Brown bodies, racialisation and physical education

Abstract

This article explores how school physical education (PE) can both reinforce stereotyped notions of the brown body as inherently physical while also allowing young people to gain educational success. Drawing on a critical ethnographic study of Māori and Pasifika (Pacific Island) youth in PE in New Zealand, the article explores how the academic status of PE, and its alignment with sport, positions the brown bodies of these youth in problematic and stereotypical ways. While PE may reinforce racialised stereotypes, it is also a space of recognition and achievement for youth. Bourdieu's notions of capital, field and habitus provide insight into how such contradictions potentially offer social transformation while simultaneously reproducing social status.

Keywords:

• Physical education
• Body
• Sport
• Race
• Ethnicity
• Bourdieu
• Māori
• Pasifika
• New Zealand

Notes

1. Pākehā is the Māori name for European or non-Māori.

2. Year 9 is the first year of high school in New Zealand (13 years), equivalent to the first year of junior high in the USA. Year 11 is the first year of senior high school, although it remains part of an integrated Year 9—Year 13 high school model.

3. Māori are the indigenous peoples of New Zealand. Although ostensibly a relatively homogeneous group, Māori identify on the basis of self-ascription, and, as with any ethnic group, combine with other ethnicities, including European and Pasifika, in complex ways.

4. Pasifika is now the commonly accepted term for Pacific migrants who have settled in New Zealand in significant numbers since the 1960s, principally from the islands of Samoa, Tonga, Cook Islands, Niue, Tokelau and Tuvalu. Pasifika is an inordinately complex identity and the term is used primarily in New Zealand (and Australia), it is not used in the Pacific Islands themselves (MacPherson et al., 2001; Spoonley et al., 2004).

5. According to Bourdieu, capital exists in three forms ‘as economic capital, which is immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalised in the forms of property rights; as cultural capital, which is convertible, on certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalised in the forms of educational qualifications; and as social capital, made up of social obligations (‘connections’), which is convertible, in certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalised in the forms of a title of nobility’. (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 242, emphasis in original)

6. Student breakdown by ethnicity shows a clear majority of Pasifika students at the school: Samoan (48%), Cook Islands Māori (21%), Tongan (11%) Niuean (4%). Māori comprise 12%, Pākehā/European 1% and Indian 1%. Less than 1% identify otherwise (Education Review Office, 2008).

7. The NCEA is New Zealand's formal qualifications system operational in the final three years of high school. I discuss this further in the subsequent section on PE and achievement.

8. In this article, I draw only on research data from students in the study.

9. In New Zealand, outdoor education is commonly part of PE programs. I attended a 5-day camp with the year 12 class of students during which time we engaged in hiking, slept in tents, team challenges, high ropes courses and the like.

10. These groupings are used in statistics to represent the main pan-ethnic groups in New Zealand society.

11. Historically a derogatory word for Māori, ‘hori’ has been reclaimed by young people such as Renee. While acknowledging here that others label her ‘hori’ in a negative way, she later uses it with pride to refer to behaviours associated with her own Māori culture.