6 Athletic Migrant Religiosities and the Making of ‘Respectable Men’

Abstract

Brazilians comprise a "global football workforce" (Poli, Ravenel and Besson 2019) as the largest national group of migrant players in contemporary football. Previous ethnographic studies (Rial 2008, 2012) reveal that Brazilian athletes value the opportunity to move across borders. In constructing mobile aspirations, athletes from the Global South attempt to embody a form of respectable masculinity (Esson 2015a; Besnier, Guinness, Hann and Kovač 2018). Although their movement is advantageous to many parties, sports migrants are among the most visible and precarious nodes of sports industries. Athletes are regularly subjected to short-term contracts and premature career termination due to injuries (Roderick 2006). In this chapter, I will analyse how migrant Brazilian football and futsal players construct narratives about their careers, express masculinities and embody religious symbols in the Czech Republic, Lebanon, Austria, and Israel. My analysis is based on life-history interviews with migrant athletes, and informal conversations with one sports agent and one migrant futsal coach (Connell 2010; Butler 2005). Life-history interviews reveal not only how athletes use religious symbols in their everyday life, but also how race, gender, and class are articulated in sports migrants' experiences. This chapter is inspired by my engagement with Talal Asad's "anthropology of secularism" (1987, 2000, 2003) as well as Saba Mahmood's (2001, 2005) analysis of a contemporary women's religious movement in Cairo. I argue that Asad's and Mahmood's analyses of the relationship between religion, agency, pain, and suffering open paths to new understandings and interpretations of the subjective experiences of contemporary sport migrants.