Routledge Handbook of Physical Cultural Studies

Michael Silk, David Andrews, Holly Thorpe, Michael Silk, David Andrews, Holly Thorpe, Michael L. Silk, David L. Andrews, Holly Thorpe

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317596004
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Physical cultural studies (PCS) is a dynamic and rapidly developing field of study. This handbook offers the first definitive account of the state of the art in PCS, showcasing the latest research and methodological approaches. It examines the boundaries, preoccupations, theories and politics of PCS, drawing on transdisciplinary expertise from areas as diverse as sport studies, sociology, history, cultural studies, performance studies and anthropology.

Featuring chapters written by world-leading scholars, this handbook examines the most important themes and issues within PCS, exploring the active body through the lens of class, age, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, (dis)ability, medicine, religion, space and culture. Each chapter provides an overview of the state of knowledge in a particular subject area, while also considering possibilities for developing future research.

Representing a landmark contribution to physical cultural studies and allied fields, the Routledge Handbook of Physical Cultural Studies is an essential text for any undergraduate or postgraduate course on physical culture, sports studies, leisure studies, the sociology of sport, the body, or sport and social theory.

PART I
Groundings

1
HISTORICIZING PHYSICAL CULTURAL STUDIES

Patricia Vertinsky and Gavin Weedon

Physical cultural studies (PCS) was born largely out of disciplinary struggles in kinesiology departments over the last few decades, where the moving body has increasingly become the site and source of conflict and contestation. Inheriting from cultural studies, PCS is ensconced in this language and conceptual apparatus of struggle, of epistemic crises and epistemological conflict, and this has become its modus operandi for understanding both the active body and the critical, emancipatory mission of the field. While this embattled mentality is somewhat merited by the ‘kinesiological order of things’ among those who clamor for expertise on matters of physical activity, it is also important, and impels us to emphasize that the study of physical culture has multiple lines of descent that complement its cultural studies heritage. These include the history of physical education, the birth of interdisciplinarity and the fields of ‘studies’ in the academic community, not to mention the extensive global reach of physical culture itself and its uptake outside of the Academy. In keeping with the recent trajectories of the somatic turn, we suggest that the unifying project of PCS – the ‘end to tribal warfare’ in kinesiology that Alan Ingham envisioned in 1997 – might be best pursued through more productive, albeit provocative conversations around the study of active physicality.

‘The somatic turn’: sociology of sport embraces the body

The sociology of sport’s turn to the body (and more specifically to its physical culture) over the past two to three decades is closely linked to the concerted turn to embodiment in sociology and cultural studies during the same period.¹ Bryan Turner was among the first concerned to develop a genuine sociology of the body when he wrote The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory in 1984. During the decade that followed, leading up to the publication of the second edition of the book in 1996, Turner acknowledged that there had been ‘a flood of publications concerned with the relationship between the body and society, the issue of embodiment with relation to theories of social action, the body and feminist theory and the body and consumer culture’ (Turner, 1996: 1). Over a decade and a half into the twenty-first century (including a third edition of The Body and Society in 2012) there is now ‘a generalized and enthusiastic recognition of the cultural and social significance of embodiment in every aspect of life among scholars throughout the humanities and the social sciences, as well as in areas of science and technology’, paralleled by an explosion of interest in the active body in popular culture (Featherstone and Turner, 1995: 2; Shilling, 2005). ‘Interest in the body’, it seems, ‘is everywhere’ (Hargreaves and Vertinsky, 1996: 1).

As part of this intellectual shift, Body and Society was launched in 1995 with a mandate ‘to cater for the expanding interest in the body as a topic of teaching and research within the academy; something which in turn can be related to the perceived importance of the body in popular culture, consumer culture and everyday life’ (Featherstone and Turner, 1995: 1). Since its inception it has incorporated various dimensions of physical culture into its intellectual purview, citing the pertinent foundational works of Jean-Marie Brohm (1975), Michel Bernard (1976), Georges Vigarello (1978), Pierre Bourdieu (1978, 1980, 1988), Maurice Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 1962), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987), and many others, and pointing to a widening range of substantive topics requiring debate, such as the history of the body in art, technology, medicine, religion, gender and sexuality, ethnicity, fashion, the body and emotions, consumerism and sport. We now have an array of sophisticated theoretical lenses through which to broach questions around the political, economic, social and ecological moorings of physical cultural practices. Marcel Mauss ([1935] 1973), for example, was an early leader who wrote of the social dimensions exhibited in particular styles of movement such as walking, swimming and dancing. He was among the first to explicate the cultural importance of what he called ‘techniques of the body’, that is the ways in which, from society to society, people learn through education and imitation to use their bodies in a variety of instrumental ways. In this sense, as he demonstrated, the inculcation of specific body techniques was understood to involve not only the transmission of knowledge and skills but could be linked to larger social processes and purposes and to the proselytizing of particular schemes of preference, valuation and meaning (see Dyck and Archetti, 2003: 9).

