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The first decades of the twentieth century were part of Uruguay’s modernization period. During this time, the government started to promote physical culture and the installation of public spaces fo...

A room of naked bodies, dirty and clean, the locker room is the most obvious site of the homoeroticism of sport, as illustrated in a scene from Top Gun (1986), directed by Tony Scott. The scene ope...

In Conor Heffernan’s fascinating new publication, The History of Physical Culture in Ireland, the birth of physical culture and its subsequent growth in Ireland, and the international influence whi...

In 1893 Julia Veidlere, or ‘Victorina’, brought a court case against the London Pavilion Company. The previous year, Victorina was hired to perform a series of strength feats, including the lifting...

The Enlightenment comprises various processes occurring in Europe from the middle of the eighteenth century to at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This era was a breakthrough in social, ide...

In 1898, British social reformer Ebenezer Howard published To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, calling for ‘garden city’ communities based on the principles of decentralized industry, urban ...

In 1931, Bernarr MacFadden, America’s self-proclaimed prophet of physical culture joined forces with Italian dictator Bennito Mussolini in an attempt to train a new generation of Italian soldiers. ...

The original Muscle Beach, in Santa Monica, California, is a site that looms large in the historical imagination. At once a hotbed of physical culture practices and a pop culture reference point, t...

Physical culture is a health and strength training movement that originated during the 19th century. This area of study has been neglected within the South African context. This was because the dom...

As a branch of sport history, the historiography of weightlifting lags behind other areas. The field is growing but much work needs to be done on its origins. Seeking to provide some context as to ...

The primary goal of this study is to shed new light on the meteoric rise (and fall) of maxixe dancing, from Rio de Janeiro’s practices and performances in the late 1800s to its international explos...

In their first decade of operation in Canada, Canadian Girl Guides presented numerous performances, primarily as fundraisers, to raise money for the Red Cross or to go to camp. Their performances i...

The past three decades have seen the production of a sizeable scholarly literature on the history of Irish sport, with a particularly strong emphasis on sport’s social and cultural impact on Irelan...

The present monograph is the English-language translation of the Czech original that appeared in 2016 under the title Ceskoslovenske spartakiady (Czechoslovak Spartakiads). The Czech version of the...

This book, Sport and Body Cultures in East and Southeast Asia, discusses the important role of sport in the social development and physical culture of nine countries in East and Southeast Asia. The...

Anthropologists Niko Besnier, Susan Brownell, and Thomas Carter have recently contributed a theoretically- and empirically-updated account of sport anthropology, the burgeoning, heterogenous, produ...

In 1908 W.N. Kerr, a tee-totalling, non-smoking, vegetarian athlete from Dublin took first place in a ‘Best Developed’ figure competition. Two years previously, Kerr had written to Vitality magazin...

Focusing on the career of K.V. Iyer, an Indian physical culturist of international renown, the following paper represents an in-depth discussion of exercise and bodybuilding practices in 19...

Several critical scholars recently have debunked the media’s proclamation that with Obama’s presidency, the United States has entered a post-racial era, with the media thus fabricating an image of ...

As an increasingly popular form of physical culture, CrossFit is an ideal site for the investigation of health geographies of non-elite physical activity. In responding to Andrews, Sudwell,...

Bondi, arguably Australia’s best known surf beach, raises questions about the relationships between physical cultures and the natural and built environments. In this paper I explore these relations...

Examining the period 1893 to 1918, typically seen as the heyday of physical culture across the Western world, the current submission proposes three lines of enquiry. In the first instance, the pape...

There have been strong calls to develop the study of sensory embodied scholarship in sport and physical culture that is open for all academic fields to consider. Work so far relies largely upon the sensory intelligence of the researcher in auto/ethnographic approaches and drawing as a traditional arts-based visual methods approach is rare. This paper seeks to address this situation by offering an original example of a participant-generated drawing methodology to explore lived experience of yoga. To do so we utilise phenomenology to frame our position on the mind-body-world relationship as it relates to the goals and practice of yoga and of drawing as an embodied gesture. We offer visual-led interpretations of drawings produced by participants after yoga practice, of composition strategies and the verbal explanations they invite. The drawings created new empirical and methodological insights into how the environment or world is attended to by yoga practitioners as part of a sensory emplaced experience, and opened up new dialogues and exchanges of data between the fields of physical culture and art and of the challenges of investigating lived sensory experience in this way. Our findings provide an original example of how drawings and arts-based knowledge might be incorporated into a sensory embodied research agenda in sport and physical culture. More bridging work between the arts and physical culture is needed to develop methodologies for use with novice drawer participants.

Beginning with an examination of Ireland’s turn of the century interest in physical culture, this article highlights the case of Eugen Sandow’s “Great Competition” and its Irish contestants...

