Full Description
Competition often appears to typify capitalist social life as a process that defines relative value and pits people against one another. But capitalism is not all there is to competition. In ethnographic perspective, the outcomes of competition depend on always varied, shifting and contested interpretations of what is worth competing for and how to do so. Hence, even when competition is imaged to engineer pre-defined changes or institute particular social orders, in practice its effects are often complex and unexpected. This book explores how competition is an unruly dynamic that generates unforeseen possibilities for human connection and mediates divergent social orders, rather than imposing one or another.
Contents
Introduction: What Competition Does: An Anthropological Theory
Leo Hopkinson and Teodor Zidaru
Chapter 1. Competing for the Future: Play, Drama, and Rank in Amazonia
Natalia Buitron
Chapter 2. The Ethics of Yoga and the Spirit of Godmen: Neoliberalism, Competition, and Capitalism in India
Joseph S. Alter
Chapter 3. E-sports vs. Exams: Competition Ideologies among Student Gamers in Neo-socialist China
Yichen Rao
Chapter 4. "Is There Going to Be Another Competition Today?" Contesting Development through Competition
Annie McCarthy
Chapter 5. Afterlives and Alter-lives: How Competitions Produce (Neoliberal?) Subjects in Indonesia
Nicholas J. Long
Chapter 6. Co-existing through Opposition: Competitive Theologies and Cohesion in a Spanish Village
Josep Almudéver Chanzà
