affirmation, boxers and coaches couch their work between the ropes in idioms of care and mutual support. These idioms reflect their understanding that their lives and futures are mutually dependent and intertwined. Yet conflicting accounts of what constitutes appropriate care in the ring arise when boxing's violence is framed in relation to different imagined futures, and when mutual benefit is imagined to occur in the more or less distant future. In the boxing ring and beyond, divergent forms of temporal work animate the unsettled and ambiguous nature of care.

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Section: Neoliberal Sporting Subjects?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“Punching is a sickness”

Hopkinson

2024

American Ethnologist

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“…Competition has always been central to amateur and professional sports, and this has increased since the global sports industry has become commercialized, professionalized, infused with money, and a potential source of livelihood (Besnier, Brownell & Carter 2017: chap. 8; Besnier, Calabrò & Guinness 2021; Besnier, Guinness, Hann & Kovač 2018; Kovač 2022). Yet Nancy's example, and that of thousands of aspiring and professional athletes in Iten, suggests that there is a need to ethnographically substantiate how people exactly participate in this competitive industry, how they negotiate and ascribe different values to the notion of competition, and how they constantly debate over the most beneficial ways of participating in competitive global ‘circuits’ (Cole & Groes 2016) of people and capital.…”

Section: Figurementioning

confidence: 99%

‘A place for training, not for competition’: negotiations of competition and agency among long‐distance runners in Kenya

Kovač

2023

Royal Anthropological Inst

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Kenyan long‐distance runners have for decades famously dominated international athletic competitions. Most of the aspiring runners live and train in the highlands of northwest Kenya, in Elgeyo Marakwet County, where they have access to competitive peer groups of budding athletes and an elaborate infrastructure of camps, coaches, and managers. The most promising and successful ones travel abroad to take part in international races, only to quickly return and continue training in the ‘county of champions’. Meanwhile, Kenya is undergoing a rapid transformation, envisioned by the government's development plan, which promises to transform it into a ‘globally competitive and prosperous country’. On the surface, competition is a self‐explanatory notion that drives the transnational sports industry and the state's development plan. However, ethnography of the county's capital, Iten, and its community of athletes reveals tensions: Kenyans take up, negotiate, appropriate, and challenge meanings of competition offered by the state and the sports industry on ecological, gendered, and moral grounds. Ethnography of ideologies of competition in Iten, conceptualized as moral, aesthetic, and gendered projects, complicates accounts of competition as a tool for global neoliberal governance. It also provides an alternative to analyses of African subjects’ agency in global circulation of capital, people, and ideas, namely analyses subsumed under signs of marginality, dependence, and subjection.

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Family first: The role of family in Māori and Pasifika professional athlete success

Borell,

Enari

2024

International Review for the Sociology of Sport

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Throughout the Pacific, the whānau/’āiga (family) is an integral element of community and identity. Within Polynesian communities, it is common for the whānau (family – Māori) or ‘aiga (family – Samoan) to be the most important aspect of one's existence. For many Polynesian (Māori and Pacific) athletes, the family unit is central to their ability to succeed in professional sport. The cultural identity that is developed within the family unit as well as the support and nurturing provided are ingredients for Polynesian athletes to thrive in spaces where they may not otherwise: gaining collective support in ways that are not always readily afforded to Western society. This paper draws from the stories of male professional Māori and Pasifika rugby league athletes to provide deeper insight into the critical role of Polynesian families in professional sport. As Polynesian sport academics, who were given deep insight from these athletes, we use our insider lens to tell this story.

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Sport, migration, and gender in the neoliberal age

Cited by 3 publications

References 1 publication

“Punching is a sickness”

“Punching is a sickness”

‘A place for training, not for competition’: negotiations of competition and agency among long‐distance runners in Kenya

Family first: The role of family in Māori and Pasifika professional athlete success

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