VMU Center for Social Anthropology Hosts a Public Lecture on Anthropology of Sports

Vytautas Magnus university’s (VMU) Center for Social Anthropology cordially invites you to a public lecture by Dr. Stefan Krist (University of Vienna): “The Anthropology of Sports: Fundamentals, Potentials, Examples”. The lecture will be held on February 8, 2024. 3:00 p.m. at VMU Faculty of Social Sciences (Jonavos g. 66-105, Kaunas)

The event will be held in English.

About the lecture:

Worldwide sports have become highly influential spheres of popular culture and, today, often constitute themselves major social institutions, and therefore have considerable effect on people’s lives. The lecture provides an overview of the history of social anthropological research on sports and particularly focuses on the manifold potentials of social anthropological research on sports, like its capacity to illuminate processes of colonization and decolonization, modernization, glocalization, construction of (multiple) identities, changes in body cultures, gender roles and more. Examples will range from local or ethnic sports to global trends and mega-events like the Olympics.

Stefan Krist is lecturer at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Vienna. He has studied biology, history, anthropology and Mongolian studies and worked as research associate at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, lecturer at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, and assistant professor at the Inner Mongolia University in Hohhot, China. He has been doing anthropological as well as historical research focusing regionally on Siberia, Mongolia and Northern China. Thematically he has been focusing on forms of expressive culture – primarily sports and visual arts – as well as on religious practices and migration movements.