Bale 1996 YiFuTuanSport

Space, Place and Body Culture: Yi-Fu Tuan and a Geography of SportAuthor(s): John BaleSource: Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, Vol. 78, No. 3 (1996), pp. 163-171Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Swedish Society for Anthropology and GeographyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/490831 .Accessed: 12/04/2014 06:25

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SPACE, PLACE AND BODY CULTURE: YI-FU TUAN AND A GEOGRAPHY OF SPORT

By John Bale

Bale, J. 1996: Space, Place and Body Culture: Yi-Fu Tuan and a Geography of Sport. Geogr. Ann. 78 B (3):163-171 ? Scandinavian University Press on licence from the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography.

ABSTRACT. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan has undertaken a wide variety of studies in the field of human and cultural geography. His work has shown a concern for themes ranging from topophilia to the domestication of nature and from space and place to aesthetics. It is possible to utilise Tuan's ideas to point the way to more humanistic approaches to the geographical study of sport. This is done by taking several 'fragments' from his writings and applying them to sports-geographic projects. Despite Tuan's fleeting and somewhat naive allusions to sports, many of his ideas are applicable to sports-geographic studies. These in- clude his thoughts on space and place, dominance and affection, senses of place, and the composition of the good life. An autobiographical summary provides an exemplification of some of these ideas.

'... ballet-how elegant the dancers look from a distance, how ugly from close up. And how close that elegance is to violence! At the end of a performance, the ballet slippers are stained by blood' (Tuan 1995).

Introduction The geographical study of sport has witnessed steady, though hardly spectacular, growth in the last few decades. In addition to the numerical growth of sports-geographic publications, there seems to have been a shift in emphasis from a pos- itivistic to a more humanistic approach, reflecting the general shift of emphasis within cultural geography itself. This shift of emphasis can be exempli- fied by comparing the traditional cartographic/statistical approach adopted by Rooney (1972) in his seminal Geography of American Sport with Raitz's (1995) more literary The Theater of Sport. The traditional approach to a geography of sport, dubbed as 'cartographic fetishism' (Bale 1992) and critiqued by Ley (1985) as being long on de- scription and short on interpretation, drew its in- spiration from the geographical traditions of the 1960s. Even in Raitz's edited collection of essays,

however, many of the essays fail to be informed by more interpretive approaches to geographical study. The present paper seeks to present a number of possible applications to the geographic study of sport by drawing on the work of a geographer who, since the early 1970s, has vigorously sustained an interest in humanistic cultural geography. By applying ideas from the writings ofYi-Fu Tuan I seek to encourage geographers to explore alternative routes to sports-geographic enquiry.

During the last thirty years Yi-Fu Tuan has written widely on aspects of space, place, aesthetics and landscape. His 'descriptive psychological geography' reveals an awareness of a vast range of source materials, spanning various disciplines and cultures. Tuan's writings are essays. In his own words, each of his books is like a conversation:

In such a conversation one person offers a theme-a point of view-which he clarifies with an example or two. The listener then re- sponds with a case of his own, to show that he has understood, or to show that the theme is capable of further development, or to show that it is problematical-that its application, for example, is less general than its proponent believes (Tuan 1984, ix).

The present paper is written in this spirit. It is an invitation to ponder on some of Tuan's ideas relat- ing to space, place and landscape and how the social scientific and humanistic study of sports could be enhanced by their application. Tuan's notions of topophilia, landscapes of fear, segmented worlds, dominance and affection, the good life, morality, or aesthetics (all subjects making up titles of his books) may all be applied to the global cultural phenomenon of sports. In doing so, I seek to present a more humane framework for sports-geographic studies than has hitherto been achieved. At the same time I want to work towards a geographical theory of sport, moving from an initial emphasis on space to one of place; I see a tension between these two as being central to such a theory.

Geografiska Annaler 78 B (1996) 3 163


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JOHN BALE

Few students of sports, apart from myself and a few like-minded spirits, allude to Tuan's writings (Bale 1993, 1994, Kallio 1992, Silvennoinen 1992). Yet I believe that his work has much to offer the humanist student of human body culture. In what follows I will select a small number fragments from some of Tuan's writings which, I feel, provide directions which a geography of sport might follow. My observations should be prefaced by the fact that I am basically referring in what follows to 'achievement sport' and not to other configurations of body culture such as recreation, lei- sure or play.

