A contest between worlds of sport: competing patterns of order and forms of representation in body cultures in Africa and Asia
PD Dr. Katrin Bromber
Prof. Dr. Birgit Krawietz
The joint project investigates sport practices and the discourse accompanying them in selected regions of Africa and Asia. Such representations provide an opportunity to analyze the questioning of and challenges to worldviews and seemingly globally validated patterns of order. Systems of rules that have been pre-structured by international sport organizations, the intrinsic dynamics of the market, etc. are increasingly coming into conflict with ideological, religious, national, and regionally specific worlds of life and normative claims. The focus of this research project is on this field of tension and the attempts by national power-holders and institutions, emerging reform forces, fundamentalist groups, and other actors to use sports to legitimate their respective claims or to stage them on a symbolic level.
Running at the Top: East African Competitive Sports
between National Hallmark, Local Bone of Contention
and Object of Supra-Regional Trade
PD Dr. Katrin Bromber
This project segment uses case studies in Kenya, Ethiopia, and the Arab Gulf region to investigate the discursive means employed to use success in competitive sports for constructions of the world or to position oneself on the global scale. It concentrates on track and field, in which East African athletes dominate in international competition, especially in the long-distance disciplines. A diachronic cross section through the history of sports in recent decades traces how this success has become a symbol of national strength and international competitiveness. The project will explore the degree to which sports disseminate national values and the form in which they serve to propagate different social groups’ equal rights to participate. At the same time, it will investigate which societal forces use or help shape this triumphal march and how they fit sports into an overall national design or develop them as a form of expressing criticism of globalization.
Systems of sports rules and identity-creating practices in the Asian Islamic world
Prof. Dr. Birgit Krawietz
The project studies the contemporary Islamic world’s counter-proposals to a visible, new, globalized world order in the societal sub-system of sports. Three especially dynamic and influential zones are empirically examined and set in relation to each other: the Southeast Asian “Islamic” states of Indonesia and Malaysia, as well as Turkey and the Arab Gulf states. Although Turkey’s and Indonesia’s constitutions make them secular states, the Shariah or Islamic law makes various universal and national claims to the right to (help) shape matters. On the other hand, the enormous economic boom of the Arab Gulf states in recent years has triggered massive processes of transformation, especially in the field of sports. The question is the degree to which the various regional societies can keep up with this development and with what alternative designs individuals, institutions, and various official and unofficial representatives of Islamic establishments respond to it.
A joint research project by the ZMO and FU Berlin |
