“This volume offers an original ethnographic rethinking of competition beyond its framing in economics. From Shuar festivals in Ecuador to competitive yoga in India, Chinese student gaming cultures, NGO-led children’s development contests in Delhi, Indonesian state competitions, and intra-Catholic rivalry in rural Spain, the chapters reveal competition’s contingency, ambiguity, and generative affordances. A theoretically ambitious collection that will radically reshape debates on neo-liberalism, subjectivity, and social change.” • Laura Bear, London School of Economics
“Competition has long had a bad name in anthropology. This bracing volume asks us to think again. Neither glorifying competition nor damning it, this ethnographically wide-ranging and theoretically coherent collection of essays offers a brilliant insight into competition's often unanticipated effects in multiple social contexts. The chapters explore the multifarious affordances of competition, from Spanish Catholic reformists to Chinese gamers, from Indian yogic 'Godmen' to Indigenous Ecuadorian beauty pageants. By problematising the rather tired conflation of competition with capitalism and neoliberalism, the volume offers a powerful refiguration of competition as an object of anthropological interest. A must read!” • Matei Candea, University of Cambridge
“This pioneering volume brings together eye-opening ethnographic analyses demonstrating how competition often generates outcomes quite at odds with what institutions may expect or desire. It teases apart competition and capitalism to open a new landscape for research on the former as always a process – one fraught and often wayward.” • Thomas M. Malaby, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
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.
Leo Hopkinson is a Lecturer in Medical Anthropology at University College London. He works with boxers and other athletes mostly in Ghana and the UK, exploring how they build lives through sport with a particular attention to gendered experience, competition, and the ethics of physicality in sport.
Teodor Zidaru is an Associate Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. His UKRI-funded open access monograph Speaking of Trust: Religion and Mutual Aid in Southwest Kenya (Zed Books, 2025) explores how and why people trust and mistrust one another as they cooperate and compete in electoral politics, domestic economies, microfinance groups, and informal finance.
Area:
BISAC: SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; POL042060 POLITICAL SCIENCE/Political Ideologies/Capitalism; SOC026040 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Sociology/Social Theory
available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) with support from Berghahn Open Anthro in partnership with Libraria.
