Knowledge, Representation, And Collaboration In The Anthropology Of Sport

In the past decade or so, the contemporary sporting world has changed drastically. The rapid rise in access to the digital has ensured the proliferation of sporting discourses across the globe, changing the way people understand and engage with sport. Sporting practice and digital media are now acutely intertwined, shaping media ecologies of sport that affect anthropological endeavors in this area. As anthropologists of sport, we have found ourselves dealing with the ramifications of these media ecologies during and after our fieldwork. Rather than research these digital contexts overtly, we have experienced how the digital is now a social ‘condition’ of the worlds we inhabit. Our interlocutors bring their own well-developed sporting ideologies, understandings and intentions to the ethnographic encounter, affecting how knowledge is produced, what kinds of collaboration can be sustained, and our hopes of appropriate representation.