Tuan and sports: some allusions In his writings Tuan makes few serious comments about serious sports. Given his humanism, however, it is hardly surprising that he does refer to the joy of frolicsome experiences. For example, he twice alludes to the childhood experiences of Ro- ger Bannister, the first runner to run faster than four minutes for the mile, and his (Bannister's) discovery of space becoming freedom while expe- riencing running on a beach (Tuan 1986 15-6, 1993 36-7). But there is more than a suggestion that Tuan is unclear about the distinction between sport and play. For example, he avers that 'for children and athletes life is joyous in its vitality, and vitality is motion during which time is forgotten' (Tuan 1986 15). This is a reasonable interpretation of play but certainly not of the seriousness of the athlete who is all too often locked into a rigid reg- imen of training and competition: a 'prison of measured time' (Brohm 1978). In sports, time is not forgotten, as Tuan would have us believe. On the contrary, time and space are central elements, to be ignored at the athletes' peril. Time and space either constrain the participants into particular temporal or spatial slots or act as targets to be reached or overcome. In Passing Strange and Wonderful, Tuan (1993 38) states (correctly in my view) that the athlete's goal is 'as precisely defined as in factory work: to reach a certain speed or height [i.e. time or space], to win against an oppos- ing team'. This view, which would lie comfortably with neo-marxist works on sports (e.g. Rigauer 1981) is tempered by more moderate sentiments which again reveal Tuan's unfamiliarity about crit- ical writing on modern sports. He continues:

.. unlike factory workers athletes, to reach their goal, have to be highly conscious of the

power and limits of their own bodies. The body is the athlete's instrument of success. It has to be nurtured and trained, mentally as well as physically. The athlete has to rehearse in his mind the necessary motions in relation to the barriers to be overcome. 'A beautiful shot' spectators exclaim as the ball rolls into the hole. The golfer himself (sic) senses the economy and elegance of the swing. In sport, success may be all-important, but means to it have their own beauty and justification (Tuan 1993).

What Tuan fails to recognise, however, is that style and beauty in sport have been steadily eroded as functionalism and rationalism have taken their place. Style prizes are no longer awarded in races. If prizes are awarded for beauty it is quantified beauty, as in gymnastics, ice dance, or synchro- nised swimming. The 'beautiful' actions of the gymnast hide behind the dominance of the trainer (see below) and others who, through abuse of various kinds, may retard puberty and administer drugs to such athletes. However, these observations about Tuan's somewhat naive comments on certain attributes of sports in no way mean that his ideas are irrelevant for their study: far from it. It is to their possible value that my essay now turns.

Fragment 1. Upright body--forward we race The body is central in sports but it is configured differently in achievement sports from its appe- arance in, for example, physical education or play (Eichberg 1983, 1989). In sport the body becomes more cultural and less natural than in play. In Space and Place Tuan (1977) notes how the human body is unique among mammals 'in that it easily maintains its upright position. Upright, man (sic) is ready to act. Space opens out before him..' Frontal space is primarily visual; it is perceived as the future. It is sacred space, towards the horizon, yet to be reached. Rear space is the past, the profane. Tuan illustrates these ideas in the form of a diagram, shown as Figure 1.

Of what relevance is this diagram to the geographic study of sports? One thing that a geography of sport has lacked is a distinctive conceptual framework. As noted earlier, all too often 'sports geography' reflects the mentality of a 'yet another thing to be mapped' syndrome. While it has been recognised that the things that are most distinctive about sport are also distinctively geographical

164 Geografiska Annaler 78 B (1996) 3



Future

8 o iz on ---

z

-

Front \( /-,(So -"

d o

- 1

Post I

Post

Figure 1. The future is ahead and 'up'; the past is profane and 'below' (Source: Tuan: Space and Place, 35).

