The Ethnographic Imperative in Comparative Olympic Research

• John J. MacAloon ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Chicago

     University of Chicago

     City of Chicago, Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Sociology of sport journal, ISSN 0741-1235, Vol. 9, Nº. 2, 1992, págs. 104-130
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Ethnographic method in social science research has commonly been portrayed as imposing a dilemma between values of scale and values of context. In comparative sport studies today—with their emphasis on multinational organizations, state-level agencies, commercial and media conglomerates, and mass publics of interpreting consumers as the most visible social actors—little place has been found for the practices of extended participant observation. While true with respect to other sociological communities as well, the absence of formal fieldwork methods is particularly diagnostic of sport investigators within cultural reproduction and hegemony theory and “British cultural studies.” I suggest that such methodological choices are intensely revealing of theoretical, epistemological, and political presuppositions, in particular of quite opposed conceptions of “comparative studies.” I argue that dichotomizing between experience-near methods and political analysis of large-scale institutional structures is misleading and pernicious. Sustained ethnography may be the only means of generating certain data necessary to truly comparative sociological study of the cultural and economic politics of international sport.