This article was written for a collected work about sport and values, edited by Jerzy
Kosiewicz in Poland. (16.3.04)
Popular identity in sport and culture –
About living democracy
by Henning Eichberg,
Research Institute for Sport, Culture and Civil Society/IFO, Denmark
Abstract
Sport is fascinating – but not innocent. As a mirror of societal oppositions, sport is full of
tensions: tensions between innovation and restoration, between the people and the dominating
elites, between liberation and colonization. If one tries to harmonize these contradictions –
and this is what large sports organizations normally do – crucial aspects of the significance of
sport are ignored.
The discourse of values is not innocent either. If the term “values” is used in an
affirmative way to design “the valuable” side of sport as such – and this is what Olympic
rhetoric usually does – it conceals the inner contradictions of movement practice. Values have
their basis in bodily practices with all their contradictions. Values are derived from what is
practically happening in bodily encounter between human beings, and this is – not only, but
also – a field of conflicts.
One main contradiction inside modern sport is between sport as production of
achievement and as a strategy of health. This corresponds to the relation between practices of
excellence under the value of freedom and social integration under the value of equality.
However, the classic claim of modern democracy is threefold: liberty, equality, fraternity, and
among these, the latter has found least attention. Fraternity has a basis in social life as well,
as solidarity. And indeed, a third relevant feature of sport is that it is an essential part of
popular culture, of folk interaction and group solidarity.
This has implications, which by far transgress the limits of sport as private leisure
activity. It is not purely by chance that the popular dimension so often disappears from the
view of public attention – from the view of the mass media as well as from the politics of the
large sport systems. There exists a connection between sport and the values of democracy, but
this connection is rather disquieting than affirmative.
Contents
A Tatar folk festivity
A Danish village holiday
Varieties and universality of popular sports
1. Sport as production of achievement
2. Sport as strategy of health
3. Popular sport as festivity
Festivity of sports: folk, culture, identity
From sport to popular culture: conflict, spirituality, and laughter
The event, the encounter, the dialogue
From popular culture to civil society: the people of democracy
Culture of difference – another way to peace
A Tatar folk festivity
If sport is characterized as popular activity and a part of folk culture, what are we talking
about? Let us cast an eye at two events from the 1990s.
First event. We see a wrestler walking proudly around the arena, surrounded by thousands of spectators. He bears a sheep on his shoulders, the prize of his victory, he laughs and
waves to the enthusiastic crowd. He has just won the final match in belt wrestling, the Tatar
korash, where one puts one's girdle or towel around the waist of the opponent, tries to raise
him from the ground and to throw him down on his back. After old Tatar tradition, the winner
of the last fight has won the ram, which he is bearing triumphantly through the crowd, as well
as an embroidered towel. And he obtains the title of a batyr, a Hercules, a strong man.
The triumph of the batyr is a central event in the springtime holiday which the Tatars
call Sabantuy, the "ploughman's festivity". This ancient cultural event had been suppressed
for generations as being "reactionary", "religious" or "separatist", anyway as "un-Sovietic".
But the peoples' rising of 1989/91 brought it to life again. By the festivity, a people expressed
its cultural survival. It showed that a new – and old – nation was striving for selfdetermination, Tatarstan.
At the same time, the festivity displayed ties between different peoples, while nations
in other parts of the earlier Soviet Union clashed in bloody conflicts. In Sabantuy, not only
Tatars were showing their costumes, flags, dances and musical performances, but also other
peoples and minorities living in the region, such as Bashkirs and Finns. And not least,
Russians were active both by their performances and by their expert work in communication.
They brought – as journalists, scholars and film producers – informations about this alternative event of sport and festivity out into the world (Kuznezova/Milstein 1992).
The Tatar springtime festivity includes – besides korash wrestling – running
competitions and horse races, performances of strength (as weight lifting), jumping and
several types of games. Many of the competitions have a humorous character, provoking
laughter and enjoyment. They display the grotesque sides of the human body – by sack race,
pole climbing, balancing on a swinging beam. These performances do not only put on stage
the success, but also the failure, the stumbling, the comic and the ridiculous. Some of the
dances, too, are part of the popular culture of laughter. We see a woman showing movements,
which a man tries to imitate – and all burst into fun. By this sexual parody, the tensions and
unbalances between the genders in Tatar patriarchy is displayed and exposed to common
laughter.
Other dances have a more formalized and folkloristic character. This is reminiscent
of the Soviet period when state ensembles demonstrated "living folk culture" by measured
choreographies, theatrical pathos and reconstructed costumes. Again other performances are
more sportive in character, such as parachute jump.
The Tatar Sabantuy festivity, as it reappeared after 1990, is, thus, compiled from
many elements and different sources, often in a contradictory way. Features from modern
sport and from traditional folk practice clashed and mingled – competition, dance and
folkloric arrangement – national demonstration and popular joke.
The renaissance and connection of sport, folk culture and popular festivity in the
early nineties was not restricted to Tatarstan. In the arctic regions, the Inuit peoples from Siberia, Greenland, Alaska and Canada were, since the eighties already, meeting with drum
dance and held their ancient winter festivity Kivgiq (Uiniq 1990). Among Kasakhs, the traditional New Year's festivity Nauryz in the month of March reappeared with its dances and
games (Chusainov 1990). Mongolians turned – in the sign of Jingis Khan – back to ancient
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festivities with nomad equestrianism, wrestling and bow and arrow. Many popular festivities
were organized around traditional wrestling in specific regional variations like the Tatar
korash (Godlewski 1996, Petrov 2001, Tokarski 2004: 116-17). The Baltic peoples assembled
in their large song festivities, which gave the name to what was called the “singing
revolution” of Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians (Kiisk 1967, Rüütel 2003).
From the neo-colonial darkness, young old nations and popular cultures appeared in
the light of international attention, marking their folk identity by new old games and festivities. They exposed a richness of colours and varieties, which makes the established Western
standard sport appear as poor and one-dimensional (Krämer-Mandeau 1992, Liponski 2001).
A Danish village holiday
Now let us turn into quite another direction, to the North of Europe.
