Introducing a Sociology of Snowboarding Bodies Holly Thorpe s course text author objectives Analysis of global snowboarding culture Analysis of physical cultural snowboarding body Bring social theory to life pp 2 3 Intellectual and personal statement on snowboarding culture and social theory p 18 Understandings of snowboarding bodies as historical material mediated cultural symbolic interacting gendered moving traveling sensual affective and political p 3 Objectives continued Identify and analyze how dominant power structures become expressed in and through the socially and historically contingent embodied experiences meanings and subjectivities of snowboarders p 19 Objectives continued empower readers to use social theory confidently and reflexively to understand analyze and perhaps change the social world around them p 3 Mapping Critique Social Change Markula Denison Silk Qualitative Research for Physical Culture 2011 p 8 How did Thorpe conduct her fieldwork Where did Thorpe conduct fieldwork With whom What are her evidences sources Reflexivity self reflexivity How to carry out these objectives Through fields of study such as sociology of sport and physical cultural studies At UIUC Dept of Kinesiology and Community Health area of study labeled cultural and interpretive studies Use any and every kind Thorpe p 6 from Grossberg of method theory idea evidence resources etc in order to create and improve one s interpretations Tool box p 16 Ask different questions of evidence Make sense of nuanced and contradictory evidence Illuminate theories weaknesses and changes in understanding by different thinkers Social theorizing from lived bodies p 15 How to carry out these objectives Ethnography writing about others Today much expanded method of research includes participating observation gathering primary evidence data artifacts from wide and varied sources sociological imagination Examples from Thorpe Sensual transnational reflexive ethnography Ethics of ethnography Other cautions WHAT IS SPORT AND WHY STUDY IT Play J Huizinga 1955 voluntary and free not ordinary or real life secluded and limited magic circle sacred sphere creates order and is order has an element of tension has rules no material interest promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves in secrecy Play s paradox lies in the fact that we know play will be the same but always different Norman Denzin Play is play when you know that you are playing Gregory Bateson Play Games Sport Continuum Play expressive embodied autonomous cooperative spontaneous random childlike natural primal Sport instrumental rationalized legitimated representational adult civilized modern Bernard Suits The Grasshopper Games Life and Utopia 1978 pp 34 41 To play a game is to engage in activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs using only means permitted by rules where the rules prohibit more efficient in favor of less efficient means and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity threshholdness betwixt and between In liminal spaces there is capacity for fun freedom fantasy role reversals Sport play games are liminal cultural spaces and thus have transformational qualities Liminality Blanchard Cheska The Anthropology of Sport 1985 pp 42 43 Play is behavior resting upon a biologically inherited stimulus or proclivity that is distinguished by a combination of traits play is voluntary somehow pleasurable distinct temporally from other behavior and distinct in having a make believe or transcendental quality Blanchard Cheska The Anthropology of Sport 1985 pp 42 43 So defined play includes games and sports theatrical performances and other forms of mimicry painting music dance and the entire range of arts and aesthetics wit and humor fantasy and ecstatic psychic states Ecstasy may be induced by suggestion the ingestion of drugs and other substances fasting and bodily deprivation of other kinds and by still other physical means Victor Turner 1983 pp 233 234 Playfulness is a volatile sometimes dangerous explosive essence which cultural institutions seek to bottle or contain in the vials of games of competition chance and strength in modes of simulation such as theater and in controlled disorientation from roller coasters to dervish dancing Victor Turner 1983 pp 233 234 Most definitions of play involve notions of disengagement of free wheeling of being out of mesh with the serious bread and butter let alone life and death processes of production social control getting and spending and raising the next generation Play can be everywhere and nowhere imitate anything yet be identified with nothing See Important Course Concepts on Compass 2g course site Definitions of Culture Cultural studies scholarship C Wright Mills Hegemony Be prepared to discuss these concepts in discussion section