Sport and Modernity

Richard Gruneau

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781509501601
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This important new book from one of the world's leading sociologists of sport weaves together social theory, history and political economy to provide a highly original analysis of the complex relationship between sport and modernity.

Incorporating a powerful set of theoretical insights from traditions and thinkers ranging from classical Marxism and the Frankfurt School to Foucault and Bourdieu, Gruneau analyzes the emergence of "sport" as a distinctive field of practice in western societies. Examining subjects including the legacy of Greek and Roman antiquity, representations of sport in nineteenth-century England, Nazism, and modern "mega-events" such as the Olympics and the World Cup, he seeks to show how sport developed into an arena which articulated competing understandings of the kinds of people, bodies and practices best suited to the modern western world.

This book thereby explores with brio and sophistication how the ever-changing economic, social, and political relations of modernity have been produced and reproduced, and sometimes also opposed and escaped, through sport, from the Enlightenment to the rise of neoliberalism, as well as examining how the study of exercise, athletics, the body, and the spectacle of sport can deepen our understanding of the nature of modernity.It will be essential reading for students and scholars of the sociology and history of sport, sociology of culture, cultural history, and cultural studies.

1
ATHLETICS, BODY IMAGERY, AND SPECTACLE: GRECO-ROMAN PRACTICES, DISCOURSES, AND IDEOLOGIES

In a lengthy commentary on the nineteenth-century French writer Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin remarks at one point: “among all the relations into which modernity enters, its relation to antiquity is critical.”¹ The point is especially apt in describing modern European cultures in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whose promoters and critics frequently drew on classical references. As Marx argues in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, just as modern thinkers seemed to “be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, and creating something that did not exist before,” they conjured “the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”² One of Marx’s examples is how “the Revolution of 1789−1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire.”³

Conjuring an often mythic past to service modern projects in the present went far beyond the realm of revolutionary politics. Partly spurred by new archeological discoveries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, enthusiasm for “classical” antiquity swept through Europe and North America, influencing areas as diverse as literature, art, political philosophy, education, and sport. In England in particular, a “classical” education became a key part of the curriculum of elite schools and universities.⁴

In sport, the idealized use of classical images and mythic narratives typically constructed a view of the timelessness of athletic competition and of toned male bodily symmetry as a universal standard of beauty. Philhellenic educators and historians such as Pierre de Coubertin, E. N. Gardiner and H. A. Harris imagined a “golden age” in Greek athletics which provided a universal moral and aesthetic standpoint, not only for evaluating athletic practices elsewhere in the ancient world but, more importantly, for assessing the nature, meaning, and value of sport in twentieth-century western modernity.⁵ In this view, the cultural value of sport was seen to lie in the agonistic quest for excellence and honor for their own sake, as well as qualities of self-restraint, leadership and obedience, loyalty and cooperation, versatility, and the ability to take defeat well.⁶

However, these evaluations of sport were muddled by a deepening obsession with masculine physicality and vitality that swept across parts of Europe and North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the one hand, what Harold Segel calls a “new thematics” of war and sport emerged to underpin a growing international enthusiasm for “physical fitness, the great outdoors, [and] blood sport.”⁷ In Italian futurism and Nazism, for example, the appropriation of classicism became linked to the celebration of bodily energies as part of an emergent critique of the decadence of European modernity, ultimately supporting a view of “war” as the world’s “only hygiene.”⁸ On the other hand, this view fought it out with modern humanistic concerns about the elevation of raw instincts and emotions over reason; a one-dimensional obsession with specialized physical training over intellectual training; the potential degeneration of sporting contests into “bread and circuses”; and the belief that the growth of large-scale spectacles is an indicator of moral and social decline. Proponents of both perspectives claimed inspiration from athletics, body imagery, and circus spectacles in ancient Greece and Rome.

Since the 1970s, classical scholars have criticized such one-dimensional views of athletics and circus spectacles in Greco-Roman antiquity and have promoted more nuanced historical analyses.⁹ A wave of new classical scholarship since the turn of the twenty-first century has revealed enormous complication, hybridity, social difference, and contradiction in the “sport” of antiquity. Partly inspired by this new wave of classical scholarship, my goal in this chapter is to provide a sociologically oriented summary of athletics, body imagery, and spectacle in the histories of ancient Greece and Rome. Through this summary, I mean to provide context for discussion in later chapters of the highly selective, often contradictory, social, cultural, and political uses of classicism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and North America. While there is considerable historical research on the role of classical narratives, images, and debates in the making of modern sport, I am more interested here in broader sociological questions, including the ideological legacies of ancient Greek and Roman athletics, body cultures, and spectacles in shaping the nature of modernity itself.

Agon and the vita activa in Greek antiquity

Ancient Greek civilization developed over the course of many centuries through a series of migrations and conquests of territory, beginning in the Greek Peloponnesus and Aegean islands and expanding through much of the Mediterranean including the southern part of the Balkans and the western part of Asia Minor, Sicily, southern Italy, and parts of northern Africa. This led to hundreds of Hellenic city-states of varying sizes and influence, which lacked central mechanisms of unified political authority but typically shared a common body of linguistic, religious, and cultural traditions. Innovations in literature and art, athletic competition, and independent philosophical inquiry were notable aspects of these traditions.¹⁰

In the case of philosophy, classical Greek writers developed a level of critical reflexivity that was comparatively unique for their time. It was not enough to live in society unreflectively, what was required was to extend the goals of living to include reflection on the nature and meaning of life itself, including concepts such as representation, experience, justice, virtue, and politics. David Hawkes points out that, with the development of abstract speculation about concepts in ancient Greek social thought, “the veridical status of consciousness ceased to be connected to personal qualities” such as the status of the speaker, and “was instead equated with the ability to think rationally” and the ability to prove others wrong.¹¹ This not only helped to legitimate free argumentation in academies and gymnasia, it spilled into the central civic space of political discussion, the Greek agora.

Greek city-states developed complex systems of class and gendered labor that typically featured male aristocratic elites at the top of the social hierarchy, various occupational categories of “free men” and peasant-citizens in the middle and lower rankings − with women in more restricted positions within these hierarchies − and slaves at the bottom.¹² Slave labor accounted for the bulk of the manual labor force in agriculture, mining, craftwork and manufacturing, construction, and shipping, while female slaves made up almost all of the domestic labor force.¹³ While technical/vocational knowledge was respected in Greek antiquity, it tended to be viewed by the aristocratic classes as a marker of lower social status. Advanced formal education in letters (including poetry, rhetoric, and philosophy), music, and athletics was initially limited to the male children of wealthy families and was not available to laborers, slaves, or (notwithstanding some regional variations) women.

Over time, education in these activities became more widely available to free male Greek citizens in academies and gymnasia although, as David Pritchard notes in the case of Athens, even at the zenith of the city’s experiment with democracy during the fifth century BCE, wealth determined how long boys would be at school and which of the disciplines any boy could pursue.¹⁴ In classical Athens, athletics, letters, and music were prized as means for young men to display...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Athletics, Body Imagery, and Spectacle: Greco-Roman Practices, Discourses, and Ideologies
• 2 The Politics of Representation: English Sport as an Object and Project of Modernity
• 3 “Staging” (Capitalist/Colonial) Modernity: International Exhibitions and Olympics
• 4 German Modernism, Anti-Modernism, and the Critical Theory of Sport
• 5 A Savage Sorting of “Winners” and “Losers”: Modernization, Development, Sport, and the Challenge of Slums
• Index
• End User License Agreement