Neoliberal Cricketing Subjects in Contemporary India: The State-Market Dichotomy in Two Cricket Movies

This essay examines the ways in which two popular cricket movies from India — the Hindi movie Iqbal (2005) and the Tamil movie Jeeva (2014) — validate the tenets of “roll-back neoliberalism” (Peck and Tickell 2002), an ideology that calls for the withdrawal of State-regulatedwelfare mechanisms in favour of free market capitalism. The protagonists of these movies are talented cricketers from underprivileged backgrounds, and they are excluded from regional and national teams by corrupt cricket board officials. This essay critiques a common story arc that these narratives share: the protagonists are quintessentially neoliberal entrepreneurial subjects who overcome the marginalization through adept exploitation of commercial potential of the sport. The argument is that the discursive delegitimization of State intervention in cricket, and the concomitant framing of the free market as a progressive and inclusive entity, are disempowering for the cricketing public. While a State-regulated sporting culture does have its exclusionary aspects, this essay contends, contrapuntally, that the neoliberal validation of the free-market rationale can be problematic in that it absolves the State of the responsibility of fostering an inclusive cricketing culture. This study thus offers a contingent and strategic endorsement of the Indian State’s intervention in the nation‘s cricketing cultures.

Top Bins: An Exploration of Qatar’s Use of Sport and Capital to Strengthen Diplomatic Visibility

Globalization has given new life to previously benign leisures and vices, allowing states and their respective cultural industries to export (and import) their agenda and visibility. Cultural industries have long played an important role in exercising soft power, and the advent of new communication technologies and newfound spending power amongst the world’s working class has only strengthened and opened opportunities on this front. Sports, particularly ones that translate well to global competition, have become a new frontier for states to leverage assets and wealth to construct more prominent messaging surrounding their larger diplomatic work around the globe. By examining Qatari investment in football, track & field, and other international sports — especially through vehicles like the 2022 FIFA World Cup, the Qatar Investment Authority, Aspire Academy, Paris Saint-Germain, etc. — we are offered a clear understanding as to how Qatar uses its wealth to exploit the global cultural marketplace and entrench itself as an important component of global sporting culture, and the diplomatic utility they aim to reap with such investments. Keywords: Qatar, FIFA, diplomacy, football, capital

Being Breton through wrestling: Traditional gouren as a distinctive Breton activity

Gouren is a style of wrestling practiced in Brittany, France. It has been “sportised” during the last century, but it still represents an emblematic tradition for those people involved who exploit its ancient origins to describe it as a distinctive Breton activity. Following the same path of Breton “identity”—one that has been defined in opposition to hegemonic French identity— gouren is largely defined by its practitioners in opposition to the “hegemonic” wrestling style in France, judo, viewed as an epitome of globalized sports. Through their actions and narratives, Breton wrestlers shape an alternative (pre-modern) sporting culture, promoting non-aggressive, social, and non-hierarchical attitudes over radical competition, athletic performance and personal achievement. Accordingly, gouren is associated with “old-fashioned” ideas of masculinity, strength and related values, that serve to root the practice in the idealized past of Brittany—even now that women are actively involved in gouren.

Pain, Culture and Pedagogy: A Preliminary Investigation of Attitudes Towards “Reasonable” Pain Tolerance in the Grassroots Reproduction of a Culture of Risk

