Project summary: This project aims to understand how religious meaning systems become syncretic with, or replaced by, secular meaning systems, and the adaptive consequences of this interaction. Specifically, I will ethnographically examine how sport communities create social worlds that generate meaning for members and how these meanings interact with religious meanings and identities. This research extends previous work on religion as a complex adaptive system and understands both religion and sport as ritually evoked institutional systems in which meaning plays a motivational and stabilizing role.

Funding: Issachar Fund

Publications

2023	Sosis, Richard. The Ping Pong Player and the Professor: An Anthropologist Explores Fatherhood and Meaning in an Extraordinary Sport. Wildhouse Publications.
2022	Sosis, Richard, and Jordan Kiper. Sport as a meaning-making system: insights from the study of religion. Religions 13, 915, 1-17.