Instructions:
As you proceed through the course materials and learning activities, you will be expected to make entries in your Learning Journal. Continue to address aspects of everyday culture that you have directly encountered within the domains discussed in the course units—the home, the workplace, recreational activities, and real or virtual communities and subcultures. Your second submission should deal with the subject matter of Units 3 and 4.
Readings:
Chapter 2 in Culture and Everyday Life, by David Inglis. New York: Routledge, 2005
Chapter 2 in Reading the Everyday, by Joe Moran. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Unit 3
Objectives
After completing Unit 3, you should be able to achieve the following learning objectives.
Explain the relationship between leisure and “non-leisure,” i.e. work.
Identify and critically examine the workplace as a site of culture.
Explore how differences of gender, ethnicity, class, age and sexual orientation relate to changes in workplace culture.
Redefining Workplace Cultures
According to recent Stats Canada data, Canadians are spending more time in the workplace than they have since the forty-hour work week became enshrined as the “norm” for the majority of private and public sector workers. Not surprisingly, the corollary to the above is less time spent at leisure activities, and less time spent with family:
A study released Tuesday that shows workers spent an average of 45 minutes less per day with family members in 2005 than they did 20 years earlier. The Statistics Canada study found that workers in 1986 spent on average 4.2 hours, or 250 minutes, per day doing activities with their family members. In 2005, that time had dropped to 3.4 hours, or 205 minutes, a decline of 45 minutes. On average, Canadians worked 536 minutes or 8.9 hours on a working day in 2005, an increase from 506 minutes or 8.4 hours 20 years earlier. . . . The study was put together using data from four cycles of the General Social Surveys on Time Use in 1986, 1992, 1998 and 2005. (CBC News)
The above news story dates from 2007, but the trend is a continuing one, especially given that much of the impetus for this increase in time spent working is economic. Clarence Lochhead of the Vanier Institute notes that:
There is . . . ongoing economic pressure that is pushing us to spend a greater amount of time at work. There is a lot of talk about shortages of labour. There is pressure on retiring members of the baby boomer generation to keep working.
According to David Inglis, German sociologist Max Weber identified a series of characteristics that he saw as central to modern social organization, many of which are epitomized in the traditional workplace. Two of the most prominent are rationalization and bureaucratization. With regard to the former, rationalization, Inglis explains:
Overall, then for Weber, modern culture is about the instrumental pursuit of given goals, through following rationalized rules and procedures aimed at achieving those goals as efficiently as possible. Reflection on the morality or otherwise of these goals is secondary, if not in fact ignored altogether. (41)
In referring to capitalist economies, Inglis provides the following example, to argue that it really is “all about the ‘bottom line”:
Business is about finding the most efficient means of gaining a particular goal, in this case making profits, regardless of the consequences from a moral point of view. Thus when businesspeople find that profits can be increased by reducing workers’ wages or making people unemployed, the effects of these strategies on the workers—poverty, destitution—are strictly speaking irrelevant, because the only relevant consideration is the rational pursuit of profit. (41)
Bureaucracy is seen as a means of dispersing authority to facilitate greater rationalization of power. As a result, power in the workplace becomes more diffuse and more impersonal:
The idea here is that people in the modern West do not do what they are told because of the personal characteristics of the people in charge. Rather they do so because they bow down before the authority of the rules and regulations themselves and the bureaucracy which enforces them. (41)
Employees in the US Social Security Board Record Office making social security cards, c. 1938. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Harris & Ewing, LC-DIG-hec-29043.
In an approach that complements that of Weber, Karl Marx wrote of the alienation experienced by those working in post-industrial revolution capitalist economies, where, not only are they “managed” by highly developed (and often internalized) rules and procedures which stifle individuality and creativity, they do not even own the “fruits of their labour”:
We have treated the alienation of practical human activity, labour, from two aspects. (1) The relationship of the worker to the product of his labour as an alien object that has power over him. . . . (2) The relationship of labour to the act of production inside labour. This relationship is the relationship of the worker to his own activity as something that is alien and does not belong to him; it is activity that is passivity; power that is weakness; procreation that is castration. . . . It is self-alienation [as well as] alienation from the object [the thing produced]. (6)
Marx and Weber were writing in the nineteenth century but the phenomena they identified as central to the political economy of capitalism did become more fully realized over the course of the subsequent hundred years. But, what of the workplace today? Is work in the twenty-first century organized differently and, if so, what are the cultural implications of this?
