Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that urban dwellers engage with sports not merely as sources of leisure or opportunities for social connection but also as promising venues for constructing claims of individuality. It asks how such claims speak to other types of desires and projects that figure within urban lives.

Paper long abstract:

The playing, organizing, and watching of sports is a ubiquitous feature of everyday life in cities around the world. Which sports are preferred, in which cities, and by whom, reflect considerations reaching from the local to the global that combine diverse social, economic and political interests. While access to sport is not always invariably to all who might wish to partake of it, nonetheless, declaring and maintaining at least some level of interest and involvement in sport remains, for the most part, a matter of choice. Subject to limitations of access, urbanites may decide whether to avoid contact with sport in any form or to join in, at least to the extent they can manage. Thus, sport constitutes a social field within which personal tastes and individual choices enjoy substantial, if not unlimited, leeway.

This paper argues that urban dwellers engage with sports not merely as sources of leisure or opportunities for social connection but also—and no less significantly—as promising venues for constructing claims of individuality. It considers how the claiming of individuality through engagement with sport may speak to other types of desires and projects that figure within urban lives. The ethnographic base for the paper is fieldwork on organized sports for children and youths in Canada and the staging of the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, as well as findings reported by other anthropologists of sport.