(that is space and place), no simple conceptual focus has been presented which demonstrates the ar- gument that the roots of sports and geography are essentially the same. Figure 1 begins to edge towards the recognition of an isomorphism between the bases of sport and geography. In a sense, it hints at nothing less than a geographical theory of sport. Consider in Figure 1, for example, the sacred space. In human space (geography) human- kind has constantly sought the horizon and the world beyond it (Kayser Nielsen 1995). In achievement sports we constantly seek the record. The record is, like frontal space, sacred, something to be worshipped, something to be achieved (like the horizon). The record is about conquering space and extending distances. But once the record is found, like the horizon a new one appears. In Fig- ure 1 the past and back-space are described as profane. In sport they are better described as nostalgia but stand in the same relationship to the record as does sacred to the profane. Nostalgia is a major phenomenon in sports (Snyder 1991). It is the world of past achievements, glories and golden ages to be sure, but it is also a world of perform- ances which today appear mundane, routine, ordi- nary, poor. In this sense, it is a world of the profane-something to be mocked and abused, a world of going down and out of the ranking lists. The great Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi is said to have told his son Matti that he would never be a great runner, to which his son replied, 'I'11 beat

your times though'-a poignant tale about 'progress' and sport (Track and Field News 1957).

The basic human spatial orientations of forward and backward and up and down resonate strongly in a world of sports. Born into a world of apparent- ly natural human uprightness and forwardness, is it not implicit that there is a natural propensity towards record-orientation? Could human beings, therefore, be more naturally sporting (in an achievement rather than play sense) than those with more anarchic (less competitive) persuasions may have previously thought?

Fragment 2. Attention! Sport as Inattention The model in Figure 1 is dominated by space, over which progression towards the horizon of the record seems unimpeded by the distraction of place. Such abstract ('placeless') space needs to be naturalised in order for it to approximate more closely to our lived world. But it is the pure space of Figure 1 which is the sporting ideal. Logically, the milieu for 'fair play' is a neutral plane upon which no participant has an environmental advan- tage over the other. It is the opposite of the aesthetic-the anaesthetic (Tuan 1987). Such a sport space approximates to 'placelessness', a term used to describe places which both look and feel alike (Relph 1976). Such a dystopian ideal for sport is painted by the philosopher Paul Weiss. He projects an ideal 'set of conditions for a race [as] one where there are no turns, no wind, no interference, no interval between starting signal and start, and no ir- regularities to the track-in short, no deviations from a standard situation' (Weiss 1969 105). Sports places are, in their ideal type, paradigms of placelessness. The logic of fair play, the compari- son of performance, and the achievement of mean- ingful records, dictate that such places should be the same-exactly the same-as each other. Al- though in many cases place (peopled space) continues to triumph over such pure space, the tendency remains towards a placeless sports environment. The world of sports with its geometries and synthetic surfaces simplifies the world of nature. The natural world is difficult to understand; the world of sport is the world made simple without aesthetic distractions. In its pure form it is a world of unambiguous dualisms-the ball is in or out, there are winners and losers, we have success or failure, you are on the team or off the team.

In a short paper titled 'Attention: moral-cognitive geography' Tuan noted that:



JOHN BALE

few of us in social science can bear the tension of attending to social reality-its bewildering webs of exchange, its contradictions, and its heavy burden of pain. We prefer to act. Armed with questionnaires we go quickly into the field to collect data, worrying more whether the data are of a quality sufficient for statistical manipulation-whether they will generate enough graphs and tables to charm the refe- rees of a journal-than whether they are of a quality for reading the heart of a problem (Tu- an 1989).

Nature is as difficult to understand as social reality. In sport's ideal type we rid ourselves of nature in order to make life easier. In athletics and football we replace nature with synthetic tracks and plastic grass. We enclose our fields with concrete and we make the horizon of the record our sole goal. The need to understand what we are doing requires too much attention. When we begin to understand it we often become uneasy with what we have learned. We seek consolation in numbers. When my interest in the nature of nature or of body cultural experiences wanes, I race around a 400 metre track to fit as much effort as I can into as little time as possible. The stopwatch, and the camera (to which Tuan alludes), 'like all machines invites ac- tion and sharply narrows the range of experience' (Tuan 1989). To athletes the stopwatch 'is a source of psychological reassurance and not merely a recording instrument' (Tuan 1989). The tendency in many sports meetings is towards placing a greater emphasis on shorter distances and on more speed; this needs less attention (Tuan 1989). It is a form of sport for an age of zapping between different tv channels, an age of instant gratification.

It is difficult to get lost on a football field or a 400 metre track with the spatial details so clearly marked. Indeed, the rules of sport insist that I must not wander into, and lose myself in, someone else's space. But it is all too easy to get lost in nature. The world of athletic artifice, which increasingly characterises achievement sport, can therefore be viewed as a symptom of inattention. It is inte- resting that in orienteering, a sport close to nature, the fine detail of nature, place and space all need to be absorbed by the participants. In orienteering- a humane, intelligent and supremely geographical sport-speed is subordinated to attention; the participant has to look for things other than the finish- ing line or the final whistle.

