Sport to the Rescue of the Suburbs: Sport to Educate? Sport to Reassure? When Politicians Respond to the Signs of Disturbance of Law and Order

Since the beginning of the 1980s, sport has appeared to be the last recourse against the worsening of living conditions, lack of job security and the ghettoisation of certain boroughs that stand out mostly because of continuing urban riots and juvenile violence. All of this is continually exaggerated by the media and politicians in their continual desire to dramatise and exaggerate. Certain sub-issues immediately emerge: what are the theoretical or ideological foundations on which this concept of making sport a lever for preventive policies is based? And what sport are we talking about? Is it the physical activities and sport (PAS) practised in the schools and institutes, civil sport or sport in the streets? Why do young people increasingly abandon civil/federated sport to practise ‘adventure sports’ or self-organised sports? Can self-organised sports and, more precisely, sport played outside the tower blocks favour the ‘self-control of impulses’? And if they can, under what conditions can they favour socialisation and contribute to preventing vandalism or violent acts? If it must be admitted that the links between sport and education, sport and prevention, sport and insertion, etc., are considered to be self-evident, they are rarely analysed or questioned.     

Sport in the service of the state: Images of physical culture and Soviet women, 1917–1941

Using images drawn from a number of media, this article explores how and why the Soviet government encouraged women to take up sport prior to World War II. It is suggested that the regime had three goals in mind: to strengthen the military preparedness of the country, to improve the productivity of its workers, and to further the acceptance of new, more ideologically correct, forms of leisure. These goals offer a striking contrast with movements in Western Europe and North America, where women's participation in sport was heavily connected with their roles as wives and mothers.     

The Introduction and Meaning of the Word Sport in the Netherlands, 1647–1910

In contrast with the Netherlands’ status as a sports nation, academic articles on Dutch sports history are scarce. In this paper, we would like to establish a ‘textual’ basis for further research. By means of a large-scale digital analysis, we have been able to depict important phases in the Dutch ‘sportification process’. Sport gradually infiltrated Dutch society: first it was mentioned as an English word in bilingual dictionaries, translated literature and ego documents. Then, English sports were described in recreational education books. Indeed, from 1845 onwards, English teachers at Dutch elite schools played an important role in the actual practising of English sports such as cricket, hockey and football. Together with the founding of sports clubs, specific sports manuals were published. Finally, via the introduction of sports sections in general newspapers, sport (as term) was widely diffused in society. Hence, in 1910, Luitje Van Der Wal was the first to translate the English word sport as ‘sport’ in K. Ten Bruggencate’s Engelsch Woordenboek. To be sure, this sportification process did not please everyone. There were warnings about the negative aspects that the adoption of English sports would create. Nonetheless, even traditional Dutch activities became sportified in a modern way.     

Sport,Prison, Violence: On Imprisonment and Confinement Conditions – ‘French Prison Sport’ and the Instruments of the World's Good Conscience

In France today, sport is considered to be a fundamental element of the educational offer in the prison environment, especially because it represents in the eyes of the majority an activity that is capable of channelling violence and violent behaviours, although this exemplary effect of education cannot be taken for granted. It is based, in fact, on a commonly accepted opinion and on evidence that is rarely questioned and is even contradicted in recent studies. But can sport, as a more or less formalised pedagogical, institutional and/or sociopolitical project, continue to be ‘educational’ in particular social spaces, like prison, which in essence distorts the conditions of unconstrained free practice and cultural dissemination? Starting from a case study, focused on France, the aim of this paper is to question the relation of sport with the calming qualities and/or, on the contrary, those that produce force fields, not by isolating it and constructing an improvised model but rather by re-inserting it into the issue of pacifying social fields, that is by re-integrating sports practice in the very place which gives it a sense and literally one which incarnates a motor praxeology with constraints – not to say control.     

Cultural Imperialism,Nationalism, and the Modernization of Physical Education and Sport in China, 1840–1949

Abstract

This paper examines how missionary educational institutions and Young Men’s Christian Association physical education and sport programmes, in conjunction with the nation-building project of the Nationalist government, transformed and modernized physical education and sport in China from 1840 to 1937. The concepts of cultural imperialism and nationalism are central to this study, to understand how the two interacted in the process of the development of modern physical education and sports in China. This paper argues that the cultural imperialism model is ineffective for an understanding of the impact of missionaries on Chinese society and the subsequent transformation and indigenization of physical education and sport in modern China. More precisely, the way in which Chinese nationalism played an active role in resisting, selecting, and reshaping the cultural products (modern physical education and sport) evidences a process that was an active negotiation, rather than a passive consumption, of Western culture. This said, Christian physical education and sport programmes had long-lasting effects on how physical education and sports became the way to define ‘modern’ bodies as they were incorporated into the wider education programme of modernizing China under the Nationalist government.     

