Review of Indigenous, Traditional, and Folk Sports: Contesting Modernities, edited by Mariann Vaczi and Alan Bairner

The sixteen chapters of Indigenous, Traditional, and Folk Sports: Contesting Modernities cover a great deal of geographical and conceptual ground.The authors describe Indigenous, traditional, and folk sports as sharing a subaltern position; as surviving the widespread diffusion of Western sports; and as being situated "between the local, the national, and the global; between the archaic and the modern; and between ritual and record" (p. 1).Throughout the text, the reader learns that the continuation of different sporting practices that have roots in the distant past face many of the same contemporary pressures and tensions, often reproducing inequalities and a hegemonic view of culture.The book is divided into four sections: "Rediscovering Heritage: Identity and Ethnopolitics," "Nationalizing the Traditional," "Modernizing the Indigenous: 'Redemptions' and Disenchantments," and "Indigenizing the Modern: In Search of Myth, Ethos, and Symbol."Somewhat confusingly, the titles of these sections are different in the table of contents than in the introduction, which discusses the book section by section.Nevertheless, taken together, the chapters reveal the messiness of attempts to root the past in the contemporary and the contemporary in the past.In the introduction, the editors, Mariann Vaczi and Alan Bairner, provide a strong overview of many of the pressing issues at play in Indigenous, traditional, and folk sports, including the establishment of UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage designation, which is meant to safeguard and protect certain practices but, as demonstrated in some of the chapters, has had paradoxical implications.The authors of several chapters discuss intangible cultural heritage, but these chapters are only briefly put in conversation with each other in the book's introduction.Writing a brief preface to each section or a conclusion at the end of the book would have enabled readers, and particularly undergraduate students, to make further connections between the chapters.The provision of a few more definitions in the introduction as well as an overview of Allen Guttman's characteristics of modern sport would also have assisted those without strong backgrounds to engage with this text.Tom Fabian's chapter, the third of the book, provides some useful definitions (of such words as "history," "heritage," and "heritization") and a useful overview of the process involved in making UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage register.Having this chapter appear earlier in the text might have helped readers to better navigate this edited collection.The editors stress that this book responds to calls to "reexamine dominant narratives and insert subaltern voices into the mainstream history, sociology, and anthropology of sport" (p.2).In the introduction, Vaczi and Bairner state that the text's decolonial approach is present in the book via two main dimensions: focusing on Indigenous, traditional, and folk sports and "giving space to Indigenous voices, moralities, and world views through addressing the stories of their movement

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