ABSTRACT
This chapter will build on the understanding of the importance of sports medicine as a distinctive cultural environment in which the body can be managed, as was illuminated in Chapter 1. In relation to medicine, the body can be conceptualised as an engine with a mortal quality, to borrow from the work of Hoberman (1992). The body is the one tool with which a sportsperson ultimately has to work (Howe 2001). Because humans are embodied actors within society, the social investigation of the body is problematic since it is from our vantage-point within a body that we view the social world. The social world that the body occupied therefore can be observed from many distinct points of view. For example, a body that is seen as the focus of biomedical investigation may be seen as completely distinct from the same body explored from a symbolic perspective. This ‘stratified’ body (Maguire 1993) suggests that it might be difficult to articulate the importance of the body from one moment to the next. The stratification of the body highlights the flexibility that may be employed to understand the body's importance in the cultural world of sport. This flexibility in the interpretation of the body's importance can be combined with Hoberman's (1992) notion of mortality, which is related to how the body may be altered through various methods of performance enhancement that are a by-product of the push for commercial success discussed in the previous chapter. This current chapter will focus upon an exploration of the key conceptualisations of the body as they relate to sporting culture and in doing so it will lay the foundation upon which pain, injury and risk are explored in subsequent chapters.