The second event happens in a village of Southwest Zealand, Denmark. It is a
Saturday afternoon in the month of August 1993. One hundred of the 150 inhabitants are
crowding on the green where a large tent and benches have been erected. People are talking
and drinking their coffee when suddenly a farmer's wife, leader of the local sports association,
calls to the games. Old and young people, men and women form three large circles to play a
game of run and catch. After this, a sack race makes people stumbling, laughing and shouting.
We feel a spirit of competition and personal engagement growing in each of the groups,
though at last it does not matter which team really has won. The last game is a tug of war –
the children of the village pulling against the grown-ups. It ends in laughter and surprise
because the children succeed in pulling the strong men all over the green.
After these games, the preparatory group – which is determined anew from year to
year – has planned something special: a competition of orienteering all through the village.
The participants form several teams and try to find the described route, which is passing
through the inhabitants' estates and gardens. On their way they have to fulfil some tasks such
as jumping rope, making a song about the experience of the day and laying out the longest
chain of their clothes. So one suddenly sees all these serious people, more or less festively
dressed, laying down one shirt or stocking after the other until they stand more or less naked
by the way. The old village church stares shocked at the event, which it maybe has never seen
before.
Again, the teams are developing a spirit of competition and group solidarity. But
when the "winning" team shall be named later on, nobody expresses real interest in that sort
of "result". The common experience itself was what mattered – the competitive situation
without “product”. And in the evening, people grill sausages and meat before finally dancing
until midnight.
When the series of annual summer festivities in the Zealand village started around
1980, it was a result of pleasure – but also of a sad necessity. The village was on the way to
becoming a dull "sleeping quarter" lacking any social life. The majority of the farmers had
given up under the growing economic burdens, and most of the inhabitants earned their
income now by wage work in one of the nearby towns. They return to the village for sleeping
– and to relax in front of the television screen. The school had been transferred to neighbour
village in a process of concentration. The local shopkeeper could not stand the competition
with the large supermarkets in town. The church was frequented not much more than twice a
year, for Christmas and confirmation services – and else for marriages and funerals. Many of
the inhabitants – removing in and out of the village – did not know each other any longer, and
the village road was no longer a place of meeting, but of passing by in automobiles. The
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reform of Danish municipality structures in the seventies had finished with important
elements of local self-administration.
In other words, the village life was marked by isolation, anonymity and alienation,
just like in Danish suburbs generally. The last somewhat broader extended network, which
had survived, was the local sports club. But its activities were only attractive for a part of the
inhabitants, and its sport hall is placed one kilometre outside the village.
In this situation of social deficiency, the reinvention of festivity around 1980 was an
act of rescue. But festivity was easier thought than done. Once a year on a Saturday evening,
people would gather in a barn, sit down on the banks, eat and drink, talk with neighbours and
– after inclination – dance a little bit. It was a "culture of sitting" which spread its boredom
over the arrangement, ornamented by decent dance in couples after common known song-hits,
played on a hammond-organ. Only when a street-player group was hired in one of the years,
more life and movement came into the arrangement, by common round dances and song
games. But normally, it was only the children who added movement and vivid life to the
festivity. They engaged in disorderly games in the falling darkness outside the barn. Thus
generally, the villagers faced the serious problem of how to make festivity alive.
By including funny competitions, body movement and new and old games into the
social process, the festivity in 1993 gained a new quality. The chairwoman of the local sport
association had transferred social meaning from sport and game to community. The young
peoples’ fancy of movement and the elder peoples’ social demand could unite on a new and
common level. (About the traditional games in Denmark see also Møller 1997)
Varieties and universality of popular sports
If we compare these two events from a Northern and from an Eastern country, the social and
cultural differences are evident. Further examples could be added from other parts of the
world, showing further varieties.
In the West of Europe, festivities of popular games and traditional – so-called
“Celtic” – wrestling have flourished since the 1980s (Barreau/Jaouen 1998 and 2001,
Liponski/Jaouen 2003). In Brittany, gouren wrestling and jeux traditionnels have been in the
focus (Ferré 2002, Beaulieu/Ronné 2002), in Scotland Highland Games and backhold
wrestling. In the South of Europe, Portuguese folk games, Italian festivities, the bat games of
the Aosta valley and Basque competitions of force attracted broad public attention (Daudry
1984 ff, Amador Ramirez 1997). In different parts of the world, people met in their own folk
festivals and began to spread their particular folk activities to other regions. The Brazilian
fighting art of capoeira is now also practiced in Western metropolis, in Copenhagen as well
as in Amsterdam (Frogner 1996, Borghäll/Capoeira 1997, Crum 2001). The Indonesian
martial art pencak silat held its first international tournament in Vienna in 1986 (Cordes
1992), and Indonesian games found interest among Western educationalists (Jost/Smidt
1990). Gymnastics as popular festivity attract large participation and spectatorship, with Zulu
warrior dance from South Africa included (as at the Gymnaestrada in Berlin 1995). The Tanzanian dance festivities ngoma have sent waves of drumming and dancing to Danish popular
culture (Elbæk 1996). Eskimo and Indian Games in North America have boomed (Johnston
1978, Ipellie 1985) and gave inspiration to educational innovations (Frey/Allen 1989,
Keewatin 1989), and the Greenland summer festivity aasivik combined drum dance and rock
music (Eichberg 1989) ...
All this reveals how rich and extremely differentiated the world of games and sports
is. Each event is related to a very particular cultural situation, and yet the practices are
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exchanged by diffusions of new type (Bale/Maguire 1994: 256-280, Pfister/Yueye 1999).
Current popular sports is much more than just “old sports”. There are gliding crossings from
traditional games to the New Games, as they spread from the Californian counterculture of
the 1960s (Fluegelman 1976 and 1981) – and back again from the New Games to the
rediscovery and revitalization of old games (Møller 1997). Festivals of sport and game like
the annual Danish Store Legedag (Great Play Day), which spread during the 1980s, do not
discern between “traditional” and “new” activities. The festival of Danish popular sports
Landsstævnet (The Country’s Meeting), which is arranged each four years, continues
traditions of gymnastics, but has enlarged this program with other sports and adopted
elements of the rock festival (Eichberg/Madsen 2004). From the other side, from the field of
youth cultures, pop events like rock festivals, New Age esoteric messes, Love Parades, Dark
Wave messes and role games have integrated elements of sport and movement culture, play
and games. City marathons and other similar running events have developed into carnival-like
festivities. A new event culture is rising at the horizon, which offers a new framework for
popular sports.
