Books by Thomas F Carter
In Foreign Fields examines the lives, decisions and challenges faced by transnational sport migra... more In Foreign Fields examines the lives, decisions and challenges faced by transnational sport migrants - those professionals working in the sports industry who cross borders as part of their professional lives. Despite a great deal of romance surrounding international celebrity athletes, the vast majority of transnational sport migrants - players, journalists, coaches, administrators and medical personnel - toil far away from the limelight. Based on twelve years of ethnographic research conducted on three continents, I trace their lives, routes and experiences, documenting their travels and travails. I argue that far from the ease of mobility that celebrity sports stars enjoy, the vast majority of transnational sports migrants make huge sacrifices and labour under political restrictions, often enforced by sport's governing bodies. This unique and clearly written study will make fascinating reading for anthropologists, sociologists and anyone interested in the lives of those who follow their sporting dreams.
The Introduction is available below
Winner of 2009 Outstanding Book Award, North American Society for the Sociology of Sport.
In p... more Winner of 2009 Outstanding Book Award, North American Society for the Sociology of Sport.
In parks and cafes, homes and stadium stands, Cubans talk baseball. I contend that when they are analyzing and debating plays, games, teams, and athletes, Cubans are exchanging ideas not just about baseball but also about Cuba and cubanidad, or what it means to be Cuban. I explore the interconnections between baseball and Cuban identity. Suggesting that baseball is in many ways an apt metaphor for cubanidad, I point out aspects of the sport that resonate with Cuban social and political life: the perpetual tension between risk and security, the interplay between individual style and collective regulation, and the risky journeys undertaken with the intention, but not the guarantee, of returning home.
Chapter One is available below
Papers by Thomas F Carter
Mega-events like the Olympic Games and FIFA World Cup transform cities. These transformations are... more Mega-events like the Olympic Games and FIFA World Cup transform cities. These transformations are a conscious aim of hosting such events, hailed by organisers and politicians as lasting legacies for the benefit of the population. Mounting evidence suggests, however, that such events serve to harm local populations, deepening inequality and marginalisation with most positive impacts proving ephemeral (Boykoff 2013). Despite this, media coverage of such events tends to marginalise critical voices (Boykoff 2014; Lenskyj 2004), instead encouraging the celebration of national pride. These events, as Horne (2017) argues, are mediated spectacles of transformation, promoting an oftenidealised image of the host city or country on the global stage. Yet this mediated image is contested, with those excluded from the event using alternative media to promote different understandings of what the city could be. This chapter focusses on one group of activists seeking to challenge the idealised image of Rio de Janeiro presented at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, which sought to exclude the (in)famous favelas from the vision of the city. Rio Olympic Neighbourhood Watch (RioOnWatch) is a media project of the Rio de Janeiro-based NGO Catalytic Communities (CatComm). It provides a platform for news and discussion about development in the Olympic city from the perspective of favela residents, publishing in both English and Portuguese. Initiated in 2010, eight months after Rio won the right to host the 2016 Olympic Games, the news site published over 1,500 interlinked articles in two languages over six years, detailing every twist and turn in the preparations for Rio 2016. This chapter analyses one aspect of RioOnWatch's work as a discourse intervention to improve policies for Rio's favela communities by transforming the discourse which legitimises state violence in informal communities. Through shifting the discourse, RioOnWatch aimed to leave a lasting legacy of diminished state violence in favelas. The chapter starts with an explanation of how the site operates and the various missions of the site before introducing the concept of discourse intervention, and examining CatComm's attempt to change the discourse around favelas in the Olympic spotlight. RioOnWatch RioOnWatch is run by the CatComm team, which remains small and loose, with just five paid members of staff. Several different types of material are produced for the site from event reports and Q&A interviews to photo essays and book reviews. These features range from five hundred words to well over a thousand words, as well as providing different types of information in different styles, with all articles required to focus on favela perspectives, frequently quoting residents. This diversity is part of a deliberate attempt to attract readers with different interests and different reading habits, while focussing on the site's core mission by foregrounding favela perspectives. The majority of articles are written by interns, mostly young Westerners on study abroad programmes in Rio de Janeiro or recent graduates looking for international experience in urban planning issues, but also including Masters and doctoral students and those with an interest in Brazilian development. These are termed 'International Observers', following activists who protested against the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics also using International Observers. Interns, in most cases, are committed to the project for a three-month period and complete a project designed around their skills and interests, in a particular community or on a particular subject that is deemed in need of coverage by the CatComm team (via regular input from favela residents). Interns also regularly respond to requests for coverage made by community leaders, including reporting on human rights violations, community meetings and cultural events. Researchers in Rio de Janeiro for
