Deconstructing Sport History: A Postmodern Analysis

Introduction: Sport History and Postmodernism

Introduction Sport History and Postmodernism MURRAY G. PHILLIPS In our contemporary or postmodern world, history conceived of as an empirical research method based upon the belief in some reasonably accurate correspondence between the past, its interpretation and its narrative representative is no longer a tenable conception of the task of the historian. —Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History In Deconstructing History, Alun Munslow offers a critique of the empirical research method that provides a direct challenge to sport history and a glimpse into the wider turmoil in the historical profession. Disagreements, dissention, and controversy are certainly nothing new to the historical profession , but the last couple of decades have witnessed a growing critique of fundamental historical practices that have characterized the discipline. The creation of specific journals, such as Rethinking History, and an increasing range of books from the 1980s by prominent historians and philosophers indicate both an expanding interest in and, as Munslow mandates above, a growing skepticism of historical practices. As E. H. Carr was more than well aware, the perennial question “what is history?” refuses to go away.1 What is specifically pertinent for this book is that the interest in historical practices has not been reflected in the subdiscipline of sport history. An analysis of English-language historical journals including Sport History Review, the Journal of Sport History, The International Journal of the History of Sport, and Sporting Traditions illustrate minimal interest in critiquing the ways in which sport history has been created and produced.2 As Table I.1 1 indicates, these attempts to evaluate, summarize, or critique the subdiscipline in the major journals have been miniscule in comparison to the total number of published articles. In addition to these articles, there are synopses in other discipline-based journals,3 several chapters in books4 and at least four books that have examined methodological issues or problems in sport history.5 This survey, over three decades of the life of sport history, indicates that the cupboard is not bare in terms of internal analysis, but it seems reasonable to conclude that self-reflection has not been a defining characteristic of the subdiscipline. The relatively small number of articles, chapters, and books written about the “state of the subdiscipline” are informative in a number of ways. They show that sport history has not been a stagnant or static subdiscipline. New topics, issues, and methodologies have arisen. Topics have ranged from Greek and Roman sports, to medieval tournaments, to Communist sporting activities, to college and professional sports, to Olympic history as well as historical analysis of specific sports and sportspeople. Some of these topics have been examined with specific focus on class, commercialism, ethnicity, gender, imperialism, nationalism, race, and regionalism, and a small number of sport historians have employed Eliasian, feminist, Marxist, modernization, Gramscian and Weberian theories in their work. In this regard sport history, as several authors have indicated, has taken “its philosophical, theoretical, and methodological cues from social history.”6 As informative as the state of the subdiscipline synopses are, with the exception of a few instances, they do not raise questions about the fundamental practices of producing sport history. Precious few of these state of the subdiscipline articles critique the underlying assumptions on which sport his2 Murray G. Phillips Table I.1. “State of the Subdiscipline” Articles in Sport History Journals (1974–2000) Number of Percentage of Published “State of Total Number “State of the the Subdiscipline” of Published Subdiscipline” Journal Articles Articles Articles Sport History Review (1970–) 9 321 2.8 Journal of Sport History (1974–) 12 297 4 International Journal of the History of Sport (1984–) 20 470 4.3 Sporting Traditions (1984–) 10 169 5.9 tory has been built or, as Munslow has contended, “the foundational way historians ‘know’ things about the past has been unchallenged.”7 Very rarely do sport scholars, for instance, modify the perennial question, “what is history?” to ask, “what is sport history?” or extend this question, following the insights of a range of historians and philosophers, to ask, “what are the methodological , epistemological and ontological premises of sport history?” Nor have scholars queried why sport historians are failing to engage with debates that have questioned practices in many historical disciplines or, for that matter, the issues that have unsettled, destabilized, and reconstituted much of the humanities. The limited acknowledgement of these issues in sport history has been the catalyst for this collection. SPORT HISTORY’S MOMENTS...