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SoCioIogy of Sport Journal, 1988, 5, 153-161
Program for a Sociology of Sport
Pierre Bourdieu
Collbge de France
One of the obstacles to a scientific sociology of sport is due to the fact that
sociologists of sport are in a way doubly dominated, both in the world of sociologists and in the world of sport. Since it would take too long to develop this somewhat blunt proposition, I will proceed, in the manner of the prophets, by way
of a parable. In a recent discussion with one of my American sociologist friends,
Aaron Cicourel, I learned that the great black athletes, who, in the United States,
are often enrolled in such prestigious universities as Stanford, live in a sort of
golden ghetto, because right-wing people do not talk very willingly with blacks
while left-wing people do not talk very willingly with athletes. If one reflects
on this and develops this paradigm, one might find in it the principle of the special difficulties that the sociology of sport encounters: scorned by sociologists,
it is despised by sportspersons. The logic of the social division of labor tends
to reproduce itself in the division of scientific labor. Thus there are, on the one
hand, those who know sport very well on a practical level but do not know how
to talk about it and, on the other hand, those who know sport very poorly on
a practical level and who could talk about it, but disdain doing so, or do so without rhyme or reason.
In order to be able to constitute a sociology of sport, one must first realize
that a particular sport cannot be analyzed independently of the totality of sporting practices; one must conceptualize the space of sporting practices as a system
within which each element receives its distinctive value. In other words, to understand a sport, whatever it may be, one must locate its position in the space of
sports. The latter can be constructed by using sets of indicators such as, on the
one hand, the distribution of practitioners according to their position in social
space, the distribution of the different federations according to their number of
members, their assets, the social characteristics of their directors, etc., or, on
the other hand, the type of relation to the body that each sport favors or demands,
whether it involves direct contact, body-to-body struggle, as in wrestling or Ameri-
Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the 8th ICSS Symposium, Paris,
and the International Conference on the Olympics and Cultural Exchange, Seoul. Originally published in Pierre Bourdieu, Choses Dites, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1987. English translation by John MacAloon and Alan D. Savage.
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can football, or on the contrary, excludes all contact, as in golf, or only allows
it through the mediation of a ball, as in tennis, or of special equipment, as in
fencing. This space of sports must then be related to the social space of which
it is an expression. This must be done in order to avoid the errors due to directly
connecting a sport and a group, as suggested by ordinary intuition. Indeed, one
immediately grasps the preferential relationship which obtains today between wrestling and the members of the working classes or between aikido and the new petty bourgeoisie. (In the French space of sports, that is. For reasons discussed below,
it is quite possible that such relationships may not be observed in other national
spaces of sports.) These are things that one understands all too quickly. The work
of the sociologist consists of identifying the socially pertinent properties that make
for an affinity between a given sport and the interests, tastes, and preferences
of a definite social category.
Thus, as Jean-Paul Clement clearly shows in the case of wrestling, for
example, the importance of body-to-body fighting, stressed by the nudity of the
opponents, induces a rugged and direct bodily contact, while in aikido the contact is fleeting, distanced, and fighting on the ground is nonexistent. If one understands so easily the opposition between wrestling and aikido, it is because the
opposition between "earthy, " "virile, " "body-to-body ," "direct, ' ' etc., and
''airy," "light,'' "distanced," "gracious" goes beyond the playing-field of sports
and the antagonism between two contact sports. In short, the determining element of the system of preferences is here the relation to the body, to the degree
of engagement of the body, which is associated with a social position and with
a primeval experience of the physical and social world. This relation to the body
is one inseparable from the whole relation to the world: the most distinctive practices are also those that ensure the most distanced relationship with the opponent;
they are also the most aestheticized, inasmuch as violence is always more euphernized in them, and form and forms prevail over force and function. Social
distance is very easily retranslated in the logic of sports. Everywhere golf creates distance: with regard to the nonparticipants; by the reserved space, harmoniously arranged, where its practice takes place; and with regard to the opponents,
by the very logic of a confrontationwhich excludes all direct contact, even through
a ball.
