Sports between democratization and alienation

Abstract

This presentation explores how sport and physical activity participate in two of the processes involved in the reproduction and transformation of the existing social order, namely democratization and alienation. The aim is not to make an in-depth and comprehensive analysis of them, but to give an overview of the plurality of ways to achieve them. The first part focuses on understanding the meaning of sport and its relationship to philosophy. As for the second part, it is devoted to a process by which the field of sports and physical activities appears as one of the fields of socially desirable cultural practices, due to the process of democratization of the sports field, through the movement of sports for all. As for the third part, inspired by Marx's theory, we deal with four different modes of realizing the process of alienation in the field of physical and sports activities. It is linked to the alienation caused by competitive sports, the physical reification resulting from the evaluation of physical condition and the "false consciousness" or the ideology of "health through physical activities", in addition to what the sports scene conveys, within the spectacle society, according to Guy Debord, Signs of a process of alienation.