This article examines South African professional cricketers’ motivations for coming to the UK to ... more This article examines South African professional cricketers’ motivations for coming to the UK to ply their trade. Our data covers fifteen years of migratory cricketers leaving South Africa for the northern hemisphere. Through numerous interviews, these migrants explain their reasons for leaving South Africa. The South Africans list numerous motivations for engaging in migration, which includes career opportunities, financial incentives, developing professional networks, and family safety, among others. Our focus in this article is on the perceived problems with the governance of South African cricket, and the economic differences and sporting conditions between South Africa and the United Kingdom.
International Journal of Cuban Studies, 2013
The Cuban government creates and seeks opportunities to engage in collaboration, diplomacy, comme... more The Cuban government creates and seeks opportunities to engage in collaboration, diplomacy, commerce, and trade in order to pursue its own concepts of progressive international development, which involves garnering much needed hard currency and political benefits for its national interests. Such strategies include the organisation and deployment of sport and physical activity programmes. Based on our analysis of, and interactions with, Cuba's Ministry of Sport — the Instituto Nacional de Deportes, Educación Física y Recreación (INDER) — we suggest that INDER pursues both sport development and sport for development — at home and abroad — while simultaneously seeking economic benefits through its for-profit enterprise division named Cubadeportes. The implications of this comprehensive and sometimes contradictory approach are considered, in terms of politics, policy, internationalism and the place of sport therein.
Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2010
After Japan eliminated Cuba from the 2009 World Baseball Classic, a statement by 'comrade' Fidel ... more After Japan eliminated Cuba from the 2009 World Baseball Classic, a statement by 'comrade' Fidel Castro Ruz was posted on various websites (Castro, 2009). A mixture of bluster and contrition, Castro's commentary found fault not with his team's players, but with its leadership. 'We are the ones to blame', he stressed. As an aside, he could not resist accusing the tournament's organisers of plotting to oust the team representing 'a revolutionary country that has heroically resisted and has not been able to be defeated in the battle of ideas'. But he ended with an internal call to arms: '[W]e have to revolutionise the methods for the preparation and development of our athletes. . .'. When the revolutionary fervour of a nation's long-time larger-than-life leader carries over from politics to sport, any book trying to illuminate the nation's zeitgeist through the prism of baseball risks devolving into a specialised biography. Thomas Carter offers relevant titbits about 'El Comandante', such as that in 1959 he played alongside Che Guevara-who 'was not a good baseball player'-and other revolutionary leaders against a team of military officers from the ousted regime. 'In defeating their opposition', Carter writes, 'the Revolutionary leaders provided a not-so-subtle allegory of their victories over the Cuban armed forces a year earlier (pp.105-106).' Admirably, though, he spends most of the book exploring how common Cubans reveal their cubanidad, or national identity, through baseball. Where Carter's book especially shines is in glimpses of fans' interactions and debates. We encounter ambivalence about defectors (such as Orlando Hernández) who go on to star in the United States. We learn about the contrasting personalities of the television characters 'Willie' and 'Geovany'-an earnest striver who fails in crucial situations and a lazy natural talent who produces-and thus why calling players by those nicknames raises socio-political questions about what it means to succeed. And in a passage about the battle between competing gangs of spectators for acceptance as de facto cheerleaders, we see how fans express their cubanidad as non-playing participants. Carter writes elegantly about facts, ushering the reader comfortably into each scene. When he writes about ideas, though, ethnographic jargon deadens the prose. Most maddeningly, his devotion to Foucauldian terminology spawns countless references to 'symbolic discourses', 'discursive frameworks', and the like. The following sentence is typical in its fuzziness and verbosity: 'Baseball. .. should be understood as a recurring spectacle that allows Cubans to affirm and shape the constitution of their own identities
In this chapter we assert the need for a transformative approach to conducting research on sport.... more In this chapter we assert the need for a transformative approach to conducting research on sport. The transformative approach, which we call Critical Proactivism, insists upon the scholar taking an active political stance in conducting research with an explicit purpose for attempting to transform sport and the ways knowledge is produced about sport. We argue in this chapter, and introduce the various ways the contributors to this volume demonstrate, that it is not enough to call for change within sport, but efforts to transform the very power relations and institutional structures of sport.
