Part 28 (1/2)
The connections between sports and literacy are far fro sports events, as a spectator in the stadium, or in front of the television, does not require the literacy we associate with libraries, reading and writing, and school education One does not need to read in order to see who is fastest, strongest, or juhest, or throws or catches the best And one does not really need to be literate in order to beco, ju are part of our physical repertory, related to our day-to-day existence, easy to associate ays through which survival took place when scavenging, hunting, fishi+ng, and foraging were the fundas to feed the killed Even the association of sports and withphysical perfore, oral or written
Exceptional physical characteristics were, and still are in some parts of the world, celebrated as expressions of forces beyond i Gods orshi+pped through exceptional physical feats perfor them In archaic cultures, athletes could even be sacrificed on the altar of gratitude, where the best were destined to please the Gods
The initial phases of as eventually called sport correspond to establishi+ng those sign systeestures, sounds, shapes) which, in anticipation of language, e possible and necessary This was a phase of syncretis do after an ani for play are different formatic contexts They have different motivations and different outcomes Probably 20,000 years separate these two experiences in tienerality and abstraction that a coo experiences of self-constitution within which the doed drastically The qualifier sport-a hich seee of the 19th century-probably came about in the framework of the division between secular and non-secular forms of human praxis Both ical endowical practice were based on awareness of the role the body plays and the recognition of the practical need to disse aspect, not recognized as such, not conceptualized, but acknowledged in the cult of the body and the attempt to make it part of the shared culture The contest (for which the Greeks used the words athlos) and the prize (athlon, which eventually led to the word athlete) eh which survival and well-being came about
As a complex experience, sports involves rational and irrational co the relation between literacy and sports, one has to account for both dimensions
Sports is approached here froh which it became what it is today: a well defined form of relaxation, but probably ed in the market like any other product of human practice
The immediate connection between physical fitness and the outcome of practical experiences dominated by physical aspects was established within very lily patterned, activity It soon became the measure of survival success, and thus the rationality shared by the co the survival of the fittest is reflected in competition Athletes competed in order to please Gods; to conjure fertility, rain, or the extension of life; or to expel delyphs (cave paintings, engravings on stone) and in carvings or etchings on animal horn and metal, as well as in the first written testier, the faster, the ile was evinced Docuraphic coordinates, have in common the emphasis on the physical as it acquired a syical characteristics improved chances of survival means to understand the rationality of the body Its embodiment in the culture of physical awareness facilitated practical experiences of human self-constitution that would result in sports professions The irrational eleh all males and all females are structurally the same, some individuals seem better endowed physically As with h which each person acknowledges his or her identity, what could not be clarified was placed in a domain of explanations where the rationality is lost This is why expectations of rain, of longer life, of chasing away evil forces are associated with sports The cult of the body, in particular of body parts, resulted fro to awareness of oneself When the body, or parts of it, becaoal in itself, the rationality of physical fitness for survival is contradicted by the irrationality of fitness for reasons other than individual and coion, and politics appropriated the irrational component of physical activities In ancient co of physical phenomena, atte of the body of co of the entire community
When it comes to physical fitness in the context of survival of the fittest, can we suppose that a lone hu like the lonely ani with others, killing and being killed? Probably not Scale defines the species as one that ascertains its self-constitution in cooperative efforts, no matter how primitive Up to a certain scale, the only competition was for survival It translated into food and offspring Only after the agricultural phase, which corresponds to a level of efficiency of more food than immediately necessary, the element of competition shi+fts from survival to ascertainment
Competition and expectations of perfor, and were progressively acknowledged as part of the dynae in the role of huht with it expectations of physical fitness corresponding to expected levels of efficiency
Sports and self-constitution
Gymnastics is an expression of the cult of the body parallel to that of art In order to realize its dimensions, it needs to be seen from this broader perspective, not as a random set of exercises It has a physical and a metaphysical dimension, the latter related to the obsession with ideal proportions that eventually were expressed in philosophic terms There are plenty of explanations to be considered for both the origin of the practical experience of sports and the for to soh not in order to endorse them, will help to sho diversity of sports experiences resulted in diversity of interpretations
The basic assumption of this entire book, human self-constitution in practical experiences, translates into the statement that sports is not a reflective but a constitutive experience
Indeed, through running, jua to physical characteristics and mental coordination that facilitate physical performance in the reality of their existence This projection is a direct way of identifying oneself and thus of becoroup of people The ins of sports identify these in the experience of survival, thus placing them in the Darwinian evolutionist frame When survival skills, maintenance, and reproduction skills become distinct and relatively autonomous, they follow recurrent patterns on whose basis social practice takes place and new ideas are for reat extent it is But funda people sharing the notion of physical exercise and attaching to it social, cultural, econo