But that is not enough and can even lead to a realist and substantialist
vision both of each sport and of the whole of the corresponding practitioners,
and of the relation between the two. As I tried to show in the opening address
to the Seventh Congress of HISPA, one must be careful not to establish a direct
relation, as I just did, between a sport and a social position, such as between
wrestling or soccer and workers, or between judo and employees. This cannot
be done, if only because one could easily show that workers are far from being
the most represented among soccer players. In point of fact, the correspondence,
which is a true homology, is established between the space of sporting practices,
or, more precisely, the space of the finely analyzed different modalities of the
practice of different sports, and the space of social positions. It is in the relationship between these two spaces that the relevant properties of each sporting practice are defined. And the very changes of these practices themselves can only
be understood in this logic, insofar as one of the factors that determine them is
the desire to preserve, at the level of these practices, the distances that exist between positions. The history of sporting practices cannot be but a structural his-
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tory, taking into account the systematic transformationsproduced, for example,
by the emergence of a new sport (California sports) or the popularization of an
existing sport, such as tennis.
Incidentally, one of the difficulties in the analysis of sporting practices
resides in the fact that the nominal unity (of tennis, skiing, soccer) that statistics
assume (including the best and the most recent ones, such as those of the French
Ministry of Cultural Affairs) conceals a dispersion, more or less pronounced depending on the sport, of the ways of practicing it. Also concealed is the fact that
this dispersion increases when the growth in the number of practitioners (which
can result solely from a greater incidence of practice among those categories that
already practice) is accompanied by a social diversification of the practitioners.
Such is the case with tennis, whose nominal unity hides the fact that, under the
same name, one finds ways of playing that are as different as cross-country skiing, mountain touring, and downhill skiing are in their own domain. For example,
the tennis of small municipal clubs, played in jeans and Adidas on hard surfaces,
has very little in common with the tennis in white outfits and pleated skirts which
was the rule some 20 years ago and still endures in select clubs. (One would also
find a world of differences at the level of the style of the players, in their relation
to competition and to training, etc.)
In short, the priority of priorities is the construction of the structure of the
space of sporting practices, the effects of which will be documented by monographs devoted to particular sports. If I do not know that perturbations on Uranus are determined by Neptune, I will believe that I understand what happens
on Uranus, while in reality I will only understand the effects of Neptune. The
object of the story here is the history of these transformations of the structure,
which can be understood only by knowing what the structure was at a given point
in time. (This means that the opposition between structure and change, between
statics and dynamics, is completely fictitious, and one cannot understand change
except on the basis of knowledge of the structure.) So much for the first point.
The second point is that the space of sports is not a self-contained universe.
It is inserted into a universe of practices and of consumptions that are themselves
structured and constituted in a system. It is entirely justified to treat sporting practices as a relatively autonomous space, but one must not forget that this space
is the site of forces that do not act on it alone. I mean simply that sporting
consumptions-if one wants to call them such-cannot be studied independently
of food consumptions, or leisure consumptions in general. The sporting practices apt to be recorded by a statistical survey can be described as the outcome
of the relation between a supply and a demand, or, more precisely, between the
space of products offered at a given moment and the space of dispositions (associated with the position occupied in social space and which are likely to be
expressed in other consumptions in connection to another space of supply).
When one keeps in mind the structural logic within which each of the
practices is defined, what must the concrete scientific approach be? Does the work
of the researcher consist merely in delineating this space by relying, for example,
on the structure of the distrbution of wrestlers, boxers, rugbymen, etc., by sex,
age, or occupation? In fact, this structural framework can, for a time, remain
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roughly defined, to the extent allowed by the aggregate statistics which are available and especially by the limits of these statistics and of the codes by which they
are constructed.
Now here is a very general principle of method. Rather than being content
with knowing in depth a small sector of reality of which one ignores, for want
of asking it, how it is situated in the space from which it was abstracted and what
its functioning might owe to this position, one must proceed in the manner of
the academic architects who presented a charcoal sketch of the entire building
in which the part elaborated in detail was situated. One thus must try-at the risk
of running counter to the positivist expectations which everything, by the way,
seems to vindicate ("better to make a small, modest, and precise contribution
than to build grand, superficial constructions")-to construct a summary description of the totality of the space under consideration.
