Sports play a giant role in contemporary society worldwide. But few of us pause to think about the larger questions of money, politics, race, sex, culture, and commercialization that surround sports everywhere. This course draws on the tools of anthropology, sociology, history, and other disciplines to give you new perspectives on the games we watch and play. It's the new and improved version of Professor Orin Starn's original "Sports and Society" for Coursera, which drew more than 40,000 students. We will focus on both popular sports like soccer (or “football,” as anyone outside America calls it), basketball, and baseball, and also lesser-known ones like mountain-climbing and fishing. You will never watch or think about sports in the same way again.
The Fitness Revolution, Part 1
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From the course by Duke University
Sports and Society
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From the lesson
Gender, Sexuality, and the Rise of Women's Sports
Meet the Instructors
Orin StarnProfessor
Cultural Anthropology
[MUSIC]
Let's explore today the relationship between sports and everyday recreation.
I want to talk about in particular about what could be called the fitness
revolution.
Now in general in modern society, over the last few decades,
we've seen a much greater awareness of health and the body.
People quitting smoking, and dieting, and eating healthy,
and organic food, none of all this stuff existed 40 or 50 years ago.
I remember there is a photo of the 1958 World Cup of the Brazilian players who
were going to win the championship smoking in the locker room during half time.
On an older day, not so long ago, smoking, fatty food,
all this stuff was just taken for granted.
Now we're much more aware about health and
questions of lifestyle and lifespan and sickness and disease.
This concern for health has gone along with the fitness revolution and what you
have now is people spending millions, billions of hours staying in shape.
We have aerobics, and we have Zumba, and we have weight lifting, and
we have jogging, and we have CrossFit, and we have yoga and we have Pilates.
It's a gigantic industry.
Some people talk now about the McDonaldization of fitness,
where we have outfits like Gold's Gym or 24 Hour Fitness,
where you can go to any city in many parts of the world and
go in and use the same machines, like you get the same
hamburger in the McDonald's franchise in Istanbul as you would in Peoria, Illinois.
You go to the Gold's Gym in Paris and
it'll be the same as the Gold's Gym in San Paulo, Brazil or whatever.
So the McDonaldization of fitness, the growth of fitness, the fitness revolution.
I would still say overall, going back to earlier in the course,
that we spend more time watching sports and recreation on TV,
than we do actually moving our own body, playing sports, working out.
A lot of times, we talk more about working out than we actually do but
this is still a big thing and a lot of hours and energy are being spent on it.
Thinking about this a little more deeply, I want to raise some of the issues that
we might bring into play in trying to make sense of the fitness revolution.
For many of us, the fitness revolution is not just something that we do for
pleasure cuz it's fun.
We want to stay in shape,
we want to beat back Father Time but it's also a kind of duty.
Darn, I have to go to the gym again.
I really don't want to but I gotta go to my yoga class or whatever.
Staying fit has become this duty in modern society.
I wanna raise three points, in particular, in trying to think more deeply about this
phenomenon in relationship to the duty to be fit.
A first issue is the whole question of social class and
its relationship to fitness.
Here a pivotal thinker is the French anthropologist sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu.
Bourdieu wrote a lot of famous things but
one of his famous books is called Distinction.
What he argues is that in modern societies, our hierarchy, the way that we
distinguish ourselves from people in other social classes is not just based on money.
It's partly based on money, if you're a billionaire, you belong
to a different social class than I do as a middle class university professor.
But Bourdieu argues that social class in modern capitalism is not just
about your income, [COUGH] it's also about taste,
it's about habits, it's about style.
It's about what you do in your leisure time.
He argues that in the things that we buy,
in the way that we act in everyday life, in our tastes, in our tastes,
we participate in creating this hierarchy of social distinctions in society.
Just to give you an example, the car you buy, the car you drive.
If you drive a Prius, you're distinguishing yourself a little bit,
you're probably like a white,
liberal, intelligencia, probably you're concerned about the environment.