In the 1980s and 1990s, management gurus such as Tom Peters argued that new forms of human resource management (Kaizen, Total Quality Management, “team concept” and so forth) have led in changes in organizational cultures that have resulted in a less adversarial, more congenial workplace. But, as Graham Lowe points out, the value of these changes to those actually in the workplace is open to question. He adds that:
Some jobs [may] be inherently repetitive, and even with the latest hard and soft technologies, there are limits to how interesting and challenging they can be made. Or perhaps some workers. . . place more value on their weekly paycheque than on the psychological rewards of work or the existence of a ‘trust relationship’ between them and their boss. (155)
While Lowe is largely concerned with the micropolitics of the workplace, Joe Moran argues that the “new” workplace can only be understood in the broader context of economic globalization:
In the neo-liberal economic and political climate of the last few decades, work and its related activities have undergone seismic changes. Perhaps more than any other area of quotidian life, workspace throughout Europe, America and the rest of the world has become increasingly standardized as it is subsumed into a global corporate culture reaching far beyond the world of commerce into many areas of working life. (29)
But what really concerns Moran is the fact that the superficial sameness of the “new” workplace conceals a range of disparities:
While this kind of workspace is used by growing numbers of people throughout the world, its burdens and rewards are distributed unequally. This tension between globalized sameness and local inequality is evident in new homogeneous types of working environments (open-plan offices, out-of-town call centres, business parks and industrial estates); [and] in the pervasive ‘consultative’ ethos of managerial culture that seeks to conceal its harsher realities. (29)
An office worker on the job, 2007. Photograph by Mr. Chrome, Wikimedia Commons.
Moran then explores the cultural politics of the new workplace through his analysis of media texts, including Mike Judge’s film Office Space (1999) and the popular BBC TV series, The Office (36–48). He notes that the former (filmed near Austin Texas) “does not simply use the office as a backdrop for conventional plot intrigue between the characters, or the comic implications of contemporary gender politics” (36). Quite the opposite: Judge’s focus is on the mundane, day-to-day activities and what these reveal about the nature power relations in the so-called “new” workplace:
Office Space is primarily about the tension between an assertive managerialism and the consultative rhetoric that seeks both to explain and to implement it. There is nothing particularly new about the ‘libertarian’ school of management theory, despite its self-presentation as groundbreaking and revolutionary. In the mid-1950s William H. Whyte was already noting the rise of a management style that sought moral legitimacy through its emphasis on the employee’s ‘personality’ and ‘soul’. . . . In the 1980s and 1990s, though, this school of management took on an increasingly evangelical tone, reflected in the work of best-selling authors such as Charles Handy, Tom Peters, and Peter Senge and the huge amounts of money spent by firms on outside consultants, training programmes, motivational speakers, and life coaches. (Moran 37)
The Office TV series is also about the darker side of post-millennial workplace culture. As Moran points out, The Office exploits the “docusoap format” and the visual codes of reality television:
The self-consciously amateurish camerawork might suggest that it is conveying the reality of office life in a spontaneous, unmediated way, but it also shows that the office is an intermediate public/private space in which much remains unsaid. (42)
A motivational speaker at a seminar, 2004. Photograph © Courtney Navey, iStockphoto.
Moran concludes that The Office is a brilliant example of the plight of the middle-manager and of how hollow the “feel-good” rhetoric of Total Quality Management sounds when the “threat of redundancy hangs over The Office from beginning to end” (44). In referring to the central character (and middle-manager) Brent, whose authority is precarious, Moran observes:
He sees himself as a corporate rebel, boasting about not living by ‘the rules’. In fact, his leadership style chimes perfectly with management theory’s voguish flirtation with soft skills. In one scene, Brent parrots the stock phrase “the employees are our most important commodity” while his receptionist is crying quietly in the background. (44)
From Blue Collar to Call Centre
Economic globalization has changed the face of work, and clearly it has changed workplace cultures as well. Deregulation, the removal of trade barriers and the resulting “outsourcing” and flight of capital to low-wage economies benefited transnational corporations but it did not benefit workers, particularly those in Europe and North America who were traditionally employed in stable, permanent well-paid sectors such as manufacturing. Over the course of the past two decades those jobs have all but disappeared. The stereotypical (white, male) factory worker has become an endangered species, and the term “rust belt” is now used to describe those areas of central Canada and the USA formerly known as the “industrial heartland”.
