Why sports? What is their function in society, how are they organized, and why do people participate? This groundbreaking volume is filled with descriptive data relating to these questions and many others, and it does what none has done previously, by bringing together an edited collection of essays that describe and compare sport in twelve Asian and African nations from a social science perspective. Written by an international team of anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and physical educators, these chapters are not accounts by scholars viewing sport from afar; each writer...