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Exploring European Sporting Identities: History, Theory, Methodology, Seán Crosson Dr., Philip Dine

Seán Crosson

This collaborative study (an introduction to the collection Sport, Representation, and Evolving Identities in Europe) is intended to contribute to the ongoing elucidation of the role of sport in the processes of identity construction in contemporary societies, including an overview of its historical development and the major theoretical and methodological approaches to the examination of sport. Since the pioneering work of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger on ‘the invention of tradition’ (1983), and Benedict Anderson on ‘imagined communities’ (1983), modern games have regularly been identified as a core component in the construction of Europeans’ individual and communal senses of self, …