Introducing a Sociology of Snowboarding BodiesHolly 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-reflexivityHow 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 cautionsWHAT 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 BatesonPlay Games Sport ContinuumPlay  expressive  embodied  autonomous  cooperative  spontaneous  random  childlike  natural  primalSport  instrumental  rationalized  legitimated  representational  adult  civilized  modernBernard 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.Liminality  “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.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