Reading the sociological theory of play and sport "Huizinga"

Subject Areas : Sociological studies of sports

kamal javanmard ¹ (Department of sociology. Shahre qods branch. Islamic azad university. Tehran. Iran.)

Received: 2022-12-24 Accepted : 2023-03-06 Published : 2023-09-23

Keywords: Johan Huizinga, play and sport, sociology of sports, homo ludens,

Abstract :

"Huizinga" and the social genealogy of play and sportAbstract Purpose: "Johan Huizinga" introduces the game as a fundamental element of culture and civilization in the book "Homo ludens". Therefore, the purpose of this article is the social genealogy of games and sports with a sociological approach from the perspective of this sociology of sports, which considers plays to be ahead of culture and civilization. But he has a less optimistic view of sports and considers it a degenerate version of the play.Methodology: Based on the fact that the sociological analysis of the book “Homo ludens” written by Huizinga in 1938 is the focus of this article.Therefore, historical research method and library technique were used.Findings: Huizinga believed that play preceded all social phenomena.Because everything was a play in the beginning and these are the transformed forms of plays that were born in the form of plays. He believes that sports gradually lost its nature as a playe from the 1940s onwards.Conclusion: The book "Homo ludens" is a defensive manifesto to support the play and an indictment against sports. In this book, Huizinga considered play as the key to understanding cultures. By criticizing sports, he believed that modern society has distorted the spirit of plays. As far as signs of a devastating decline in gaming are concerned. He believes that politics and advertisements cast a shadow on sports and entered this arena in a hidden and creeping way And sports have diverted the cheerful spirit of plays and turned into a tool of domination.Johan Huizinga, the historian and sociologist of sport, introduced the game as a building block of human culture in his book Homo ludens, and argued that culture and civilization were essentially transformed forms of play and were born as play. He goes a step further and claims that the game is beyond the game and that everything was at the beginning of the play. To this end, in this article, we first review the biography and application of the ideas of this Dutch author, and then a brief overview of the classic and influential book "Homo ludens", which is a defensive manifest to support the game and a kind of indictment against sports. It was modern, we throw and then we define the play and the characteristics of this cultural phenomenon and with a dynamical cognitive and statistical approach to the analysis of the place of the play in the past eras. An excerpt from this article is devoted to the theory of "magic circle", which puts a temporary break in the world of actors' lives and temporarily fascinates them with a confrontational and imaginational atmosphere, and the end of this article is the sociology of political sport. His not-so-positive view of modern sports and the political structures and functions that have secretly and creepily entered the field of sports and destroyed the spirit of games as a means of domination.