Tara Magdalinski and Timothy J. L. Chandler,
editors. New York: Routledge, 2002. 200 pp. $29.95 US. ISBN 0415259614.
[1] They shoot! They score! Tara Magdalinski and Timothy Chandler
have gathered a strong, unified collection of essays on sport and
religion, accessible to scholars and students. Starting from the proposition
(contrary to the Olympic ideal) that sport reinforces differences
rather than integrating diverse peoples, the editors assemble nine
contextualized case studies. From Sumo wrestlers to Jewish-American
women's basketball teams, each chapter shows how sport serves as a
contested performance of religious identity.
[2] Magdalinski and Chandler are eager to move scholarship
past the obvious structural similarities between sport and religion.
They note how "despite even the most ritualistic nature of fandom,
sport simply does not address the basic questions that religious communities
try to answer" (198). Instead, they want to redirect study on
this topic to issues of religious identity, particularly how sports
can "operate in the service of a religious community and assist
in the promulgation of its theology" (2).
[3] All but two articles deal with Christianity and Islam. In
thus focusing on two religions that have proselytizing missions and
a transcendent deity, the collection is able to highlight varied kinds
of anxiety about maintaining and embodying correct doctrine. However,
opportunities for larger comparative analysis would have been facilitated
by including sport in contemporary nationalist Hinduism or Native
American contexts.
[4] Not only did the editors unify the book, their individual
contributions are compelling. Chandler's examination of differences
in playing style between Catholic and Protestant rugby teams in England
compares two schools: Sherborne (Anglican) and Downside (Catholic).
Chandler's perspective is unique: he is not only a scholar, but also
coached both teams (117, n 21)! He considers how theological and cultural
differences manifest in physical bodies, how ideas affect styles of
play and teamwork. The Protestant school has a legacy of muscular
Christianity, the Catholic school the burden of minority identity,
so that the Catholic "athletic body has been used to stand
up for a Catholic world view, (while) in the Protestant schools
the manly athletic body has been used to stand in for religion"
(110). The result is a mystique of Catholic difference, bodily discipline,
and fierce play.
[5] Similar issues of masculinity, religion and playing style
are broached in John Nauright and Tara Magdalinski's article on Muslim
rugby in South Africa. Twentieth-century South Africa means explicit
discrimination: Muslim players were excluded from the City and Suburban
Rugby Union by the 1930s, while the predominantly Muslim teams that
constituted the Western Province Colored Rugby Football Union would
not schedule matches during Ramadan or daily prayer times. Magdalinski
and Nauright suggest that the playing style of Muslim teams, considered
physical and brutal, could be ascribed to class as well as religion
(128). However, the deployment of a "hardy Muslim masculinity"
(135) developed because religion had priority as a marker of identity,
through visible shared cultural norms (125).
[6] One of the recurring themes in the book is how sporting
events have the potential to bring people together . . . so rival
groups can aggressively reassert their badges of difference. In Northern
Ireland, Mike Cronin contends that sport "has been an active
force of division that underpins, rather than counteracts, the bitterness
of a sectarian society" (21), providing merely another location
for displaying "symbols of allegiance" (34). In his study
of Croatian-Australian soccer sub-culture, John Hughson notes that
the most rabid fans amplify "the obligatory aspects of their
ethnic background" in order to make their ethnicity and Catholicism
into the kind of "clear binary distinction from the enemy (which)
can be used in the soccer-supporting context as a key mode of abuse
of the proxy enemy" (66, 63). In the context of Berber liberation
movements, Paul Silverstein reports how rooting for the highly successful
JSK team "has become the sine qua non marker of a transnational
Amazigh consciousness" (52). This persists despite - perhaps,
indeed, because of - the Algerian government's attempt to Islamicize
and suppress ethnic differences within the country, turning stadiums
into sites of resistance for Berbers.
[7] Richard Light and Louise Kinnaird's article on Shinto's
appropriation of sumo demonstrates how the careful construction of
"authentic" Japanese culture addressed the fear that distinct
national identity was under siege. The contemporary participation
of non-Japanese wrestlers has again evoked this defensive response
to perceived external threats. Drawing effectively from Hobsbawm and
Raymond Williams on the usable past (141-42), they trace how the ruling
powers, from the Shogunate to the military dictators of the early
twentieth century, manipulated and rationalized sumo and Shinto for
grander, triumphalist aims.
[8] Three articles concern sports in the United States. The
first, by George Randels, Jr. and Becky Beal on the Promise Keepers,
spends too much time on H. Richard Neibuhr, and not enough on its
topic. However, when they suggest that since sports stadiums function
as "a safe space for men, the stadium venue may enable many Promise
Keepers to have a meaningful religious experience that they could
never attain in a church" (171), they provide an interesting
twist on Douglas's feminization of American culture thesis. Maureen
Smith's approach to Muhammad Ali's role within the Nation of Islam
offers a wealth of details on the post-Malcolm NOI, and makes it clear
that Elijah Muhammad's critique of sport was opportunistically muted
or highlighted, depending on the visibility and pliability of Ali.
[9] Linda Borish's article on the uses of sport by Jewish immigrant
women in early-to-mid twentieth century America is an exception, in
both content and implications, within the book. Not only is it alone
in concentrating on women, but it also provides considerable compensatory
history, and it does not highlight conflict between Jewish and gentile
women in sports. The Jewishness of these women athletes is discussed
in creative tension with their Americanization through sports, not
as a hostile maintenance of a besieged identity.
[10] Most of the articles present a highly managed, visible
communal religious identity, embodied in physical practices such as
asceticism and dress, which are then re-asserted in the sports arena.
While there are unexplored connections in this collection -specifically
to issues of gender, sexuality, and militarism in religion - the editors
have achieved their goal of pointing religion and sport scholarship
onto a more complex track.
Jennifer Rycenga, San José State University
(jrycenga@earthlink.net).
