ABSTRACT
Like diplomacy, sport is often over-simplified and misunderstood. Sport is one of the oldest, most complex institutions created by humans for pleasure, spectacle and, most importantly, the sublimation of conflict. Moreover, in the twenty-first century, the 'sportscape' is truly global, generates trillions of dollars, and affects and involves billions of fans, players and coaches. The relationship between sport and anthropology is discussed, as well as its evolution from Ancient Sumer through to Rome and the Industrial Age. Traditional anthropologists, for instance, have been reluctant to consider the role sport played in the first human societies, preferring to focus on the mainstays of their discipline 'holism, ethnography, and the comparative method'. Such mainstream inertia in anthropology is difficult to fathom. Games, play, running, sport and so on, are literally woven into human DNA. Sport is also a great diplomatic leveller for relations between groups.