Fragment 3. The Segmented World of Sport In Segmented Worlds and Self Tuan provides a view of the increasingly spatialised world of sub- divided and enclosed segments of territorialised space (Tuan 1982). Like Michel Foucault (1979) and the cultural geographer, Robert Sack (1986), each of whom have explored the segmentation (or territorialisation) of space as a form of power, Tuan does not refer to one of the most obviously segmented disciplinary forms of modern society, the world of sports. He does, however, deal with the changing spatial arrangement of theatre-space which is, in its evolution, similar to the changing geography of sport-space (Tuan 1982). For Tuan the increasing segmentation of space results from 'people's growing sense of self and their need for greater individual and group privacy'. His basic question, therefore, is 'how spatial segmentation is related to a deepening sense of self' (Tuan 1982).

In his chapter on the spatial evolution of the theatre, Tuan's approach is clearly relevant to any study of sport and society, stressing as he does, the change from public square (for sport, streets, fields and commons) to drawing room (and for sport, in- door halls and arenas), from participation to spectatorship, and from the tragedy and farce of human intercourse (in folk games) to the inability to connect (as in many modern sports). What is in- teresting in this respect is that Tuan does not place much emphasis on the use of spatial segmentation as a mechanism of power. The emphasis, instead, is focused on the breakdown of community. This is entirely relevant to the current situation in Europe- an football. The mingling of people on open and unconfined terraces at football grounds is gradual- ly being forcibly eliminated by the introduction of all-seat stadiums. The confinement of spectators to seats is a tactic which all major football clubs in Britain have had to undertake following the crowd disaster at Hillsborough, Sheffield, in 1989, where almost one hundred people died from being crushed against barriers intended to control the en- croachment of crowds on to the field. Seating was regarded as safer and more comfortable. It is not necessarily either. The necessity to buy tickets in advance means that one cannot be sure of sitting with one's friends. The spectator becomes isolated. The isolation of people from their groups by placing them in numbered seats mirrors exactly Tuan's point-the breakdown (literally) of community (Tuan 1982). Gregariousness becomes im- possible.




Fragment 4. Athletes as Pets; Stadiums as Gardens Sports conquer space by segmenting and territori- alising it. Sports conquer nature (physical and human) by turning it into stadiums and athletes. In his pessimistic book Dominance and Affection (Tuan 1984)-which he has described as one of his expressions of despair-Tuan draws our attention to the inevitability of power in a humanised world. His particular focus is human power over nature in its botanical and zoological forms. But the inevitability of power can be reflected in two ways, through dominance on the one hand and affection on the other. For Tuan 'affection is not the opposite of dominance; rather it is dominance's anodyne- it is dominance with a human face' (Tuan 1984). Power, therefore, can be directed towards pleasure as well as pain.

In the context of the landscape of sport Tuan's view of dominance and affection provides a powerful conceptual framework for exploring the emergence of a distinctive form of landscape devoted solely to sport. Such monocultural land use may be termed sportscape; it is analogous to the garden-a blending of nature and artifice. The human analogue of the garden is the pet, an appropriate metaphor for the modern athlete. Sport's im- pact on both the landscape and the human body is one of power. In many cases this can be in the form of affection, as when a lawn tennis court is lovin- gly tended and maintained or when an athlete is nurtured carefully by her coach in a trusted relationship of mutual respect and affection. On the other hand it can be one of true dominance-the construction of a new ski piste which totally and permanently damages slopes and vegetation cover, or the cruel trainer of a boxer who allows his charge to continue to fight until his health is impai- red. The fact that humanised landscapes, such as those of sports, can be much-loved places illustrates the ambiguous character of power over nature. This point tends to be ignored by 'deep-ecologists' who often see sport as inherently anti-nature (Gal- tung 1984). Tuan points to the inevitability of power in a humanised world; the basic problem for sport, as for everything else, is to see that it does not become over-humanised, or where dominance is not mitigated by affection.

