The Discipline of Leisure by Simon Coleman Tamara Kohn

Author:Simon Coleman, Tamara Kohn [Simon Coleman, Tamara Kohn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781845453725
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Berghahn Books, Incorporated
Published: 2008-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

7

PLAYING LIKE CANADIANS: IMPROVISING NATION AND IDENTITY THROUGH SPORT

Noel Dyck

Introduction

Whether actively pursued or incidentally encountered, engagement with sport constitutes a salient feature of everyday life for a sizable proportion of children, youth and adults in cities and communities across Canada. This chapter examines how varying forms of involvement with sport may be marshalled to shape domestic representations of Canada as a nation as well as to mediate the paired and often problematic identities of ‘Canadians’ and ‘immigrants’. Although Western social science has traditionally relegated sport to a supposedly frivolous category of mere ‘fun and games’, such a perspective is badly dated and conceptually callow. Within Canada, as in many other nations, participation in and contemplation of sporting activity has become a powerful vehicle for defining and celebrating nationhood. What is more, sport provides complex organisational and expressive capacities for enunciating and embodying opposing ideological propositions about appropriate relationships between Canadians ‘old’ and ‘new’, propositions articulated in terms of acceptance or avoidance of the disciplined practices that comprise sport.

On the one hand rests a decidedly positive and hopeful depiction of sport that envisions it as an accessible and effective vehicle for fostering the social and cultural integration of immigrants and their children into athletic and recreational sport activities valued by many Canadians (Minister's Task Force on Federal Sport Policy, 1992). According to this scenario, the team relationships, camaraderie and shared values forged by athletes on the field of play may also be shared by parents on the sidelines, be they native-born or immigrants. Moreover, it is believed by aficionados of sport that competing in the same games under the same rules will give rise to forms of cultural intimacy capable of furnishing shared experiences, understandings, idioms and identities. These, it is surmised, can be transported away from the gymnasia, pools and rinks of athletic competition and applied beneficially in other realms of everyday life. From this perspective, sport participation is defined as a voluntary and highly enjoyable field of endeavour that, if made equally available to all residents of Canada, would help to bring ‘us’ together in smaller and larger ways. Herein lies the cherished prospect of building a civically integrated society by harnessing the recreational pleasures and associative powers ascribed to sport.

There is, however, ‘another hand’ upon which perches a less idyllic rendering of the nexus between immigration, nationality and sport in Canada. The implicit expectation that immigrants can and should join in the sporting activities preferred by other Canadians may be held with an intensity that acts to blur the line between hospitality and expectations of assimilation. An instance of this was evoked by a story appearing in the sports section of the Vancouver Sun newspaper on 7 November 2000. In a weekly column on local high school sports, it was reported that:

Richmond High's once-proud and successful senior boys' football program appears to have been thrown for a devastating loss. How devastating? The Colts may have played their last game ever last Friday in Victoria against the Mount Douglas

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