In recent years a considerable body of psychological research has explored the relationship between membership of socio-cultural groups and personal pain perception. Rather less systematic attention has, however, been accorded to how such group membership(s) might influence individual attitudes towards the pain of others. In this paper, immersion in the culture of competitive sport, widely regarded as being exaggeratedly tolerant of risky behaviours around pain, is taken as a case-in-point with students of Physical Education (PE) in tertiary education as the key focus. PE students are highly-immersed in competitive sporting culture both academically and (typically) practically, and also represent a key nexus of cross-generational transmission regarding the norms of sport itself. Their attitudes towards the pain that others should reasonably tolerate during a range of activities, sporting and otherwise, were evaluated through a direct comparison with those of peers much less immersed in competitive sporting culture. In total, N=301 (144 PE, 157 non-PE) undergraduate students in the UK responded to a vignette-based survey. Therein, all participants were required to rate the pain (on a standard 0-10 scale) at which a standardised “other” should desist engagement with a set of five defined sporting and non-sporting tasks, each with weak and strong task severities. Results indicated that PE students were significantly more likely to expect others to persevere through higher levels of pain than their non-PE peers, but only during the sport-related tasks – an effect further magnified when task severity was high. In other tasks, there was no significant difference between groups, or valence of the effect was actually reversed. It is argued that the findings underscore some extant knowledge about the relationship between acculturated attitudes to pain, while also having practical implications for understanding sport-based pedagogy, and its potentially problematic role in the ongoing reproduction of a “culture of risk.”

A Cultural History of Sport in the Age of Enlightenment

A Cultural History of Sport in the Age of Enlightenment covers the period 1650 to 1800, a period often seen as a time of decline in sporting practice and literature. In fact, a rich sporting culture existed and sports were practised by both men and women at all levels of society. The Enlightenment called into question many of the earlier notions of religion, gender, and rank which had previously shaped sporting activities and also initiated the commercialization, professionalization, and associativity which were to define modern sport. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Sport presents the first comprehensive history from classical antiquity to today, covering all forms and aspects of sport and its ever-changing social, cultural, political, and economic context and impact. The themes covered in each volume are the purpose of sport; sporting time and sporting space; products, training, and technology; rules and order; conflict and accommodation; inclusion, exclusion, and segregation; minds, bodies, and identities; representation.

A Cultural History of Sport in Antiquity

A Cultural History of Sport in Antiquity covers the period 800 BCE to 600 CE. From the founding of the Olympics and Rome’s celebratory games, sport permeated the cultural life of Greco-Roman antiquity almost as it does our own. Gymnasiums, public baths, monumental arenas, and circuses for chariot racing were constructed, and athletic contests proliferated. Sports-themed household objects were very popular, whilst the exploits of individual athletes, gladiators, and charioteers were immortalized in poetry, monuments, and the mosaic floors of the wealthy. This rich sporting culture attests to the importance of leisure among the middle and upper classes of the Greco-Roman world, but by 600 CE rising costs, barbarian invasions, and Christianity had swept it all away. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Sport presents the first comprehensive history from classical antiquity to today, covering all forms and aspects of sport and its ever-changing social, cultural, political, and economic context and impact. The themes covered in each volume are the purpose of sport; sporting time and sporting space; products, training, and technology; rules and order; conflict and accommodation; inclusion, exclusion, and segregation; minds, bodies, and identities; representation.

Homo- and transnegativity in sport in Europe: Experiences of LGBT+ individuals in various sport settings

There is broad academic consensus that LGBT+ individuals have been marginalised in both sporting culture and in the academic literature. While the majority of academic research is conducted in the USA, UK, Canada and Australia, the present research is the first to provide a comprehensive picture of the situation and experiences of LGBT+ individuals in sport in Europe based on a quantitative online survey with LGBT+ respondents over 16 years old ( N = 5524). Against the background of a multilevel model for understanding the experiences of LGBT+ individuals and the minority stress model, this article focuses on two questions: firstly, if, and to what extent, LGBT+ individuals witness or experience homo-/transnegative episodes in sport and, secondly, whether they refrain from participating in sport and/or feel excluded from specific sports due to their sexual orientation and/or gender identity. The analysis takes into account diverse intersections of sexual orientation and gender identities within the umbrella of LGBT+ and different sport contexts that reflect the broad scope of sport cultures. Data reveal that non-cisgender persons make up the most vulnerable group within the umbrella of LGBT+ and that there is an inverse relation of distal/proximal stressors with regard to experiences of homophobic language in different sport contexts.