Sport In The Golden Age Of China Volume 1

Download or read book Sport in the Golden Age of China, Volume 1 written by Lingyu Xie and published by Palmer Higgs Pty Ltd. This book was released on 2013-12-03 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of was to examine the evidence of sport in the so called "Golden Age" of ancient China, and to place that evidence in a cultural context. The particular theoretical approach was a structuralist and functionalist one, its basic assumption being that sport as a social institution is to be understood in terms of its relationship to other components in the system, and thus sport can be seen as reinforcing or supporting other dimensions of the system. A theoretical model proposed by Salter and Jones was utilized. When evidence of sports and the cultural components of the Salter and Jones model were subject to analysis, activities related to cultural identification were in the majority, followed by those classified as being of social interaction, then political, ceremonial, economic and domestic.As sports are held to be a microcosm of society then the conclusion would have to be that the culture was one that stressed the ideas, standards, knowledge and techniques of that culture, and emphasised the reciprocal relationship of human beings. Political and ceremonial type sports also loomed large in the culture, demonstrating perhaps the subservience required of a majority of the population and the firm control by those in power to control that population.Four hypotheses were advanced and upheld. First, that sporting activities in the Golden Age of ancient China were influenced by both enculturation and acculturation. Second, that the preponderance of sport was related to the upper classes. Third, that the majority of the activities were of the informal variety, some of them being purely recreational. Fourth, the majority of the activities were for males, which corresponds with the male dominant, traditional culture of China, though the point is valid that their involvement exceeds that of any prior period in Chinese history. Fifth, that certain activities were restricted through climate and geography. Sport in the Golden Age did not stand separate from life, rather it influenced, and was in turn influenced by, the various cultural components. Sport was clearly a social phenomenon, which extended into politics, even into foreign policy, the military and religion, and formed close relationships with these various components. It would appear that sport was a reasonable mirror, or microcosm, of culture in the Golden Age of ancient China.