Ironic postcard “Greetings from America’s Rust Belt, Duluth, Minnesota, 2010”. Postcard © Larry Fulton.
Today, lower paying part-time jobs, often in the service or retail sectors, have replaced their stable full-time equivalents in both the private and public sectors. American journalist and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich “went underground” to get first-hand experience of what the conditions of employment for increasing numbers of the so-called “working poor” were actually like. She documents her experience in a book entitled Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and as far as reviewer Dori DeSpain is concerned, Nickel and Dimed should be “mandatory reading” for anyone entering today’s workforce:
Ehrenreich spent about three months in three cities throughout the nation, attempting to “get by” on the salary available to low-paid and unskilled workers. Beginning with advantages not enjoyed by many such individuals—she is white, English-speaking, educated, healthy, and unburdened with transportation or child-care worries—she tried to support herself by working as a waitress, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart employee. She discovered that her average salary of $7 per hour couldn’t even provide the necessities of life (rent, transportation, and food), let alone the luxury of health coverage.
. . . Ehrenreich takes on issues and questions posed before and during the experiment, including why these wages are so low, why workers are so accepting of them, and what Washington’s refusal to increase the minimum wage to a realistic “living wage” says about both our economy and our culture. (DeSpain)
Ehrenreich was, of course, exposing the plight of those trapped in the low wage economy in the US, but this phenomenon is a result of globalization and as such it is not confined to a single country. From his vantage point in the UK, Joe Moran has observed similar trends. In his discussion of call centres he points out that:
. . . the monotonous, poorly-paid lot of the telephone operative is real enough, and the proliferation of call centres in recent years has led to a number of concerned press articles about the rise of these new “dark satanic mills”, “phone farms” and “sweatshops”. . . . Ulrich Beck argues that one of the characteristics of the new kind of “flexible, pluralized under-employment” in liberal economies is that it is increasingly hidden. “The place of the visible character of work, concentrated in factory halls and tall buildings, is taken by an invisible organization of the firm”. . . [Furthermore] British and American companies are also increasingly relocating their call centres to parts of the English-speaking developing world, such as the West Indies, Malaysia, and, especially, India. (32–33)
Call centre in Lakeland, FL, 2006. Photograph by Petialtil, Wikimedia Commons.
This, along with other factors, including the expansion of migrant labour and the increased use of temporary foreign workers to provide a kind of “just-in-time” labour pool, has also resulted in an increased feminization and ethnicization of the workforce. According to Fiona McQuarrie, changes in demographics include growing numbers of female workers, “rising from 37.1 percent in 1976 to 45.9 percent in 1999 ”(McQuarrie 514) as well as many more older workers of all genders. Where the latter are concerned she suggests that this is a result of several factors including the desire to continue to take advantage of employer subsidized medical and dental care (517) in an era where good jobs are scarce, job security is precarious, and pension plans are under attack from both fiscally conservative governments and business interests critical of “payroll taxes”. Also, when speaking of ethnic and racial diversity in the workplace, McQuarrie observes that while, where gender is concerned, “the occupational patterns for visible minority men and women are very similar to those of non-minority men and women”(518), there are some important differences:
It is interesting to note, however, that more visible minority than non-minority women work in jobs involving manual labour, and that more visible minority than non-minority men work in sales and service jobs. Employment data also show that adults who belong to a visible minority are more likely to have university degrees than adults who do not belong to a visible minority, but visible minority members with university degrees are “not as likely as others with the same level of education to be employed in the higher-paying professional or managerial occupations”. This mismatch between education level and occupational level is referred to as underemployment. (518)
Learning Activity
The human impact of changes in the workplace has been the subject of popular culture. Listen to Bruce Springsteen’s song “The Factory” and James McMurtry’s “We Can’t Make It Here Anymore”. What do these songs have to say about “alienated labour” and the outsourcing of manufacturing and other “blue collar” jobs?
