ABSTRACT
Country sports, and the question of their potential futures (if any), raise a number of profound and complex issues about local identity and political agency, and their regulation, in the contemporary world of globalizing capitalism and commodified leisure practices. To most of their supporters, traditional country sports involving hunting, shooting and fishing are claimed to be the participant expression of a social group and its agriculturally related mode of life in the countryside itself. Without the supporting apparatus of the rest of rural life, its proponents argue, the notion of country sports would have no meaning. They are therefore conceptually as well as spatially a world away from the hyper-commodified and globalized mercenary trade of urban sports such as professional league football, in which the highest-paying professional teams asset-strip the developing world to provide a form of circus-entertainment for a paying public, most of whom access the resulting entertainment on screen. All the circus needs is a big top, which could be anywhere – so new stadia are built where convenient, whatever the traditions of the clubs which play in them. Country sports, on the other hand – the argument runs – are crafted in relation to landscape and community, and cannot survive without both.
