ABSTRACT
In re-reading Blowing the Whistle, it is apparent that a gap had opened up, in which politics tended to drift away from other elements of the social and cultural world. Politics as here constructed seemed to have little to do with pleasure, with consuming, or with inhabiting space. Insufficient attention was paid to the pleasures of sport, to the ways in which it is consumed, or to the places in which it is consumed. In order for sport to be consumed, of course it has to be produced, and produced in commodity forms. This chapter explores the way the pleasures, commodities and spaces of sport interrelate. I once stood at the top of an Olympics ski-jump with two colleagues. We stared down at the terrifyingly steep descent, at the slight upturn at the end, and beyond that at what appeared to be a tiny landing area, surrounded by spectator terracing and sponsors banners. One of my colleagues suggested that if an anthropologist came down from Mars, she would want to know what terrible crime the skijumpers had committed, that they had to be subjected to such a terrible ordeal. The story reminds us of the need for a degree of critical distance, of estrangement. In order to fully understand cultural practices, they need to be made strange. We need to alter our perspective to avoid merely taking things for granted.
