Sport: Bodies at Play?

Abstract

Sport presents a distinctive field of enquiry and a particular social world. Bodies may be central to sporting practices, but sport is also characterized by specific ways of acting and ways of being and has its own regulatory frameworks. What is distinctive about embodied sporting practices? What is specific about sport? Sport is a significant part of global and local economic networks like so much of the contemporary economic infrastructure. Sport is a commodity, like many others — a means of making a living for some and of generating wealth. However, sport is a distinctive field, as I shall argue in this chapter, not only because of the centrality of bodies and body practices to sporting projects, but also because of the particular features that mark sport out, including its histories and concern with play as well as with competition and cooperation, and their inherent tension. Sport is also a set of pleasurable activities that people do because they want to. This makes sport attractive, although its associations with play and pleasure may also render it marginal and trivial in some contexts as an area of study and even as a field of endeavour. Sport offers both an equal and a very unequal playing field in which opportunities are both created and denied.