In all this richness, one can recognize some common features. It is popular sport and
movement culture, which we witness in the Tatar and the Danish events as well as in the other
cases. People are active in types of sport, which are essentially contributing to their social culture. But what does this mean – the “popular” dimension of sports? What is the universal
significance of folk culture?
After all, we should have been able to answer to this question since long time,
because modern society has developed huge and powerful organisations of sports as well as
elaborate sports sciences to define and administrate all the arising questions of the meaning of
sports. However, a closer examination shows that very little has been done to cast light on just
this fundamental dimension of what is the popular in sports.
This must have a more profound reason. Let us have a look at the current patterns of
interpretation, by which experts try to define the social meaning of sport. Why do people
engage themselves in sports?
1. Sport as production of achievement
The dominant answer is still that sport is centring on achievement. Sport represents – as one
tries to define – the striving of the human being towards better and better results, towards
records. The human being – it is said – has always developed imaginations of "gods, heroes,
super-men", and the "quicker, higher, stronger" of modern Olympic sport is just a natural
prolongation of this universal aspiration. Sport assorts the participants into winners and
loosers. More concretely, the fundamental elements of sport are results produced by
competitions on hierarchical levels, results which should be compared and quantified. They
require a technologized and rational training. A central organization has to administrate the
system by arbitration, standardization and control. A progressing specialization leads to more
and more differentiated sport disciplines.
As it is easy to see, this analysis of what sport fundamentally is includes at the same
time a political concept of what sport should be. With this voluntarism we are on the level of
values, as seen through the eyes of the dominant sport system. However at a nearer
examination, few – if any – of the named fundamentals of the achievement system fit for the
explanation of the described events of popular sport.
Neither for the Danish village people nor for the Tatar participants of springtime
festivity is it relevant that there must be results and records measured in centimetres, grams,
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seconds or points, nor must these be compared with Olympic standards or others. Neither the
Danish nor the Tatar festivity has to enter into a hierarchical series of sport tournaments or to
be controlled by a pyramidal organization of functionaries and arbitrators, umpires or
referees. There is no scientific training for sack race, and an organized specialization of
disciplines would not give any meaning. If there is a "hero" – like the Tatar batyr-Herkules –
then he or she is important for collective identification and enjoyment of the people, not for
the production of abstract records. Outstanding sportive performance may be fascinating, but
is not at the core of popular sports.
So it is essentially not the Olympic type of sportive achievement, which is the point
in these popular sports and folk festivities. Nor does the principle of top performance explain
the dynamics of the Baltic song rallies, of ngoma dance in Tanzanian villages or of samba and
capoeira in Brazilian suburbs – and in the Western metropolis. The extreme achievement
orientation in international sport with its winner-and-loser configuration seems to be rather a
colonial phenomenon linked to a certain type of Western industrial-capitalist society and its
worldwide expansion (Eichberg 1978 and 1998, Bale 1996 and 2002). Commercialization and
the one-sided attention of the mass media to this side of sport have furthermore contributed to
make the model of achievement sport hegemonic.
But the hegemony of achievement orientation in sports has at the same time
produced its own crisis. Doping is not only a marginal mistake in the system, but a logical
consequence of organizing sport on the line of result production. If one subordinates the
human being to its achievement, then doping – by the means of chemical, physiological and
other manipulations – is a rational prolongation. Achievement sport and the artificial creation
of monsters are by some common logic linked to each other (Hoberman 1992).
2. Sport as strategy of health
It did not happen by accident that during the last decades another dimension of sports has
obtained new attention, the health aspect of bodily movement. Today we witness many attempts to redefine sport as a means of fitness and individual health in the framework of
welfare society. Why do people exercise sports? Because it makes their life longer and
healthier.
Again, scientific analysis cannot be separated from political promotion. With large
public relation inputs, public programmes are launched for hygienic motion, physical training
and "wellness". Sport is not only a strategy of health, it should be. Health sport aims at the
social integration of a given population into the patterns of “correct life” – as seen by the
values of the public system. This collective fitness meets with certain personal values as
individual fitness and health. Again we observe the interplay of practice and values, of basis
and superstructure.
Why is there the new focus of sports? The established sport system has discovered
that the achievement principle actually does not describe what is essential for the real people
active in sports. If one wants to "sell" sports, one must find other ways. And: The system of
achievement sport – being in crisis because of its doping scandals and its corruption by the
media market and commercialization – tries to restore the public confidence by creating a
supplement of positive “added values”. And furthermore: A new commercial market is
booming based on new health-related activities of fitness and wellness (Dietrich 1990,
Hartmann 2002: 32-40).
But to which degree can we trust the analytical contents of the sport-health
hypothesis? Can we understand popular sport involvement as an outcome of this strategy?
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There is no doubt that physical activity has positive effects on the life of the
individual, and the increasing ecological stress in our industrial and urban as well as in rural
environments makes this aspect more and more significant. We all want to be healthy,
beautiful and smart. And no doubt, sport can also be used for rehabilitation and prevention.
However, when regarding the fascination and activity as it is really going on in popular
sports, the health aspect – especially among young people – is not at all central. The Tatars
definitely do not meet in wrestling and "ploughman's festivity" for the sake of their fitness.
Nor do the Danish villagers run their festive competitions because of hygienic considerations.
If anything like "health" gives a meaning in popular sports – whether in the Turkish
yagli oil wrestling or in the melon dance of the Kalahari Bushmen, whether in the Malay duel
dance pencak silat or in the roller-skating of Copenhagen youngsters, whether in the capoeira
in Brazilian streets or in Amsterdam and Copenhagen – than it is related to a common mood
of social “healthiness”. Popular sport creates a climate of collective well-being, a spirit of
community, which protects against the experience of alienation. The "healthy" dimension of
folk sports is rather in family with the "magic" sides of popular medicine.
