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Reading Guide to: Bourdieu, P.
(1993) 'How Can One Be a Sportsman?' in Bourdieu, P. (1993) Sociology in Question, London:
Sage
Publications
Bourdieu 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 past times.
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. (There is a great deal of
discussion of cultural practices as well as sport, and how they are
divided by the 'aesthetics' in the enormous study of French culture
Bourdieu 1984). The easiest way to note this connection 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 producers at
work in the sporting field offers sport 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, but are reduced the level of
fans '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, moralists, the clergy, doctors, educators, and
clothes designers. Before going further, is also important to note
that sport is sometimes merely a pretext for organising 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 with other ('socialisation') 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 terms on activities are
designed to maintain and invest in the body as an end in itself .
Keep fit regimes expresse 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, it is
the female body that shows the trends particularly, such as the
intersection between the concern for health and the concern for
beauty --'women... are more imperative for they are required to
submit to the norms defining what the body ought to be, not only in
its perceptible configuration but also in its 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 traditions with 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) |