Abstract
The history of sport and its emergence as a central feature of Western society and culture is very complex. It can be seen as part of the pursuit of leisure and pleasure, a loosening of external and internal controls, and a quest for excitement. It became an integral part of the civilizing process, of increasing interdependence, of the control of violence, and of state formation and nation building.1 Sport gradually became central to everyday life in capitalist societies, particularly in expanding towns and cities.
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Notes
See Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986):
Eric Dunning, Sport Matters: Sociological Studies of Sport, Violence and Civilisation (London: Routledge, 1999).
Eileen Kennedy and Laura Hills, Sport, Media and Society (New York: Berg, 2009), 1.
As Van Krieken argues, this is partly because the absence of a language barrier enables them to cross national boundaries. See Robert Van Kreiken, Celebrity Society (London: Routledge, 2012), 51.
Mike Cronin, “Beyond Sectarianism: Sport and Irish Culture,” in Ireland: Beyond Boundaries, ed. L. Harte and Y. Whelan (London: Pluto Press, 2007), 215–237;
John Hargreaves, Sport, Power and Culture (Oxford: Polity, 1986), 57–113.
See Mike Cronin, Sport and Nationalism in Ireland: Gaelic Games, Soccer and Irish Identity since 1884 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999).
See Paul Darby, Gaelic Games, Nationalism and the Irish Diaspora in the United States (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2009);
Tom Humphries, Green Fields: Gaelic Sport in Ireland (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996).
Pete Lunn and Richard Layte, The Irish Sports Monitor, Third Annual Report. Dublin: The Economic and Social Research Institute, 2009, 12, 46, 52, 40. Of the main sports, leaving aside walking, jogging, cycling and dancing, swimming was the most popular (7.2 percent) followed by soccer (5.6 percent), golf (4.6 percent), Gaelic football (2.6 percent), hurling (1.4 percent), and rugby (0.9 percent). Lunn and Layte, Sports Monitor, 23. One of the problems in measuring the level of participation in sport is how to distinguish it from fitness and exercise. When is going for a run, walking, or cycling a sport? A survey in 2003 found that 78 percent of respondents engaged in physical activities to some degree, but only about 40 percent did so regularly enough to correspond to the minimum standards of physical activity recommended by the World Health Organisation. Recreational walking was by far the most popular form of leisure-time physical activity: 60 percent of adults had taken a walk in the four weeks prior to the survey.
See Liam Delaney and Tony Fahey, Social and Economic Value of Sport in Ireland (Dublin: Economic and Social Research Institute, 2005), 16, 23.
In his classic analysis of social capital, Putnam argued that the decline in collective sports (he focused on bowling leagues in the United States) led to a decline in social capital. Putnam linked this to the arrival of the mass media and the commodification of sport. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). However, research suggests that the social bonding of sport is not even or homogeneous. Membership of sports clubs is higher among younger people—particularly men—and those with better educational backgrounds and higher occupational groups. Women, unskilled workers, the unemployed, and older people are not as much involved in sporting clubs; see Delaney and Fahey, Social and Economic Value of Sport in Ireland, 2–3.
This is adapted from Durkheim’s definition. See Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976 [1915]), 47.
See Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 93.
See Elias and Dunning, Quest for Excitement, 222. There is also an argument that sport is a legacy of religious ritual, and that the origins of many modern-day sport are to be found in the practices associated with fertility festivals. See Susan Birrell, “Sport as Ritual: Interpretations from Durkheim to Goffman,” Social Forces 60.2 (1981), 354; Dunning, Sport Matters, 7.
Carl Stempel “Adult Participation Sports as Cultural Capital: A Test of Bourdieu’s Theory of the Field of Sports,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 40.4 (2005), 411–432.
Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1996);
Ann Swidler, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2001), 71–88.
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© 2014 Tom Inglis
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Inglis, T. (2014). Sport. In: Meanings of Life in Contemporary Ireland. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137413727_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137413727_6
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