19.01.2012 | ||||||||
Crisis And Contradiction In Bodybuilding
Alan M. Klein
While the projection of ideal images is very important in American culture, it is in the subculture of sport and bodybuilding that it gets carried to tbe extreme. A 4 year study of bodybuilding's Mecca-Southern California- revealed a fundamental set of discrepancies between what the subculture projects as ideal and what actually goes on. These discrepancies are examined to determine which ones result from changes that have taken place in bodybuilding and which are structural to it. It is shown that as the sportsubculture altered its image to achieve cultural respectability, it inadvertently created new problems. The shifts are examined within the context of studies of deviance and point to the need for a long term ethnography in sport sociology.
Sociologists and anthropologists have avoided disciplinary conflict in part because they have drawn territorial boundaries that complement each others' interests, a feat that has as much to do with avoidance as it does engagement. Subject matter and methodology were divided so as to avoid turf issues. According to this simplified scheme, anthropologists study exotic cultures (preferably non-White and non-European) while sociologists seek out Westem societies. Anthropologists do qualitative analysis, while sociologists focus on quantitative. Enough is shared between them to constitute an intellectual demilitarized zone filled with anthropologists studying Westem urban contexts and rural sociologists working in areas like Brazil and the Philippines.
The study of sport reflects both the separation and complementarity between sociology and anthropology. Sport sociology has been even more separate from anthropology than have other sociological fields, making the potential contributions from ethnography more promising. The following ethnographic study will speak to the fruitful relationship between the disciplines of sport sociology, urban anthropology, and studies of subculture. In particular, the relationship between cultural ideals and behavioral actuality will be examined. While both disciplines share an interest in this relationship, they have framed it somewhat differently (e.g., Durkheim, 1953; Becker, 1963; Diamond, 1972; Linton, 1945; Freilich 1977). Using some of the more recent contributions from the field of subcultural studies, this paper focuses on the use of historical analysis and power relationships to look at discrepancies between ideal and real (Hebdige, 1983).
In sport analysis there is an immediate difference in the way the two fields define the appropriate subject of study. Sociologists study sport, while anthropologists deal with play. Play is certainly a broader category of behavior than sport, covering as it does, for instance, a child sitting alone making mudpies, as well as organized competition. By and large, however, anthropological studies of play view sport as less common in kin-based, nonstate societies, hence more properly the realm of other social scientists.
The association that each discipline forms also reflects these divisions. The North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS) studies Western sport or occasionally sport in Eastern industrial society (e.g., Cantelon & Gruneau, 1982; Eitzen, 1983). Exceptions are uncommon, such as Lever's study of soccer in Brazil (Lever, 1983). On the other hand, The Anthropological Association for the Study of Play (TAASP) tends to look at games and play in a Third World context (e.g., Stevens, 1977; Schwartzman, 1980; Blanchard and Cheska, 1983). The commitment to ethnography and fieldwork is noted in the work on sport carried out by anthropologists, while their sociologist colleagues lean heavily toward quantitative methods. It is the possibility of a sport ethnography within the sociological domain of contemporary industrial sport that represents a fruitful merger of anthropological orientation and sociological setting. This study attempts such a fusion.
Sport Sociology and the Ethnography of Sport Sport sociologists occupy a position of low status within the hierarchy of sociological specializations. Studying almost any institution, be it law, family, corporations, even deviance itself, seems more legitimate than the study of sport. Among sport sociologists there is an unstated consensus about the negative views their colleagues outside the specialty have of them. In partial response to this, sport sociologists have compensated with a hyperempirical methodology. Quantitative sport studies predominate as evidenced by the citations of work in leading texts (Coakley, 1982; Eitzen and Sage, 1978; Leonard, 1960). Journals such as the Journal of Sport and Social Issues and Sociology of Sport Journal, also point to a gap at least as large as the one that separates the disciplines of sociology and anthropology.
Anthropologists have increasingly carried out ethnographies and fieldwork on games (Blanchard & Cheska, 1985). With few exceptions, however, these studies have been on nonindustrial peoples (e.g., Geertz, 1972) or marginal groups within industrial societies (e.g., Tindall, 1975). While these are worthwhile anthropological contributions that deepen our understanding of culture, they do little to inform our understanding of American or Western society as it is affected by and through sport. This reinforces the oft-held view of anthropology as having little to say about the dominant society. Anthropologists have developed their analysis of small-scale societies, however, seeing them as a set institutions and cultural variables which act to integrate and alter that society through consensus and conflict. This assessed through participant observation. More important, anthropologists stress the use of culture as a prism through which social life can be interpreted. While sociologists are aware of these techniques and perspectives, it is the anthropologists who have developed them more fully. As a result, they can be used to advantage where other perspective have previously prevailed.
Sport ethnography is virtually nonexistent. Participant observation in the service of sport reporting is not in itself sufficient. On occasion, journalists with unusually keen insight and a sense of social analysis inadvertently cross over into the realm of ethnography (e.g., Lipsyte, 1975; Boswell, 1983). However, these efforts remain dilettantish rather than being serious ethnography. The observations of Janet Lever in her thoughtful sociological work on Brazilian soccer (1983), or those of Brower (1975) or Devereux (1976) on Little Leaguers, are not the same as those of Colin TurnbuU (1965) or Spradley (1970) or Lee (1979). Missing is the view of soccer or baseball as a self-contained integrated whole, a cultural diorama That totality and the insight and understanding that comes from the method and perspective of ethnography can be a critical element in the rise of sport sociology to a position of prominence.
Dit is het eerste deel van een samenvatting van Alan Kleins Little Big Men. Andere delen: [Deel 2] [Deel 3] [Deel 4] [Deel 5] [Deel 6]
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