ABSTRACT
This chapter is about both the actual social practice and the metaphysics of the research process. What this entails more specifically involves us making a case for our own critical understanding of ethnography in the sociology of sport, which breaks with essentialist methodological approaches in order to explore the complex social interaction that characterises the discursively constituted social formations of sport. The interpretation of ethnography we flesh out in this chapter suggests that, if we are to cultivate some suggestive and insightful understandings of the problematic of ‘deviance’ in sport, the sort of social enquiry we must develop is one that places a premium on the contingency of local and historically specific social practices. Our analysis in this chapter demonstrates the point that attempting to abstract ‘deviance’ from the quotidian of its context is an unconvincing cure for this contingency.