At least it is clear that this provisional outline, imperfect as it may be,
needs to be filled in, and that the very empirical investigations it guides will contribute to filling it. The fact remains that these investigations will be radically
different, in their very intention, from what they would have been in the absence
of such a framework, which is the condition of an adequate construction of the
objects of specific empirical research. This theoretical framework (here, the idea
of the space of sports; elsewhere, the notion of a field of power), even if it remains largely empty, even if it provides mostly caution and programmatic orientations, will cause me to choose my objects in a different way and thus to maximize
the interest of monographs. If, for instance, being able to study only three sports,
I am using the notion of space of sports, and I have hypotheses concerning the
axes around which this space is organized, I will be in a position to choose to
maximize the profit of my scientific investments by choosing three points very
dispersed in this space. Or I will be able, as Jean-Paul Clement did, for example,
to choose to study a subspace in this space, such as the subspace of contact sports,
and to conduct, at this level, a study of the structural effects by grasping wrestling, judo, and aikido as three points of a same subspace of forces. I will be
able, without risking losing myself in the details, to scrutinize, which seems to
me to be the very condition of scientific work, and to film contests to measure
how much time one spends lying on the ground in wrestling, judo, and aikido;
in short, I will be able to measure all that can be measured, but on the basis of
a construction which determines the choice of objects and of relevant features.
Being pressed for time, I am aware of the somewhat abrupt, peremptory, and
perhaps apparently contradictory character of what I just said. Nonetheless, I believe that I have given sufficient guidance on what can be a method aiming at
establishing a dialectic between the general and the particular, which alone can
allow us to reconcile the general and synoptic view demanded by the construction of the structure of the whole and the close, idiographic view. The antagonism
between the grand macrosociological vision and the microscopic view of a
microsociology, or between the construction of objective structures and the depiction of the subjective representations of agents, of their practical constructions,
is dissolved along with all the oppositions that take the form of "epistemological
couples" (between theory and empiricism, etc.), as soon as one has succeeded
in achieving what seems to me to be the craft par excellence of the researcher:
investing a theoretical problem of far-reaching implications in an empirical object that is well constructed and controllable with the means at hand, that is, possibly, by an isolated researcher, with no funding, limited to his own labor power.
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But I must dispel the impression of objectivist realism that could be given
by my adumbration-of a "st~cturalframework," conceived as
to
empirical analysis. I keep saying again and again that structures are nothing other
than the objectified product of historical struggles such as can be apprehended
at a given moment in time. And the world of sporting practices that the statistical
survey photographs at a certain moment is only the-resultant of the relationship
between a supply, produced by all previous history, that is, the whole set of
"models" of the practices (rules, equipment, specialized institutions, etc.) and
a demand, inscribed in dispositions. The supply itself, as it is given at a definite
moment, in the form of aset of sports likely to be practiced (or watched), is
already the product of a long series of relations between models of practice and
dispositions to practice. For example, the program of bodily practices designated
by the word "rugby" is not the same in the 1930s, in 1950, and in 1980 (even
though in its f o i d , technical definition, it has remained identical, give or take
a few rule changes). It is marked, in objectivity and in representations, by the
appropriations of which it was the object and by the specifications (for instance,
the "violence") it received in the concrete "realization" performed by agents
form (for example,
endowed with socially constituted dispositions of a
in the 1930s, the students of Paris University Club and of Sporting Bordeaux
University Club or of Oxford and Cambridge, and, in the 1980s, the Welsh miners
and the farmers, small shopkeepers, or employees of Romans, Toulon, or Wziers).
At every moment this effect of social appropriation causes each of the "realities" offered under a name of sport to be objectively marked by a set of properties that are not part of the purely technical definition, which can even be officially
excluded from it, and which guide practices and choices (among other things by
giving an objective foundation to
of the type "that's so petty bourgeois," "that's for eggheads," etc.).
