Professor of West African Anthropology
Department of Anthropology and Sociology
& School of Anthropology, Media and Gender
Muscular Faith: The Interplay between Sport and Religion in Africa
Professor Marloes Janson has secured an European Research Council advanced grant to explore the connections between and sport religion in Africa. The five-year project will explore the intersectionality between religion and sport through an ethnographic approach.
Overview
Africa is popularly known as both the ‘sporting continent’ since the 1965 African games and as the most religious continent, making it a unique setting to investigate the interplay between sports and religion, which is the focus of my ERC Advanced Grant. While sport and religion have been studied mostly separately, as practices they have many similarities: both are embodied and both use rituals and evoke emotions to induce high levels of group identity and cohesiveness. Hence, it makes sense to study them in tandem, especially in Africa where churches and mosques organise spiritual clinics to help athletes succeed in their careers and recover from injuries and where many national teams have a budgetary allocation for religious specialists to spiritually empower athletes.
I will spend the coming 5 years conducting ethnographic research, together with a multidisciplinary team of African researchers, on how four professional sports appropriate elements from Islam, Christianity, and African religious traditions in four countries: boxing in Nigeria, soccer in South Africa, long-distance running in Kenya, and karate in Egypt. We will use an apprentice-ship style ethnographic research approach, meaning that we will train with athletes.
The grant is worth almost 2.3 million Euro and involves partners at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and Helwan University in Egypt.
Professor Marloes Janson in the boxing ring, North London Boxing Club
Image credit: Marloes Janson
Nigerian soccer fan dressed up as imam
Image credit: Akintunde Akinleye
