One Country, One Sport, Endless Knowledge: The Anthropological Study of Sports in South Africa
Keywords:
sport, South Africa, reconciliationAbstract
Sport was one of the most important venues for the construction of difference and inequality in apartheid South Africa. The construction of the body and the boundaries main taining difference between the defined groups in South Africa are described in this paper, as well as the use of sports talk to define and seek national unity and to construct national character. Soccer was set aside as the sport most suited to non-Whites, thus becoming available as one of the most important venues for statements of Black identity, organizational competence, pride and excellence. Despite the exaggeration of difference and segmentation of the population into ostensibly independent geographic regions in the past, despite continuing attempts to maintain the boundaries of White ethnicity, despite tremendous, racialized differences in wealth, the discourse of sport in South Africa supports the new nation, from the President to the poorest fan watching games through holes in the fence
Downloads
Publication Facts
Reviewer profiles N/A
Author statements
- Editor & editorial board
- profiles
- Academic society
- Canadian Anthropology Society
- Publisher
- University of Victoria
To learn about these publication facts, click 
PF is maintained by the Public Knowledge Project
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Authors contributing to Anthropologica agree to release their articles under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported license. This licence allows anyone to share their work (copy, distribute, transmit) and to adapt it for non-commercial purposes provided that appropriate attribution is given, and that in the event of reuse or distribution, the terms of this license are made clear.
Authors retain copyright of their work and grant the journal right of first publication.
Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