Thus, the differential distribution of sporting practices is the result of relating
two homologous spaces, a space of possible practices, the supply, and a space
of dispositions to practice, the demand. On the supply side, there is a space of
sports understood as program of sporting practices that are characterized, first,
by their intrinsic, technical properties (that is, notably the possibilities and especially the impossibilities that they offer for the expression of different bodily dispositions). Second, they are characterized by their relational, structural properties
as these are defined in relation to the totality of the other programs of sporting
practices simultaneously offered, but which are fully realized at a given moment
only by taking on the properties of appropriation conferred upon them by their
dominant association, through modal participants, with a position in the social
space, in reality as in representation. On the other hand, there is, on the side
of demand, a space of sporting dispositions which, as a dimension of the system
of dispositions (habitus),are relationally and structurally determined, as are the
positions to which they correspond, and which are defined in the particularity
of their specification, at a given moment, by the present state of supply (which
is instrumental in producing the need for it by providing the effective possibility
of its realization) and also by the selling out of the supply at the previous stage.
This, I believe, is a very general model which governs the most diverse
consumption practices. Thus Vivaldi received, in a 20-year interval, completely
opposed social evaluations, going from the status of a musicologist's "rediscovery" to that of background music ("muzak") for department stores. Even if a
sport, a musical work, and a philosophical text unquestionably define, simply
by their intrinsic properties, the limits of their possible social uses, they lend themselves to a diversity of utilizations and are characterized at each moment by the
dominant use that is being made of them. In what is offered to perception, a
philosophical author, Spinoza or Kant for example, is never reduced to the intrinsic truth of his work; in its social truth, it encompasses the major interpretations given of it, by the disciples of Kant and Spinoza of the time, who are
themselves defined by their objective or subjective relation to the disciples of
the preceding period and their interpretations, as well as by the originators or
advocates of other philosophies. It is in reaction to this indivisible complex of
a Kant appropriated by Kantians who project onto Kant their social characteristics-and not only by their interpretations of him-that Heidegger opposes a
metaphysical, quasi-existentialist Kant (with, for example, the theme of finitude)
to the cosmopolitan, universalist, rationalist, and progressive Kant of the neoKantians.
You must be wondering what I'm trying to get at. In fact, just as the
social meaning of a philosophical work can thus be reversed (and most of the
great works, those of Descartes, Kant, and even Marx, are continually changing
meanings, as each generation of commentators reverses the interpretation of the
preceding generation), in the same way a sporting practice which, in its technical, "intrinsic" definition, always presents a great elasticity, thereby allowing
for very different, even opposed, uses, can also change meanings. More precisely, the dominant meaning, that is, the social meaning attached to a sporting practice by its dominant social users (numerically or socially), can change. In fact,
a sport frequently receives two very different meanings at the same time. In this
situation, the objectivized program of sporting practices designated by a term
such as running or swimming, or even tennis, rugby, wrestling, or judo, is the
stake of struggles (due to the program's objective polysemy and its partial indetermination, which make it liable to several uses) between people who oppose
one another on the true use, the proper use, the right way to practice the practice
offered by the objectivized program of practice in question (or, in the case of
a philosophical or musical work, by the objectivized program of interpretation
or performance).
At any given movement, a sport is a bit like a piece of music: a score
(a rule of play, etc.) but subject to competing interpretations (and a whole array
of sedirnented past interpretations). That is what each new performer confronts,
more unconsciously than consciously, when he or she proposes "his" or "her"
interpretation. It is in this logic that "returns" (to Kant, to antique instruments,
to French boxing, etc.) need to be analyzed. I said that the dominant meaning
can change. In fact, a new type of sporting practice can be built with the elements of the dominant program of sporting practices which had been left in a
virtual, implicit, or repressed state-for example, by unleashing the violence that
was excluded from a sport by the imperative of "fair play," precisely because
it is defined in opposition to this dominant meaning.
The mainspring of these reversals, whose logic of distinction alone is insufficient to explain them, rests no doubt in the reaction of newcomers, and of
the socially constituted dispositions that they import into the field, against the
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socially marked complex which constitutes a sport, or a philosophical work, as
an objectivized program of practice, but socially realized, embodied by socially
marked agents, and thus marked by the social characteristics of these agents, by
the effect of appropriation. If, from a synchronic perspective, such and such a
program designated by a name of a sport (wrestling, horsemanship, tennis) or
by a philosopher's or a composer's name or by a name of a genre, such as opera,
operetta, street theater, or even a style, such as realism, symbolism, etc., seems
to be directly related to the dispositions inscribed in the occupants of a definite
social position (as, for example, in the relation between wrestling or rugby and
the dominated), a diachronic perspective can provide a different representation.