In other words: Folk health in sports refers primarily to a social quality. It is
therefore far from the health concept of Western scientific medicine and from laboratory
physiology, though people often use these to rationalize their cultural needs. The scientist and
fashionable discourse of “health” delivers a trustworthy language – but what is the practice,
which people want to describe by this language? Folk health is far from purely individual
fitness sport. The definition of sport as health activity, as it is promoted by the international
Olympic sport and by the strategies of public systems to launch “Sport for all” from above,
obscure these oppositions and contradictions. These approaches do not help to understand,
what there really is at the core of popular sport activity.
A comparison with dance and music can make the limits of the sport-for-health
hypothesis clearer. It would not give any meaning to explain the popular enjoyment of dance
– whether country dance, waltz, disco or pogo – by its health qualities. Rhythmic rock music
does not obtain its fascination as youth activity from the striving for physical fitness. Should
we make programs for fitness by "dance for all" or "music for all"? No, surely not. If “music
for all” nevertheless gives a meaning, it means to make music accessible for all, opening
chances for broad cultural involvement – and that is what the Danish musikskole (music
school) tries on a broad basis.
Popular sports and games are just like dance and music active contributions to
culture – and in this (and only this) respect they are “sport for all”. And if the notion of health
gives any meaning in this connection, then culture is rather an alternative – social –
definition of health.
If sport for health and social integration is confronted with sport for the production
of achievement, this contradiction may remind us of the two first elements in the triad of
democratic values: equality and freedom.
The freedom of competition and production corresponds to the logic of the market –
survival of the fittest, use of any means, including doping, to achieve one’s ends: “It is the
achievement that matters.” This is sport for the few, giving also freedom of exaggeration.
In contrast, it is the value of equality that can be seen in connection with the logic of
health: “We are all equal” – face to face with our own health. And the public system, the
state, guarantees the framework for this healthy life, welfare and social integration. This is
world of the Sport for all.
However, revolutionary democracy expressed not only a dual, but a threefold set of
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values: Liberty, equality and fraternity. The fraternity or sorority of movement culture is what
we find in festivity and association. Brotherhood and sisterhood is the relation of solidarity,
which forms the basis of civil society: “We meet” – in popular self-organization and
voluntary action. People move in relation to each other, touching each other and meeting the
other in dialogue.
Values (liberty, equality and fraternity) and structures (market, state, civil society)
are related to each other – this is what the inner contradictions of sport (for achievement, for
health, for popular togetherness) witness about.
3. Popular sport as festivity
If it is true that there is an important difference between the orientation towards achievement
of measured results on one hand, the strategy of physiological health on the other, and the
dynamics of popular sports as something third – than sport is not one. We can forget the
dominating ideology of the one Olympic sport and can look with fresh eyes at the reality of
folk activities in sports.
Indeed, the Tatar sabantuy and the Danish village holiday have something in
common: They are festivities. The same is true for nearly all the other games, sports and activities, which historians, anthropologists and journalists have characterized as popular sports
– from the Greenland Inuit drum dance to the famous American Red Indian running competitions and to the Landsstævne, the gymnastics and sports festival of Danish popular sport.
They all create a larger totality than just the isolated and specialized activity. They create a
social gesamtkunstwerk – by putting the bodily activity into the centre of the cultural event.
Popular sports create festivity.
If this is true, we have to look at sports in a quite new way – which, by the by, is at
the same time a very old way. Sport, games and festivity have in earlier history always been
connected with each other, until this connection broke down in the process of industrial
alienation. Bodily movement in competition, dance, play and game constitutes a central point
in the festive display of life – this is popular culture (Eichberg 1995 a, b and c). Festivity as
the core of sports – sports as a central element of festivity – this means that sport is not
isolated, but enters into a connection with a broader spectrum of cultural activities.
Let us have a closer look at this totality of festivity. What is forming the cultural
context of folk sports?
Music is a central element of festivity. No festivity without the rhythm and the
melodies of a community (see also Hall 1984). By "cleansing" sport from music, the sport of
the industrial society has become poorer. But in popular sports, you will always hear the drum
– or the joint singing, which is a feature in Danish folkelig, popular culture. These traditional
elements have during the recent decades become revitalized by rock music, rap and hip-hop,
even by “crazes” like raves and love parades.
Dance is another important feature in popular festivity. In dance, movements are
synchronized, forming a social, bodily and erotic connection. The dance, too, was isolated by
achievement sport under the command of specialization. But in many forms – for instance in
Danish folkelig gymnastics, in aerobics and many other fashionable forms – we see dance reentering the field of sports.
The variety and integration of activities forms the gesamtkunstwerk of festivity.
While a sports tournament splits the human bodily practice up into specialized activities,
isolating them side by side – also spatially – like an exposition of products, the popular festivity mixes the activities and smelts them into an always new totality, a happening.
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The multiplicity of activities facilitates the mingling and interlacing of the social
groups, which is an essential feature of festivity. Old and young people, men and women,
children and grown-ups, insiders and outsiders come together in popular sports. Without their
meeting and interaction, a festivity would not be popular. In contrast, the laws of assortment
in achievement sport have carried the disciplinary sport far away from the popular culture. By
its lack of hierarchical order and of separation between the groups, popular festivity is nearer
to democracy than the sport of standardization.
Festivity is a display of identity – and this means also a shift of identity. Playing a
role – that is what the "strong man" or Hercules of the Tatars does as well as the
Schützenkönig ("riflemen's king") in popular shooting or the "King" or "Queen of May" in
Nordic popular festivities. The champion of sports has his origin in the popular culture of
shifting and playing roles, side by side with the princess, the witch, and the fool. Walking on
stilts makes us "high", and stumbling brings us down to the earth – these games tell the story
of highness and change. But also the mask and the drunkenness are means of changing identity – in the framework of a social game. Festivity and popular sport give the human being the
chance to become "an other".
By festivity, people celebrate that life has a meaning. They meet around a common
cause, which is relevant and significant for their community. This may be the identity of
being Tatar in the Great Eastern revolution of 1989/91 or the creative will to overcome
alienation in the Danish everyday life. Festivity will always have "holy" and in this respect
"religious" dimensions – and political, meta-political ones. It contrasts the stress of everyday
life and creates a rhythm of repetition. Thus as a part of festivity, popular sport has a ritual
significance. Sport displays – by the bodily movements of the participants – the meaning of
life.
