Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T19:44:54.285Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

9 - Global Sport Industries, Comparison, and Economies of Scales

from Part III - Distant and Fluid Comparisons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 May 2020

Michael Schnegg
Affiliation:
Universität Hamburg
Edward D. Lowe
Affiliation:
Soka University of America
Get access

Summary

Comparison figured centrally in the GLOBALSPORT project, which investigated the migration of athletes and aspiring athletes in various sports, along several geographical and aspirational trajectories. In its initial design, the project was framed by broad generalizations. Not surprisingly, field researchers encountered specificities during their fieldwork, which contradicted some of the original insights. The team had to grapple with the tension between comparisons across sites and the unique contexts found in each site. The common thread in all subprojects was the presence of global sport industries in people’s lived experiences. These industries have undergone major reconfigurations through corporatization, mediatization, and commercialization, which have engendered a dramatic increase in athletes’ transnational mobility. This mobility and the industries that create and sustain it have restructured individual lives and cultural expectations as preconditions for success. The comparisons reveal common themes in the transformation of key aspects of experience. But comparison also reveals how different scalar processes configure these themes in the contexts of specific field sites.

Type
Chapter
Information
Comparing Cultures
Innovations in Comparative Ethnography
, pp. 201 - 222
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1991. “Writing against Culture.” In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, edited by Fox, Richard, 137–62. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research.Google Scholar
Andrews, David L., and Silk, Michael L., eds. 2012. Sport and Neoliberalism: Politics, Consumption, and Culture. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Besnier, Niko. 2009. Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.Google Scholar
Besnier, Niko. 2012. “The Athlete’s Body and the Global Condition: Tongan Rugby Players in Japan.American Ethnologist 39 (3): 491–510.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Besnier, Niko, and Brownell, Susan. 2012. “Sport, Modernity, and the Body.Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 443–59.Google Scholar
Besnier, Niko, Brownell, Susan, and Carter, Thomas F.. 2018a. The Anthropology of Sport: Bodies, Borders, Biopolitics. Oakland: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Besnier, Niko, Guinness, Daniel, Hann, Mark, and Kovač, Uroš. 2018b. “Rethinking Masculinity in the Neoliberal Age: Cameroonian Footballers, Fijian Rugby Players, and Senegalese Wrestlers.Comparative Studies in Society and History 60 (4): 839–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burstyn, Varda. 1999. The Rites of Men: Manhood, Politics, and the Culture of Sport. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Clifford, James, and Marcus, George E., eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Coleman, Simon, 2007. The Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Comaroff, Jean, and Comaroff, John L.. 2000. “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming.” Public Culture 12 (2): 291–43.Google Scholar
Connell, Raewyn W. 1995. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Connell, Raewyn W., and Messerschmidt, James W.. 2005. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.Gender & Society 19 (6): 829–59.Google Scholar
Darby, Paul, Akindes, Gerard, and Kirwin, Matthew. 2007. “Football Academies and the Migration of African Football Labour to Europe.Journal of Sport and Social Issues 31 (2): 143–61.Google Scholar
di Leonardo, Micaela, ed. 1990. Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Esson, James. 2013. “A Body and a Dream at a Vital Conjuncture: Ghanaian Youth, Uncertainty and the Allure of Football.Geoforum 47 (June): 84–89.Google Scholar
Esson, James. 2015. “You Have to Try your Luck: Male Ghanaian Youth and the Uncertainty of Football Migration.Environment and Planning A 47 (6): 1383–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferguson, James. 2015. Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Gamburd, Michele R. 2000. The Kitchen Spoon’s Handle: Transnationalism and Sri Lanka’s Migrant Housemaids. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Gershon, Ilana. 2011. “Neoliberal Agency.Current Anthropology 52 (4): 537–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gershon, Ilana, and Alexy, Allison. 2011. “The Ethics of Disconnection in a Neoliberal Age.Anthropological Quarterly 84 (4): 799–808.Google Scholar
Gingrich, Andre. 2012. “Comparative Methods in Socio-Cultural Anthropology Today.” In The SAGE Handbook of Social Anthropology, edited by Fardon, Richard, Harris, Oliva, Marchand, Trevor H. J., Nuttall, Mark, Shore, Cris, Strang, Veronica, and Wilson, Richard A., 211–22. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Guinness, Daniel, and Besnier, Niko. 2016. “Nation, Nationalism, and Sport: Fijian Rugby in the Local–Global Nexus.Anthropological Quarterly 89 (4): 1107–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guttmann, Allen. 1994. Games and Empires: Modern Sports and Cultural Imperialism. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Handler, Richard. 2009. “The Uses of Incommensurability in Anthropology.New Literary History 40 (3): 627–47.Google Scholar
Hann, Mark. 2018. “Sporting Aspirations: Football, Wrestling, and Neoliberal Subjectivity in Urban Senegal.” PhD thesis, Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Harvey, David W. 1968. “Pattern, Process, and the Scale Problem in Geographical Research.Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 45 (September): 71–78.Google Scholar
Herle, Anita, and Rouse, Sandra, eds. 1998. Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Centenary Essays on the 1898 Anthropological Expedition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kiste, Robert C., and Marshall, Mac, eds. 1998. American Anthropology in Micronesia: An Assessment. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.Google Scholar
Kovač, Uroš. 2018. “The Precarity of Masculinity: Football, Pentecostalism, and Transnational Aspirations in Cameroon.” PhD thesis, Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Lazar, Sian. 2012. “Disjunctive Comparison: Citizenship and Trade Unionism in Bolivia and Argentina.Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (n.s.) 18 (2): 349–68.Google Scholar
Lefebvre, Henri. 1974. “La production de l’espace.L’homme et la société 31 (1): 15–32.Google Scholar
Marcus, George E. 1995. “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography.Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marcus, George E., and Fisher, Michael M. J., eds. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
McGovern, Patrick. 2002. “Globalization or Internationalization? Foreign Footballers in the English League, 1946–95.Sociology 36 (1): 23–42.Google Scholar
McGuigan, Jim. 2014. “The Neoliberal Self.Culture Unbound 6: 223–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, Toby, Lawrence, Geoffrey, McKay, Jim, and Rowe, David. 1999. “Modifying the Sign: Sport and Globalization.Social Text 17: 15–33.Google Scholar
Rodriguez, Robyn M. 2010. Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Rose, Nikolas, and Miller, Peter. 2008. Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Scherer, Jay, and Jackson, Steve. 2010. Globalization, Sport and Corporate Nationalism: The New Cultural Economy of the New Zealand All Blacks. Oxford: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Silverman, Sydel. 2011. “The Puerto Rico Project: Reflections Sixty Years Later.” Identities 18 (3): 179–84.Google Scholar
Taylor, Matthew. 2006. “Global Players? Football, Migration and Globalization, c1930–2000.Historical Social Research 31 (1): 7–30.Google Scholar
Tomlinson, Matt, and Tengan, Ty P. Kāwika, eds. 2016. New Mana: Transformations of a Classic Concept in Pacific Languages and Cultures. Canberra: ANU ePress.Google Scholar
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Vogt, Evon Z. 1994. Fieldwork among the Maya: Reflections on the Harvard Chiapas Project. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
West, Paige. 2006. Conservation Is Our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×