Why studying sports matters

Sports has been in the news lately, but not just in the sports section of newspapers, sports talk radio, or ESPN. Instead, sports have increasingly been covered by legal reporters and mainstream journalists because of the numerous scandals that have plagued both professional and amateur sports. The most recent scandals have hit all the major professional sports (and not only in the United States). To summarize, Major League Baseball is plagued by allegations of illegal steroid and other drug use (symbolized by Barry Bonds’ alleged use of performance enhancing drugs in his pursuit of the home run record); the NFL (American football) is dealing with all sorts of off-field criminal activities (most recently the Atlanta Falcon’s star quarterback Michael Vick’s involvement in dogfighting); and perhaps most problematic of all is the NBA’s referee scandal, where a referee has been accused of conspiracy to fix NBA games for gambling rings. The Tour de France, still reeling from last year’s champion’s violation of drug policies, had its pre-race favorite and the front runner during the race both pulled out of competition because of more doping allegations.

On August 1st, even The Diane Rehm show, a public radio call-in show that usually covers news, politics, the arts and literature, dedicated a show to the numerous scandals in sports. Wider society, or at least the reporters who have access to the airwaves, seem to be in great angst over the epidemic of unlawful and unethical practices of our sports heroes. Explaining why there is such concern over these scandals, Sally Jenkins of the Washington Posts, said:

“We tend to assign responsibility for protecting our ethics and our concepts of virtue to athletes, more than any other figures in our culture. We don’t ask the same of actors, singers, we don’t even ask it frankly right now of our Attorney General. We actually ask athletes to protect our values to a certain extent. … Kids take messages from these people, they’re not taking messages from the Attorney General of the United States when it comes to playing with the truth. With all three of these things going on at the same time, have we allowed values in our games to deteriorate? Yes, we have, we have become a permissive society and that’s reflected in our games.”

Anthropologist Jeremy MacClancy of Oxford Brookes University makes a similar point in the introduction to his 1996 volume Sports, Identity, and Ethnicity, in that sports are a cultural arena that not only reflects society, but also, through its particular disciplining and idealization of the human body in agonistic competition, reflects on society. Anthropologists have long studied sports, dating at least as far back as James Mooney’s 1890 study of Cherokee lacrosse (the sport that I played in college and continue to be involved in as a college and high school referee and head coach of a college club team) published in the American Anthropologist. Yet the anthropological study of sports, as many of the specialists in this field have pointed out, has been peripheral as field in the past for two major reasons: the dismissal by academics of the value in studying popular culture and the historical focus of anthropology on the “primitive” (only “moderns” play sports, at least according to classical definitions of sports such as the one by Norbert Elias: “contests involving bodily strength or skills of a non-military type [with] rules constraining the contestants … aimed at reducing the risk of physical injury to a minimum”).But things have changed in anthropology, as they have in sports. We anthropologists often seem to be obsessed with popular culture, looking at everything from Japanese Hip-Hop to Second Life. Now more than ever, the study of sports as popular culture by anthropologists is crucial to understanding all the major issues in social relations and cultural meanings that we grapple with, such as power, gender, and identity. For example, in a recent article in City and Society, anthropologist Thomas Carter of the University of Brighton has argued that sports as a public spectacle has become a major feature marking the emergence of global cities. More importantly, our students, colleagues, and neighbors are all talking about sports; to stay relevant, we need to keep up our end of the conversation.

In the posts that follow, I will discuss some recent studies by anthropologists on sports, including some of my own work, that demonstrate the wide array of issues that can be fruitfully explored by using sports as a lens.