Sport, Technology and the Body: The Nature of Performance

What is the nature of athletic performance? This book offers an answer to this fascinating question by considering the relationship between sport, technology and the body. Specifically, it examines cultural resistance to the enhancement of athletes and explores the ways in which performance technologies complicate and confound our conception of the sporting body.

The book addresses concerns about the technological "invasion" of the "natural" body to investigate expectations that athletic performances reflect nothing more than the actual capacity of the untainted athlete. By examining a series of case studies, including Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius, Fastskin swimsuits, hypoxic chambers and an array of illicit substances and methods, the book distinguishes between internal and external technologies to highlight the ways that performance enhancement, and public reaction to it, can be read.

Sport, Technology and the Body offers a powerful challenge to conventional views of athletic performance that stand authenticity against artifice, integrity against corruption, and athletic purity against technological intrusion. It is essential reading for all serious students of the sociology, culture or ethics of sport.

With God on their Side: Sport in the Service of Religion

Co-edited with Timothy J.L. Chandler

'Sport' and 'religion' are cultural institutions with a global reach. Each is characterised by ritualised performance and by the ecstatic devotion of its followers, whether in the sports arena or the cathedral of worship. This fascinating collection is the first to examine, in detail, the relationship between these two cultural institutions from an international, religiously pluralistic perspective. It illuminates the role of sport and religion in the social formation of collective groups, and explores how sport might operate in the service of a religious community.
The book offers a series of cutting-edge contemporary historical case-studies, wide-ranging in their social and religious contexts. It presents important new work on the following fascinating topics:
* sport and Catholicism in Northern Ireland
* Shinto and sumo in Japan
* women, sport and the American Jewish identity
* religion, race and rugby in South Africa
* sport and Islam in France and North Africa
* sport and Christian fundamentalism in the US
* Muhammad Ali and the Nation of Islam.
With God on their Side is vital reading for all students of the history, sociology and culture of sport. It also presents important new research material that will be of interest to religious studies students, historians and anthropologists.