The Native Sport And Recreation Program

The summary of Chapter 6 is that community sports and youth in North America are somewhat offered a variety of settings such as private sports clubs, schools, and recreation center across the globe. There are several types of sport structures that create many management challenges including conflicts over the goal of an organization, accessibility, the management of volunteers, and financial likelihood. Even though the sport participation continues to grow both in the U.S. and Canada, the opportunities are widely based on topography and gender meaning places like rural areas or gender types such as females are still lagging in access to the sport participation. Families, societies, and individuals benefit from physical activity and sport. The

Foucault wanted academics to think about government and their practices not as a ‘capitalist ruling state’, but to focus on how some form of power and government will always be necessary to control society. It can be argued that Foucault was challenging society, power, knowledge and everything it stood for in this broader sense. Many of Foucault’s ideas were an interdisciplinary form of criticism with reasons to show how, by looking at events with a different kind of knowledge, power is not just a repressive tool of power but a tool of conspiracy - one institution, one individual against another. In turn Foucault (like Bennett) suggests that power is a whole complex of forces which produce what

Over the past several years, United Nations agencies, international sport federations, national governments, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been using sport as a method for social transformation and collective development (Kidd & MacDonnell, 2007). Sport-for-development (SFD) initiatives exemplify this paradigm as they have become increasingly popular instruments concerned with increasing social integration, reducing economic inequities, and alleviating health disparities that individuals in disenfranchised communities experience through the power of sport (Hayhurst, 2009). In Canada, the Canadian Sport Policy 2012 formalized the perceived value of SFD initiatives as evidenced by the creation of a strategy specifically intended for Indigenous participation and prioritization in Canadian sport: the Aboriginal Participation Policy (APP) (Paraschak, 2012; Te Hiwi, 2014). The APP is symbolic as it is the primary mechanism that rhetorically guides Sport Canada’s efforts to work with the Federal and Provincial levels of government to confront systemic inequities, which effectively limit Aboriginal participation in sport (Thibault & Harvey, 2013). Moreover, the APP was predicated upon the acknowledgement that Aboriginal youth in Canada face substantial challenges and that these problems are inextricably linked to a history of colonial policies and Eurocentric institutions, which have marginalized Aboriginal peoples from social inclusion (Forsyth, 2008; Paraschak, 2012). To emphasize, the APP included recognition of the importance of Aboriginal cultures in the effective expansion of sport, the significance of health advancement for Aboriginal peoples, and increasing Aboriginal sport participation through community driven

Positioning the body in such a way that it actively participants in the consumption and reproduction of dominance as well as subordination allows a framework through which to view the body as a text. Functioning as an agent of cultural production, possessing the power to define cultural constructions, practices, and perceptions, inevitably acting as a form of social control. Susan Bordo in her article, The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity from

First what is Biopower? Well according to Foucault, biopower is a technology of power, which is a way of managing and controlling entire populations. Biopower led to the emergence of the modern nation state and capitalism. Foucault describes it as "an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations” (Foucault 140). The primary and most important goal of biopower is life. The government goal is to secure and improve people’s lives. Power is exercised exclusively over life, and is exercised either to foster life or to disallow it. Biopower according to Foucault is a power that “exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavours to

Americans have always loved sports; although the sports early Americans practiced may not still today be what the majority of people enjoy. For example, early Americans hunted, swam, ran, rode horses and played competitive games such as tug of war. They also participated in military skills contests, which have always been seen as an acceptable form of leisure time activity across many cultures. Sports have always been part of the American culture and identity. In her book “More than just a game: Sports in American Life since 1945,” Kathryn Jay states: “In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sports remained an important cultural venue for many immigrants, serving as a public ritual of inclusion as well as a space in which minority groups could prove their worth to themselves and to a white, Anglo-Saxon majority” (35). Although sports, as Jay mentioned, presented a venue for inclusion, it did not extend to all Americans. It is only over time that minority classes were able to get social justice and truly find a common ground. Women and African-Americans are a perfect example of this. This in turn reveals the underlying hypocrisy in the culture of American sports until recently.

According to Foucault, individualism is harmful and is constructed through the acts of disciplinary power. Thus, Foucault describes disciplinary power as a new from of governance that modern society uses to exercise power through the use of constant surveillance (Rabinow, 1984). Disciplinary power works by conditioning, training and supervising individuals to behave in a publically accepted manner. Prior to the emergence of disciplinary power, traditional sovereign power was demonstrated which encouraged physical violence and strict rules and regulations to control individual (Rabinow, 1984). Controversially, disciplinary power is now a subtle form of physical power which renders more control but strays away from corporal punishment.

