BIO

Hello, my name is Jibril Mustafa. I'm currently a sophomore majoring in Athletic Training from Tampa, Florida. I am currently working towards becoming a Physical Therapist and I decided to participate in Undergraduate research because I wanted to learn more about sports and health, fields that I am pursuing a career in.

Health, Culture, and Athletic Pursuits: A Critical Inquiry into Sport Anthropology

Abstract

Sports like basketball and soccer are prevalent throughout all parts of the globe, yet sports are not a common research topic in anthropology. Sport anthropology investigates how sport can shape societies in several ways, including socially, politically, culturally, and religiously. Sport anthropology also investigates how sport is shaped by these same aspects and many more. This study serves as a deeper analysis of how sport shapes and is shaped by health, specifically overall human health, cultural perspectives, nutrition, recovery, mental health, and rehabilitation. This project was a literature review and analysis of different sources relevant to the topics researched. These resources included articles, journals, and videos. The conducted search was done on academic databases and included keywords such as “sport health”, “nutrition”, “mental health”, and “athletes”, among others. The search almost exclusively yielded medical articles and journals. Many of these articles were difficult to understand as they contained medical jargon and concepts that were not easily digested. I found limiting and filtering the searches on the academic databases to be more successful. An example of this process includes limiting sources to only the last decade or also filtering sources to only include videos. This search of academic databases showed that there aren’t many different resources when it comes to sport anthropology and health. This calls for the advancement and growth of different types of sources and the inclusion of information that is easier to understand as well as engaging for readers.

Keywords: sport, health, anthropology