READING
GUIDE TO: Bourdieu,
P.
(1993) Sociology in
Question, London: Sage
by Dave Harris
Ch. 15 How Can One Be a
Sportsman?
Bourdieu's
remarkable
contribution to the sociology of
sport offers a complex argument
about sport in the context of the
struggles between fractions who
constitute the whole 'field', the
social classes who use sport to
express their aesthetics and
distancing strategies, and the
need to focus on legitimate uses
of the body. To take these issues
and summarise them briefly in
turn, the field of sports is
normally seen as organically
linked to pre-industrial games,
festivals, and activities such as
hunting, but this conceals the
difference between modern sport
and those pre-modern pastimes.
Bourdieu describes the relation
between them as a
'break which is itself
linked to the constitution of a
field of specific practices,
endowed with its own specific
rewards and its own rules' (118).
This break is associated with an
elite practice, abstracting bodily
activity from its cultural and
social contexts, and treating it
disinterestedly: this in turn
permits using the body for
abstract purposes (sport for its
own sake), developing whole
artificial rules to govern sports,
permitting the emergence of
professionals as opposed to
amateurs, and finally generating
the whole population of the field,
including physiotherapists,
academics, specialists and so on.
Turning
to the second issue, it is clear
that disinterestedness and
abstraction are key elements of the 'high
aesthetic' which represents in turn
the unconscious dispositions (the 'habitus') of
the aristocracy. The easiest way to
note this is to explore the
connection between elite schools and
the emergence of modern sports: the
cult of fair play 'is the way of
playing the game characteristic of
those who do not get so carried away
by the game as to forget that it is
a game, those who maintain the "role
distance"... that is implied in all
roles designated for the future
leaders' (120). This also feeds into
the growing autonomy of the sport
and the way which it is regulated.
Sporting excellence, and the cult of
the amateur also played a part in
distinguishing aristocrats from 'other
fractions of the dominant class'
(121), or other classes who might
appear as rivals. Bourdieu argues
that this basic process of
distinction can be detected behind a
number of other oppositions found in
the sporting field, such as 'the male
and female, the virile and the
effeminate' (122). Ironically,
having developed this abstract and
detached, professional, organized
version of sport, the product is
then offered for popular consumption
but as a spectacle. The consumers
themselves add to the spectacular
qualities of modern sport, precisely
because they cannot occupy the
aesthetic that produced it The fans
are 'condemned
to an imaginary participation which
is owned in illusory compensation
for the dispossession they suffer at
the hands of experts' (125) : they
have to concentrate on 'incidents'
or on the results instead.
It
is
clear that sport in particular is
centred on 'struggles
over
the definition of the legitimate
body and the legitimate use of the
body' (122), struggles which invite
participation from all sorts of
other contributors, such as
moralists, the clergy, doctors,
educators, and clothes designers. It
is also important to note that sport
is sometimes merely a pretext for
organising (business or social)
meetings, as in games of golf or
shooting. Sciences of the body
emerge, to rival aesthetics of the
body. Claims are made about the
inner effects of developing the
body, such as the cultivation of
leadership and discipline, or the
use of disciplinary regimes in
schools or other total institutions.
Controlling movements of the body
produces dispositions, which compare
well with other mechanisms to
install dispositions, and are 'reinserted
into the unity of the system of
dispositions, the habitus' (127).
Different sorts of bodies are the
outward signs of these dispositions
-- strong bodies or healthy bodies,
representing working-class and
middle-class dispositions
respectively. Other sports offer
chances to relate to the body
differently, to establish that one
can endure pain and suffering (boxing),
or to demonstrate a willingness to
gamble the body (motorcycling,
athletics, dangerous sports). Some
physical activities work on the
outside of the body and its surface,
such as those to develop '"physique",
that
is, the body for others' (130).
There is a working class
instrumentalism towards the body,
while the middle class preference
turns on activities which are
designed to maintain and invest in
the body as an end in itself . Keep
fit regimes express an interest in
scientific knowledge about the body,
anatomical knowledge (such as that
of the specific muscle groups), and
demonstrate a willingness to undergo
deferred gratification, which
fulfils 'the
ascetic dispositions of
upwardly-mobile individuals' (130).
Finally, the female body shows the
trends particularly, such as the
intersection between the concern for
health and the concern for beauty
--'women... are more imperatively
required to submit to the norms
defining what the body ought to be,
not only in its perceptible
configuration but also against
motion, its gait, etc' (130).
Finally,
Bourdieu
attempts to explain why it seems so
natural and inevitable that we like
the kinds of sports that are
provided. We have a clue in the
earlier discussion about
aristocratic definitions of sport
being returned to the working
classes in a popular form. The
competition between different
fractions in the sporting field
generates novel products, such as
different schools or specialisms.
These producers are also able to
affect the habitus:
'They are therefore
predisposed to give voice to the
more or less conscious expectations
of the corresponding fractions of
the lay public and, by objectifying
those expectations, to realise them'
(131).
more notes
on Bourdieu and other social theorists
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