From Ivory Tower to Corporate Power: Work in Today’s Universities
Given all the above, it is not surprising that we frequently hear talk about rising societal polarization, a widening gap between rich and poor and even the disappearance of the middle class as such. Journalist and social critic Linda McQuaig notes that:
The level of inequality in North America is extreme by historical standards. In 2008 the top-earning 1 percent of Americans collected a whopping 24 percent of the national income. The last time income was distributed that unequally in America was 1929. (31)
McQuaig argues that society’s wealth has not somehow magically evaporated, rather it has been taken out of the public sphere and redirected into the pockets of the private sector. This has had an impact on institutions such as universities, and some scholars, among them Bill Reading, Marc Bosquet, and Cary Nelson, are quick to point out that the resulting changes have not been for the better. Nelson blames a combination of “the coopted blindness of faculty, the conservatism of disciplinary organizations” [and] the remorseless advance of reliance on contingent labour” (xiv) in a context where the economic system “now regulates the lives of students and faculty alike”.(xiii). Nor does Nelson hold out much hope for the academy of the future if, as he suspects, the current trends continue:
Certainly every major economic and structural trend in higher education suggests that the future will include further declines in faculty compensation, independence, and intellectual freedom. A large number of undergraduates . . . are themselves already just part-time students, deflected from their studies by jobs. And higher education as a whole continues to drift fitfully toward a narrow mission of job training and away from the more complex democratic mission of empowering critical citizenship. (xv)
Supposedly, the opposite of work is leisure. We all spend time on leisure activities such as reading, going to the theatre, or road-trips and camping with friends and family. Many such activities can also be defined as play or recreation. But if we look more closely at the semantics of the latter term, it becomes apparent that something is being created, in fact re-created, on (presumably) an ongoing basis. In the next unit we will look more closely at the cultural dynamics of recreational activities such as sport, and popular music.
Unit 4
After completing Unit 4, you should be able to achieve the following learning objectives.
Recognize the cultural significance of a range of recreational activities, both formal and informal, collective and individual.
Discuss the significance of context as a defining aspect of recreational cultures.
Explore how differences in gender, ethnicity, class, age, and sexual orientation relate to recreational culture.
Creative Play vs. Re/creation
Play is frequently seen as the opposite of work, yet the relationship between the two seems to be at once taken-for-granted and fundamental. Indeed, as the old rhyme cautions us, “all work and no play make Jack a dull boy”. As early as 1938, Dutch anthropologist Johan Huizinga was writing about the importance that play has had over time, linking the “ludic” spirit of playfulness to creativity, and asserting its importance to virtually all human societies. Summarizing Huizinga’s research, L. B. Jeffries notes that:
There are a variety of scientific and anthropological explanations for play. A child at play is imitating adults, and the reason we engage in sport is to release excess energy. Huizinga points out that the common characteristic of anyone explaining play is that “play must serve something which is not play” (2). Play is an element that merges with something else. Linguistically the word “play” varies drastically from culture to culture. In ancient German, the word for play is an abstract concept that could reference a drinking competition or deciding how to kill someone. In English, it more clearly indicates the exclusion of “seriousness”. In other cultures, the word can be a reference for sexual conduct or a way of expressing laziness (40). Huizinga writes, “All peoples play, and play remarkably alike; but their languages differ widely in their conception of play, conceiving it neither as distinctly nor as broadly as modern European languages do”. (Jeffries 28)
Huizinga then distinguishes between basic play and something that he calls higher play. Like the athlete winning a victory for the fans, the play element acts as the foundation for more complex cultural exchanges.
