Teaming up with Animals: The Making of Canine and Human Athletes in the Alaska Dog Mushing Community of Practice

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This paper aims to provide an intervention into the anthropology of sport and the study of multi-species relations. The notion of community practice (CoP), as defined by sociolinguists, delineates as its ethnographic object a group of people who carry out a joint activity and share (at least some) linguistic resources and interpretive frameworks for making sense of discourse that takes place during the joint endeavor. Findings from ethnographic and linguistic anthropological fieldwork with Alaska dog mushers illustrate how elaborating CoP as an analytic framework provides a rich, new perspective on the study of sport and human-animal relations.