Sports and culture

For sociologists subscribing to a hierarchical model of culture, sports may be regarded as its antithesis: a bodily practice, of little cultural consequence, gazed on by passive spectators for the enrichment of the leisure and media industries. The neglect of sports as a sociological subject until relatively recently may be attributed to a common resistance within intellectual culture to engagement with the corporeal realm of popular pleasure. However, the increasing prominence of (especially electronically mediated) sports, a more open-minded attitude within sociology to what has often been dismissed as "mass" or "low" culture, and the influence of interdisciplinary approaches (especially cultural studies) has created space for a developed cultural sociology of sport. This shift by no means signals a theoretical, conceptual, and methodological consensus concerning sports and culture in the discipline, but, rather, a new willingness to explore their relationship within a sociological framework.