Efficiency Play, Games, Competitions, Production – How to Analyze the Configurations of Sport?

• Authors: Henning Eichberg
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The comparative, differential phenomenology of play and games has a critical political point. A mainstream discourse identifies – more or less – sport with play and game and describes sport as just a modernized extension of play or as a universal phenomenon that has existed since the Stone Age or the ancient Greek Olympics. This may be problematical, as there was no sport before industrial modernity. Before 1800, people were involved in a richness of play and games, competitions, festivities, and dances, which to large extent have disappeared or were marginalized, suppressed, and replaced by sport. The established rhetoric of “ancient Greek sport”, “medieval tournament sport”, etc., can be questioned. Configurational analysis as a procedure of differential phenomenology can help in analyzing sport as a specific modern game which produces objectified results through bodily movement. This analysis casts light not only on the phenomenon of sport itself, but also on the methodological and epistemological challenge of studying play, movement, and body culture.

Keywords

EN

configurational analysis; differential phenomenology; historical relativity; basis and superstructure; modernity; riding; space; time; energy

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Physical Culture and Sport. Studies and Research
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 72
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 5-16

Dates

published

2016-12-01

received

2016-10-03

accepted

2016-11-24

online

2016-12-01

Contributors

author

Henning Eichberg

• University of Southern Denmark,

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/pcssr-2016-0024