Anthropology in Sporting Worlds: Knowledge, Collaboration, and Representation in the Digital Age

The contemporary sporting world is rapidly changing. As digital technologies become more sophisticated, people are finding new ways to use them while playing, watching, teaching, and learning sport. The rapid rise in access to such digital technologies and media around the world continues to drive this innovation. Digital technologies have become central to sporting practice, and this in turn changes the way that people engage with sport. As a global phenomenon, sport is very visible evidence that the digital is now a social ‘condition’ of the worlds we inhabit. As anthropologists of sport, we have found ourselves dealing with the ramifications of this social condition, both during and after our fieldwork. In this volume, we illustrate the increasingly nuanced relationship between digital media ecologies and sporting practice, and examine the ramifications for carrying out the anthropology of sport. This volume is organised into three sections, which address the role of the digital in knowledge production, what kinds of collaborations can be sustained in the digital age, and our hopes of appropriate representation. All the chapters demonstrate that while digital technologies open new modes of knowledge production, the way people consume digital media equally shapes how such knowledge is formed. The digital enables new modes of knowing, but can equally constrain them. Acknowledging this requires us to work collaboratively with our interlocutors, by forging joint understanding that accounts for such complexity. When attempting to represent our interlocutors appropriately, we must be equally mindful of the nuanced ways such representations move and change across digital landscapes. These important ethical and methodological concerns implore the researcher to reconsider their approach to the anthropology of sport. More than anything, they reflect that to do ethnographic work today requires a keen sensitivity to the shifts of digital discourses. At their root, these themes speak to the fundamental relationship between anthropologist and interlocutor. Indeed, doing anthropology on sport in the digital age highlights how this relationship continues to change rapidly