The International Journal of the History of Sport, 2016
International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 2011
In the lead up to the 2010 Commonwealth Games held in Delhi, India, reports circulated around the... more In the lead up to the 2010 Commonwealth Games held in Delhi, India, reports circulated around the world documenting the filthy conditions of the athletes' living quarters, the collapse of a pedestrian bridge and the subsequent cave-in of the roof of the weightlifting venue. All occurring in the immediate fortnight prior to the opening ceremony, the organizers of the Games were rapidly losing potential symbolic capital the city stood to gain from hosting this mega-event. The Commonwealth Games were supposed to raise Delhi's standing in the economy of appearances, announcing its arrival as a modern 21st-century locality vibrantly ready for its immersion in the global competition over capital and placing it on a par with other BRIC urban conurbations like Beijing, Shanghai, Sao Paolo, and Rio de Janeiro. Following South Africa's FIFA-acclaimed success hosting the FIFA 2010 men's World Cup, but more importantly and most especially the Beijing Olympiad that so effectively announced the arrival of China as a world player in the global arena, Delhi's 'coming out party' transformed into a debutante's worst nightmare: illusory beauty was revealed to have been mere veneer. As one of the four BRIC nations that many pundits consider to be the future economic leading nations of the 21st century, Delhi's hosting of the Commonwealth Games was supposed to demonstrate spectacularly the city's and, by extension, the nation-state's vibrancy and vitality as a player in the cutthroat game of global capital. Even as the celebratory spectacles are held within the sporting venues and the imagery of athletic vitality is transmitted around the world, the poverty, pollution, and the rumoured and assumed corruption that so plague Delhian and Indian governments (Gupta, 2005) has already been reaffirmed and solidified in the 'global imagination'.
Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2012
Few activities bring together physicality, emotions, politics, money, and morality as dramaticall... more Few activities bring together physicality, emotions, politics, money, and morality as dramatically as sport. In Brazil's stadiums or parks in China, on Cuba's baseball diamonds or rugby fields in Fiji, human beings test their physical limits, invest emotional energy, bet money, perform witchcraft, and ingest substances, making sport a microcosm of what life is about. The Anthropology of Sport explores not only what anthropological thinking tells us about sports, but also what sports tell us about the ways in which the sporting body is shaped by and shapes the social, cultural, political, and historical contexts in which we live. Core themes discussed in this book include the body, modernity, nationalism, the state, citizenship, transnationalism, globalization, and gender and sexuality.
