LAUSR

In his classic 1934 essay, “Les techniques du corps” (Body Techniques), the French sociologist Marcel Mauss called attention to a set of embodied practices from eating and sleeping to walking and swimming. While generally taken for granted as naturalized human aptitudes, Mauss deployed myriad examples hitherto filed under “miscellany” in the ethnographic record to demonstrate that such activities are in fact cultivated techniques that constitute the particular “habitus” of a society. Until recently, sport had been similarly relegated to the miscellany of Middle East studies, generally garnering but passing attention or, at best, making for a fun side project for those studying ostensibly more serious matters such as sectarian conflict, nationalism, or state building. But, over the last decade or so, a new generation of scholars of and in the region has embraced theMaussian revolution and come to understand the centrality of sporting practices to the very making and unmaking of communities, nations, and states—to the constitution and contestation of the modern Middle East as we know it today. Most apparent has been the salience of sport (and particularly football/soccer) within nationalist projects, international diplomacy, and contentious identity politics. Although, in light of the awarding of Qatar of the 2022 World Cup, much attention has focused, often in journalistic fashion, on the political interests and economic stakes of world football, scholars have begun to trace more rigorously how soccer stadia become preeminent sites where nation-states come to be united and contested in Algeria, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Yemen, and elsewhere. Carl Rommel, for instance, ethnographically traces the centrality of Cairene football clubs such as Al-Ahly and Zamalek to competing visions of the Egyptian nation; he critically unpacks how their ultra supporters achieved mythical status as revolutionary subjects in the 2011 Tahrir Square occupation and the 2012 Port Said massacre. State governments have responded with attempts to regulate the unruly violence and protean affiliations called forth by such football passions, to harness sport as a means to discipline youthful populations into nationals subjects. Nearly every country in the region has a ministry-level agency devoted to sport, generally also conjoined with youth affairs, indexing enduring anxieties over the capacity of postcolonial states to assimilate new generations into the national project. Yet, as scholars have long emphasized, the instrumentalization ofmega-events such as the WorldCup,Olympics,AsianGames, andMediterraneanGames to shore uppolitical regimes and perform spectacles of nationhood risk ringing hollow to jaded participant-spectators and can never entirely kill vernacular expressions of political imagination mobilized within stadia or inmore private consumption settings.More andmore, women and those frommarginalized ethno-religious groups have demanded inclusion in sports structures that have long been the preserve of male majorities; they have formed parallel leagues, garnered Int. J. Middle East Stud. 51 (2019), 482–485