Paper short abstract:

Neuroscientists are increasingly showing the damaging effects of low-force head impacts in sport, prompting new questions about responsibility, care, and violence in sporting contexts. This paper considers what anthropological approaches might add to understandings of sporting brain injury.

Paper long abstract:

Moral and medical anxiety about sporting brain-injury is going through a process of profound change. Emerging neuroscientific research (e.g. Russell et al 2021) shows that repeated lower-force blows to the head cause the neurodegenerative illness Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) – an illness only previously associated only with higher-force impacts known as ‘concussions’. CTE has profound, life-changing effects, yet often only becomes symptomatic after sporting careers end, and is currently only diagnosable post-mortem. Consequently, emergent cases of sporting CTE are raising new questions about who is responsible for past injuries, what meaningful care looks like in the present/future, and how (indeed, if) sports might be regulated to prevent CTE. These questions - about responsibility, care, violence, commoditisation - emerge at the intersection of major transnational forces (e.g. governance bodies, multi-billion-dollar teams and leagues), yet also always play out through contextually specific notions of personhood, body, illness, ageing etc. Building on ethnographic research with boxers in Ghana and the UK, this paper asks what a distinctly anthropological perspective might add to our understanding of sporting brain injury. Conversely, I also consider how ethnographic engagements with sporting CTE – as both lived experience and emergent bio-medical category - might deepen our understanding of injury more broadly. In particular, I consider what might be gained by exploring how sporting CTE is navigated by sports practitioners on the periphery of global sporting industries – where resources may be scarce, regulation less stringent, and where many athletes are involved in global sporting economies from subaltern positions.