Program for a Sociology of Sport

Abstract

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-