Football fans at the first match of the FIFA World Cup, Mexico vs South Africa, Soccer City, Johannesburg, SA, June 2010. Photograph by Celso FLORES from Paris, Fr [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
One of these more complex “cultural exchanges” has to do with the relationship that exists between work and recreation within capitalist economies and the ways in which time off work (used for leisure and recreation) is needed in order to ensure that time spent at work is in fact productive. In fact the term “re-creation” suggests the need to restore and renew something that has been used up:
In Marx’s period and in his analysis, the principal aspect of capitalist production was the alienation of workers from the means of producing commodities in general. Today and for some time past, the principal aspect of capitalist production has been the alienation of workers from the means of producing and reproducing themselves . . .’ a Marxist view . . . sees leisure time correctly as a time of production, reproduction and repair of labour power. This production, reproduction and repair are activities. They are things people must do. As such, they require labour power. To be sure, this latter labour power you do not have to sell directly to capital. But you have to use it to produce labour power in the form that you do have to sell. (Livant, 1975b, qtd in Smythe, 250)
The above is one example that confirms Huizinga’s view that “play must [always] serve something that is not play” (2). However, as Jeffries points out, Huizinga is very concerned with the blurring of boundaries between the two, and warns that play:
. . . may become so cluttered with seriousness, rank, nationalism, pomp, and other technicalities to such an extent that it has ceased to be play. As noted above, once strict forms or order are applied to play it only becomes an imitation. . . . Sports cease to be play because of the distinction between professional and amateur, the play spirit of “spontaneity and carelessness” is gone due to creation of a “true” player as opposed to the inferior casual one. It has ceased to be a culture creating activity because of its rigid rules”. (Jeffries 197–198)
Tennis player Rafael Nadal at the Australian Open, February, 2009. Photograph by Steve Collis, Wikimedia Commons.
For Shirley Fedorak, popular music is also a kind of play, insofar as engaging with it is another “universal pattern of human behaviour” (38). And, like games and sports, music has been made serve the ends of a whole range of social/cultural/political agendas, some serious, some less so. In speaking of West Indian calypso music, she notes that “this music is a reflection of Afro-Caribbean working class identity, but it also provides a platform for satire, protest and defiance of colonial presence”(39). She also points out that pop cultural activities (including music and dance) can have ambivalent relationships to dominant cultural and political goals, and even resistant subcultural styles (such as rap music) can be co-opted. However actually identifying how these processes work—and in whose interests—can be a complex matter:
Appropriation of the underground message by the state to serve its goals calls into question globalization theories that suggest cultural flows endanger nation states (Appadurai 1990) and that unfamiliar lifestyles broadcast on international television will overwhelm local politics (Gilroy 1987). These theories ignore potential alliances between transnational and national bodies. (45)
Rapper Wiz Khalifa performing at the Boston Urban Music Project (BUMP) at Boston City Hall Plaza in Boston, Massachusetts USA on Saturday, August 7, 2010. Photograph © Weekly Dig.
Fedorak gives the example of Cuban rap musicians who are “building networks with African-American rappers based on race and marginality that transcend any national borders, while also generating a critique of global capitalism that allows them to collaborate with the Cuban socialist state” (46). She concludes that popular music, like sport, is much more than simply pure, uncomplicated play:
Popular music is both a reflection of cultural mores and a way to empower members of a culture to express their gendered and ethnic identity, to uphold their worldview, and to resist inequality. Popular music then, provides a venue for social and political commentary. (48)
Popular Culture and the Body
Like Huizinga and others, Fedorak emphasizes that sports are “a vital component of popular culture, steeped in tradition, ritual and social commentary. . . ” (102). She contends that much of the appeal of sports and games in general has to do with the open-ended nature of the outcome. While it is probably the case that the stronger competitor (team or individual) will win, there is also the possibility of an upset, and it satisfies our desire to “cheer for the underdog”. She notes in passing that this appeals to the “magico-realist [spirit] that has permeated popular culture since the Middle Ages (94) but what she is really talking about is the notion of carnival. Cultural studies theorist John Fiske draws on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to explain what is meant by the terms “carnival” and “carnivalesque”:
In his study of Rabelais, Bakhtin (1968) developed his theory of the carnival to account for the differences between the life proposed by the disciplined social order and the repressed pleasures of the subordinate. . . . The carnival, according to Bakhtin, was characterized by laughter, by excessiveness (particularly of the body and bodily functions) by bad taste and offensiveness, and by degradation. . . ). (81–82)
According to Fiske, the function of carnival was “to liberate, to allow for a creative playful freedom” (82). As such, he sees it as being both a part of, yet somehow opposed to, physical recreation:
Carnival is an exaggeration of sport, the space for freedom and control that games offer is opened up even further by the weakening of the rules that contain it. Like sport, carnival abides by certain rules that give it a pattern, but unlike sport (whose rules tend to replicate the social) carnival inverts those rules and builds a world upside down). (82)
“Dance of the Devil” at the Carnival de Oruro where the Archangel Michael leads a troop of devils, Oruro, Bolivia, March 7, 2011. Photograph by erios30, Wikipedia.
