Sport, Dance and Embodied Identities

Noel Dyck, Eduardo P. Archetti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000324013
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Sport and dance command the passions and devotion of countless athletes, dancers and fans worldwide. Although conventionally thought to reside within separate social realms, these two embodied cultural forms are revealed in this benchmark volume to share a vital capacity to constitute and express identities through their practiced movements and scripted forms. Thus, the work of choreographers and coaches along with the performances of dancers and athletes offer not merely entertainment and aesthetic accomplishment but also powerful means for celebrating existing social arrangements and cultural ideals or, alternately, for imagining and advocating new ones.Drawing on a wide selection of sport and dance activities from around the world, this book elucidates the ways in which embodied performances both mirror and reshape social life. It traces, for example, how football, salsa and tango can each be employed to articulate or rewrite national and gender identities. Also examined are children's sport and the dynamics by which immigration and cultural integration, along with the socialization of children and youth, may be directed through the organization of community sport. The volume investigates the marshalling of sport and dance in settings from Africa to Ireland as vehicles for framing moral issues that revolve around the appropriate use, protection and exhibition of the body. This innovative study establishes the paradoxical fashion in which dance and sport can unite certain people and communities while at the same time serving exclusionary and nationalistic purposes.

Part I Introduction

—1— Embodied Identities: Reshaping Social Life Through Sport and Dance

Noel Dyck and Eduardo P. Archetti

Introduction

In a football match staged in a Salvadorean village a team representing the ladino elite meets one consisting mainly of the sons of indigenous men killed by ladino paramilitary patrols during the civil war of the 1980s. On the dance-floors of Hamburg nightclubs German aficionados of salsa negotiate the delicate issue of women being obliged to follow the lead of their male partners in an age of otherwise relentless gender equality. When selecting playing partners the boys and girls of an inner-city Copenhagen recreational badminton programme mandated by social policies of inclusion move across the gym towards friends while cutting a swath of non-attention through children from other schools and social classes. What these and other ethnographic scenarios examined in this book serve to highlight are the diverse and complex ways in which sport and dance are implicated in the production and expression of embodied identities. These identities inevitably reflect not only stylized forms of movement and purpose, but also the contexts within which they are nurtured.

Bringing together sport and dance as ethnographically distinctive but analytically commensurable forms of body culture and social practice represents a departure from previous ways of thinking about these two fields within anthropology and other disciplines. Sport and dance are conventionally viewed in the West as residing within separate and even opposed cultural realms. Yet they share not only a common status as techniques of the body (Mauss 1973), but also a vital capacity to express and reformulate identities and meanings through their practised movements and scripted forms. Sport and dance spark widespread participation, critical appreciation and endless interpretation by performers and their audiences. Indeed, the embodied practices of athletes and dancers afford not merely pleasure and entertainment but powerful means for celebrating existing social arrangements and cultural ideals or for imagining and advocating new ones.

The eleven chapters that follow explore a variety of sport and dance forms, activities and relationships in locales that reach from Europe to Africa and North, South and Central America. They probe the ways in which particular historical and ethnographic settings and undertakings serve to mark sport and dance both as embodied activities and as objects for contemplation, recognition and discourse that give rise to a variety of reworked national, ethnic, class, gender and personal identities. The forms of sport and dance discussed in this volume include those created as expressions of modernity that are directly or indirectly implicated in projects of nation-building. Others exemplify processes of globalization within which forms of embodied practice, such as tango, aikido and Riverdance, that are produced in the ‘periphery’ may be exported, thereby contesting the cultural hegemony of the ‘centre’.

As prime sites for not only leisure, but also the production, reproduction and contestation of identities, sport and dance balance precariously between a set of recurring contradictions. Thus, the embodied identities spawned by athletes and dancers are frivolous yet serious; categorical yet personal; ephemeral yet abiding; and, relegated to the field of leisure, supposedly on the margins of everyday life, yet the focus of burgeoning economic industries and formidable political interests. Precisely because sport and dance are performed within these oscillating contradictions, they provide penetrating analytical vantage points from which to apprehend the taken-for-granted arrangements and assumptions of social life.

The volume is organized into three parts. The chapters in the first part examine sport training regimes that work to shape the bodies and selves of child and youth athletes, as well as the ways in which boys and girls pursue their own concerns and exercise agency within these settings. Sally Anderson’s chapter presents an ethnographic account in which a group of children, meeting at an inner-city Copenhagen recreational centre for badminton practice, receive instruction not only about how to strike the shuttlecock effectively but also about how to comport themselves appropriately within a situation pervaded by Danish ideals of universality and inclusive social fellowship. Anderson argues that the task of promoting state-mandated ideals of sociality through sport involves rather more than the propagation of inclusive cognitive categories and adult supervisors’ exercise of proper moral direction. What her carefully observed account establishes is the manner in which these children construct a highly skilled, intricately coordinated non-verbal performance that satisfactorily enacts the tenets of inclusive sociality without disrupting their preference for playing mainly with their friends. Anderson’s analysis highlights the physical and social sophistication with which these young badminton players navigate the moral domain that constitutes recreational sport in Denmark.