Within the life sciences, there has been a move away from genetic determinism toward an awareness of how the environment (from cellular to social) can impact gene expression and health outcomes. Si...

The physical culture of Chinese folk sports is embedded in religions and rituals that have been predominantly ruled by men. However, this situation has been changing as the forms and meanings of fo...

Professor Eugeniusz Piasecki’s multiple contributions to the development of physical education as well as his activities in various educational, scientific, and social organizations place him among...

In this paper, we introduce readers to the Indigenous Wellbeing of Boys and Men project, a 4-year research collaboration between scholars from the Universities of Manitoba and British Colum...

With a focus on popular entertainments in Australia at the turn of the twentieth century, this article examines the aesthetic slippage that occurred between the circus and the variety theat...

At an embodied and personal level this paper plays with what Evans, J., & Davies, B. (2011. New directions, new questions? Social theory, education and embodiment. Sport, Education & Society, 16(3)...

A Danish fitness chain recently introduced a new concept called Bubbles & Squat. Here, fitness training is combined with free champagne and music. In this paper, we examine this new way of bringing parties, alcohol and physical culture together by exploring the possible meaning of it through existential philosophical analysis. We draw in particular on Nietzsche’s distinction between the Apolline and the Dionysiac, as well as his account of great health. On this basis, we analyse Bubbles & Squat as a case of Dionysiac intoxication, excess and ecstasy sneaking into contemporary Apolline fitness culture. In the last part of the paper, we raise the question if adding parties and bubbles to fitness training may, perhaps paradoxically, be healthy for the participants in an existential sense because it contributes to existential balance between the Dionysiac and the Apolline. We conclude that the philosophical framework presented in this paper can contribute to a new understanding of a general physical cultural phenomenon that the case of Bubbles & Squat represents.

In many ways, early historical scholarship on physical culture tended to focus upon men and strength: body building, weight training, therapeutics and purposive exercise, and pioneering development...

Young people’s experiences of, and (dis)engagement with, physical education has received considerable attention in recent years. Yet one ‘group’, care-experienced young people, remain ‘hidden’ within the prevailing literature. In light of their apparent invisibility within research, this novel, exploratory study seeks to gain some understanding of the factors associated with (dis)engagement from/with physical education among this youth population. In contrast to the few studies that explore the broader physical culture experiences of care-experienced youth that prioritise the voices of adults, this paper combines data from two studies to give voice to the experiences of four care-experienced young men in England, alongside those of key adults, namely residential staff, foster carers and physical education teachers. Data were derived from participatory research methods with the young people and semi-structured interviews with the adults who work with/for them. Drawing upon Bourdieu, principally his notions of field, habitus and capital, the findings suggest that these care-experienced young people are at a pedagogic disadvantage, since they are not as well positioned to access opportunities for learning and participation or develop, maintain and extend those skills and dispositions that are recognised as valued capital in physical education. Moreover, the changing room, as a sub-field of the broader physical education space, where bodies are particularly on display, may present obstacles for care-experienced young people’s engagement due to their prior experiences of physical and/or sexual abuse. This study therefore calls for further research exploring care-experienced young people’s experiences of physical education, teachers’ understandings of care-experienced youth, and how their pedagogic practice might shape (dis)engagement with physical education.

Critical scholars of sport and physical culture have devoted significant attention to developing critiques of epistemological hierarchies and the discursive power of biomedical knowledge in sport, ...

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Luanda, the capital of the Portuguese colony of Angola, institutionalized colonial sport and physical culture practices revealed social con...

Scholars in sport, physical activity and physical education have recently articulated the need for appreciative inquiries into the deconstruction and denaturalisation of gender because such work is...

Surfing economies, working through material culture in the form of high fashion clothing, surfing monikers or fashion clothing has had scholarly attention in the past. Unlike other sports however, ...

This article looks at Khalsa College, the first college specifically aimed at the Sikh community in late colonial India, and its schemes for and ideals of physical culture. Despite Sikh communal an...

Building on Geraldine Biddle-Perry's 2014 discussion of Gamage's department store, and seeking to address the still existent historical dearth on sporting retail, the following article highlights t...

Founded in 1906, the Alpine Club of Canada (ACC) was a key proponent of mountain adventure and advocacy. This paper examines the club’s annual camps, physical culture, and conservation invo...

This paper reflects on the methodological challenges faced during a qualitative research project on sport and physical culture in the Canadian federal prison system, during which the author tried a...

Exiting long-term ethnographic research is occasionally fraught with a litany of professional, ethical, and existential dilemmas. As ethnographers in physical cultural studies (PCS) attest, participation with people in the field over the long term writes a researcher rather deeply. Being personally contoured by a physical culture under study can enchant a researcher as new physical experiences occur, meaningful social bonds are forged, affective curiosities are explored, and one’s analytic imagination is unleashed. The eventual separation and dis-embodiment from a culture as a study ends can be rather dis-enchanting and alienating. Often glossed over in the sport and exercise literature, leaving or exiting is a long-term process intimately connected with sensual embodiment in the field. Leaving is an ever-present process and inexorably stitched to how a researcher knows, does, and analyses ethnographic work. In this paper, we reflect on exiting processes in two separate ethnographic ventures in ph...

