Modern sport between purity and hybridity

Abstract

Issues of purity are central to modern sport, as well as to modernity in general. This paper ponders the role of purity in modern sport by also including its counterpart, hybridity, in the discussion. In sport studies, the concept of the ‘human’ is identified as something taken for granted, and therefore remains under-theorized. Bruno Latour's conception of modernity and scientific practice is here combined with Sigmund Loland's analogy between scientific experiments and sport competitions. Purity is assumed to be related to the idea of modern sport as a practice, which revolves around distilling samples of ‘humanness’ that should not be polluted by non-human interference. This paper argues that while modern sport strives to minimize non-human impact, it acknowledges the hybrid material that sport results are moulded from. The concept ‘Human’ is therefore not an a priori in modern sport but an a posteriori.

Notes

^1.McEvoy, ‘Pistorius’.

^2.Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 66.

^3. Cf. Loland, Fair Play in Sport.

^4.Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.

^5. Cf. Gugutzer, ‘Die Fiktion des Naturlichen’; Sheridan, Pasveer and van Hilvoorde, ‘Gene-Talk and Sport-Talk’ and van Hilvoorde, Vos and de Wert, ‘Flopping, Klapping and Gene Doping’.

^6. Cf. Loland, Fair Play in Sport; Guttmann, Sport: The First Five Millennia; Elias and Dunning, Quest for Excitement and Eichberg, Bodily Democracy.

^7.Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.

^8.Guttmann, Sport: The First Five Millennia, 323.

^9.Guttmann, From Ritual to Record.

^10.Wheaton, Understanding Lifestyle Sports.

^11.Eichberg, Bodily Democracy.

^12.Barthes, What is Sport? 63.

^13.Ibid., 63 and 65.

^14. Cf. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 249.

^15. Cf. Rossiter, ‘Rock climbing’.

^16.Gugutzer, ‘Die Fiktion des Naturlichen’; Sheridan, Pasveer and van Hilvoorde, ‘Gene-Talk and Sport-Talk…’ and van Hilvoorde, Vos and de Wert, ‘Flopping, Klapping and Gene Doping’.

^17.Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.

^18.Ibid., 12.

^19. Gugutzer, ‘Die Fiktion des Naturlichen’.

^20.Elias and Dunning, Quest for Excitement.

^21. ‘They’ will be used instead of ‘we’, since the latter will be employed as a narrative/rhetorical way of addressing the reader and the author at the same time.

^22.Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind.

^23.Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 12.

^24.Ibid.

^25.Ibid.

^26.Latour, We Have Never Been Modern; Pandora's Hope.

^27.Loland, Fair Play in Sport.

^28.Ibid., 45.

^29.Ibid., 149.

^30.van Bottenburg and Salome, ‘The Indoorisation of Outdoor Sports’.

^31.Latour, Pandora's Hope.

^32.Elias and Dunning, Quest for Excitement.

^33.Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 26–8, 31, 84, 111, 143–4.

^34.Serres, The Parasite and Serres and Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time.

^35.Serres and Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time, 166.

^36. Cf. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.