The French semiotician, Roland Barthes, sees the sport of wrestling as being especially rich in carnivalesque elements. He goes even further, arguing that wrestling displays these characteristics to such an extent that it “is not a sport, it is a spectacle” (15) and Fiske reminds us that “ritual spectacles” fall within the original definition of carnival which Bakhtin provides earlier (83).
In my article entitled “Wild Bodies and True Lies: Carnival, Spectacle and the Curious Case of Trailer Park Boys,” I discuss how carnival—with its rudeness, vulgarity, and over-the-top glorification of the underdog—is central to the show’s image and arguably a key to its popularity:
. . . Bubbles [one of the central characters] displays his carnivalesque unruly body in the guise of an amateur wrestler. He dons a costume, not unlike that worn by the Jolly Green Giant brand icon, and grapples with opponents under the stage name of “The Green Bastard”. There are echoes here of Roland Barthes’ claim that, in wrestling, the “bastard” is defined as “essentially someone unstable, who accepts the rules only when they are useful to him and transgresses the formal continuity of attitudes. He is unpredictable, and therefore, asocial” (Barthes, 1970, p. 24).
Professional wrestlers El Hijo De Santo (silver costume) vs Blue Demon Jr., July 5, 2008. Photograph by dansky, Wikipedia.
The tension between anarchy and authority is central to carnival and, in his roles as trailer park supervisor and failed policeman, Jim Lahey represents the authority figure who is mocked, challenged and usurped on a regular basis. As John Fiske (1989) reminds us, the carnivalesque “typically inverts normal patterns of social life and involves . . . travesties, humiliations, profanations and comic crownings and uncrownings” (p. 69). In Sunnyvale Trailer Park, such inversions are indeed “typical”—in fact they happen every week! (Hughes-Fuller 101)
Learning Activity
View the Trailer Park Boys episode “The Green Bastard” (season 4 episode 4).
Keeping in mind the characteristics described above, in what ways does this episode of Trailer Park Boys incorporate aspects of the carnivalesque?
David Inglis uses examples drawn from sports to illustrate how our everyday bodies are (as he puts it) “sculpted by the particular cultural context a person is brought up and lives within” (30). He discusses embodied gender by describing the different ways in which boys and girls play games differently and by observing (not without a degree of humour) that Hilary Clinton, a figure who possesses no small degree of symbolic cultural authority, when given a baseball, still “throws like a girl” (31). He emphasizes that:
Such differences in posture and motility are perhaps not the result of ‘natural’ differences in body shape and size between males and females, but instead are due to processes of socialization where boys learn different bodily skills and capacities for movement than do girls. . . . One of the central claims of feminist thought is that biological ‘sex’ is a different thing from ‘gender’ which is a matter of social convention. (31)
In the section entitled “Social Class and Body Techniques” Inglis takes up the ideas of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in deploying concepts such as “habitus” to analyse how different classes display distinctive forms of physical behaviours:
For Bourdieu, each [class] . . . ’possesses’ its own habitus and thus also its own distinctive set of body techniques. Thus there exist distinctively ‘working class’ ways of eating, drinking, walking, talking, and suchlike, just as there are distinctive ‘lower middle class’ and ‘upper middle class’ ways of doing these sorts of things too.” (34)
Speaking specifically of recreational culture, Inglis comments that class position tends to:
. . . orient individuals to prefer certain sporting activities over others. Activities such as fencing or polo are typical choices [of upper middle class men], not just because they offer opportunities to mix and mingle in socially select clubhouses, but also because such activities allow movement in relatively ‘elegant’ ways, rather than in the more crude ways that certain activities like weight-lifting involve; there is an elective affinity between the body techniques of this class and the forms of movement allowed in the kinds of sports they enjoy. (35)
Polo players, April 2009. Photograph by Siddha, Wikimedia Commons.
