Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The sportization process involved a shift towards the competitive, regularized, rationalized, and gendered bodily exertions of achievement sport that, in turn, connected to wider changes at the level of personality, body deportment, and social interaction. This process entailed regulating violence, developing formalized sets of rules and governing bodies, and shifting body habitus. Despite the existence of European rivals in the form of German and Swedish gymnastics, and although some older folk pastimes also survived, it was male achievement sport, emerging out of England, that was to affect people's body habitus on a global scale. Resistance to and reinterpretations of this body culture have been evident throughout the ongoing sportization process. The initial sportization of British/English pastimes occurred in phases. There was a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century phase in which the principal pastimes of cricket, fox hunting, horse racing, and boxing emerged as modern sports. A second, nineteenth-century phase followed in which soccer, rugby, tennis, and track and field assumed modern forms and during which school-based sport developed ( Elias & Dunning 1986 ). A third sportization phase during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries paralleled wider globalization processes and was shaped by a series of global flows. Modern sport rapidly diffused globally along ... log in or subscribe to read full text