Culture and Sports

Abstract

To great gains, sociologists have either emphasized culture and sports as reflections of larger social forces and inequalities or as unique transformative powers. Therefore, it seems to be a pressing need in the field to strike a middle ground between these two poles of reasoning. If sociological sport scholarship on social inequalities and cultural autonomy is synthesized, sports emerge as a meaning-making process that allows us to reflect on, test, defy and enact social power. As sports are carried out through symbolic representations and actions, they reproduce social order and privilege but also allow improvisation and social change. At its best, the culture-and-sports literature underlines this agency and subversion with respect to hegemonic powers and expose sports’ contradictory nature of being both fair and foul, at the same time.

Looking closely at the paradigms that shape understandings of culture and sports allows for a theoretically informed view of the field. Scattered across social science and humanities is a literature emphasizing the open-ended quality of sports contests and the agency and subversive qualities of sports actors. Underlining contradiction, complexity, and contingency, this literature emerges with a fully stacked interdisciplinary toolkit for focusing on the interstices, borders, and impact zones where social and cultural phenomena collide. To revitalize and sharpen explanatory claims about the cultural autonomy of sports, or the lack thereof, this literature is vital. It shows how meaning making about sports and within sports is shaped by individuals’ and collectives’ maneuvering of play, game and ritual-like modalities. Play is open-ended. Games are constrained. Social performances use culture in a ritual-like manner to maneuver the gray areas where freedom and constraints, sports and social issues spark friction. Looking closely at this body of literature, a few key studies that emphasize how sports shape social life become key to moving the field onward.

At the interstices between culture and sports resides a multiplicityof meanings and actions about complex, unjust, and fragmented societies. On this middle ground, culture and sports are diverse yet mutually constitutive. The many patterns and pluralities that this mutuality generates show how culture and sports collide, why sports’ meanings and actions vary, and how sports are important in social cohesion, domination, and resistance. Therefore, future research will do well to incorporate and amend a vast range of theories under the sociological study of culture and sports. Using culture as an analytic vantage point shows how sports shape social life from multiple vantage points and positions, and it provides a subtle compromise for the study of the ways in which sports are specialized institutions and part of a whole way of life. The literature that focuses on this middle ground between social inequalities and cultural autonomy makes the study of culture and sports subversive in that it can empirically and theoretically contests the truths of sports, sociology, and society.