Fragment 5. Sport and senses of place; topophilia and topophobia I have already noted that people may feel affection

for sports places. Tuan uses the term 'topophilia' to describe the sentiment which links affection with place or landscape (Tuan 1974). Tuan's interpretation of topophilia seems to encapsulate the feeling that many sports fans have for their 'home field'. In such contexts this is nothing less than the love of place. It is the intense affection that the Bri- tish football fan has for his (rarely her) stadium that, to an extent, explains the present geographical pattern of British football. The love of place demonstrates in many ways in the recent history of British stadiums. Such sentiment has been powerful enough to retain stadiums in locations thought by many to be no longer suitable. Planners have too often ignored the power of topophilia in drawing up prescriptions for new stadium locations.

The high cultural genre of poetry, as found in Bachalard's (1969) Poetics of Space, is hardly appropriate for capturing evidence of a sense of place in the context of sport. In popular culture evidence for topophlia has to be found elsewhere, for example by simply talking to people. Consider the views of a fan of Hibernian Football Club, an Ed- inburgh club which was faced with the prospect of leaving its 'home' ground at Easter Road Stadium. On hearing that the club would remain in its'home' fans' comments were typified by the following:

There is a rush of adrenaline every time I go through the gate. It's home from home. I feel more at home there than I do in my own home.

That piece of land is wrapped into my Sat- urday you know, in the sense that it is consist- ent with how I conduct Saturday-where I go before the game, who I meet up with, what time I leave (Mackay 1995).

In such comments we see the counterpoint to ster- ile sports space-that of a much loved place. De- spite the tendency towards placelessness or 'non- place', sports environments seem to constantly bear witness to the reassertion of the power of place in the face of tendencies to the contrary. It is this tension between place and space which would seem to be a necessary feature of any geographical theory of sport.

The dark side of a sense of place is topophobia. Unlike Bachelard who avoided a consideration of hostile places, Tuan devoted an entire book to Landscapes of Fear (Tuan 1979). Fear and spatial segmentation are related. As Tuan notes:



JOHN BALE

Generally speaking, every human made boundary on the earth's surface-garden hedge, city wall, or 'radar fence'-is an attempt to keep inimical forces at bay. Bounda- ries are everywhere because threats are ubiq- uitous: the neighbor's dog, children with mud- dy shoes, strangers, the insane, alien armies, disease, wind and rain (Tuan 1979 6).

Examples from sport are readily found; it is partly, at least, because of fear that we enclose many of the spaces inside our stadiums. After all, crowds are often perceived as dangerous and fearsome. If they are contained fear is reduced. Sports organis- ers fear snow and rain. As a response they enclose stadiums and arenas. The cordon sanitaire separat- ing the sports field from the spectators' enclosure in many stadiums is an example of the recognition of hostility and fear. Athletes fear another compet- itor interfering with their progress. To prevent this we segregate them in lanes.

As with many of Tuan's writings, most of the examples are taken from earlier times and modern places are all too often ignored. His book on 'topophobia' is no exception. Yet the idea of hostile and disliked places is particularly appropriate to the landscapes and places of modern sports. Sport-related fear ranges from the attitudes of residents who live near sports stadiums and for whom sport generates 'negative externalities', to parents who fear for the lives of children who may be lured into participation in life-threatening sports such as bo- xing, horse racing, rugby or motor racing. A friend of mine has a fear of 'stadiums and arenas, they are big ugly places, worse on sporting days when the areas become congested with loud people in loud machines'. A landscape of love for some becomes a landscape of fear for others. Fear in sport also oc- curs in the micro-spaces of the stadium as athletes prepare, in the labyrinthine under world of the stadium, for their event. A phenomenological treat- ment of fear in sport has yet to be authored but the very idea of malign landscapes, as presented by Tuan, would appear an eminently suitable conceptual framework for such a project.

Fragment 6. A Good Life? The questions which Tuan addresses in his essays cannot be said to be easy to answer. He does not dodge big questions. Consider, for example, what makes up a good life? This is an appropriate ques-

tion to apply to a life in sports, as it is elsewhere. How may we start searching for an answer to this question when supported by Tuan's thoughts?

Tuan regards popular attitudes towards the good life as being made up of two broad aspirations. The first is the search for certain environmental settings-the garden, the house, the city square. The aesthetic does matter; its opposite is a condition of living death, the anaesthetic. The second (which many people would probably put first) is a range of idealised activities. Tuan cites the farmer and what he can do for society as an example. In addition, the good life can be envisioned through philoso- phy which may start with an exploration of human nature itself. And what of the views of Utopian thinkers? How do they see a life where society has been changed for the better? It is not possible to examine the relevance of all these questions here. What I propose to do is to ask the question, what makes good body culture? I have deliberately avoided using the word 'sport' since this can be regarded as simply one configuration of body cultural practices (Eichberg, 1983 1989).

