Scholars have long shown the social significance of sport cultures in the making of class, race, ethnic and gender relations in ways through which national and regional economies and identities are shaped and negotiated. However, sport studies have mostly tended to be confined within the debates of commercialization, mediatization and neoliberal market economies. Sport involves a search for pleasurable, de-routinised, emotionally charged competitive space, micro-acts of sociability and mimesis or a combination of all these aspects of excitement, and thereby enunciates a largely non-verbal and a non-scripted spectacle of theatrical movements and action (Elias 1978; Dunning 1998). Beyond its quest for excitement, pleasure and leisure, sport is imbued with power relations, contestations and conflicts both at the individual and collective levels. It entails the questions of identity, ideology, embodiment, emotion, aspiration and mobility along with the drifts in global, national and regional economy and culture. While international and national sports associations increasingly adopted anti-racist, equity-based and justice-oriented policies, sporting individuals, spectators, fans, and franchises continually remake the relations of power in the field of sport and in the broader social setting. Further, sport is seen as an avenue for articulating aspirations and claims to upward social mobility.
Situating the interfaces of sport, stratification and social mobility, this panel seeks contributions that explore sports subjects and sporting experiences—playing, watching and organizing—entangled in the making and remaking of hierarchies and inequalities in transnational and regional contexts of ethnographic significance. As its objectives, the panel will capture themes around identity and embodiment, youth and emergent cultures of health and social status, global media and economy, labour relations, doping and discipline, and discussions around class, caste, religion, gender and racial relations, which are critical to the anthropology of sport, stratification and social mobility and the questions of identity and inequality.