And – last but not least – life is grotesque and should not only be taken seriously.
Popular festivity has always features of the non-serious, of carnival. Popular sport can only be
understood as part of the popular culture of laughter. The strong body is fascinating – but isn't
it also grotesque, ridiculous? The winners in tug of war – are finally falling on their arse
(Eichberg 2003). Popular games display the stumbling and the failure. The sack race, the
mock tournament, the fight on a swinging beam and the stilt race give occasions for laughter.
The clown and the fool are important figures in popular festivity and in folk sport.
All in all, festivity comments on the life of the people – and so does popular sport.
By temporarily exceeding the "normality" of everyday life, people play the game – affirming
their life and ironically experimenting on it. By festivity and sports they display both identity
and the shift of identity – otherness.
In popular movement culture it is the process that counts. The sport activity enters
into a dialogical process of communication. This contrasts clearly with the mainstream
concept of sport as work, as it is analysed by natural science in ergonomic terms and as it is
displayed in achievement sport as the production of results, of sportive products.
The contradictions between process and product, between communication and
production are rooted in bodily practice. The popular dimension of sport is, thus, not only
ideology, not only superstructure, as it is constituted by high-level discourses about the
"proved added values". Ideological values and the "use" of sport may be imposed on the
practice of sport from above, as it is practiced by Olympic ideology and state sport, but also
be added to sports by social movements from below, which was tried by as different traditions
as Christian sports, the workers’ sport movement, nationalist gymnastics and current fitness
sport. Finally, under neo-liberal conditions, the ideology of values may become something
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like value management. In contrast, the popular dimension of sports is to be found in the
activity itself.
Festivity of sports: folk, culture, identity
Festivity and the festive dimension of sports reveal that there is a fundamental connection
between “the people”, culture and identity.
Culture is the way, people live their life. Conceived as a totality, popular culture
places the human body and movement in its centre. That is what festivity shows by game and
dance, by competition and play.
Identity is the never-ending question: Who am I? Who are you? Who are we?
Identity is an opposition to alienation, counterbalancing the impression that "I don't know
whom I am". And identity has always a collective dimension. There is no I without a Thou
and a We. There is no identity without cultural identity. Festivity makes this connection concrete, visible and sensible. By meeting in game and dance, the I becomes a You and enters
into a We (Buber 1923, Eichberg 2003).
Therefore it is a reductive strategy to define popular sport as a part of leisure politics
only. As festive display and questioning of identity, the place of popular sport is on quite
another level than the public management of the population's reproduction. Popular sport is
essentially more than leisure and spare time activity, more than an annex to the world of
production.
Folk, the popular dimension is extremely difficult to translate between different
languages, because each of these languages refers to very particular historical-social
experiences. In Denmark, folkelig idræt (popular sport) is a well-established term in the world
of organized sports. Folkelig oplysning (popular enlightenment) has a central place in the
statute of one of the two large national sports federations, De danske Gymnastik- og Idrætsforeninger (DGI). (However, this organization is permanently disquieted by debates about to
which degree folkelig oplysning is a superfluous ideological superstructure over "normal"
sport activity or a feature of deep practical significance.) The meaning of folk is linked to the
term folkelig, which in Denmark is broadly accepted outside sports as in folkelig forening
(popular association) and folkehøjskole (popular academy). Folkelig oplysning (popular
enlightenment) describes the general, non-formal education in Denmark, and folkestyre is the
Danish term for democracy. Historically, the focus on folk and folkelighed, the popular
dimension of culture, dates back to the poet, philosopher and theologian N. F. S. Grundtvig
(1783-1872). But it is the actual understanding that is under discussion today – and demands
translation.
When trying to translate the folkelig to other languages, one meets serious problems.
In English for instance, peoples' sport seems to have political, mostly left-wing undertones,
while the more neutral concept of folk games points towards traditional practices, which, if
they have any political undertones, are mostly conservative. In contrast again, sport in
popular culture is related to the complex of youth cultures, media and commercial sport in
late modernity. The corresponding terms folk song and folk music have experienced a
characteristic shift in the 1960s from conservative traditionalism to an expression of
oppositional attitudes – folk, hippie and revolt. Evidently, people, folk and the popular are
neither unambiguous nor identical.
What is "popular" in the field of body cultural practice, is diverse in relation to the
political dimension where the range goes from German völkisches Turnen (popular gymnastics) with xenophobic and racist connotations to Russian narodnaya fizicheskaya kultura
10
(popular physical culture) in the frame-work of Soviet Marxist ideology. However, the
diversity does not only concern ideological superstructures, but also and basically the bodily
practice itself. Flemish volkssport (popular sport) refers to old games from – typically – an
urban culture while Swedish and Swedish-Finnish folklig idrott (popular sport) describes
traditional rural games and Swedish idrott som folkrörelse (sport as popular movement)
includes the modern mainstream of competitive sport. Danish folkelig idræt is, in contrast,
historically derived from modern (Swedish Lingian) gymnastics, while the attention to sport
in the frame-work of English popular culture, as it is studied in the tradition of the
Birmingham school, is mostly directed towards soccer sport and football fan behaviour.
Italian discourses about sport e cultura dei popoli (sport and culture of the peoples), culture
ludiche, tradizionali e popolari (traditional and popular cultures of play and game) and giochi
popolari (popular games) describe – similar to the French jeux populaires – a broad range of
mostly regional games. But sport popolare (popular sport) was during many years also a
communist term for people's sport or mass sport on a lower level of performance, thus
mirroring and popularizing the patterns of achievement sport. Volkssport in the German
socialist tradition started after 1900 as an alternative to bourgeois mainstream sport and was
near to healthy gymnastics. During the 1950s Volkssport was revived in the GDR – and soon
misused as a supplement to elite sport. Austrian Volkssport, in contrast, was mainly organized
around wandering, and from there, the term of volkssport spread after 1945 to America where
it denotes non-competitive activities like volkswalk (volksmarching), volksbike, volksski, and
volksswim. In the Third World, the "popular" – as in Libyan People's sport or Public sport –
refers to mass sport with anti-colonial connotations (Eichberg 1998: 87-99).