A Footnote to Sport History: Twenty Years of Cricket,Conflict and Contestation in Samoa, 1880–1900

Abstract

During the late-nineteenth century, imperial expansion increasingly produced what Louise Pratt terms ‘contact zones’ – ‘social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power’. Sport was one of the most visible spaces where this process took place. This paper uses the example of cricket in Samoa to demonstrate how different groups sought to control sport’s meaning amidst great uncertainty. Almost as soon as they began playing cricket, Samoans radically altered its method and meaning to create the distinctively Samoan game of kirikiti. This act established the cricket pitch as a ‘contested space’ between Samoans and foreigners, who were wary of kirikiti’s association with Samoan politics and customary exchange. As was the case in Samoa more generally, however, this struggle was not neatly divided between Samoans and foreigners. While missionaries and settlers portrayed the game as a threat, others – notably sailors and proponents of British influence – greeted it with relative enthusiasm. For their part, Samoans used the game to signal alignment with or against one or another Western power. Finally, Samoa’s growing ‘mixed-race’ community saw the game as a means of confirming their place in both the Samoan and European ‘worlds’.     

Military Sport in the Belgian Congo: From Physical Training and Leisure to Belgian-Congolese Records in Track and Field, 1945–1960

While the important role of several ‘muscular missionaries' in promoting sport has been thoroughly studied and discussed, less is known about the sports policy of the Force Publique (FP, Public Army) in the Belgian Congo. Therefore, for this article we have focused on military sources. Like the Catholic Church, the FP tried to establish a new order and, by doing so, shaped ‘new tribes' and new identities. In the military training camps – where the recruits lived together with their wives and children – they were physically drilled by means of Swedish gymnastics, fitness exercises and battle training. The choice of Swedish gymnastics was not a surprise, since Belgium was the Mecca of Swedish gymnastics until 1968. Additionally, the soldiers practised sports like football, volleyball, basketball, judo and track and field, as a kind of leisure. With regard to track and field, however, well-performing athletes were selected and displaced to the best training facilities. Some of these Congolese elite athletes, like Victor Mangwele, were able to break Belgian records during their participation in national and international competitions. It remains unclear, however, to what degree all these military athletes also became part of a ‘new elite'. In the eyes of the Congolese population, their performances could be seen in an ambivalent way: on the one hand they represented the disciplining policy of the colonial power, on the other hand they were idols showing the colonial power the prowess of the African population.     

The Rise of Modern Sport in Fin de Siècle São Paulo: Reading Elite and Bourgeois Sensibilities,the Popular Press,and the Creation of Cultural Capital

In the period between 1890 and 1910, British sport flourished in a rapidly modernizing Brazilian city. São Paulo boomed as a coffee export centre for the global market, growing into the second largest metropolis in Brazil. New businesses and industries developed and thousands of immigrants from around the world migrated to the expanding South American city. Along with the flow of new residents came new ideas, new attitudes, and new lifestyles. British sporting customs particularly attracted the attention of São Paulo’s wealthy elites and expanding middle classes who saw in these habits the potential to advertize their commitment to modern ideals of civilization and order. The new British-style sporting clubs that sprang up in São Paulo conferred the cultural capital that the leadership castes needed to gain and maintain their hegemony in the city’s rapidly changing social landscape. São Paulo’s press circulated these new sensibilities and revealed that the city’s sporting enthusiasts both reproduced Westernized norms and re-signified athletic sensibilities to fit Brazilian social patterns.     

Exploring the Relationship Between Athletes’ Perceptions of the Motivational Climate to Their Compassion,Self-Compassion,Shame, and Pride in Adult Recreational Sport

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between athletes’ perceptions of the motivational climate (caring, task-, and ego-involving) to their levels of compassion, self-compassion, pride, and shame in a recreational sport setting. Athletes (N = 164) in a competitive Wiffle Ball tournament completed a survey. A canonical correlation analysis revealed one significant function indicating that athletes’ perceptions of a caring and task-involving motivational climate were associated with higher levels of authentic pride and lower levels of hubristic pride. Results suggest adult recreational sport participants may benefit from experiencing a positive and supportive team climate.     

Alsatian Ski Clubs Between 1896 and 1914: An Exploratory Evaluation of the Role of Employees in the German ‘Sportization’ of Skiing

The study explores, with the use of a local example (the province of Alsace), the conditions of the sportization of skiing in Germany prior to the First World War. Common sense credits the upper class with playing a predominant role in this transformation of skiing into a sport. The author believes, on the contrary, that it is the employees (middle class) who are the principal actors. These key stakeholders of the new middle class (Neu Mittelstand) thus express symbolically their role in the modernization of German society, as well as their ambition to climb the social ladder. Furthermore, they make use of the same values they use consistently in their everyday working environment: applied knowledge, rationalization, technicalization, performance comparison and decisiveness. Based on a corpus of original reference sources (administration and association archives, press releases and special journals) the study reinforces the hypothesis that certain physical activities become the true ‘sports for employees’.     

Girls and Women and the Role of Sport in Different Age Groups: Poland 1918–1939

Abstract

In this paper, the role of sport in the processes of creating the modern woman in the interwar Poland will be examined. The analysing of the women’s press shows how the publicists use the hygiene and the woman’s body in discourse of age and in building the new emancipated, strong woman. How they incorporated ideas young body, active lifestyle, and images of modern women – la Garçonne created in USA and West Europe and presented them to the Polish audience.