Sport In The Pacific

Sport in the Pacific is a comparative consideration of the modern movement of Pacific peoples and their physical pursuits across national and cultural boundaries. It covers Australia, Japan and the United States. Its contributors ensure a deeper understanding of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific particularly their social identities and cultural responses in the wake of the arrival of modern sport. Sport in the Pacific comprises eight original contributions which analyze Polynesian and Abogirnal athletes and athletics in colonial and post-colonial contexts. Their analyses stress the importance of adaptation and appropriation, reinvention and revivialism, as well as diaspora and globalization. The volume will have three overlapping themes: change and continuity, cultural and transcultural power, and the complexity of race, gender, and national identity. Sport in the Pacific, in short, compares the significance of modern sport in a largely ignored setting: the indigenous societies of the Pacific.This book was previously published as a special issue of International Journal of the History of Sport.

In 2008, as few in the world are unaware, China was host to the world via the Beijing Olympics. The world watched the metamorphosis of Beijing from insecure capital to confident metropolis but, aware of it or not, the world was also watching the symbolic assertion, via the Games, of a rising superpower. The Pacific Rim will be the stage on which China initially displays its new hegemonic intentions, aspirations and ambitions. Thus in Post-Beijing 2008, the political, economic and cultural impact of Beijing 2008 on the geopolitical future of the Pacific Rim will be discussed. This perspective, analysed by some of the most distinguished academic commentators from some of the world's leading universities who are closely associated with the Pacific Rim (East and West), is original in focus and the analysis is pregnant with political possibilities. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

Although socio-cultural issues in relation to women within the fields of sport and exercise have been extensively researched, this research has tended to concentrate on the Western world. Women, Sport and Exercise in the Asia-Pacific Region moves the conversation away entirely from Western contexts to discuss these issues with a sole focus on the geographic Asia-Pacific region. Presenting a diverse range of empirical case studies, from bodybuilding in Kazakhstan and Thailand, karate in Afghanistan, and women’s rugby in Fiji to women’s soccer in North Korea and netball in Papua New Guinea, the book demonstrates how sports may be used as a lens to examine the historical, socio-cultural and political specificities of non-Western and post-colonial societies. It also explores the complex ways in which non-Western women resist as well as accommodate sport and exercise-related sociocultural oppression, helping us to better understand the nexus of sport, exercise, gender, sexuality and power in the Asia-Pacific area. This is a fascinating and important resource for students of sports studies, sports management, sport development, social sciences and gender studies, as well as an excellent read for academics and researchers with an interest in sport, exercise, gender and post-colonial studies.

This book focuses on the variety of strategies developed by women athletes in the Pacific Islands to claim contested sporting spaces – in particular, rugby union, soccer, beach volleyball, recreational sports and exercise – as a prism to explore grassroots women’s engagement with heavily entrenched postcolonial (hetero)patriarchy. Based on primary research conducted in Fiji, Samoa, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu, the book investigates contested sporting spaces as sites of infrapolitics intersected primarily by gender and also by other markers of inequality, including ethnicity, sexuality, class and geopolitics. Contrary to historical and contemporary representations of Pacific Island women as victims of gender injustice, it explores how these athletes and those who support them actively carve out space for their transformative agency. Pacific IslandWomen and Contested Sporting Spaces: Staking Their Claim focuses on a region underexamined by sport or gender studies researchers and will be of key interest to scholars and students in Gender Studies, Sport Studies, Sociology and Pacific Studies as well as sport practitioners and policymakers.

Following consistent and rapid general economic growth, Pacific Rim countries have grown as a major force in sports. Australia, China, Japan and Korea populated the top ten medals list at the 2012 London Olympics. Pacific Rim countries are major consumers of international sports and domestic professional sports have expanded continuously over time. Nippon Professional Baseball and the Korean Baseball Organization are the second and third largest baseball leagues measured by attendance and revenue following Major League Baseball in the U.S. This book also includes event studies of team ownership, assessment of human capital markets, analysis of the relationship between attendance and competitive balance, the components of fan demand in common the world over, and business decisions concerning attendance and pricing. There is already demand for comprehensive study of the sports business in the Pacific Rim as witnessed by this growth. This book will be of interest of researchers studying and/or teaching in the fields of sports economics and sports management as well as a general audience interested in business governance around the world.

"Sport in the Pacific is a comparative consideration of the modern movement of Pacific peoples and their physical pursuits across national and cultural boundaries. It covers Australia, Japan and the United States. Its contributors ensure a deeper understanding of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific?particularly their social identities and cultural responses in the wake of the arrival of modern sport. Sport in the Pacific comprises eight original contributions which analyze Polynesian and Abogirnal athletes and athletics in colonial and post-colonial contexts. Their analyses stress the importance of adaptation and appropriation, reinvention and revivialism, as well as diaspora and globalization. The volume will have three overlapping themes: change and continuity, cultural and transcultural power, and the complexity of race, gender, and national identity. Sport in the Pacific, in short, compares the significance of modern sport in a largely ignored setting: the indigenous societies of the Pacific.This book was previously published as a special issue of International Journal of the History of Sport."--Provided by publisher.

Soft Power Politics- Past and Present: Football and Baseball on the Western Pacific Rim illustrates the momentous expanse and moment of sport in the Asia Pacific region and through these essays dealing with two of the most prodigious global team sports confronts various cultural clashes that Samuel Huntington would ensure the end of civilisation. They also demonstrate the power sport has to change the world and to inspire and unite people globally. All who sail under the flag of Sport, as ingenuous as it may seem to the host of cynics that abounds, believe that dialogues that emerge from arguments included in this text represent communication of the highest order and have the potential to produce the cohesion that can close some of those cracks that Huntington said would open up along, what he called the fault lines between civilisations.This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.