240534 VO MM3 The Anthropology of Sports: Concepts, Potentials, Examples (2023W)

Sports have become highly influential spheres of popular culture and also act as trend setters in visual culture worldwide. Today sports influence, and constitute themselves, major social institutions, and therefore have considerable effect on people’s lives.
This course provides an overview of the history of social anthropological research on sports both competitive and recreational and analyzes developments in local, ethnic, national and global sports scenes.
First, important theories and concepts, from ancient thoughts up to recent research approaches, which determined the notions of sports and play and came to grips with sports’ origins, their diverse cultural traits, body concepts, and gender aspects as well as with sports’ political and other utilizations, will be presented and discussed. Thereafter the course will focus on analyses of sportive activities as forms of social interactions of the people engaged. Examples presented and discussed will range from local or ethnic sports like Mongolian wrestling to global trends like the fitness boom and mega-events like the Olympics. It will be shown how phenomena and developments, such as globalization, migration, transnationality, social disparity, climate change, exclusion, nationalisms, identity constructions and many more, influence in often contradictory ways sports and the people engaged in them and how they navigate through those challenges. Particular focus will be laid on the manifold potentials of social anthropological research on sports, like its capacity to illuminate processes of colonization and decolonization, modernization, glocalization, construction of multiple identities, changes in body cultures, gender roles and more.
While this course is based on lectures by the teacher, students´ participation will be encouraged and highly appreciated and they shall prepare for the class sessions by reading mandatory as well as recommended literature.