CCGL9010
Sports culture under global capitalism
Offer semester
Lecture time
Lecture venue
Credits awarded
1st semester
Wednesday
17:00 - 18:50
LE5
6
Sports capture the minds and bodies of billions of people around the world and have an immense significance in our everyday lives. This course engages different cross-cultural examples of sport and introduces students to the relationship between sport and its sociocultural settings.
Sports inform and create certain lifestyles and values: they are about cooperation, inclusion, and fair play. But they are also about competition, inequality, and violence. Sports are highly structured, and yet at the same time totally unpredictable. Sports transmit moral principles and shape attitudes to life, but might also undermine authority and contribute to social instability. Sports can both unite and divide teams, groups of people, and even entire nations. Sports are not only shaped by society, but sports themselves shape society, dynamically intertwined as they are with moral education, socioeconomic class, gender, ethnicity, nationalism, globalization.
In this course, students will explore different cross-cultural examples of sports from all over the world, introducing the role and importance of sports in the present and the past, in “modern” and “traditional” societies, and seeing the relationship between sports and their sociocultural setting. We will draw on a variety of disciplines including sociology, anthropology, gender studies, history, and cultural studies.
Study Load
Activities
Number of hours
Lectures
24
Tutorials
11
Reading / Self-study
48
Assessment: Essay / Report writing
52
Total:
135
Analyze sports and games in an anthropological and sociological manner.
Describe the history and development of games and sports, highlighting their role in “traditional” and contemporary societies.
Demonstrate the complexity and interrelatedness of sports, society, and culture--even for those that are completely uninterested in sports.
Examine critically their own engagement with sports (as practitioners, spectators, or other roles) in their everyday lives.
Conduct an ethnographic project and effectively communicate research findings as a group.
Tasks
Weighting
Students will be assessed on the quality of their participation in tutorial discussions
20%
Quizzes will assess students’ understanding of the core issues covered in the lectures and key readings
40%
Students will be divided into groups and will conduct a small sport-related fieldwork; they will present their findings to classmates and additionally write an individual report.
40%
Blanchard, Kendall. 2000. “The Anthropology of Sport.” In Jay Coakley and Eric Dunning, eds., Handbook of Sports Studies, pp. 144-156.
Fox, Robin J. 1961. “Pueblo Baseball: A New Use for Old Witchcraft.” The Journal of American Folklore 74 (291): 9-16.
Guttmann, Allen. 2000. “The Development of Modern Sports.” In Jay Coakley and Eric Dunning, eds., Handbook of Sports Studies, pp. 248-259.
Coakley, Jay J. 2009. “Sport in Society: An Inspiration or an Opiate?” In Stanley Eitzen, ed., Sport in Contemporary Society: An Anthology, pp. 16-32.
Real, Michael R. 2003. “Super Bowl: Mythic Spectacle.” In Eric Dunning and Dominic Malcolm, eds., Sport: Critical Concepts in Sociology, pp. 187-199.
Gmelch, George. 2003. “Baseball Magic.” In James Spradley & David M. McCurdy, eds., Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology, pp. 348-357.
Eitzen, Stanley D. 2009. “Ethical Dilemmas in Sport: The Dark Side of Competition.” In Eitzen, Stanley, ed., Sport in Contemporary Society: An Anthology (8thed.), pp. 161-170.
Bryson, Lois. 1987. “Sport and the Maintenance of Masculine Hegemony.” Women’s Studies International Forum 10(4): 349-360.
Hartmann, Douglas. 2003. “The Sanctity of Sunday Football: Why Men Love Sports.” Contexts 2(4):13-19.
Messner, Michael A. 1990. “When Bodies Are Weapons: Masculinity and Violence in Sport,” International Review for the Sociology of Sports 25(3): 203-218.
Kottak, Conrad. 1995. “Swimming in Cross-Cultural Currents.” In David J. Hess and Roberto A. DaMatta, eds., The Brazilian Puzzle, pp. 49-58.
Alter, Joseph S. 2000. “Kabaddi, a National Sport of India: The Internationalism of Nationalism and the Foreignness of Indianness”, In Noel Dyck, ed. 2000. Games, Sports and Cultures, pp. 83-115.
Foley, Douglas E. 1990. “The Great American Football Ritual: Reproducing Race, Class, and Gender Inequality.” Sociology of Sport Journal 7:111-135.
Klein, Alan M. 2006. “Growing the Game: The Globalization of Major League Baseball.” In Stanley Eitzen, ed., Sport in Contemporary Society: An Anthology.
Miah, Andy. 2010. “The DREAM Gene for the Post-human Athlete: Reducing Exercise-Induced Pain Sensations Using Gene Transfer”, in Sands, R.R. & Sands, L. The Anthropology of Sport and Human Movement: A Biocultural Perspective, Lexington Books, pp. 327-341.
Witkowski, Emma. 2012. “On the Digital Playing Field: How We ‘Do Sport’ With Networked Computer Games”, Games and Culture7(5): 349-374.
All required and recommended readings will be provided at the beginning of the semester on Moodle.
Offer Semester | Lecture Day | Lecture Time | Venue | Credits awarded |
|---|---|---|---|---|
1st semester | Wednesday | 17:00 - 18:50 | LE5 | 6 |
