Visibility and Erasure in Pacific Island Sport: An Epilogue

Humans everywhere have probably always engaged in activities that could be described as sport, namely behaviours that involved moving the body, often in close coordination with others, cooperating or competing with fellow participants and deriving from the experience a number of potentially contradictory emotions, including pleasure, camaraderie, hostility or disappointment. But like all human activities, some forms of sport have acquired considerable visibility while others have receded into the shadows. There are many different reasons for why these divergences exist, but most have something to do with power in its multiple forms. For example, when a concept of ‘modern sport’ began to emerge in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, sporting activities that gave inspiration for Association football or rugby, such as various local ball games, gradually fell by the wayside because those who played them were not members of the elites that codified how sport ‘should’ be played. The West's colonial expansion in the 19th century had the effect of sidelining or obliterating many local sporting activities (Besnier et al., 2018, pp. 39–70). The world of sport is thus the arena for struggles over value: what counts as a sport and what does not; what sports deserve funding, attention and promotion; who can play particular sport and who cannot; and multiple other ways in which particular sports and their practitioners gain visibility and are assigned high value while others are erased or devalued (Brownell & Besnier, 2019).