Abstract
Investigations of sport migration patterns have too often focused exclusively on macro level global institutional interplay, discounting the navigational strategies of the migrants themselves in favor of a fetishized narrative of globalization. In his ethnographic study on the patterns of professional sports migration, Thomas Carter adopts a critical “transnational” lens to analyze the experiences of athletes as they produce their own mobility within a complex and ever-evolving sovereign structural space. In Foreign Fields relies on personal narratives collected over twelve years from an array of professional sports voices to unpack the intricate tactics utilized by transnational sports migrants in the corresponding processes of movement and constraint.
To erect the framework, Carter develops his central criterion that analysis of the fundamental construct of movement through transnational migration necessitates the framework of transculturation: whereby local contexts shape global movement. Assessing structure and agency in this transnational migration model, Carter breaks down the argument into its component parts. As global sport has evolved into a commodity fetish, the creation of the modern “NEOsport” (New Economic Order Sport) masks the political domination of the “transnational capitalist class” and athletes’ bodies become fetishized commodities, alienated from their immaterial labor. Alternatively, transnational professional athletes can utilize flexible citizenship as capital and engage in the self-actualizing process of “doing as being,” thereby producing and characterizing the “migrant self.” Yet the process of “self-construction” becomes an alienating process of commodity and culture fetishism as the self is negotiated and refracted through the gaze of the local context—a truly dialectical relationship. Additionally, strain between the various sovereign entities (the state, INGOs, and transnational corporations) and individual decisions about movement parleyed through familial influences and financial calculus constitutes a major theme of the work (as evidenced in the ethnographic accounts). Socio-structural legal constraints to mobility, countered by the strategic visibility at precise time points of undocumented sports transnationals, add a further element to the migration patterns and narratives of these mobile agents.
This meticulously refined examination of transnational migration through the perspective of the professional athlete elucidates an assortment of essential motifs of global and transnational affairs. Fecund with topics for discussion, Carter’s ethnography could easily find its way into any anthropology, sociology, or international studies classroom. This work warrants acclamation as a novel approach to an under-researched substantive topic.