Kurs:Sport Politics/Reader
Postcolonial Sport in Society
[Bearbeiten]The Olympic Games and the Olympic Movement differ from other sport events and sport organizations as they are officially linked to an ideology, that is, to "... a systematic set of arguments and beliefs used to justify an existing or desired social order.
Blending sport with culture and education, Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy found in effort, the educational value of good example, and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.
Where and how a society defines sport and the body reflects how its members define themselves.
Coincidentally, sports in modern industrial and post-industrial societies have come to be parables tinctured with the issues and conflicts of race, ethnicity, and gender.
Over the past century and a half, the advent and evolution of modern sport, and of course the Olympic movement, have been closely intertwined with Jewish history.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the socio-political emancipation, accelerated pace of industrialization, economic empowerment, rise of political and racial anti-Semitism, and the ascent of political Zionism coincided with the rise of modern sport and the formative years of the Olympic movement.
The question of how sport and Jewish intellectual thought, ethics, and tradition interacts with each other is an intriguingly complex one.
An interpretation of Jewish religious ethics and its influence on modern life is compounded by ethno-cultural dimensions that have developed as a consequence of cultural and social forces beyond the boundaries of the Jewish community.
The Cuban regime rejects the neo-marxist argument that sport promotes elitism and anti-collectivist ideas.
The Cubans view sport not only as beneficial for health and discipline, but also as an activity which can contribute to the formation of the new man.
Like the workers' sports movements between the world wars, the Cuban leaders believe that the context, not the nature of sport, determines its effect on the population.
1 In a Marxist state, the Cubans argue, everyone has, and should have, the right to participate in sport as a part of their all-round development.
Thus, the Castro regime has promoted mass participation, emphasised all-round education, and the ide- ological example of its top athletes.
From the Cuban point of view, Cuba's international "Superstars," trained in special sports schools, are not the prod- ucts of elitism, but reflect the improvements brought about by the revolution, particularly the increased access to sports activities.
The development of sports in China since the nineteenth century has been influenced to varying degrees by imperialism, nationalism, Maoism, and postcolonial thinking.
This paper explores these ideologies from three angles: Mao's early thinking regarding physical culture and sport; the development of sports under Mao's socialism and the Cultural Revolution; and China's breakthrough in the post-Mao era.
In sum, sport remains connected over time with the idea of "Imagined Olympians" and of a response to the "Sick Man complex." The advent of postcolonial thought has opened the possibility of more diverse understandings of sports in China.
I will argue that globalization is a busi- ness-led agenda, the effect of which is to create global markets for products which may be very good, but whose popular consumption - especially in the case of cul- tural products like sports or music or film - helps to standardize cultures that were once distinctive.
How- ever the corollary has been the 'delocalization' of sporting cultures, and a conver- gence between the promotion of sports themselves, and the use of sports to promote other consumer products and brand names.
' In what follows, I will begin with a critique of what Peter Donnelly has called "Prolympism."2 I will argue here that in their modern partnership with global commerce, and in the ideological and material celebration of 'winners' that fol- lows almost inevitably from sponsors' commercial interests, the Olympic Games have lost some - if not yet all - of the ideological and moral significance that used to distinguish them from other world championships in professional sports, notably soccer's World Cup.
I will argue that the normative legitimation of the calculating pursuit of victory that now characterizes any global sports event where being a 'winner' trans- lates into enormous financial rewards has served to strip "World class" sports of the Fourth International Symposium for Olympic Research 1 Global and Cultural Critique: Problematizing the Olympic Games ethical significance that sport once claimed, and that the differences between the Olympic sports and most professional sports in this regard are no longer meaningful.
I will further argue that the systematic and scientific pursuit of victory that is sponsored by government 'sport systems', in Canada and many other countries, has also led to a standardization of what used to be historical differences in preparation, tactics, and national styles, Together, these tendencies mean that even though spectators still thrill to the accomplishments of outstanding individuals and teams, international sport today is increasingly a monoculture, featuring "Programmed bodies" and spon- sors who demand results.
The concluding section of the paper seeks to situate the globalization of sport within broader campaigns to recon- struct the citizens of actual places as global consumers, and to celebrate consumer identities.
The reproduction of elite masculinity in the postcolonial non-West has remained an invisible affair.
This is largely because the postcolonial masculinity of non-Western elites is written into the naturalised bodily practices and social spaces of everyday life that signified the "Nativized" body politic of the nation-state.
Whiteness has become visible because of its diminished dominance and in juxtaposition with non-whiteness in today's multicultural metropolitan societies, but how do we make postcolonial masculinity visible in the nativised body politic? In Singapore, the national education system is the state apparatus of choice for reproducing this body politic, with same-sex elite schools colonial heritage playing the central role in cultivating elite masculinity.
