In Rio de Janeiro, the spiritual home of world football, and Buenos Aires, where a popular soccer club president was recently elected mayor, the game is an integral part of national identity. Using the football stadium as an illuminating cultural lens, Temples of the Earthbound Gods examines many aspects of urban culture that play out within these monumental architectural forms, including spirituality, violence, rigid social norms, anarchy, and also expressions of sexuality and gender. Tracing the history of the game in Brazil and Argentina through colonial influences as well as indigenous ball courts in Mayan, Aztec, Zapotec, Mixtec, and Olmec societies, Christopher Gaffney's study spans both ancient and contemporary worlds, linking the development of stadiums to urbanization and the consolidation of nation building in two of Latin America's most intriguing megacities.

This book studies architecture and literature of Rio de Janeiro, the “Marvellous City,” from the revolution of 1889 to the Olympics of 2016, taking the reader on a journey through the history of the city. This study offers a wide-ranging and thought-provoking insight that moves from ruins to Modernism, from the past to the future, from futebol to fiction, and from beach to favela, to uncover the surprising feature—decadence—at the heart of this unique and seemingly timeless urban world. An innovative and in-depth study of buildings, books, and characters in the city’s modern history, this fundamental new work sets the reader in the glorious world of Rio de Janeiro.

Physical cultural studies (PCS) is a dynamic and rapidly developing field of study. This handbook offers the first definitive account of the state of the art in PCS, showcasing the latest research and methodological approaches. It examines the boundaries, preoccupations, theories and politics of PCS, drawing on transdisciplinary expertise from areas as diverse as sport studies, sociology, history, cultural studies, performance studies and anthropology. Featuring chapters written by world-leading scholars, this handbook examines the most important themes and issues within PCS, exploring the active body through the lens of class, age, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, (dis)ability, medicine, religion, space and culture. Each chapter provides an overview of the state of knowledge in a particular subject area, while also considering possibilities for developing future research. Representing a landmark contribution to physical cultural studies and allied fields, the Routledge Handbook of Physical Cultural Studies is an essential text for any undergraduate or postgraduate course on physical culture, sports studies, leisure studies, the sociology of sport, the body, or sport and social theory.

Engaging and reader friendly, Fundamentals of Sport Management addresses the foundations of the field for students and professionals. It provides real-world examples and career opportunities in the exciting world of sport management.

Whether you are an urban geographer, an urban sociologist or an urban political scientist, and whether you take a qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods approach, the challenge that confronts researchers of our increasingly "globalized" urban studies remains fundamentally the same—how to make sense of urban complexity. This book confronts this challenge by exploring the various methodological approaches for doing global urban research, including Comparative Urbanism, Social Network Analysis, and Data Visualization. With contributions from leading scholars across the world, Doing Global Urban Research offers a key forum to discuss how the practice of research can deepen our knowledge of globalized urbanization.

Brazil has done much to shape football/soccer, but how has soccer shaped Brazil? Despite the political and social importance of the beautiful game to the country, the subject has hitherto received little attention. This book presents groundbreaking work by historians and researchers from Brazil, the United States, Britain and France, who examine the political significance, in the broadest sense, of the sport in which Brazil has long been a world leader. The authors consider questions such as the relationship between soccer, the workplace and working class culture; the formation of Brazilian national identity; race relations; political and social movements; and the impact of the sport on social mobility. Contributions to the book range in time from the late nineteenth century, when the British first introduced the sport to Brazil, to the present day, as the 'country of soccer' prepares itself to host the 2014 World Cup, painting a vivid picture of the many ways in which soccer exists and functions in Brazil, both on and off the pitch.

"This book focuses on the history of baseball in the Dominican Republic, especially the sport's political ramifications. Yoder argues that Dominicans kept their sense of democratic idealism in part because they were intertwined with the aspirations of baseball as it developed into a transnational industry. Baseball became economically central to the Dominican Republic at the same time as the country was turning toward concerns of development, resulting in an economic and political "Third Way" that drew from both the Cuban and US models"--