One Country, One Sport, Endless Knowledge: The Anthropological Study of Sports in South Africa

Abstract

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