SportCult (review)

SportCult. Edited by Randy Martin and Toby Miller. Cultural Politics series, volume 6. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999; vii + 294 pp. $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

The editors of SportCult, Randy Martin and Toby Miller, present their readers with an ambitious project: "a rethinking of our approach to sport that can enlarge the field of cultural politics" (4). For Martin and Miller, sport is a medium through which bodies and nations intersect and are made meaningful, and a sports act must be understood as a text in which cultural (inter)action may be read anew. The selection of sports in SportCult is eclectic and global in its concerns, ranging from cricket and rugby to kung fu, aerobics, and golf; from South Africa, Mexico, and Tanzania to the United States. In keeping with the book's cultural studies orientation, sports are regarded as texts rather than performances, and the reading of culture through sport is driven as much by theory as by embodied observation. Sport is obviously a visually rich topic, however that there is only one photograph (of lucha libre) points to the reading of sport as text rather than performance. As seems increasingly common in cultural as well as performance studies, while many of the essayists address the politics of race, gender, and nation, they also risk replicating the very authoritarian voices they purport to critique. The editors make claims for sport's potential to offer its practitioners and audiences arenas for resisting, transgressing, and subverting the dominant culture, but often the claims are rooted in a set of ideals rather than in close analysis of specific examples. The most provocative and, I think useful essays are also the most contingent, capturing the writer's curiosity about, enthusiasm for, and the sensual experience of a particular sport and analyzing its cultural implications.

The first of the book's four parts, "Building Nations," considers the "transnational traffic in sport" (2) and is explicitly engaged in the postcolonial project. Two of the three essays in this part are centered on the politics of cricket in South Africa and in Sri Lanka. The third essay, by May Joseph, locates the success of kung fu cinema in 1970s Tanzania in the links between its "performance of frugality" and the "communal self-reliance" of the ujamaa (familyhood) doctrine of the socialist regime (42). As with many of the essays, her discussion seems in some sense incomplete, perhaps limited by space; for example, her assertion that "kung fu choreography embodies a viable technology of self for people of small frames, implicitly critiquing conventional masculinity" (57) is provocative but seems outside the primary focus of her essay and, as such, is rather suspect for not being thoroughly examined.

The next part, titled "Building Bodies," is primarily focused on the ways in which aerobics and bodybuilding practices may be read as potentially subversive of the dominant culture. The two essays on aerobics, by Randy Martin and Michael Real, are oddly disembodied. We know they've danced the dance, but the place of the ethnographer on the floor remains unquestioned, an unspoken tension which, if directly engaged, might have given the essays more force in challenging conventional readings of aerobics as enforced conformity. Jon Stratton's discussion of bodybuilding appears on the surface to be a fairly straightforward summary of the current thinking in this area. But by setting the specific history of Eugen Sandow, the first star bodybuilder, against other cultural icons--from Frankenstein to Tarzan and the Terminator--he provokes a rethinking of the way in which we look at these constructs of masculinity. Like Martin and Real, Stratton is ambivalent about his subject's potential to transgress dominant cultural values: "Building one's own body is, at one and the same time, the epitome of unalienated labor in that it does not involve the cash nexus directly and the most profoundly alienating experience in that the body is treated as a product" (170). As the last essay in this part, it seems...