Certain individual experiences contribute towards this particular version of the good life. Among children there seems to be 'a common delight in bodily movement-a biological exuber- ance' (Tuan 1986 13). But for how long can delight be obtained from such movement? Delight dies when the child is forced to run. When the body is pressured delight turns to pain. And, as Tuan (1991) beautifully, but poignantly put it, 'in the adult's world, play often has to yield to necessity. There is still time for play, but under restrained cir- cumstances with a sort of lid placed on the l61an of imagination'.

An autobiographical exegesis. Playful physical movement in an aesthetically pleasing environment in which all the senses are stimulated is, for me, almost a paradigm of the good (sporting) life. I will attempt to illustrate this by exploring my own feelings about running in three different environmental settings. This narrative approach may be idiosyncratic; in seeking to identify my own feeling about the body, movement and landscape I bring Eichberg's idea of a trialectic of movement cultural configurations (Eichberg 1983, 1989) (Figure 2) into contact with Tuan's views of The Good Life.

My memories of three environments of running are as follows.




Figure 2. A personal running trialectic: seeking the good life.

Sport as

Achievement

RUNNING TRACK

//", Physical _Zen

Education sensuality

GYMNASIUM FIELDS, FOOTPATHS, FORESTS

i) The gymnasium: a landscape of fear. At my high school, physical education classes took place in a rectangular gymnasium with a hard floor, wall bars and numerous forms of gymnastic equipment. I have few memories of m- classes in this 'contain- er'. This may be because of the repetitive nature of the activities or because of the predictable character of the environment. In such a milieu running often formed a part of various other activities-running to do a forward roll or running to jump over a piece of equipment Other forms of running in- cluded sprinting fromn wall to wall for anaerobic conditioning and running on the spot to produce 'good' posture. My abiding memory is one of fear of hurting my body, of breaking an arm, or of bruising an elbow on the hard, unyielding surface.

My fear of the gymnasium can be attributed to one particular incident. At the age of about 13 I had an injection in my arm for immunisation against a dangerous disease. The injection left a scab of con- gealed blood on my arm. While in this condition I had to take a PE class which, on this occasion, in- volved learning how to do a hand-spring (or some such test of agility). In doing so I would be assisted by the teacher. When my turn came, I ran up to the carpet on which the spring would take place, put my hands on the ground and the teacher grasped my arm, intending to assist me in the execution of the exercise. In doing so, however, he removed the scab from my arm inducing (what seemed at the time to be) considerable pain. That may be a tiny

event in my body's history, but it made me fearful of gymnastics for the rest of my life. One learns one's attitudes towards activities-and, in passing, towards environments-through the body.

ii) Torture on the track. During my adolescent years I took running very seriously. I could say that my life was governed by a fetish of quantified running. I would endeavour to run on a 400 metre (or in those days, 440 yards) running track as often as I could. At that time the mania was for 'interval running'-described accurately by the neo-marxist, Bero Rigauer (1981), as a rationalised training method 'which coerces the athlete into continual repetition of the same precisely fixed and isolated narrow tasks'. I frequently finished such training sessions in a state of exhaustion, trying to vomit but unable to be sick. We learn through both the in- tellect and the viscera. Of course, the running track did not have the same fear for me as the gymnasium. But it was enclosed-by the accurately measured distances and times in which my body was constrained. My aim was to improve my times (I rarely won a race). Numbers, averages and tenths of seconds dominated my 'record book'. In a way the running track was a 'sacred place'-I was certainly drawn to it and did it produce over- whelming experiences-where the body's performance could be measured. The places at which I ran held a kind of 'fatal attraction'. To be sure, friendships were formed and camaraderie was



JOHN BALE

forged. But these too were subservient to achievement. And when I ran at the beautiful Stockholm Olympic Stadium it was the visual environment which was attractive, not the bodily experience.

