Suited up and Stripped Down: Perspectives for Sociocultural Sport Studies

Abstract

It is clear that sports are cultural performances, and as such they should be studied simultaneously at two levels. On the one hand we must examine the dramatic, expressive meanings that sports have for people who encounter them—the suited up level. At the same time, we need analyses that go below this to examine social structures within and beyond sports—the stripped down level. Our energies should be directed toward work that interrelates the two. Scholarship of this nature will force us to be more eclectic in our theoretical orientations, drawing on a broad array of social science and humanities frameworks. The broader and deeper our understanding of these frameworks, the more sophisticated and insightM will be our work, making it more likely to contribute in important ways to mainline social science theory. The term “sport sociology” seems too narrow in light of the need for simultaneous suited up and stripped down analyses of sports that embrace numerous disciplinary perspectives. A more apt term for this enterprise, combining reference to culture and to social structure in one stroke, is “sociocultural sport studies.”