America’s Game(s): A Critical Anthropology of Sport

This insightful volume considers how to locate America in the sporting world: in the traditions and rituals of a national pastime or in the baseball academies run by American professional teams in the Dominican Republic? With the athletes that carry a flag in Olympic ceremonies or among the executives in the boardrooms of Nike? The contributors argue that ‘America’ is located in these familiar sites and practices but also and increasingly in these novel contexts, where the bodies, strategies, and aspirations of others are becoming subject to American ludic, agonistic, and moral orders. Collectively, their contention is that American sports as a category needs to be reconsidered, to take into account the extensive networks of expertise, finance, and performance moving out from American athletic institutions as well as the ever increasing influx of talent coming from abroad that sustains American collegiate and professional athletics.

As America strives to balance cosmopolitan objectives with resurgent nationalism, it is critical to consider ‘American sports’ from within and without. This book will be of great interest to scholars of culture, politics, and sport.

This book was previously published as a special issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport.