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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Body culture studies | 4/7 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_culture_studies | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T14:59:41.109537+00:00 | kb-cron |
== Civilization, discipline, modernity == Studies of body culture enriched the analysis of historical change by conflicting terms. Norbert Elias (1986) studied sport in order to throw light on the civilizing process (→The Civilizing Process). In sports, he saw a line going from original violence to civilized interlacement and pacification. Though there were undertones of hope, Elias tried to avoid evolutionism, which since the nineteenth century postulated a 'progressive' way from 'primitive' to 'civilized' patterns. While the concept of civilization normally had hopeful undertones, discipline had more critical undertones. Cultures of bodily discipline became visible – following Foucault and the Frankfurt School – in Baroque dance (Lippe 1974), in aristocratic and bourgeois pedagogy of the spinal column during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Vigarello 1978), and in hygienic strategies, school sanitation and school gymnastics during the twentieth century (Augestad 2003). Military exercise (→military drill) in Early Modern times was the classic field for body cultural discipline (Gaulhofer 1930; Kleinschmidt 1989). In the field of sports, a central point of body-cultural dispute has been the question whether sport had its roots in Ancient Greek competitions of the Olympic type or whether it was fundamentally linked to modernity. While nineteenth century's Neo-Humanism, Classicism and Olympism assumed the ancient roots of sport, body cultural studies showed that the patterns central to modern sports – quantification, rationalisation, principle of achievement – could not be dated before the industrial culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Eichberg 1978; Guttmann 1978). What was practiced before, were popular games, noble exercises, festivities of different character, children's games and competitions, but not sport in modern understanding. The emergence of modern sport was an eruptive innovation rather than a logical prolongation of earlier practices. As a revolution of body culture, this transformation contributed to a deeper understanding of the Industrial Revolution. The so-called Eichberg-Mandell-Guttmann theory about the uniqueness of modern sport became, however, a matter of controversies and was opposed by other historians (Carter/Krüger 1990). What came out of the controversies between the concepts of modernity, evolution, civilization, discipline and revolution was that "modernization" only can be thought as a non-lineal change with nuances and full of contradictions. This is how the history of sport (Nielsen 1993 and 2005) and of gymnastics (Defrance 1987; Vestergård Madsen 2003) as well as the history of running (Bale 2004) have been described in body-cultural terms. One of the visible and at the same time deeper changes in relation to the modern body concerns the dress reform and the appearance of the naked body, especially in the years between 1900 and the 1920s. The change from noble pale skin to suntanned skin as a 'sportive' distinction was not only linked to sport, but had a strong impact on society as a whole. The change of appreciated body colour reversed the social-bodily distinctions between people and classes fundamentally, and nudism became a radical expression of this body-cultural change.
== Industrial body and production == Body culture studies have cast new light on the origins and conditions of the Industrial Revolution, which in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries transformed people's everyday life in a fundamental way. The traditional common-sense explanations of industrialization by technology and economy as 'driving forces' have shown as insufficient. Economic interests and technological change had their basic conditions in human social-bodily practice. The history of sport and games in body cultural perspective showed that this practice was changing one or two generations, before the Industrial Revolution as a technological and economic transformation took place. What had been carnival-like festivities, tournaments and popular games before, became modern sport by a new focus on results, measuring and quantifying records (Eichberg 1978; Guttmann 1978). Under the aspect of the principle of achievement, there was no sport in ancient Egypt, in ancient Greece, among the Aztecs or Vikings, and in European Middle Ages, though there were games, competitions and festivities. Sport as a new type of body culture resulted from societal changes in the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries. The genesis of sport in connection with industrial productivity called to attention the historical-cultural relativity of "production" (→Manufacturing) itself. Studies in the history of "the human motor" and the "mortal engines" of sport showed reification (→reification (Marxism)) and technology as lines of historical dynamics (Rigauer 1969; Vigarello 1988; Rabinbach 1992; Hoberman 1992). Production became apparent not as a universal concept, but as something historically specific – and sport was its body-cultural ritual.