It seems, then, that the same object offered could be appropriated by agents endowed with very diverse dispositions; in short, it is as if anybody could appropriate
any program and as if any program could be appropriated by anybody. (This sound
"relativism" has at least the virtue of putting us on guard against the tendency,
recurrent in the history of art, to establish direct links between social positions
and aesthetic stances, for example, between "realism" and the dominated, by
forgetting that the same dispositions could, in relation to different spaces of supply, find an expression in different positions-takings.)
In fact, semantic elasticity is never infinite (one need only think of golf
or wrestling). Furthermore, at every moment, choices are not distributed randomly among the different possibilities offered, even if, when the space of "possible~''is very constrained (for example, the young Mam vs. the old Marx), the
relation between dispositions and stance-takings @risesde position) is very obscure because the dispositions that can directly project their structure of demands
in more open, less codified worlds must in this case limit themselves to negative
choices or last resorts. It can be said, I believe, that the dispositions associated
with the different positions in social space, and in particular, structurally opposed
dispositions tied to the opposed positions in this space, always find an outlet,
though sometimes only in the unrecognizable form of the specific, minute oppositions that organize a given field at a certain time, oppositions which are irnperceptible for those who do not possess the appropriate categories of perception.
It is not forbidden to think that the same dispositions that led Heidegger to a
"conservative-revolutionary" form of thought could have, in relation to another
space of philosophical supply, led him to the young Marx. Nor is it forbidden
to think that the same person (but it would not have been the same) who finds
today in aikido a way of escaping judo, in its objectively skimpy, competitive,
petty bourgeois qualities-I am speaking obviously of socially appropriatedjudo-would have asked pretty much the same thing, 30 years ago, of judo itself.
I would have also liked to say something, if only cursorily, about the whole
program of research implied in the idea that a field of specialists in the production of sporting goods and services (among which, for example, are sport shows
such as the NFL Monday night) is progressively constituted, a field within which
specific interests develop (hnked to competition, specific balances of power, etc.).
I will limit myself to mentioning one consequence, among many others, of the
constitution of this relatively autonomous field: namely, the continual expansion
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of the gap between professionals and amateurs, which goes hand in hand with
the development of spectator sports totally separated from ordinary sport.
It is remarkable that a similar process is observed in other areas, notably
that of dance. In both cases, the progressive constitution of a relatively autonomous field reserved for professionals comes with a dispossession of lay people,
who are reduced little by little to the role of spectators. In contradistinction to
folk dancing, which is often associated with ritual functions, court dancing, which
becomes show, requires possession of a specific knowledge (one must know time
and step), and therefore masters of dance are led to accent technical virtuosity
and to undertake a work of explication and codification. Starting in the 19th century, professional dancers begin to appear who perform in salons before people
who practice dance themselves and can still appreciate it as connoisseurs; then,
in time, there is a total separation between great dancers and spectators who do
not practice dance and are limited to a passive comprehension. From then on,
the evolution of professional practice depends more and more upon the logic internal to the field of the specialists, while the nonspecialists are relegated to the
rank of a public less and less capable of the kind of appreciation that practice
gives. In sport matters, one is often, in the best of cases, at the stage of dance
in the 19th century, with professionals who perform in front of amateurs who
still practice or have practiced. But, the diffusion made possible by television
brings in more and more spectators bereft of all practical competency and who
care more about the extrinsic aspects of practice, such as the result, the victory.
This has repercussions, through the sanction (financial or other) handed down
by the audience, upon the very functioning of the field of the specialists (such
as the quest for victory at all costs, and with it, among other things, the rise of
violence).
I will end here since the time allotted to me has almost run out. I will
present the last point in a few seconds. I began by mentioning the effects in the
scientific field of the division of labor between theoreticians and practitioners.
