Paper short abstract:

Learning to play sports is not merely a technical issue. It also involves children and adults who negotiate whether sport is an enabling play-modality or an institutionalized constraining of play. Exploring this process can help us understand how playful sporting dispositions shape social life.

Paper long abstract:

Sports are not ready made, but always interpreted and remade. This presentation argues that to get at this process of interpretation –how we experiment, enjoy and play– we must theorize sport as an opportunity structure. Doing participant observation in a Norwegian boys sports-team aging from 7 to 10, I witnessed how children players and adult coaches agreed and disagreed about the playfulness of their activity. These disputes even became a game within the game. In this presentation, I use these data to show how children and adults negotiate the playfulness of sports through a series of counter performances, and to theorize sports as a modality that is generative of social performances. As a result, sports are revealed as stages where actors set sports apart from other activities and then, through social performances, re-enact games either as an attractive play modality or as a constrained organizing of creative play opportunities. To better get at this process, I propose a model inspired by Durkheim’s notion of the negative and positive cult. Yet to avoid the pitfalls of Durkheim’s idealism, his postulating consensus, and undertheorizing change, the model adopts a cultural sociology concerned with diversity, transformation, and contradiction. The result is a model that can contribute to the study of sports by highlighting creativity and by stressing how participants maneuver competition and inequalities in sports and society. The outcome of these sport experimentations, I suggest, is contingent on the how we maneuver the play modality itself.