I begin by showing that colonial education in these schools was the site of struggle in the early twentieth century between the different hybrid masculinities promoted by the elite Straits Chinese caught between Christian-centered Anglo-centric multiculturalism and China-oriented neo-Confucian reformism.
Reading a combination of Straits Chinese and the school publications of the elite Anglo-Chinese School, I show that these masculinities are formative of the national field of elite domination and capture the full array of class and racial tensions and anxieties displaced by the schooling of imperial white masculinity, but here unto a decolonized field that is symbolically constituted as a rugged and humble, middle-class Chineseness.
I conclude by showing that the national masculinity is being transformed into cosmopolitan masculinities that also combine feminine maternal authority, as elite anxieties turn to engage neoliberal globalization and the rise of Asia led by an awakened China.
- [http://hermes-ir.lib.hit-u.ac.jp/rs/bitstream/10086/8293/1/HJsoc0330201610.pdf Political ideology, modernity and sports policy: a comparative analysis of sports policy in Britain and Japan
I Henry, K Uchiumi - Hitotsubashi journal of social studies, 2001] In the contemporary literature on globalisation there is an on-going debate about the role of the state.
Such claims are linked to discussions of the 'hollowing out' of the state, in which it is argued that many of the powers and responsibilities formerly discharged by national governments have been removed 'up- wards' to the jurisdiction of transnational bodies, 'downwards' to sub-national bodies, or 'outwards' from the public to the commercial or voluntary sector.
In contrast to this view, other commentators have argued that the globalised system is best conceptualised as the product of state action, and that rather than 'hollowing out', the state is better described as spreading its activities into a more extended set of networks.
An element of the argument about the significance of the nation-state also relates to the question of whether and how politics actually make a difference to what states do and what policy programmes they adopt.
The suggestion is that where the room for manoeuvre for individual governments is reduced the opportunity for diiferentiated policy approaches is reduced.
According to this argument, in a globalised and interdependent economy, if one state or economic block, for example, seeks to reduce labour costs by reducing taxation thus lowering social expenditure, then other governments will be required to follow suit, regardless of whether they espouse neo-liberal values, because if they retain higher social expenditure this implies higher taxation, thus higher labour costs and subsequently an inability to compete effectively in world markets.
Since Pierre de Coubertin first recognized the value of using sport to reform France's educational system in the late 19th Century, the Anglo-American "Cult of sport" has been used by many educational reform- ers in the Western world to infuse a sense of moral quality into education.
One major vehicle driving its spread has been the Olympic Games.
The constant emphasis on the Games' humanitarian val- ues, such as peace, fair play and friendship, and the simultaneous downplaying of its political nature has enabled Olympic educational initiatives to escape the critical eye of many scholars.
Using a postcolonial lens to analyze Coubertin's educational vision, this preliminary investigation explores the colonial past of Olympic Education in order to determine whether it is indeed an exemplary model for educational reform, or simply a less-threatening form of cultural domination by the West.
Singapur
[Bearbeiten]Sport, one of the most pervasive cultural exports of the British, soon gained a significant cultural position in the new colony.
The predominant sporting ideology of the leading boys' schools of Singapore mirrored that of English Public Schools: muscular Christianity.
The attitude towards sport and physical activity in general, that emanated from the Chinese schools has also had an enduring effect on the sports culture of the nation.
The traditional Chinese attitude to 'play' exerted a considerable negative influence upon the efforts to establish sport in Singapore.
The sport culture of modern Singapore is thus a complex creolized form of the model left by the British.
Any new shift in attitude towards sport - the sports culture - will be only tolerated if viewed as being politically sound; nothing is left to chance.
Postcolonial Sport
[Bearbeiten]Africa
[Bearbeiten]Juego del Palo
[Bearbeiten]East-Asia
[Bearbeiten]China
[Bearbeiten]Chin Woo
[Bearbeiten]Dragon Boat
[Bearbeiten]In the beginning of the 20th century, indigenous body cultures were viewed as outdated culture, later dragon boat races were once diminished because of its "Feudalist" and "Counterrevolutionary" character in the period of Cultural Revolution in China.
The boating enthusiasts have made efforts to include the dragon boating to Olympic Games the modernization of the races has caused different echoes in Taiwan, China and Hong Kong and reflected the identity dynamics of each period.
In sum, traditionalization and modernization of dragon boat races have raised critical debates over the power relationship involved the representations of body cultures among the different postcolonial Chinese societies.