I think that sport is, with dance, one of those areas in which the problem of the
relationships between theory and practice, and also between language and the
body, arises in a most acute form. Some physical education teachers have tried
to analyze what it means, for example, for a coach or a music professor to order
the body. How does one make somebody, that is, someone's body, understand
how it can correct its movement? The problems raised by the teaching of bodily
practices seem to me to comprise a number of theoretical questions of utmost
importance, insofar as the social sciences endeavor to construct theories of actions that are for the most part generated at a subconscious level, and are learned
by means of a silent, practical communication, from body to body as one might
say. And sporting pedagogy is perhaps that area par excellence in which to consider an issue that one generally confronts in the realm of politics: the problem
of the awakening of consciousness (prise de conscience).
There is a particular mode of understanding, often forgotten in theories of
intelligence, which consists of understanding with one's body. There are a great
many things that we understand only with our bodies, at a subconscious level
without having the words to say them. The silence of sportspersons I evoked in
my introduction is partly due to the fact that, when one is not a specialist in verbal explication, there are things one doesn't know how to say, and sport practices are among those practices in which comprehension is (essentially) corporeal.
Very often one can only say, "Look, do as I do." It has often been remarked
Program for a Sociology of Sport
161
that the books written by great dancers convey almost nothing of that which made
the "genius" of their authors. And as Edwin Denby noted about ThCophile Gautier or MallarmC, the most pertinent remarks about dance come less (often) from
dancers or even critics than from enlightened amateurs. This is readily understood when one realizes that dance is the only performing art in which
communication-between dancers and public, but also between master and disciple-is entirely oral and visual, or better, mimetic. That is because of the absence of any objectification in adequate written form. (The absence of the equivalent of the score, which makes it possible to distinguish clearly between score
and performance, leads to identifying the work with its performance, the dance
with the dancer.) Following this approach, one could try to study the effects that
the introduction of the video camera has had on dance as well as on sport. One
question would be to find out whether it is necessaiy to use words in order to
make the body understand certain things, and whether, when one speaks to the
body with words, it is the theoretically and scientifically correct words that make
the body understand best, or whether, sometimes, words that have nothing to
do with the adequate description of what one wants to communicate are not better understood by the body.
By considering this understanding of the body one could possibly contribute
to a theory of belief. You will think that I am striding with seven-league boots,
but I believe that there is a link between the body and what is called in French
1'esprit de corps. If most organizations-the Church, the army, political parties,
industrial firms, etc.-put such a great emphasis on bodily disciplines, it is because obedience consists in large part in belief, and belief is what the body (corps)
concedes even when the mind (l'espn't) says no. (One could, in this logic, ponder
the notion of discipline.) It is perhaps by considering what is most specific in
sport, that is, the methodological manipulation of the body, and the fact that
sport-as all disciplines in all total or totalitarian institutions, such as convents,
prisons, asylums, political parties, etc.-is a way of obtaining from the body a
form of consent that the mind could refuse, that one will best manage to understand the use that most authoritarian regimes make of sports. Bodily discipline
is the instrument par excellence of all forms of "domestication." We know, for
example, how the Jesuits used dance in their pedagogy. It would be necessary
to analyze along those lines the dialectical relationship that unites bodily postures
and the corresponding feelings, for to assume certain positions or postures is,
as we know since Pascal, to induce or reinforce the feelings they express. The
gesture, according to the paradox of the actor or dancer, reinforces the feeling
that reinforces the gesture. This explains the place that all seemingly totalitarian
regimes grant to collective corporeal practices, which help to somatize the social
by symbolizing it, and aim at reinforcing social orchestration through its bodily
and collective mimesis. m e Soldier's Story reminds us of the old popular tradition for which to make someone dance is to possess him. "Spiritual exercises"
are bodily exercises and a good many modern training practices are a form of
secular asceticism.
There is a contradiction, that I feel very strongly, between what I want to
say and the conditions in which I am saying it. It would have been necessary
for me to be able to take a very precise example and to analyze it thoroughly.
Now, owing to the limits imposed on my speech by time constraints, you may
be under the impression that I have propounded grand theoretical perspectives
while my intention was completely the opposite.