You shop at Whole Foods,
you're likely to be a little bit more politically liberal, Democratic.
Of course, this is not true of everybody who drives a Prius.
These are gross stereotypes but there is the Prius is a certain
statement through consumerism about one's social class position.
But say, if you bought an F150 pick up truck, you're more likely
you might still be white, Latino, you might be African American too.
You're from the Bible Belt, you're more likely to be working class,
that's what you need construction, you need a truck for, probably maybe ranching,
maybe a little more politically conservative.
Again, not everybody who has a Ford F-150 truck is like this.
But again, it's a different kind of statement about who you are and
where you fit into the jigsaw puzzle of American society.
One of the things that we've seen about distinction and taste is that,
in modern society, it's become all the more fragmented and complex in some ways.
My mother in law who's British,
she said when she was growing up in London way back in the 50s,
she said that the way people distinguished social class was by what you drank.
Wine was for the hoity-toity aristocracy, rich people, and
beer was more for the working man in the pub, and all of that.
That's not true anymore.
Now just beer itself, there's so many different kinds of beer, and
each one is a way of distinguishing who you are in society.
It's slotted into a particular social demographic that may have to do with
profession and race and age and gender.
If you like Rogue River beer from Oregon or
some micro-brew, maybe you're more likely to be a hipster,
creative class, maybe 20, 30-something person.
Whereas if you drink Bud, you're more likely a working class, or maybe suburban
person who's not trying to be on the edge of post-hippiedom or whatever.
Even within the beer market, there's all these distinctions that can be made.
Distinction to go back to Bourdieu's concept.
This takes us back around to the fitness this revolution because one of the things
that happens in our exercise choices is that we locate
ourselves within the hierarchy and patchwork quilt of society.
In general, if you're into fitness and you're going to the gym and
you're taking these classes, you're more likely positioning yourself and
getting positioned as middle class or
upper middle class more likely, white collar then blue collar.
This has lot to do with you know the demands of different jobs.
If you been out ranching all day or throwing stuff into a pick up truck or
you're a Latino guy who works on a construction site,
you're not gonna spend your free time going to the gym to do Pilates and
move your aching muscles and body more.
Or if you're a fast food worker flipping burgers all
day on your feet at Burger King, again, you're likely just not to have the energy,
among other things, to go and do the whole gym thing.
The gym thing is partly,
very much connected to white collar work, which where you sit at a desk, or
on your computer, and you want and need that feeling of moving your body.
Already, doing the fitness thing is tied up with social distinctions and
tied up with white collar identity in America.
Then even within the fitness craze,
there are also forms of social distinctions that are being made.
If you do yoga, which I’ve been doing lately, which believe me, I need it.
I'm incredibly inflexible and I had all these back operations so
I've been doing yoga.
Yoga is more the post-hippy, a little new-agey,
maybe, Whole food shopping, it's probably the Prius driving people are all in yoga.
Again, gross stereotypes but if you've been to a yoga studio and
heard namaste and all that stuff, you have a sense of what I'm talking about.
Whereas, if you do cross fit, like my wife does,
that's more associated with police, and military or police wannabe,
military wannabe, hipsters who want to be like bad dudes with big muscles and
wear tight t-shirts and stuff and the whole sweaty gym thing.
CrossFit is a different demographic from the yoga studio or
capoeira which my wife also teaches capoeira.
That's a more multi-ethnic with some like African diasporic elements and
some hippies and then some other people and stuff.
Each of these kinds of forms, these fitness choices are about
Bourdieu's concept of distinction, and distinction in society.
There's a quote I love from Roger Kaiwa,
where he says, tell me what you play, and I'll tell you who you are.
What's pretty clear is that our choices about our fitness activities
can say quite a lot about who we are and where we fit in society.
In the second part of the lecture,
I wanna raise a couple more issues about the fitness revolution.
[MUSIC]
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