The fact that the references to "the people" are so multi-faceted, may, however, not
be misunderstood as if all was possible in this semantic field. Folk sport and folk culture have
always distinctive features. If one says “folk sport”, this says something about “non-folk”,
too. In Denmark, the folkelig idræt has since one century been understood as part of a
kulturkamp (cultural struggle) with bourgeois sport of competition, and this cannot be
separated from the struggle of social classes against the dominating elites. More generally,
"the popular" can be understood as a predominantly critical term, which expresses an
indignation against certain "non-popular" practices – how ever these may be defined in detail.
This dates back to the origin of the modern “folk” and democracy in the revolutions of
1789/1848, when people cried in the streets: “We are the people!”
Furthermore it deserves special attention that the Danish word folkelig with its traits
of social distinctiveness has the derivative mellemfolkelig at its side. Indeed, the
mellemfolkelig (inter-popular) is an important ingredient of Danish political culture.
Mellemfolkelig idræt can describe international sport exchange on the grassroots level (eg.
Danish-Tanzanian) as well as sport contacts involving ethnic and migrant minorities in
Denmark (eg. Bosnian refugees in Denmark). The Danish umbrella organization for developmental grassroot cooperation with the Third World has the name Mellemfolkeligt Samvirke
(Cooperation between the peoples, see Elbæk 1996). Mellemfolkelig – something like: interpopular, inter-ethnic or inter-folk, between the peoples or from people to people – is,
however, difficult to translate adequately to some other languages.
Seen in intercultural comparison, there is both Unübersichtlichkeit and distinction in
"folk" – both a non-panoptical dimension, to express it with Michel Foucault (1975), and a
clear-cut meaning. The significance of folk is that there are also other folk, not only "my own
one". And this otherness means relation, dialogue, togetherness.
How this can be expressed, however, in this point the languages and cultures have
11
developed many different ways. For the simple purpose of understanding each other when
talking about our specific experiences of collective identity and otherness, we have a lot to
learn from each other.
From sport to popular culture: conflict, spirituality, and laughter
The non-verbal language of sports, games and dances seem to be helpful for a better
understanding of the fundamental democratic category of "the people", i.e. of the complex
relation between popular culture and the people of democracy (demos). The people of
democracy are – as the history of popular sports tells – not a homogenous unity, but a variety
in movement. The understanding of popular culture has to pay attention to at least three
dimensions – conflict, identity and relation to life.
Conflict: The people of democracy as well as popular culture are never free from
difference, from inner tensions and contradictions. This is illustrated by sport, which has
likewise always developed in a field of conflicts, especially conflicts between the people and
the elites in power. Culture is cultural struggle. The conflicts will never end – their end would
be the death of the culture. The way however, how conflict is treated, is decisive for the peace
dimension of sport and culture.
Identity: By popular culture, a community and a society works on the question "Who
are we?" This is not an abstract question, but a practical and bodily condition for the
participation in a world of conflicts. Sport is always a way of saying “we” to each other. The
conflict may be – as in the Tatar springtime sport – the struggle between neo-colonial oppression and a people's striving for national and democratic self-determination. Or it may be – as
in the folkelig sport in Danish villages and suburbs – the struggle for the survival of local life
under the alienating impact of a technological and capitalist society. It is since the beginnings
of modern democracy, that the question of identity has troubled people.
Popular identity is, thus, misunderstood if it is treated as a category to assort people
from above or from outside, as it was tried by Fascist regimes and by certain populist
movements. The folkelig identity of a person is what the individual itself claims to be. The
cultural identity of persons or groups cannot be defined by another – and not at all by power.
The notion of folkelig identity includes even the freedom, not to feel folkelig at all. It is on
this line that the Danish folkelig movements in history have treated the aristocracy liberally: If
a nobleman or a monarch does not want to be a part of the folk, than he may do so – it is his
problem, not ours. We know, he is not "better" than the common people. The same is true in
sports: If somebody wants to be "elite" and not involved in popular sport – o.k. – let him be.
We know, he is not "better" than the others. Identity is up to the person itself.
Relation to “the whole life”: "It is up to you" – this means also that there is always a
deeper dimension in popular festivity and sport, more profound than politics and programmes.
It is the direct human relation to “the whole of life”. Popular sport is also displaying what is
inside the person and at the same time larger than the individual: the spiritual dimension of
existence.
In a paradoxical way, this is what the carnivalism of sports expresses, too. I stumble
– you laugh – and by this togetherness in bodily convulsion "it" happens. What happens?
The event, the encounter, the dialogue
What happens is the event. The event is unique. It is once and will never happen again just
like this. It is the situational, the moment, which will resist every reduction to a logical
system. The event is here and now. (About the philosophy of the moment see Lefebvre 1959).
12
This may sound trivial, but in fact it contains subversive points, when compared with
the practice of the dominating sport system. Disciplinary sport tries to press all activities into
some narrowly defined and bureaucratically organized structures. The sport environment
makes it visible: All shall be standardized and under control. The unique place of play and
game is turned into sport space, which can be standardized. Where folk once had played the
game on the village green, on the cemetery, in the street of the suburb or in the landscape
across the boundaries of property, the sport is now transferred into a pre-fabricated container,
following international norms. The event of sport is turned into sport system. From there,
however, new popular sports are turning back to place and event – as street basket, as roller
skating, as folk marathon, as carnival of new type.
The resistance to the systematization of sport is a subversive experience of popular
sports – subversive and spiritual at the same time. Here and now, we play "our own" game –
the situational event means, that we are directly linked to our experience. No intermediary
authority can control what is popular in sport. Folk sport can have leaders – yes, indeed – and
champions too, like the Tatar wrestlers' batyr. But the basis of folk sport is what the people
themselves do. There is a point where sport is not vicarious, just as we cannot make love
vicariously for others. In popular sport, people are "direct to God".
However, the character of the event in popular sport can be described more precisely.
What is the decisive point in the sport event? It is not primarily the result of the competition,
understood as the production of data in centimeters, grams, seconds or points. This would be
the It of sports, its objective side.
Nor is sport restricted to something, which concerns my individual fitness. It cannot
be reduced to the reproduction of my personal health. "My health" is a legitimate motivation,
no doubt, but it is only a part of the subjective side of sports, the I or Me of my existence.