Track running was supplemented with occasional cross country running or even running, like Roger Bannister, on the beach and neighbouring sand dunes. But this was not 'free running'; it too was a 'prison of measured time'; it was body culture as pain-and pain was regarded as a necessary prerequisite of successful training. It was a case of 'discipline and excel' (Heikkala 1993). While running in an environment like the forest or the sand dunes did not involve the unrelenting repetitions of 'interval running', it was a means to an end-the ultimate race, the horizon of a personal best. In any case, landscapes tended to be blocked out so that they would not interfere with performance.

iii) A runner's high. For the last fifteen years my running body has changed; so too has my running milieu. I now run according much more to the traditions of a 'Zen of running'. My record of my running is not any longer a well maintained statistical gazetteer. It would best be recalled by a series of visual images and bodily feelings; images of country lanes and sharply defined colours; smells of bluebells and cut grass; the soft cushion of the forest floor when I have been fortunate enough to run in a coniferous environment. Such running in- volves finding one's own way (not being depend- ent on a prescribed setting), at one's own speed. From time to time the sheer pleasure of running fast can be indulged; it can sometimes be enhanced by endorphins, inducing 'runners high'-a feeling that I can run for ever. In this configuration, running becomes a more private, mystical, sensuous experience in which one seems to feel at one with oneself and with the environment.

Indeed, it is this third form of bodily configuration which approximates to part of Tuan's summing up of The Good Life. He notes:

Consider those moments which seem to have only a sensual or an emotional-aesthetic character: for instance running barefoot on the sand as a child... Running at peak form indeed yields bodily pleasure, but it is also an embracing happiness, a reaching out to and an immersion in the world (Tuan 1986 157).

Despite the use of the term 'peak form', surely

Tuan is not talking here about competitive running or racing for achievement. This yields bodily pain, it is not immersed in the world-indeed achievement running seeks to wipe out the world and to produce neutral landscapes which cannot-and must not, according to rules of sports, interfere with performance. He is talking about running which takes in the environment, not rejects it; a running which does not have to be fast but allows time to take in, absorb, and revel in landforms of physical diversity, not feeling constrained by the geometry of the 400 metre track; a running which embodies, not disembodies. The fact that Tuan is an occasional spectator of sports, not a practition- er, may explain why he fails to give proper weight to pain and perhaps too much weight to beauty (Tuan 1995).

Conclusion In this essay I started with some comments on space; I then moved on to concentrate on place and landscape. This reflects, perhaps, a trend in both Tuan's academic career and in the recent history of cultural geography. It is a move from the hard to the soft, from the regular to the irregular, from the closed to the open. A geography of sport continues to display a tendency towards closure. 'Geogra- phers of sport' tend to be a close-knit 'specialty group', their studies often having avoided the in- sights provided by the broader field of cultural geography. A less myopic view might be attained by embracing some of the ideas suggested by scholars such as Tuan, as outlined above.

Tuan's writing 'manages to convey its most important ideas by saying little or nothing about them' (Relph 1994). He says virtually nothing about sport but who can deny the significance of his ideas to it? His work provides 'subtle messag- es' which, when applied, could, I believe, be highly apposite to the humanistic exploration of sport. For me his work points to a number of potential projects. For example, how might we identify 'sacred places' in a sports context, places which would be worth saving from topocide? How might we identify sporting landscapes of fear and what should be done about them? How might affection come to represent the principal form of power in sport, a form of culture which is so often charac- terised by dominance? What do growth and progress mean in sports? And, most important of all, what is the good sporting life?



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Acknowledgements I am very grateful to Victoria Berry (Georgia Southern University), Kenneth Olwig (Odense University) and Yi-Fu Tuan (University of Wis- consin) for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

John Bale, Department of Education, School of Social Sciences, Keele University, Keele, Stafford- shire ST5 5GB, UK, [email protected]

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Geografiska Annaler 78 B (1996) ?

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Article Contentsp. 163p. 164p. 165p. 166p. 167p. 168p. 169p. 170p. 171

Issue Table of ContentsGeografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, Vol. 78, No. 3 (1996), pp. 129-187Volume InformationFront MatterPatterns of Strategic Alliances among Information Technology Firms in the United States [pp. 129-146]Farming Practices and Environmental Problems in an Arid Landscape: A Case Study from the Region of Lambayeque, Peru [pp. 147-161]Space, Place and Body Culture: Yi-Fu Tuan and a Geography of Sport [pp. 163-171]Review ArticleReview: Institutions of Geography in Estonia [pp. 173-179]

Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 181-182]Review: untitled [pp. 182-183]Review: untitled [pp. 183-185]

Books Received [p. 187]Back Matter

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