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Competition beyond Capitalism: Anthropological Perspectives on an Unruly Dynamic

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Volume 16

Studies in Social Analysis

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Competition beyond Capitalism

Anthropological Perspectives on an Unruly Dynamic

Edited by Leo Hopkinson and Teodor Zidaru

Made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Berghahn Open Anthro in partnership with Libraria.

186 pages, 18 illus., bibliog., index

ISBN  978-1-83695-446-0 $120.00/£92.00 / Hb / Not Yet Published (May 2026)


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Description

Competition often appears to typify capitalist social life as a process that defines relative value and pits people against one another. But capitalism is not all there is to competition. In ethnographic perspective, the outcomes of competition depend on always varied, shifting and contested interpretations of what is worth competing for and how to do so. Hence, even when competition is imaged to engineer pre-defined changes or institute particular social orders, in practice its effects are often complex and unexpected. This book explores how competition is an unruly dynamic that generates unforeseen possibilities for human connection and mediates divergent social orders, rather than imposing one or another.

Leo Hopkinson is a Lecturer in Medical Anthropology at University College London. He works with boxers and other athletes mostly in Ghana and the UK, exploring how they build lives through sport with a particular attention to gendered experience, competition, and the ethics of physicality in sport.

Teodor Zidaru is an Associate Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. His UKRI-funded open access monograph Speaking of Trust: Religion and Mutual Aid in Southwest Kenya (Zed Books, 2025) explores how and why people trust and mistrust one another as they cooperate and compete in electoral politics, domestic economies, microfinance groups, and informal finance.

Subject: Political and Economic AnthropologySociology

Competition beyond Capitalism Edited by Leo Hopkinson and Teodor Zidaru is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) with support from Berghahn Open Anthro in partnership with Libraria.

OA ISBN: 978-1-83695-448-4



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