Summary
Contents
Subject index
Understanding Sport Culture traces and analyzes the development of the modern field of sport from its ancient and medieval precursors (the festivals of Greece and Rome, and games such as folk football), through to its inception in the mid-nineteenth century as a set of activities designed to instill character and discipline in students in exclusive British public schools, up to its transformation into a global institution and popular spectacle. The narrative also focuses on and provides a detailed account of the gradual coming together of sport and the media. It explains how this relationship has accentuated sport's status as one of the most important sites in contemporary culture, while simultaneously threatening its existence.
Global Sport
Global Sport
Introduction
In the previous chapter we looked at how the field of sport developed in Britain in the nineteenth century: certain games were taken over, transformed and modernized by English public schools, and the incipient field and its activities – as well as its imperatives, discourses, logics and ethos – were exported to or taken up by the wider social field. By the late nineteenth century sport was clearly established in Britain as a separate and relatively autonomous entity. It had the necessary bureaucratic apparatuses, discourses and self-narratives to articulate itself (what it was and meant, what its values and social functions were, what was inside and outside the field) both to its various constituencies and institutions, and to the field of power ...
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