Popular sport, however, is more – it is a practice of the third way: meeting the other
and saying "you" to each other by bodily movement, game and dance. Here we are in the
dimension of Thou, the relational side of sports. By the reciprocity of "you and me", popular
sports contribute to folk community, grassroot activities and local network. What Grundtvig
called "the living word" or "the living reciprocity" appears in the body language of the games
as well. In the relation between I and Thou, in the dialogical principle, as Martin Buber
(1923) has called it, the fundamental qualities of human being can be found.
Figure: Inner contradictions of movement culture – and democracy
The objective It
Production of achievement
Olympic sport
The market and the producer/consumer
“Freedom”
13
Health and social
integration
Fitness gymnastics,
public “sport for all”
The state and the individual
“Equality”
Popular encounter
Festivity, dance and play,
carnival and folk sport
Civil society and the person
“Fraternity”, solidarity
The subjective I
The dialogical Thou
Under the aspects of event and dialogue, festivity is the outstanding feature of popular sports.
However, there is popular sport also outside the organized festivity. Folk sport is also at home
in the folkelig forening, the local association and its everyday life. And folk sport has its place
at the folkehøjskole, the popular academy.
Festivity, associational life and free school have in common that the process is
decisive, not primarily the product ("it") or the reproduction of the Self ("I"). The popular
aspect of sports will be found everywhere where the encounter is what really matters.
Festivity as the eminent event – the holiday as holy day – expresses the dialogical quality of
sports, the "holy" quality of saying "you" to each other.
That is why we have the saying about Danish folkelig oplysning, that there is no
popular enlightenment without personal development – and no personal development without
the folkelig dimension. This is true for popular sport as well.
From popular culture to civil society: the people of democracy
Popular sport makes, thus, visible what the folk are. In psychological terms this means:
Popular sport is related to identity, to popular or cultural identity. In sociological terms it
means: Popular sport is related to civil society with its principles of voluntary action and doit-yourself.
By casting light on this, popular sport can contribute to a deeper understanding of
democracy as a life form. Deeper understanding means: paying attentions to oppositions.
The concept of democracy itself expresses a potential opposition. The word points
into two fundamentally different directions, whether it is expressed in Greek language as
demo-kratia, in Danish as folke-styre (people's rule) or in German as Volks-herrschaft
(people's power). The double aspect corresponds to the perspective from above and from beneath: the people and the power.
When kratia, the power, is chosen as starting point – according to a certain perspective from above – democracy can be analysed as a system of rule or government. The
discussion will be mainly about the constitution of the state and about an institutional set-up.
The history of democracy will in this case start from the classical Greek state. From the
14
ancient polis and its contradiction between oligarchy, democracy and monarchy its history
leads to the modern problems of direct vs. representative democracy, parliamentary vs. presidential democracy or majority rule vs. pluralist democracy of minorities.
When, in contrast, demos, the people, is chosen as the analytical starting point – the
perspective from beneath – the focus will mainly be on civil society as a precondition and
basis for state formation. The historical description of democracy will in this case not start
with states and state theories, but with pre-state processes. Forms of self-organization can be
found in clan societies as well as at the roots of revolution in modern civil society. Sport and
popular movement culture as pre-political fields of a people's self-mobilization are eminent
parts of this democracy from below (Eichberg 2004).
The importance of clarification about what "the people", demos, is, becomes visible
by the problematical place of the Peoples' Right of Self-Determination in relation to
democracy. On the one hand, the peoples' right of self-determination has again and again been
declared as fundamental for democracy. This was prominently expressed by US-president
Woodrow Wilson in 1918. On the other hand, sociologists have in recent times constructed a
fundamental contradiction between the people of democracy, demos, and the ethnic people,
ethnos. One has confronted ethnos as an exclusive principle with the inclusive content of
demos (Lepsius 1986). From this perspective, experts have characterized the peoples' right of
self-determination as basically non-democratic or even anti-democratic. However, it were ethnic people and not (only) the given population inside a state-defined framework who in many
important cases have been the collective actors of self-determination (Americans vs. British
crown, Corsicans vs. French empire, Irish vs. Britain…), and this liberation has constituted a
classical root of modern democratic liberty.
Evidently, the actual ethnos-demos question and the distrust against the ethnos folk
has a background in ethnic conflicts, which could be observed during the last decades.
Nationality conflicts happened in what once was the Soviet empire, there were ethnic
eruptions in post-colonial Africa and "racial" tensions in Indio- and Latin America, and there
arose immigration problems in European metropolis, among these also in Denmark. Further
challenges can be expected from the current globalization of the markets and the threatening
break-down of the modern state as guarantor of social welfare. The relation between civil
society (folk), state and market is changing dramatically. Anyway, a clarification about democracy can scarcely be expected without a clarification of who are the people of democracy.
Under this aspect, popular sport and culture constitute a field of high importance for
an understanding of what "the people" is in practice. The case of the Tatar folk festivity
manifests a people's will to self-determination and at the same time the attempt to display
diversity – Tatar, Bashkir, Finn, Russian – in cooperative and peaceful forms. The case of the
Danish village holiday expresses the local will to self-organization, in reaction to the
alienation of every-day life, which has followed with the institutionalization of welfare (by
the state) and with capitalist commercialization (by the market). We need a sensitive
description and analysis of more cases like these.
Democracy can neither be reduced to a set of rules of representation nor to a
superstructure of public institutions. It has its basis in practical social relations and
interactions. Popular sport is an indicator for this democratic potential, and it is in festivities
and associations that living democracy can develop. Popular sport, festivity and games
contribute to democracy by encouraging people: You can do it yourself! Living democracy
means also living with the tensions between liberty, equality and fraternity (or solidarity).
This task is never finished and fulfilled. Indeed, the Danish sport association seems
15
actually to be at crisis. Associational life is threatened by immobility. Clubs have tendencies
to develop on one hand towards a sort of bureaucratic institution offering fitness motion for
certain social groups and quasi-public "sport for all". On the other hand the association is
attracted by market sport along the guidelines of competition, result production, sponsoring,
money investment and doping. So there is no reason to create pictures of false harmony
(Heinemann 1999, Ibsen 1999). The embrace by the public system and the interlacing with
the market include, however, not only dangers, but also challenges for innovations inside civil
self-organization. In spite of its inner contradictions – or just because of these – civil society
and folkelig life with their bodily-practical aspects of engagement, festivity and community
remain the source of living democracy (Putnam 1993 and 2000).