Polish historiography of sport bases its work on the nineteenth-century historiographic tradition: the resulting research and publications descriptively present the history of institutions, organizations and the achievements of sportspeople. Whereas this is work that comprehensively delves into the origins of sport and physical culture, describing in detail the oldest phenomena and events, the practice strays away from modern trends in the humanities with regards to interpretation or research methodology. In order to envision the scope of potential which the cultural perspective can o er Polish history of sports, the paper analyzes the recent historiography of Polish sport during the communist period. Discussing one of the Polish works that had been declared by its author as anthropological research on history of sports’,the paper poses questions about notions of anthropological history in Polish scholarship, discusses what ethnographic sources can tell us when they are approached as ‘facts’ from the past, and in what other ways the same sources can be interpreted when perceived as traces in the palimpsest of our contemporary culture.

The article offers an introduction into the myriad of social functions sport and physical culture had during the Yugoslav socialist project. It illustrates how sport was central to the establishmen...

This article deals with the concept of physical culture as a project used for formation of Yugoslav identity and creation of a new ‘Yugoslav body’. After the Second World War, the cultural politics of Yugoslavia entailed multifarious strategies for constructing the entity of Yugoslavs who were supposed to be united under the motto ‘Bratstvo i jedinstvo’ (Brotherhood and unity). Being one of the crucial ways for building such a collective, physical culture was defined as a legitimate right of the citizens, which brought to a development of specific ways of organization of free time in the socialist Yugoslavia. I will point out how doing sport became a proper ‘culture’ (in the affirmative sense of the term, as a synonymous with ‘cultivation’) that was considered to be one of the crucial parts of the project of making the Yugoslav people’s identity. I here draw on the recent views on socialism that suggest going beyond the Western/Eastern dichotomies and point to the multilayered qualities of the Yug...

While ethnic-minority young people are increasingly defined as bodies ‘at disadvantage', marked as less fit or less healthy than the White ‘norm', the ways young people construct meanings around th...

Though the practice of swinging weighted clubs for gymnastic exercise has a centuries long history in India, the latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed the exercise practice grow in political significance. In the years following the 1857 Indian Rebellion, both Hindu nationalists and British army officials undertook the practice with differing intent. Within the martial context, a differentiated style of British club swinging was used to reform supposedly weak and effeminate Hindus, a practice the Hindu physical culture movement sought to render useless through the promotion of heavy club swinging. In first examining the clubs’ origins and British appropriation, the paper explores how two club swinging traditions existed in India in post-1857. Following this, the paper demonstrates how the British army sought to control Hindu bodies through club swinging and how the Hindu physical culture movement concurrently sought to rebuild Hindu bodies capable of defeating British athletes through hea...

This essay argues that the predominant narratives within sport history have remained problematically wedded to assumptions and concepts of Western capitalist modernity. As a result, such sport hist...

Ballet is a popular activity among girls and women and is becoming increasingly visible within popular and fitness cultures. Much dance research has focused on the experiences of professional ballet dancers and on professional, elite, or university settings. Furthermore, ballet is often critiqued as a disciplinary practice and for celebrating an unrealistic bodily aesthetic. However, less research has focused on the experiences of recreational dancers and examined the specific material practices that discipline ballet bodies. Therefore, this qualitative research project examines the experiences of recreational ballet dancers in Western Canada and interrogates the practices that occur within one recreational ballet studio. Specifically, we draw upon Foucault’s concept of anatomo-political power to study how the organisation of time and space is used to train ballet bodies and how dancers participate in power relations. We describe how the recreational ballet studio can act as both a space of discip...

In this article, I examine the ‘turn to’ post-qualitative inquiry (PQI), new materialism and post-humanist theories to consider the challenges of, and implications for, doing research in sport, health and physical culture. The term ‘post-qualitative inquiry’ indicates a decisive departure from the ethico-onto-epistemological assumptions that have informed the humanist interpretive tradition of qualitative research. Moving beyond a theory/method divide, PQI draws its methodological inspiration from critical post-humanist debates concerned with how ‘matter’ is thought and constituted through entanglements of human and non-human bodies, affects, objects and practices. Such a shift reorients thinking around relational questions about the material-discursive forces co-implicated in what bodies can ‘do’ and how matter ‘acts’, rather than a concern with what ‘is’ a body or the agentic meaning of experience. I discuss how these new styles of thought reorient our onto-epistemological assumptions and theory...