Competition beyond Capitalism

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.

• Introduction: What Competition Does: An Anthropological TheoryLeo Hopkinson and Teodor ZidaruChapter 1. Competing for the Future: Play, Drama, and Rank in AmazoniaNatalia BuitronChapter 2. The Ethics of Yoga and the Spirit of Godmen: Neoliberalism, Competition, and Capitalism in IndiaJoseph S. AlterChapter 3. E-sports vs. Exams: Competition Ideologies among Student Gamers in Neo-socialist ChinaYichen RaoChapter 4. “Is There Going to Be Another Competition Today?” Contesting Development through CompetitionA.McCarthyChapter 5. Afterlives and Alter-lives: How Competitions Produce (Neoliberal?) Subjects in IndonesiaNicholas J. LongChapter 6. Co-existing through Opposition: Competitive Theologies and Cohesion in a Spanish VillageJosep Almudéver ChanzàConclusion: Competition in Anthropology and Anthropology in CompetitionLeo Hopkinson and Teodor Zidaru

“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