The editor, a social anthropologist at Oxford Brookes University, suggests that the articles in this collection demonstrate the profusion of ways in which sports influence, define and assist in the creation and contest of identities, and do so at a series of levels and along a range of cultural domains. He states that his reason for deciding to collate a book on the topic was his growing realisation while doing fieldwork on contested, modern notions of identity in the Basqueland that sport and identity had been neglected. To understand the Basque locals he argues, he had to learn about their sports and games and what they meant to them, in a country in which traditional sports were being revitalised, imported sports adapted and other sports (e.g., downhill multi-man go-cart racing) invented. The papers in this collection were selected from presentations at a seminar series on ’Sport, Identity and Ethnicity’ conducted at the Institute of Social Anthropology, Oxford University. The first chapter in this edited collection addresses theoretical and conceptual issues about the role of sport in culture; sport and identity; sport, ethnicity and the nationstate ; gender and identity. This introductory chapter is followed by others that address: the role played by football teams in colonial Zimbabwe to express locals’ autonomy from their British rulers; the evolution of one of Venice’s central festive occasions-its regatta-from a ritual of state to a sport of the people; modern and postmodern transformations of polo on Pakistan; the resolution of problematic aspects of social life in Turkey through wrestling; the manner by which Catalan nationalists successfully exploited the Barcelona Olympics for their own political ends; and the controversy between anglers and anti-anglers in Britain. It seems like there is something here for everyone!