Noel Dyck’s chapter considers the puzzling but abiding contradiction between the nostalgic Canadian cultural ideal of ‘pond’ hockey and the regimented realm of organized community sports for children. ‘Pond’ hockey is an oft-invoked representation of sport and childhood that envisions spontaneously initiated and free-flowing games of ice hockey in which children skate freely, enthusiastically and creatively into a zone of playful exuberance and delight. It stands in marked contrast to the workaday world of adults and the tutelary regime of the schoolroom. Dyck asks why such a vividly imagined set of ideals is, nonetheless, so systematically violated by adult-organized community sport organizations for children. His analysis pursues what this disjuncture tells us about the ways in which understandings of childhood, relations between parents and children, and the shaping of child and adult identities are articulated through sport.

Harald Beyer Broch’s chapter investigates gender ideologies and stereotypes in children’s handball in Norway. He focuses on the play of 13- to 16-year-olds, since this developmental stage is generally seen as being especially characterized by identity insecurity and experimentation. Broch analyses identity management and presentation as these are revealed through the children’s discourses on sport dress, bodies and talent. Paying close attention to the ways in which children actually engage in handball, he treats them not simply as competitors in an athletic contest, but as fully social persons whose engagement in sport is complex and variable. Boys and girls are shown to be equally concerned with their looks and body images and sensitive about discursive depiction of their on-court personalities, aggressiveness and skill as players. Athletes’ interactions with their coaches are also shown to figure significantly in the embodied play and gender identities being fashioned by children in competitive handball.

The second part of the volume explores some of the many ways in which engagement with sport and dance may serve to express and reformulate the social and experiential identities of adults. Hans Hognestad’s chapter looks into the phenomenon of long-distance support for British football clubs among Norwegian sport enthusiasts. While the popularity of football in Norway reaches back to the early part of the twentieth century, it continues to be categorized culturally as a non-Norwegian pastime. Since skiing remains the key symbol and carrier of Norwegian virtues within nationalist ideology, involvement in football permits its enthusiasts to experiment with identities that fall outside the carefully monitored confines of what constitutes proper ways of being Norwegian. Declaring and enacting one’s identity as a fan of one or another British football team affords entry into a liminal zone within which Norwegian men serially escape the confines of national identity and propriety. The remarkable lengths to which Norwegian fans from all sectors of society go in identifying with particular British football clubs and in fulfilling pilgrimages to overseas football grounds speaks to their search for expressive individuality through transnational sport sophistication.

Heike Wieschiolek’s chapter examines the salsa dancing scene that has recently emerged in Hamburg. Although now a thoroughly globalized style of dancing, salsa exhibits an unmistakable Latin American flavour in its music, movements and gender assumptions. In contrast to most social dance forms made popular during the last quarter century, salsa is performed by couples and requires body contact. Moreover, its musical structure and steps are sufficiently novel and demanding for German dancers to render it a technique requiring formal instruction. Anchoring her analysis within the anthropology of dance, Wieschiolek traces the ways in which dancing salsa enables men and women to take temporary leave of the gender and identity constraints characteristic of German urban life. Ironically, the methodical and disciplined ways in which Germans prepare themselves to dance salsa in the proper manner serve to distance them from Latin American couples, who bypass salsa dance classes and move directly to the dance-floor in Hamburg.

Tamara Kohn’s chapter elucidates the practice of aikido, a generally noncompetitive martial art originating in Japan but today practised both there and abroad. Aikido, argues Kohn, passes in and out of the realms of ‘sport’ and ‘like sport’, depending upon context and intent. The physical training and athleticism central to aikido, along with the organizational politics, social relations and sense of commitment generated by participation in a dojo, are clearly reminiscent of club structures in sport. But the practice of aikido, which features purely defensive techniques, is directed not toward competition but rather toward mastery of physical techniques and, through these, toward an enhanced sense of self and others. Kohn’s analysis highlights the attractions of aikido as a means of self-development and personal healing in a fragmented contemporary world. The capacity of aikido to generate satisfying embodied experiences and identities rests on the virtually limitless applications to the complexities of everyday life that can be made of knowledge acquired on the training mat.