We create ourselves not only rite poetry, tend land, or manufacture machines, but also e are involved in athletic experiences There is in sports, as there is in any other form of practical experience, a natural, a cultural (e learn from others and create with others), and a social (what is known as communication) dimension The sports experience appears to us as the result of the coordination of all these ele a sports event, this coordination can beco, this much to natural attributes, and this much to social implications (pride, patriotism) This is why sports events so a predeter from the dynamics of the interaction characteristic of this hue of human dynamics, in which the ability of the body was celebrated, theseeame of hockey or football Due to the syncretic nature of such events, rituals addressed existence in its perceived totality The specialized nature of games such as hockey or football leads these to address only one aspect of existence-the experience of the particular sport A ga a competition structured by rules to a confrontation of nerves, violence, or national pride, or into sheer exhibitionish the physical basis for the practical experience of sports is the sas as they evolved in time-in different cultures, different recurrent patterns and different s attached to then itself with explanations of sports given in Freudian tradition, Marxist theory, or in Huizinga'sas playful man (homo Ludens) It takes into consideration the contextual nature of any form of human practice and looks at sports, as it does at any human experience, from the perspective of a constitutional, not representational, act; in short, fromatic perspective When japanese players kick a ball in the game called kemari, the recurrent pattern of interaction is not the fah each player constitutes his identity in the performance When the Zen archer tenses his bow, the pattern, associated with the search for unity with the universe, is quite different from the pattern of archery in Africa or of the archery coay which was itself a projection of the hu an answer to what distinguishes the sun from the moon and how their influence affects patterns of human practice It is probably easier to look at the recurrent patterns of interaction of more recent sports experiences not rooted in the sy, or ice skating, to understand what aspect of the hu is projected and what kind of experience results for the participants (athletes, sports fans, public,reality is the diversity People never exhaust their i new and newer for their physical aptitude No less surprising is the pursuit of a standard experience, modeled in rules for the competition Soa, for instance) Parallel to the standard experience, there is also a deviant practice of sports (nonstandard), in forms of individual rules, ad hoc conventions, private competition The social level of sports and the private level are loosely connected To becos, to accept the rules as they apply in the standard experience, within organizations or acknowledged coe professional is pretty much in a si the rules
Language and physical performance
But the subject here is not the sie, butrather their interrelation The obvious entry point is to notice that we use language to describe the practical experience of sport and to assignin the sense that it suggests that sports would not be possible without language-an idea ie e events becolyphs and the later hieroglyphics), while not exactly a stateh elements to confirm that not only i after a wild animal, for instance) and the exercise and maintenance of the physical were, at least indirectly, acknowledged Testimony to the effect that at a certainfor the physically talented-in the toa is documented in detail-helps us understand that labor division and increased efficiency are in a relation that goes far beyond cause and effect The specialization, which probably started at that time, resulted not just froness to allocate them in ways that make the sports experience possible because a certain necessity was acknowledged
The pattern of kicking a ball in kee use in the same culture are not directly connected
Nevertheless, the gaurational nature: the ai as possible Soccer, even football, are sequential: the ai team In the first case, the field is marked by four different trees: , cherry, pine, and maple In the second, it is aes of the cultures in which such games appeared are characterized by different structures that correspond to very different practical experiences The logic eic of the sports experience Keurational, but also infused by the principle of as are seen as deeply interdependent Soccer and football are analytical, gaoal or the touchdown
No surprise then, thatthe influence of practical experience in some patterned expectation, plays a role, too
There are many extremely individualistic forms of competition, and others of collective effort While in today's global market mentality plays a different role than in the past, it still affects sports in its non-standard for how different practical experiences constitute different instances of hu one of these Even when the sports instance is disconnected from the experience that made it necessary, it is still affected by all the structural elematic context Indeed, while there is a permanency to sports-involveree of variation corresponding to successive pragmatic circu the action, it externalizes physical capabilities, but also intellectual qualities: self-control, coordination, planning Initially, physical perfore
Afterwards the two took different paths, without actually ever separating entirely (as the Greek Olye reached soh sports substituted for it: not even the highest literate expression could capture the draedy of failure, or the sublie extracted froe captured characteristics of the sports experience and generalized thee, they were submitted, in a new form, to experiences very different fro a sense of order, competitions as circus for the masses But primarily, people derived from sports the notion of competitiveness, accepted as a national characteristic, as well as a characteristic of education, of art, of the e, the notion of co, later of , and thus opens the door to the bureaucracy of sports and the institutionalized aspects we today take for granted Greeks cared for the winner
Ti devices were applied to sports later,records becamatics of docu does not require language, writing helped in establishi+ng uniforaanized competitions, is the result of the institution of literacy, and reflects pragmatic expectations pertinent to literacy
In every sports experience, there is a romantic notion of nature and freedo, and foraging But at the saes in the condition of hus as they relate to the natural environment, their natural condition, social environ fro, or,with laser beaamut The circumstances of human experience that made literacy necessary affected the status of the sports experience as well The contest became a product with a particular status; the prize reflects the sign process through which couished several characteristics of modern sports: secularism, equality of opportunity, specialization of roles, rationalization, bureaucratic organization, quantification, and quest for records What he failed to acknowledge is that such characteristics are not relevant unless considered in connection to the recurrent patterns of sports seen against the background of the general pragmatic framework