The Body as a Biological Organism – Describing the body as the “…principal locus” of our being in the world, from which our world extends out from, Johnson discusses the intricate coordination of biological systems that provides the palette for all experiences from which we infer meaning in life. Our experience of life is also linked to our physical “posture and movement”, which provides the possibility of interaction. Referring to Putnam’s ‘brain in a vat’ hypothesis,

Foucault sees discipline moving from the body to the soul or mind. Through a lengthy introduction that illustrates the torture and killing of a man in public, we see how punishment and discipline was exerted by physical means and in front of a populace. That discipline and punish is now evolved into a form of confining those to a small space behind walls where the public cannot see them. The punishment is not of the body but of the mind and soul, as Foucault calls it. Foucault argues that a new relationship has been formed between the body and punishment by saying: “from being an art of unbearable sensations, punishment has become an economy of suspended rights.”

In his view, the very architecture of school buildings, hospitals, prisons, and state buildings were designed to depict power (Foucault 1984, 190). To Foucault, power employed the “mechanism of panopticism” to observe and control (Foucault 1984, 206). The idea of panopticism here is being used to denote a system where institutions use open spaces as a means of exercising power. For example, Foucault saw great similarities in the spatial design of the military camp and high schools, hospitals, and prisons. In Foucault’s words, “this infinitely scrupulous concern with surveillance is expressed in the architecture by innumerable petty mechanisms” (Foucault 1984, 191). These ‘mechanisms’ Foucault refers to here include the unending tests, documentation and paper work that is carried out on students, patients, and military personnel, and it was through this that conclusions were made on whether a person conformed to societal expectations or not. Furthermore, conclusions can then be made on a person’s mental state, guilt, educational level, military competence, and so on. This led Foucault to ask if “the disciplines have now become the new law of modern society”? (Foucault 1984, 196). It is important to mention here that although Foucault viewed knowledge as controlling and stifling, he also saw it as productive and useful, and thus he insists that “we must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it “excludes”, it “represses”, it “censors”, it “abstracts”, it “masks”, it “conceals”. In fact, power produces reality, domains of objects, and rituals of truth” (Foucault 1984, 204-205). What this means is that although power can be used as a tool by institutions as discussed above, it can also be used by individuals to

Youth sports have a positive impact on all those that participate. Over seventy-five percent of United States families with school-aged children have at least one child who engage in organized sports. (Bailey, 1) Parents sign their children up for organized sports for numerous reasons, like, keeping their children fit and active, building a sense of teamwork, or others may be fulfilling their passion for sports through their children. Whatever the reason for signing a child up for youth sports, it is apparent that organized sports positively impact a child’s physical health, teach them important social skills, and can even help to improve their performance in school.

Sport researchers have discovered that sport both emphasizes and challenges dominant ideologies resulting in discrimination. By challenging the common way of thinking, sports can be used as a powerful tool for social tool for change (Appleby and Foster 2013)

The primary thesis of this reading is to define the varying theories of how the body is represented in a social and anthropological context. The process of contextualizing the body has been part of a 20th century movement to better understand how the human body is presented in western society. In the writer’s methodology, theories will be defined by Constructivist methods of evaluating the body, which involves examinations through history, society and culture. The principle argument of this text is that Constructivist evaluations provide a more symbolic meaning related to the human body, which is primarily a subjective evaluations of social norms, deviant perceptions, and stereotypes. Therefore, the sections on “embodiment” and “apotemnophilia:”

Critical realism underpins the ontological disposition of this research, body politics to be specific. A body politics paradigm assumes that the body may become a site for political contestation and power relations (Scotland, 2012, p.13). Body politics has been used in different disciplines and contexts, including race, to study the connection of how the body becomes at the core of status and power representations "contemporary societies tend to segregate not only access to political power but also work, religious life, domestic work, and intimate relationships according to the sex and race of the bodies they organize" (Weldon, 2013, p.1).

Susan Bordo in her work, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body, points out that “the human body is itself a politically inscribed entity, its physiology and morphology shaped by histories and practices of containment and control.” (1993, 21). That is, a pure body cannot be found, it is already inscribed, defined and explained by its very origin. But it is significant to analyze that body cannot be included and excluded in a fixed definition of society as in the way it’s beyond the fixity. Body is a social construction and its performance itself is a socially constructed notion. Performance of body according to gender, race, class, cast, power, in this way the very body and its performance are assigned, classified and conditioned by the society. Performance of a body in a fixed notion rightly points towards the imitation of the constructed norms of society. It is the way gender also