Sport Without Guarantees: Toward a Cultural Studies That Matters  

Oleh:

Andrews, David ; Giardina, Michael D.

Jenis: Article from Journal - e-Journal
Dalam koleksi: Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies vol. 8 no. 4 (Nov. 2008), page 395-422.
Fulltext: 395.pdf (162.07KB)

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At the beginning of any academic discussion of sport, it is common practice to define the central term. As a point of departure for this special issue, we feel compelled to offer a brief rejoinder to this convention. In short, we would contend that there is no guaranteed or essential manifestation, experience, or indeed definition of sport. Although physically based competitive activities are a feature of virtually all human civilizations, the popular myth of sport as a fixed and immutable category is little more than a pervasive, if compelling, fiction. Sport should instead be used as a necessarily malleable collective noun suggesting the diversity and complexity of what are temporally and spatially contingent expressions of physical culture. In Ellis Cashmore’s (2000) terms, sports are fluid and ever-changing “products of cultural endeavors, enterprises that have been manufactured in particular kinds of historical and social circumstances” (p. vii). So rather than seeking to develop some universal definition of sport, a more productive interpretive strategy is to locate particular sport forms and physical cultural experiences in the sociohistorical context within which they came to exist.

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