Intellectual recognition of the body as a site of contested significance in the social sciences and humanities is inextricable from any historicizing of PCS (Hancock et al., 2000: 1). Indeed the ever broadening scope of the ‘somatic turn’ affirms that much is at stake in the struggle for the body in twenty-first-century kinesiology, and PCS has declared its intention to ‘displace, decenter, and disrupt’ (Silk and Andrews, 2011: 29, original emphasis) natural scientific and otherwise objectivist understandings of active embodiment by way of a response. Yet there is a danger that anchoring the field within intra-departmental battles in kinesiology and the ‘fields’ and sub-disciplines of which it is comprised can underplay the multifarious histories of physical culture that promise to inform PCS. Physical culture movements and the global reach of somatic practices have long and storied histories, and any historicizing of PCS should not be conflated with, or made reducible to, the struggles within kinesiology, the mission of cultural studies or indeed the somatic turn.

Historicizing physical culture

The prevailing histories of physical culture take place in Europe and North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and show how an extended community of American and European actors, dancers, physical educators, health and fitness reformers and physical culture teachers created a spectrum of ‘body cultures’ that responded and contributed to modernity and artistic modernism. These body cultures, though heterogeneous in their form and contexts, collectively crafted and visualized a ‘modern’ body, ready for work, play, war and self-expression. Yet the obsession with physical culture apparent throughout the tense and formative modernist movement extended well beyond sport, games and purposive exercise, through gymnastics, body building and posture exercises to a wide range of holistic health practices and expressive activities.² Furthermore, interest in and knowledge about physical culture practices were circulating globally by the turn of the twentieth century through colonial struggles against imperial administrators and nationalist discourses as well as through the rise and expansion of new technologies and commodity culture (Ballantyne and Burton, 2005; Altglas, 2007). The map of domination of the world’s spaces changed out of all recognition between 1850 and 1914 such that yoga, for example, could begin to develop into ‘India’s first global brand’ of physical culture while simultaneously adapting many features to shifting local conditions (Alter, 2004, 2007).

We can see how the projects of PCS and of kinesiology are allied to the ‘anatamo-politics’ enacted by modern nation-states since the late eighteenth century (for Foucault in The Order of Things, at least), insofar as these fields of study and their members clamor to know, represent, advocate for, and be recognized as experts in matters pertaining to physical activity. Yet clearly any history of physical culture cannot simply be tied to the governance of bodies in modern, Western states but must be viewed more broadly as extending globally across centuries of human history. In his extensive work on physical cultures, Henning Eichberg has consistently called for a much greater focus upon the interlacement between Western histories of sport and physical culture and non-Western histories over time with attention to the political dimensions of body culture. Through body cultures, he says, especially in the clash between body cultures – cultural diversity becomes visible (Eichberg, 1998). Just as Foucault’s take on the discursive production of European bourgeoisie identity has been critiqued for its curious omission of colonial bodies as articulatory forces in understandings of sexuality (Stoler, 1995), it is often the case that accounts of Western physical cultural expressions do not recognize their non-Western heritage, and so risk complicity in colonial projects.

What we want to emphasize here is that the study of physical culture has multiple lines of descent, including the myriad genealogies of physical cultural practices across the globe and their uptake outside of the Academy. Moreover, those lines are best conceived as dynamic, fluid and active in contemporary physical cultures as opposed to being statically rendered in accounts of the past for intellectual posterity, as if not subject to the turbulence of worlds in which histories are (re)written. Rather than rehearse the established story of the European diffusions and non-occidental encounters with physical culture, and so risk reifying the given history as a stable template for further research, it seems more prudent to underscore here that disentangling and reassembling the transnational complexity of physical cultural histories is imperative to the project of PCS.

