The theme of the IUAES congress in this year 2023 is, for us from the Committee on Anthropology of Sports, an invitation for a reflection on the end of our first cycle of existence. In 2017, a group of researchers from all over the world organized a panel in Ottawa on sports practices and, at the end, started the constitution of this committee, which was formalized at the Florianopolis congress, in 2018, in which our first coordination was elected.
Therefore, this is a great time to celebrate our short past and prepare the future of sports studies. Then, we propose a panel that points out the multiple and diverse contributions of this area to the interpretation of the plurality of ways in which people and social groups are organized. As seen in the recent Men’s Football World Cup, the sport goes through political, economic, labor, national identity issues, which need to be analyzed from the theoretical and methodological references of Anthropology. However, the sport is not just about high performance or just male football. The sports practices of indigenous peoples, public policies of sport and leisure, issues involving gender, ethnic relations, disability, age groups and others bring a myriad of transversal themes to sports practice that provide a field increasingly researched by Anthropology, but still have numerous unexplored dimensions.
Thus, this panel is open to works that bring this diversity of themes and issues that cross the Anthropology of Sports. Works that evaluate the contributions already made in the recent past or that point out the paths through which our future should advance.