On Running and Becoming Human
Transforming Sport
Mega-events like the Olympic Games and FIFA World Cup transform cities. These transformations are... more Mega-events like the Olympic Games and FIFA World Cup transform cities. These transformations are a conscious aim of hosting such events, hailed by organisers and politicians as lasting legacies for the benefit of the population. Mounting evidence suggests, however, that such events serve to harm local populations, deepening inequality and marginalisation with most positive impacts proving ephemeral (Boykoff 2013). Despite this, media coverage of such events tends to marginalise critical voices (Boykoff 2014; Lenskyj 2004), instead encouraging the celebration of national pride. These events, as Horne (2017) argues, are mediated spectacles of transformation, promoting an oftenidealised image of the host city or country on the global stage. Yet this mediated image is contested, with those excluded from the event using alternative media to promote different understandings of what the city could be. This chapter focusses on one group of activists seeking to challenge the idealised image of Rio de Janeiro presented at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, which sought to exclude the (in)famous favelas from the vision of the city. Rio Olympic Neighbourhood Watch (RioOnWatch) is a media project of the Rio de Janeiro-based NGO Catalytic Communities (CatComm). It provides a platform for news and discussion about development in the Olympic city from the perspective of favela residents, publishing in both English and Portuguese. Initiated in 2010, eight months after Rio won the right to host the 2016 Olympic Games, the news site published over 1,500 interlinked articles in two languages over six years, detailing every twist and turn in the preparations for Rio 2016. This chapter analyses one aspect of RioOnWatch's work as a discourse intervention to improve policies for Rio's favela communities by transforming the discourse which legitimises state violence in informal communities. Through shifting the discourse, RioOnWatch aimed to leave a lasting legacy of diminished state violence in favelas. The chapter starts with an explanation of how the site operates and the various missions of the site before introducing the concept of discourse intervention, and examining CatComm's attempt to change the discourse around favelas in the Olympic spotlight. RioOnWatch RioOnWatch is run by the CatComm team, which remains small and loose, with just five paid members of staff. Several different types of material are produced for the site from event reports and Q&A interviews to photo essays and book reviews. These features range from five hundred words to well over a thousand words, as well as providing different types of information in different styles, with all articles required to focus on favela perspectives, frequently quoting residents. This diversity is part of a deliberate attempt to attract readers with different interests and different reading habits, while focussing on the site's core mission by foregrounding favela perspectives. The majority of articles are written by interns, mostly young Westerners on study abroad programmes in Rio de Janeiro or recent graduates looking for international experience in urban planning issues, but also including Masters and doctoral students and those with an interest in Brazilian development. These are termed 'International Observers', following activists who protested against the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics also using International Observers. Interns, in most cases, are committed to the project for a three-month period and complete a project designed around their skills and interests, in a particular community or on a particular subject that is deemed in need of coverage by the CatComm team (via regular input from favela residents). Interns also regularly respond to requests for coverage made by community leaders, including reporting on human rights violations, community meetings and cultural events. Researchers in Rio de Janeiro for
The Passion, Politics, and Language of Cuban Baseball, 2008
The Passion, Politics, and Language of Cuban Baseball, 2008
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Books by Thomas F Carter
The Introduction is available below
In parks and cafes, homes and stadium stands, Cubans talk baseball. I contend that when they are analyzing and debating plays, games, teams, and athletes, Cubans are exchanging ideas not just about baseball but also about Cuba and cubanidad, or what it means to be Cuban. I explore the interconnections between baseball and Cuban identity. Suggesting that baseball is in many ways an apt metaphor for cubanidad, I point out aspects of the sport that resonate with Cuban social and political life: the perpetual tension between risk and security, the interplay between individual style and collective regulation, and the risky journeys undertaken with the intention, but not the guarantee, of returning home.
Chapter One is available below
Papers by Thomas F Carter
The Introduction is available below
In parks and cafes, homes and stadium stands, Cubans talk baseball. I contend that when they are analyzing and debating plays, games, teams, and athletes, Cubans are exchanging ideas not just about baseball but also about Cuba and cubanidad, or what it means to be Cuban. I explore the interconnections between baseball and Cuban identity. Suggesting that baseball is in many ways an apt metaphor for cubanidad, I point out aspects of the sport that resonate with Cuban social and political life: the perpetual tension between risk and security, the interplay between individual style and collective regulation, and the risky journeys undertaken with the intention, but not the guarantee, of returning home.
Chapter One is available below