Ethnic Sport, its Concept and Research Perspectives

The present paper discusses a concept of “ethnic sport” and its research perspectives. Ethnic sport means the play and games which are practiced by a fixed ethnic group or in a fixed society, and relates more or less to the traditional culture, so contributes to identity building. Ethnic sport therefore looks to the ethnicity, and faces international sport such as the Olympics which looks to global standardization. However both were invented or discovered equally in the huge globalization current of the last two centuries. Ethnic sport has been studied from the different ethnological or cultural- anthropological theoretical models such as evolutionalism, diffusionalism, acculturation, structural-functionalism, symbolism and so on. Recently approaches from identity, tourism, ethnoscience body theory have attracted scholars.