Animated by Uncertainty

Joshua D. Rubin is Lecturer in Anthropology at Bates College.

• Table of ContentsAcknowledgments IntroductionChapter 1: Making Art from Uncertainty: Magic and Its Politics in South African RugbyChapter 2: Sons and Commodities: Work, Play, and the Politics of Autonomy at the Margins of Professional RugbyChapter 3: Residual Uncertainty: Play, Injuries, and Rugby’s Masculine IdealChapter 4: Searching for Certainty: Rugby and Male Identity in a Former Model C SchoolChapter 5: Fractured Frames: Rugby, Imaginative Resistance, and the Legacies of the Struggle against ApartheidChapter 6: In Apartheid’s Image: Rugby and Nationalist Spectacle in South AfricaConclusionNotesWorks CitedIndex

This book makes delightful dance partners of two groups which typically look right past each other: sports historians and anthropologists of performance. Animated by Uncertainty is both theoretically bold and ethnographically rich, allowing the reader to feel how pain and injury, as they relate to performances of masculinity in sport, offer deep insights into the embodied legacies of Apartheid's lingering manifestations of corporeal punishment on South African bruised bodies and psyches.