Culture of difference – another way to peace
So far, the analysis could be read as if the values were “only” something derived and
secondary, because they – as a superstructure – express social bodily practice, which is the
“real basis”. This would be a misunderstanding of the complex relation between basis and
superstructure (Kosiewicz/Obodynski 2004). The problem can be illustrated by the question
of war and peace in sports.
In our time, some peoples have clashed in bloody conflicts, referring to "folk" principles. War, massacres and concentration camps reappeared in Europe, and some ethnic
revivals developed towards "ethnic purge". Sport was not innocent in this connection. In the
Bosnian war of the early 1990s for instance, a Serbian militia acted under the name Srpski
Sokolovi, Serbian Falcons. This name referred to the tradition of the nineteenth century's
Panslavic gymnastic movements Sokol, “Falcon” (Blecking 1991), but now it was used in
combination with the abbreviation "SS" to terrorize the Muslim and Croat population.
Another militia operated in black uniforms under the name of “Tigers”; it was recruited by the
criminal rich man Zeljko "Arkan" Raznatovic among the violent supporters of the Serbian
soccer club “Red Star”.
On the other side, however, Sokol gymnastic organizations are actively participating
in current attempts to promote peace and anti-racist sport in the Balkans. And soccer has
shown as an effective way of encounter between ethnic groups meeting in play and game after
the traumatic clashes of civil war. This is practiced by the Open Fun Football Schools in
Bosnia and other Balkan countries (Levinsen 2001).
Soccer and soccer is not the same, gymnastics and gymnastics are not the same. The
question of values appears in the centre of social practice: Which soccer – and gymnastics in
which way?
All this can warn us against certain short-sighted conclusions. Some intellectuals
have reacted to the bloody events by denying that something like folk identity did exist at all.
All popular culture is, as it was said, just "invented", "artificially constructed", a sort of
“imagined community” and maybe even a dangerous threat against peaceful coexistence
(Anderson 1983, Hobsbawm 1983). Popular culture, the thesis said, does not exist, but only
elite culture on one hand and industrialized mass culture on the other, and both are on the way
of globalization towards a uniformity where "anything goes". (This is also debated in: Møller
2004). This argumentation is flanked by a certain Olympic sport ideology with its thesis that
there is only one sport in the world – i.e. the Western type of achievement sport – and the
uniformity of this sport could guarantee the peace in the world.
This intellectual and political strategy lacks the recognition of otherness. The
recognition of identity has, however, shown as crucial for the understanding of
16
multiculturalism and conflict in our time (Taylor 1992).
And: If popular sport is an element of democratic life from below, it cannot just be
“used” as an instrument for pacification from above, as it was often tried in administrative
strategies: Using sport for disciplining, streamlining and adjusting the people to the existing
power structure. The opposition of either worldwide uniformity or massacres is not the
alternative. On the contrary, unifying power and ethnic excesses were linked to each other.
The recent ethnic massacres had their roots in earlier state systems, which had denied the
peoples their cultural identities and instead tried to shape uniform pictures of an abstract
human being: The homo Sovieticus referred explicitly to the homo Olympicus. Peace is more
than control – and more difficult to preserve than to establish by military force. Peace follows
other logics than the one of institutional power.
Popular sport opens our eyes for the perspective that there might exist other ways to
peace. The folkelig aspect of sport and culture lies in the bodily expression of the right to be
different. Local and regional life with its distinctive features is important for identity in a
"warm" society, which recognizes the peoples right to go their own way. Popular life and
inner peace of society means: to accept differences – and to accept the possibility of conflicts.
This includes difference and multiplicity also inside the folk cultures – protection of
minorities and a basic understanding of the relational, mellemfolkelig dimension of identity.
We can play the game together – your games and our games.
The wealth of culture – and of sport – is more than just multiplicity and more than the
“freedom of choice”, which on the market is the choice between more and more channels of
the same contents. But it is diversity, and this means difference. It is difference that makes
variety – and this demands recognition of the otherness of the other. While modern sport and
gymnastics – in their different ways – always may imply certain tendencies of sameness and
standardization, popular sports represents a way to peace by playing on difference.
In this respect its is neither artificial nor threatening nor only a new expression of
exotism that one can experience capoeira in Danish folk academies or among young Dutch in
the streets of Amsterdam, that Tanzanian Sukuma drums can be heard booming over the
fields of Jutland and that Breton traditional gouren wrestling is practiced in a French judo hall
with the pictures of Japanese masters at the wall. Popular play and games have never recognized borders. But now, under the new conditions of globalization, a new level of
Unübersichtlichkeit, of non-survey develops – and new quests of identity and distinctiveness.
These quests are what people have in common.
The work for peace by a folkelig and democratic culture is, thus, based on a new
understanding of what culture is. Culture is not only a superstructure of values, ideas, symbols
and codes. It is neither "only invented" nor airy and abstract. Culture is rooted in the human
bodily existence itself. Popular culture centres about bodily movement.
This means that culture is much more than the luxury, which we can afford after we
have fulfilled our "real needs". The ranking is not: first the economic wealth and than some
culture. Culture is the way we live our lives – so culture is basic. It means: being rich by
moving together.
Culture is an alternative definition of wealth.
This paper was prepared for the Polish research project about sport and values.
The text is based on a lecture given for the preparatory congress of the International Sport and Culture
Association (ISCA) in Svendborg/Denmark 1994 and reworked for lectures in Oita/Japan 1994, at the
University of Buenos Aires 1998 and in Plouguerneau/France 1999. The lecture was first published in Danish
in: Dansk Ungdom og Idræt, Nr.3/1995, in Italian in: Lo joa' e les omo, Châtillon (Val d'Aosta), no.12 (1995)
17
and in: Presenza Nuova, Rome, 28:148 (1997), in French and Spanish in: Jean-Jacques Barreau & Guy Jaouen
(eds.): Les jeux traditionnels en Europe. Plonéour Ronarc’h: FALSAB 2001.
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