Inglis concedes that some critics find Bourdieu’s claims regarding class manifestations embodied in sport to reinforce already-existing stereotypes. However he also argues for the value of Bourdieu’s insights because of the clear way they illustrate how “social hierarchies are culturally inscribed into our bodies and it is in part through the mundane activities of our bodies that matters of social power can so deeply effect how we live our lives each and every day” (38).
Hockey and Identity: A Case Study
Much has been written about hockey as a recreational activity that has somehow come to symbolize Canadian identity (although, our official national sport is actually a close relative, lacrosse). Over a decade ago, Molson’s popular “I am Canadian” beer advertisements were used to promote the idea that Canadians really are different from Americans (and also, of course, to sell beer) and, while long line-ups for Tim Horton’s coffee seem to support this popular myth, it is ironic to note that both the above companies are no longer Canadian owned. However branding counts, and not just for the consumers of beer and coffee:
Our national identification with hockey has even been sanctioned by officialdom. During the nineties when [then] Prime Minister Chretien launched trade missions to other countries, he repeatedly referred to the participating politicians and businessmen as “Team Canada,” and this same Prime Minister appointed a retired National Hockey League star, Frank Mahovlich, to the Canadian Senate. A few years ago, the 1972 Canada/Russia hockey series was recognized in a commemorative postage stamp depicting the series-winning goal by Paul Henderson and even more recently (2002), “The Pond” was enshrined on the back of the Canadian five dollar bill. These events . . . are not without precedent. Decades earlier, during the nineteen forties and fifties, Maurice “the Rocket” Richard achieved celebrity status as the foremost goal scorer of his day while acting as a flashpoint of tensions between Quebec and English Canada. Later, in the nineteen eighties, Edmonton Oilers’ prodigy, Wayne Gretzky, became an even greater celebrity and a metonym of Canadian/American relations during the era of the free trade debate. (Hughes-Fuller)
The reality is that today, more than ever, professional hockey is drifting south of the forty-ninth parallel. The NHL does not encourage teams in small-market cities and the players themselves are attracted by the lure of higher salaries and a sun-belt life-style. But at the same time, the picture is not an entirely negative one:
The situation vis-à-vis professional hockey does seem bleak, but perhaps Canadians can take heart in the knowledge that, at the amateur level at least, “our” game has proliferated on a global scale. As Dave Bidini’s Tropic of Hockey shows, in the case of hockey the local and global have come together in ways that might well astonish the hockey traditionalist. (Hughes-Fuller)
Women’s hockey at the university level, February, 2004. Photograph by Brendan Riley, Wikimedia Commons.
In Tropic of Hockey (which was both a print book and a television documentary) Bidini shows that hockey is alive and well in unlikely places such as Dubai and Transylvania, while here at home, as Gruneau and Whitson point out, “old-timers hockey and industrial hockey are booming, as are hockey programs for girls, women and special populations” (282). Similarly, fans continue to enjoy the game at local, national, and global levels.
Sport, Hybridity, Identity
What are some other functions of “recreation”? For Fedorak, sports are an ideal venue for the phenomenon known as cultural syncretism, which refers to the practice of appropriating certain elements of a foreign cultural practice and modifying them in ways that result in a hybrid that is neither strictly indigenous nor completely unfamiliar.
She also points out that sports are fraught with multiple meanings, and concludes that, like popular music, sports can be vehicles for oppression or resistance, as well as sites of excitement, enjoyment and identification for their many devoted fans.
Much has been written about the relationship between sport and identity. In their seminal study of the relationship between sport and Scottish identity (defined in opposition to the pan-British notion of the UK) Jarvie and Walker encountered the following, at times contradictory, arguments:
That sport itself is inherently conservative and that it helps to consolidate official or centre nationalism, patriotism and racism
That sport has some inherent property that make it an instrument of national unity and integration
That sport helps to reinforce national consciousness and cultural nationalism
That sport provides a safety valve or outlet of emotional energy for frustrated peoples or nations
That sport has at times contributed to unique political struggles some of which have been connected to . . . popular nationalistic struggles
That sport, whether it be through nostalgia, mythology, invented or selected traditions, contributes to a quest for identity, be it local, regional, cultural or global (Jarvie and Walker 7).
