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______________________________________________________________________ The "Zeitschrift für
Semiotik": Abstracts ______________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________ Georg Friedrich; Eberhard Hildenbrandt Thomas Alkemeyer Maud Corinna Hietzge Monika Thiele Discussion Maud Corinna Hietzge, Free University Berlin Summary. Body and body movements in sports follow rules and instructions, but their
special meaning is not determined by those rules and instructions alone. The constitution
of meaning in sports is based on its relation to the rest of a culture and takes place on
several levels: Practical discourse connects sports with everyday life. The mass media
increasingly conceive of sports as an embodiment of society and contribute to the
realization of this conception through the social instrumentalization of the body.
Historical and philosophical texts are used to legitimize the resultant meanings. In this
way it has become possible to use rule-oriented body behavior for the training of bodily
stereotypes, specific gender relations, as well as cooperation and competition. Behavior
dispositions which appear to be socially neutral are functionalized for the preservation
or change of power relations. The bodily practice of modernity is thus a symbolic
practice. The semiotics of sports has the task of investigating the structure and function
of the sign processes in this symbolic practice. Sport as a culture segment from a semiotic perspective Georg Friedrich and Eberhard Hildenbrandt; University of Marburg Summary. In the debate presently taking place in sports studies concerning the
relationship between sports and culture, the conceptions of culture vary remarkably. Part
1 of the present contribution pleads for using the philosophy of symbolic forms as a basis
for characterizing sports within culture. This entails specific methodological strategies
for sports studies: substratum analysis, meaning analysis, and historical analysis. Part 2
then describes the typology of cultural development as discussed in recent semiotic
studies and analyzes subcultural sports activities. It is pointed out why groups of youth
who favor self-organized sports activities tend to neglect the movement practices of
institutionalized sports. Sport as mimesis of society: social performance in the symbolic framework of sport Thomas Alkemeyer, Free University Berlin Summary. A semiotic approach which only focuses on the internal logic and the specific
functional rules of the symbolic system of sports tends to separate sports activities from
the social conditions of their production, reproduction and social utilization. This is
why the present treatise elaborates on the practical relations which connect the only
apparently totally self-referential symbol product of sports to a social context and thus
contribute to its meaning. The argumentation runs as follows: based on the medium of the
body, sports activities are mimetic performances of basic figurations, action patterns,
and convictions of modern societies and are therefore related to social power. The primary
signs of these performances may carry secondary content assignments produced by media
stagings. Semiotic approaches to sports must therefore be embedded in a comprehensive
sociological framework and linked to recent cultural anthropology if they are to
contribute to a general understanding of the segment of culture called "sports"
and of the changes experienced by it through continuing differentiation. Semiotic processes in the performance of the body in sport Maud Corinna Hietzge, Free University Berlin Summary. Unlike sociology, semiotics has so far taken little notice of the body in
sports, and sports research has, until recently, not reflected on the sign character of
the body. Based on the social anthropology of the ritual, this contribution gives a
semiotic account of the staging of the body in sports events. Through the
institutionalized practice of body movements, the bodies of the sports participants are
formed towards body images which attain the status of general ideals through
advertisement. This makes the body function as a semantic battery loaded with social
connotations which are hardly accessible to the individual consciousness. The rituals of
sports have a common pattern; they require a spatial and temporal separation from everyday
life to facilitate a transitory practice leading to critical situations in which social
norms and values may be problematized, and they end by reproducing the original order of
everyday life. Thus the rituals of sports can have both subversive content and
conservative effects. This constitutive ambivalence determines the role of sports in
modern societies. Monika Thiele, University of Bremen Summary. Like other areas of material culture, architecture not only fulfills an
instrumental function, but also carries social meaning which is conveyed by its formal
properties. Where unconscious symbolization and desymbolization are concerned,
psychoanalytic symbol-analysis can be used to refine the sign-theoretic approach. The
utilitarian architecture used in building gymnasiums in the 1970s produced an environment
without sensuality in the very place designed for bodily activities. As an example of a
counter-concept, the building of the German Training Center for Gymnastics in Bremen is
described. They present themselves as aesthetically ambitious and clinically clean, thus
corresponding to the concepts of perfection and purity conveyed by the staging of the
female body in this sport. Discussion: Renate Dürr and Hans Lenk, University of Karlsruhe Summary. Perception, thought and action are here described as schema-guided activities
according to Kant and Peirce. This justifies understanding them as processes of
interpretation even where they occur pre- or subconsciously. It also takes into account
the fact that interpreting is principally a socially based process, as was shown by
Wittgenstein. According to Pierce, the general openness of each interpretation for
additional interpretation processes potentially creates ever new levels of sign processes.
This can also be seen in sports activities, in which, according to Lorenz and Scherer, a
distinction can be made between the execution of an action (as by an athlete) and its
illustrative citation (as by a coach). Situations of teaching and learning of the first
and higher levels lead to an iterated application of these relations in the execution of a
citation, the citation of this execution, etc. Mental training in top competitive sports
makes use of these processes. They are exemplified here by the Gienger salto and its
schematic representations. |
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© 1999-2001, Webmaster Research Center for Semiotics, Institute for Linguistics, Fac. 1, Technical University Berlin, Berlin, Germany |
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