ABSTRACT
As a postgraduate student, grappling with the theoretical challenges of post-modernism, I vividly recall a tutorial with my graduate supervisor, John Hargreaves, a ‘devout’ (Neo) Marxist, when he gravely declared, ‘Belinda, you need to find your framework.’ Twenty years later, and this illusive framework still eludes me. Yet the absence of a coherent or all-encompassing metanarrative through which to frame my work is a situation I am more comfortable with; and in this I am not alone. In the preface to his collection of essays titled The Interpretation of Cultures, Geertz (2000: v) asks ‘did they add up to anything: a theory? A standpoint? An approach?’ (cited in McDonald, 2007: 4). Like Geertz (and McDonald), I am also unwilling to impose a theoretical framework or claim a theoretical coherence onto what has been an organic process. Research agendas and themes have emerged, been modified and then subsequently led to a range of (mostly) connected themes and theoretical concerns. That is not to say that, in making sense of empirical research, one should not be striving to create a ‘critical commentary that not only synthesises, but that “transcends the particular”’ (McDonald, 2007: 4). I hope that this ambition has been achieved throughout this book. Yet given the range of ever-changing, boundary-shifting sporting activities that constitute lifestyle sports, and the diverse, selective and partial picture the case studies presented in this book represent, to draw any overarching theoretical conclusion about the cultural politics of lifestyle sports at this conjunctural moment would result in nothing more than an oversimplification. So in this short coda, I briefly reflect back on a question that has framed this journey: whether lifestyle sports have, and can continue to hold, political potential.
