The Wrestlers of Khartoum, Sudan: An Embodied Material Culture of Virility

Abstract

This is an ethnography of the contemporary martial art of Sudanese wrestling. Adapted over the past three to four decades from diverse rituals indigenous to the Nuba Mountains, this intense sporting practice now brings together thousands of ethnically-diverse, mainly working class spectators and athletes, in a stadium located in Sudan's capital, Khartoum. Inside this wrestling arena, a cross-ethnic configuration of ideal masculine personhood, which I call the hyper-virile wrestler (sabi), has emerged. The ability to become this ideal figure, imbued with enviable qualities, is not predicated on one's ethnicity, religion, occupation or political connections, but instead on one's ability to master specific forms of bodily conduct. Grounded in extensive visual and sensory ethnographic fieldwork in Khartoum's burgeoning multi-ethnic urban milieux (before, during and after Sudan's 2018-19 revolution), this thesis explores how and why diverse men choose to become hyper-virile wrestlers, and the effects that wrestling has on their bodies, selves and lives. Framed within the Matiere a Penser anthropological school of thought, I propose an understanding of Sudanese wrestling as an embodied material culture of virility comprised of learned bodily conducts, embodied relations to matter, and mystical-religious practices, all of which provoke corporeal and moral changes within the wrestler's self. This study further advances a literature that seeks to understand how bodily techniques and material culture shape human subjects, and highlights new configurations of masculine personhood and male corporeality in majority-Muslim Sudan. By focusing on a sporting practice shared by multiple, largely peripheral ethnic groups, the study offers an important re-reading of Sudanese identity politics. Whereas popular and scholarly perspectives on the two Sudans often focus on what divides the peoples of these countries, rather than on what unites them (Arab identities versus African identities, Northerners versus Southerners, Muslims versus Christians, Centre versus Periphery), this study instead spotlights the emergence of a new configuration of Sudanese personhood which has subverted colonial-era ethnic polarities through the embodied material culture of a martial art. Show more