Antropologia do Esporte

Sportive megaevents draw some of the biggest audiences around the world. At the same time, national sports and local sportive past times are used as ways to strengthen many and diverse social identities in groups as varied as: Paralympic Games, Military World Games, Jewish Games (Maccabiah), LGBTQIA Games, World Games for Indigenous People, among many others, in a movement which has been growing over the last decades. Following the importance of sports in local, national, and international arenas, an increasing number of anthropologists have been dedicated to studying these sportive practices, consolidating this area in our discipline. This effort has resulted in the production of many ethnographies, not only about discussing specific dimensions of sportive practices, but also dialoguing with many other areas, such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, politics, urbanization, economics, corporality, emotions and tourism, or revisiting classical themes as kinship and rituality. Therefore, this panel proposes to create a place of encounters among all these individual and local initiatives. Following the panel organized in Ottawa 2017, our aim is to congregate different perspectives and theoretical references of the Anthropology of Sports to amplify our capacity to put our local ethnographies in dialogue with the transnational context which characterizes the current construction of sportive fieldwork and to increase our comparative perspective within and across disciplines.

The field of study of Sports Anthropology has grown considerably in recent years. In Brazil, since the last two editions of the Brazilian Meeting of Anthropology, there are two working groups in function of the great demand of submitted researches that approached studies in this area. Sports activities, as a social function, comprise much more than a bodily practice. They approach political, economic and cultural aspects ranging from the circulation of athletes and large sums of money, to the transposition of conflicts between nations being transferred to sports arenas. These characteristics connect sport directly to the process of globalization, which has been intensified in recent decades. This panel has the objective of holding debates that approach sports and globalization, from the point of view of different researchers in the area. From this perspective, it is intended to hold three sessions covering the themes: gender, sexuality and body; careers and consumption; transnational circulation, nations and identities.

Anthropology plays important roles in the field of sport studies. This association began in the late 19th century when sport in different social contexts were noticed, documented and analyzed by anthropologists in ethnographies as one aspect of studying local culture. Not limited to anthropology, scholars from other disciplines, such as education, physical development, sociology and social development have also applied anthropological theories and methodologies for investigating meaning and function of sport in different societies. In parallel, the revival of the modern Olympic Games reflected the desire to promote peace education, cross-cultural understanding, coexistence and well-being amongst people and nations.
Anthropological approaches are important for our understanding of the movements, impacts and challenges related to sport events (Besnier & Brownell, 2012), however, after almost one decade, further development in this field is not clear. With the purpose of reviewing and discussing anthropological knowledge applications and challenges in past, present, and potential sport events, including Olympic and Paralympic Games, this panel invites submissions from scholars who are concerned with or have used anthropological theories and methodologies for investigation of sport and sport events. It welcomes ethnographic case studies, theoretical research, and any form of anthropological investigations and applications, either within communities or in global contexts.