{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.028132992327365727, 'fraction_numerical': 0.02009499451954695, 'mean_word_length': 5.581730769230769, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Editorial Introduction 39(3): Sport, Religion, and Intellectual Property

Sport, religion, and intellectual property are the topics of the articles in this issue. Reading these articles together, one is reminded that religion and sport both rely on rules of play and access, spectacle performances, and material culture. Moreover, sporting and religious institutions, paraphernalia, practices, and ideologies are easily considered intellectual property. This provides a basis for exclusion and inclusion of their stakeholders, and a means of commoditizing what would otherwise be free entertainments and sources of meaning. The juxtaposition suggests ways that the comparative empirical study of all of these domains might be enormously productive. Karen McGarry’s ‘‘Sport in Transition: Emerging Trends on Culture Change in the Anthropology of Sport’’ documents a range of recent works that have pulled the study of sport from anthropology’s shelf of neglect. Ethnographic, archaeological, and ethnohistoric methods, and a range of cultural and temporal variation in sporting activities, are brought into contact. McGarry places these works, which in most cases limit themselves to a single subfield perspective, in a general anthropological context to productively bring, for example, the ancient Mesoamerican ball game onto the same anthropological playing field as Canadian hockey. Here the language of sportscasters and the identity afforded by cheering for one’s chosen team, or by being an athlete in international competitions, come together and point to some of the many unrealized potentials of a general anthropology of sport. Turning to religion, Edward Swenson provides a critical treatment of several books on the archaeology, ethnography, and cognitive psychology of the topic in ‘‘Revelation and Resolution: Religion as the Key to Cognition, Power, and History in Anthropology.’’ Swenson locates the significance of religious ritual and belief in the historical particularities of culture and agency rather than in universal cognitive processes and tendencies (though he would prefer not to isolate such abstractions as religion, ritual, and belief for analysis lest holistic understanding be sacrificed on the altar of heuristic expediency). Not only does he find neurobiological explanations of human religiosity of limited value to anthropology, he argues that many of the authors who allude to them do not test them in the light of either cultural or biological data. His article stands to inspire both controversy and improvement in the approaches he discusses. Reviews in Anthropology, 39:149–150, 2010 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0093-8157 print=1556-3014 online DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2010.509027