Kinesiology’s inconvenient truth

Nonetheless, PCS as it has been formalized as a field of study in recent years (in dialogue with Alan Ingham’s vision for eponymous departments), has been historicized largely as emerging from disciplinary struggles within kinesiology departments, including the marginalization and much-debated ‘demise’ of the sociology of sport. The physical body in movement, the demands of high-level sport, and the rapidly growing arena of sports medicine and technology are increasingly prime foci of departments of kinesiology, or movement and exercise sciences, where those attached to sub-disciplines and professional accreditations vie with one another to garner research money, medically oriented business, and laboratory space. In this regard, the focus of kinesiology still reflects that envisaged by Dr R. Tait McKenzie, widely heralded as one of the leading pioneers of physical education, who said a century ago that ‘the policy of the department may be said to contain something of the hospital clinic, a great deal of the classroom and laboratory and a little of the arena’ (Berryman, 1995: 4). At the same time, the rapidly increasing move to a science and technology-based kinesiology, sport performance analysis and a return to a medical base (and a disease model) in pursuit of ‘exercise is medicine’ (Berryman, 2010), has tended to rigidify segmented groups with distinct cultures and organizational values, contributing to a heady mix of scholarly alienation. Among sociologists of sport, for example, there is a growing worry that the central implications of the body in questions of self-identity, the construction and maintenance of social inequalities, and the constitution and development of societies mean that it is far too important a subject for them to leave to the natural sciences and the sports medicine docs (Shilling, 1993: 204).³

These concerns found expression in David Andrews’s 2007 address at the Academy of Kinesiology and Physical Education, (now the Academy of Kinesiology) meeting, in which he spoke passionately about the seemingly limitless and dominating effects of the sciences in kinesiology, and made the case for the ‘physical cultural studies imperative’ (Andrews, 2008). His critique, grounded in his own experience of the neo-liberal, corporate university, was of the instantiation of an epistemological hierarchy that privileged positivist over post-positivist, quantitative over qualitative, and predictive over interpretive ways of knowing active bodies. He took particular aim at a faculty that professed a focus and expertise on matters of human movement while failing to acknowledge that ‘the active body is as much a social, cultural, philosophical, and historical entity as it is a genetic physiological, and psychological vessel and needs to be engaged as such through rigorous ethnographic, auto-ethnographic, textual and discursive, socio-historic treatment’ (ibid.: 50). Kinesiology, he warned, was facing a crisis, at the very least manifest in terms of empirical ambiguity and political impotency. And policing that crisis was a response, he held, not only demanded by its urgency and high stakes, but informed by the cultural studies mantra derived from the classic study of that same name.⁴

At the same time, Andrews acknowledged that the sociology of sport community had been partly culpable in contributing to its own marginal status within a ‘science-as-king-based’ kinesiology, suggesting that its narrow focus on sport had limited the reach of that subdiscipline. Worse, he and his colleagues increasingly worried that sociologists of sport were climbing into bed with the scientists themselves; that evidence-based research was seeping into the critical sociological study of sport and threatening to neuter the political and critical potentialities of their sub-discipline. Public commentators such as Dave Zirin (2008) accused the sociology of sport of at its best, critically examining relationships of power, helping to fend off increasingly odious attacks on human freedom and equality, but at its worst drowning in a morass of incoherent, esoteric theoretical jargon where research is judged by the quantity of citations. Then there was Washington and Karen’s (2001) damning review that sports sociology was professionally marginalized, scorned by sociologists and despised by sportspersons. Michael Atkinson (2011: 136) even hinted that ‘perhaps in some ways the sociology of sport died some time ago without receiving a public eulogy or penned obituary’. Retrenchments in many departments of kinesiology or human movement studies units hinted that the sociology of sport was losing ground against science-oriented sub-disciplines which were teaming up with engineers, geneticists, orthopedic physicians and the applied health sciences more generally to expand their reach into emerging research funding possibilities and technically oriented job opportunities for their students (see for example, Lock, 2015). A central and compelling message in the history of medicine is the need to combine science and the humanities in understanding health and disease and in providing complementary tools to engineer improvements in the health of human populations (Jackson, 2014). Yet what Sir Burton Clark could say in 1963, ‘that men of the sociological tribe [Ah, they were really men in those days!] rarely visit the land of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Groundings
• Part II Practices
• Part III Subjectified bodies
• Part IV Institutionalized bodies
• Part V Experiential bodies
• Part VI Spaces
• Part VII Contexts and sites of embodied practice
• Part VIII Methodological contingencies
• Part IX Politics and praxis
• Afterword: (Digital) physical cultural studies?
• Index