Henrik Ronsbo’s chapter documents the manner in which the game of football has in little more than forty years become a dominant means for embodying male identities and asserting indigenous status in the village of Santo Domingo, Salvador. Ronsbo’s ethnography of masculinity proceeds from an insightful reading of earlier anthropological accounts of economic and political structures and processes in Meso-American society. He argues that traditional ethnological concerns with male sociality that were descriptively rooted in the study of religious brotherhoods in this region have been overtaken by the arrival of football as a popular pastime. The first part of Ronsbo’s chapter details the everyday practice of football as a means for leisure as well as for the creation, maintenance and dissolution of alliances between young men within the indigenous community. In the second part he analyses a historic and contentious match between ethnically distinct segments of a community that was violently divided during the civil war of the 1980s. In this venue, too, football embodies identities, albeit those that connect their bearers to painful memories and continuing divisions.

The third part of the volume delves into the use of sport and dance as vehicles for expressing and reformulating national identities. Helena Wulff’s chapter investigates the moral politics and purposes of national identity in which Irish dance is steeped. Irish bodies have long been subjected to particularly stringent forms of control by church and state, and within this context dancing has been deemed especially problematic. Indeed, in 1935 the state implemented the Public Dance Hall Act as a way of stopping informal dancing at crossroads and in barns and private houses. Today in Belfast it is joked that the Free Presbyterian Church has banned sex because it might lead to dancing, while in Dublin a recent production of the Dance Theatre of Ireland was enthusiastically reviewed by the local media – which, nonetheless, only hinted at the nudity featured in the performance. Notwithstanding the global popularity of Riverdance and other forms of Irish dance, there linger within both parts of Ireland unresolved contradictions regarding dancing, sexuality and touch. Wulff’s chapter delineates the complex interconnections between dance, morality, nation-building and identity in Ireland.

Werner Krauss’s chapter interrogates the relationship between nation, sport and identity through an account of the German national football team’s symbolic and emotional significance in postwar German society. The demoralization and stigma borne by Germans following the Second World War were accompanied by a determination to eliminate any vestiges of cultural practices and postures associated with national socialism. The unexpected victory of the German team in the 1954 World Cup competition staged in Berne suddenly offered Germans a powerful yet legitimate means of experiencing national pride and expressing a renewed and positive German national identity. Krauss locates the essence of what came to be known as the ‘Miracle of Berne’ in the shift that it signalled from the battlefield to the playing-field and from the martial to the cultural. Krauss’s analysis of German football in terms of miracles, heroes, myths and master narratives traces the continuing impact of highly masculine German values upon representations of national identity.

Eduardo P. Archetti’s chapter mounts an analysis that compares sport and dance as forms of embodied practice and aesthetic pleasure that serve both as public mirrors and as models of identity. Focusing upon football and tango, Archetti recounts how these two forms of performance have become exemplars of Argentinian movement, style and identity. Football, he notes, constitutes a ritual and a game at one and the same time. While football celebrates males’ loyalty to clubs and neighbourhoods, tango engages both men and women sensually. It celebrates the art of seduction under male control and features the exhibition of ‘cool’ control and the performing of chess-like figures and movements – much like the Argentinian speciality of controlled dribbling of the ball on the playing-field. Both football and tango, argues Archetti, became central to the construction of national narratives in Argentina, not least through the exporting of so many of its footballers and tango dancers to the rest of the world.

Anne Leseth’s chapter on dance, sport and politics in Dar-es-Salaam examines the ways in which body practices both reflect and shape the political contexts within which they are performed. She begins her analysis with a critical assessment of conventional social-science categories and boundaries that separate practices such as sport and dance from one another. Tanzanians, she reports, classify various games, athletic contests and styles of dance together under the rubric of michezo. While the modern notion of ‘sport’ is also well known in Tanzania, owing to its instrumental use by both colonial and post-colonial governments as a means for ‘developing’ and changing people, Leseth argues that ‘sport’ and michezo represent not only different categories but fundamentally different ways of knowing body practices. Leseth’s ethnographic account of the use of sport and dance as means for pursuing and celebrating national unity also reveals how hybrid forms of Tanzanian body practice blend imported styles with traditional forms of movement.

This volume has four overlapping objectives. The first is to consider ways in which different forms of sport and dance, as techniques of the body, can be brought into a common theoretical framework. The second aim is to explore how the embodied movements and practices of athletes and dancers are transformed into performances that connect audiences and performers interactionally as well as communicatively. The third task is to trace the ways in which sport and dance give rise to embodied identities that are generated on the fields of play or on dance-floors, but that are also transported to and deployed within other realms of social life. Finally, this volume considers the manner in which the bodies and activities of athletes, dancers and their fans are not only socially inscribed but also socially inscribing. In short, this volume asks how sport and dance fit into and reflect social lives and settings, and how these performative activities and the relationships to which they give rise serve to reshape the larger contexts within which they are enacted.

The traditional reluctance within anthropology to give serious and sustained attention to the study of games and sports resulted in large part from the viewing of these as products of modernity (Archetti 1998). Since sports pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Training Children's Bodies and Selves
• Part III: Reshaping Adult Identities
• Part IV: Embodying the National
• Index