REVIEWS

Jørn Hansen & Niels Kayser Nielsen, (eds), Sports, Body and Health

(Odense, DK: Odense University Press, 2000)

Review by Annemarie Jutel

In 1995, the Institute of Sports Science of Odense University in Southern Denmark staged a seminar focusing on cultural scholarship. This conference sought to cast a historical and sociological light on the relation between sports, body culture and humanistic science. While not precisely an interdisciplinary project, it was certainly a staged convergence of disciplines and an opportunity for otherwise infrequent exchanges: a positive step towards what Peter Stearns describes in his contribution to this issue of Junctures as a “better understanding of the human condition.”

In Sports, Body and Health, editors Jørn Hansen and Niels Kayser Nielsen have produced an anthology of short writings from this seminar. They enunciate the desire to capture a range of cultural meanings and discourses surrounding sports, the body and health and to explicate the relationship between sports and health. They focus on how health has been used as a legitimising discourse in the promotion of sport, and uncover the manifold cultural meanings surrounding the sporting body.

They face major challenges in attempting to achieve these goals. The first is whether a conference paper lends itself to being a chapter, and the second, whether or not those cultural theorists can indeed find a ground upon which their erudite views can merge with those of the scientist. The task is one of transformation.

In a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, William Germano, vice-president and publishing director at Routledge Press discusses the challenges of writing the academic book and indeed describes it in terms of transformation. * A book takes its success from the author’s ability to extrapolate from one kind of presentation (in the case he describes, the doctoral dissertation) to another: from the dissertation which rehearses scholarship, suppresses an authorial voice, and demonstrates analytic skills, to the book which speaks broadly, has absorbed scholarship, sustains an authorial voice, and commands an extended narrative. These are not merely mechanical adjustments but rather are conceptual necessities and are pivotal to a book’s success. Sports, Body and Health, while covering useful terrain and providing important food for thought, struggles to make fruitful transformations from one genre to another.

Focusing on Benkt Söderberg’s chapter “The Swedish Sports Movement and the Medical Profession: A Question of Power” as an initial example, we can witness one transformative test. Söderberg’s concise chapter reviews the relationship of the medical profession to sport, both in reference to its enunciated position relative to competition sports, and the means by which it both attempted and achieved a mechanism of regulation over physical education and competitive sport.

The transformative challenge for Söderberg was to bring a conference paper to an academic readership. The piece contains many of the rhetorical devices of the oral presentation, including open-ended questions without answers, conversational tone, and colloquialism. Unfortunately, these lose their impact in the cold reality of the written word. The cajoling body language which invites a spectator to reflection must be replaced by other tactics when the medium is ink on paper. But tone is not the only issue at hand. Many of the contributors, including Söderberg, while able speakers of the language, lack precision, however, with the written word. Far from wishing to convey an inappropriate Anglo-centrism, I would be remiss not to bring to the fore the limitations contained in the oftimes awkward syntactic solutions chosen by the author. Here I suggest an editorial shortcoming. There should always be a native speaker of the language of publication in the editorial team.

The result of these adaptations is a little piece which skims over the surface of the fascinating topic, inviting its listeners (rather than its readers) to come to question time for an extra ten minutes of discussion, but a ten minutes which is sadly missing from the published text. Hansen and Nielsen, editors of this book, failed in their assessment of Söderberg’s piece – as in those of a number of others contained in Sports, Body and Health – to identify the important differences between the conference paper and the written word.

Similar issues face the authors of other chapters. While Brian Turner and John Bale are masters of the English language, and indeed masters of their respective subjects (Cartesian concepts of the body and the representation of Kenyan body culture), their succinct chapters present certain problems to the reader. Tantalising the reader with scant text reminiscent of the twenty minute conference presentation, they remain lectures. Turner’s piece has references without citations and Bale’s barely covers six pages.

While the socio-cultural scholar might be enthralled, he or she leaves unsated. The non-specialist reader is likely to encounter a similar dissatisfaction. Although the few pages set out for each topic are hardly enough to overwhelm, they leave many doors opened to paths not taken. In such brief presentations, readers are unlikely to go away with a sense of understanding the new issues put before them.

Despite these shortcomings, Sports, Body and Health does bring together many leaders in the area of sport and body culture, all of whom have something interesting to say. Well-known scholars Hargreaves, von der Lipp, Dietrich and Eichberg add to the impressive line-up and really make the cultural scholar sorry to have missed this particular conference. Unfortunately, the book cannot quite make up for this loss.

* William Germano, “If Dissertations Could Talk, What Would They Say?,” The Chronicle for Higher Education (13 June 2003), B9.