Bancel, N.

Clastres, P.

Vallotton, F.

English

PubMed

Clastres, Patrick

Vallotton, François

Bancel, Nicolas

PubMed Central

Editorial: Youth, Young People, and Sport in the Twentieth Century

Serveur académique lausannois

EDITORIALpublished: 25 April 2022doi: 10.3389/fspor.2022.887919Frontiers in Sports and Active Living | www.frontiersin.org 1 April 2022 | Volume 4 | Article 887919Edited and reviewed by:Pirkko Markula,University of Alberta, Canada*Correspondence:Patrick Clastrespatrick.clastres@unil.chFrançois Vallottonfrancois.vallotton@unil.chNicolas Bancelnicolas.bancel@unil.chSpecialty section:This article was submitted toThe History, Culture and Sociology ofSports,a section of the journalFrontiers in Sports and Active LivingReceived: 02 March 2022Accepted: 09 March 2022Published: 25 April 2022Citation:Clastres P, Vallotton F and Bancel N(2022) Editorial: Youth, Young People,and Sport in the Twentieth Century.Front. Sports Act. Living 4:887919.doi: 10.3389/fspor.2022.887919Editorial: Youth, Young People, andSport in the Twentieth CenturyPatrick Clastres*, François Vallotton* and Nicolas Bancel*University of Lausanne, Lausanne, SwitzerlandKeywords: sport history, youth-young adults, twentieth century,WesternCountries and non,masculinization, sportpolicies, students, scoutingEditorial on the Research TopicYouth, Young People, and Sport in the Twentieth CenturyThe ten contributions in this volume were presented at the 23rd Congress of the EuropeanCommittee for Sports History (CESH) organized in September 2019 by the University of Lausanne’sInstitute of Sport Sciences (ISSUL) and the Social and Political Sciences Faculty (SSP). Our topicwas chosen in response to the fact that, even though sport is commonly associated with youth,few sports historians have focused on the issue of age. Indeed, research into the history of sporthas tended to concentrate on aspects such as sportspeople’s/spectators’ national, social, gender orracial identities, rather than on age/age groups. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule in fieldssuch as the history of physical education, the history of bodily and moral discipline policies and thehistory of supporters. Historians, sociologists, ethnologists and anthropologists have shown thatthe ages at which childhood and youth begin and end vary from one civilization to another, fromone social category to another, from one gender to another, and from one era to another.According to Mauger (2001), by declaring in 1978 that “youth is only a word,” Bourdieu (1978)was encouraging us to analyse the social and cultural differences between youths and not to seeyoung people as “a social unit, a constituted group, with common interests, related to a biologicallydefined age,” but as “an age of life”, i.e., a sequence of biographical trajectories. Our preliminaryquestioning owes much to the work published in 1996 by Levi and Schmitt (1996) who affirmedthat “the word “youth” has meaning everywhere and always, even if it takes on different names andcontents depending on the period” and “that among the common characteristics, we can retain thetransitory status, intermediate between childhood and adulthood, a brief period of learning (sexual,warlike, professional, etc.) and finally a status ofmargin.”So our general question was: What is the case from a sports perspective? And the crucialquestions that arise is first of all that of sources. As Sirinelli (2009) writes for the periods prior tothe nineteenth century, “for a long time a sociologically dominated category, youth was most oftenbarely audible to contemporaries and the traces left about it were external, coming, for example,from public authorities or from the sphere of knowledge development.” In the light of documents asrich as the Carnets de voyage dans les îles Britanniques (Clastres, 2023) or theMémoires de jeunessede Pierre de Coubertin (Clastres, 2008), or even the Diary of the 1896 Olympic tennis championJohn Pius Boland (Gillmeister, 2008), it would be interesting and useful to systematically collect thetestimonies left by the young practitioners themselves.At what age do children start and stop doing sport in different societies? Does giving up sportsignal entry to the adult world? Or into the world of seniors, considered too old for physicalexercise? Could doing sport be seen as a heuristic criterion for defining the transitional state ofyouth? Does one stay young into old age as long as one continues doing sport? Do boys leave theoften-maternal world of childhood games by adopting masculine sports rituals? Do girls adoptnew forms of exercise as they get older? Does physical exercise play a role in the strict separationbetween girls and boys or is there a degree of porosity?Where there are age distinctions with respectto sports, how did they arise? Do these age categories reflect age categories in the rest of societyClastres et al. Editorial: Youth, Young People, and Sport in the Twentieth Century(puberty, school, work, religion, citizenship), or are they specificto the world of sport? How and by whom are they definedand justified?Is it possible to identify “youth sports groups,” that is,communities of young people whose identity is based on theiryoung age and their sports activities? What becomes of thesecommunities of young sportspeople when their members becomeadults? Do they continue, dilute, evolve, break up, reactivate?Do young sportspeople feel particular emotions that are specificto their age? Once they become adults, how much nostalgia dothey retain for their sporting pasts? Do young sportspeople seethemselves primarily as sportspeople or as young people? Is therea methodological risk in reducing them to a single category, thatof “sportsperson,” when they also play other social roles in theirdaily lives? How, here like elsewhere, can age, social position andgender be articulated? What part do young people play in theinstitutions that run sport? Do young people take the initiativeto create clubs, leagues or federations? In the case of institutionscreated and controlled by adults, are young people’s voices heard.How are they viewed?In terms of other forms of power exercised by adultsover sporting practices (political, medical, educational, military,religious, professional), what impact do they have on youngpeople? How much freedom do they truly have? Is it, in fact,possible to explain the success of sport across the centuriesby the freedom young people draw from the statute of beinga sportsperson? But, paradoxically, do not these practicesalso, and sometimes simultaneously, have a normative, and/ordisciplinary dimension?YOUNG PEOPLE AND SPORT INNON-WESTERN COUNTRIESIn this volume, we also focus on a number of studiesdealing with the various sports activities intended foryoung people in non-Western regions and we wish torecall here the double contribution of British, Americanand French historiographies.Since the mid-1980s, Mangan (1986, 1989) has taken aninterest in the issue of sport within the British empire, in whichyoung people are the main actors. Research on the articulationbetween sport and religion has been carried out on a large scale,going beyond the role of Protestantism only, as exemplified by thework of Alpert and Remillar (2019). Inaugurating the traditionof the Postcolonial Studies in sports history, Appadurai (1996)highlighted in the development of cricket in colonial India.Anglo-Saxon historians did also investigate the Pacific regionlike Sacks (2019). American researchers claim a global vision ofthe mechanisms underlying the dissemination of sport amongthe young in colonized countries, like the synthesis on Gamesand empires directed by (Guttmann, 1994). Both Guttmann(1994) and Appadurai (1996)—while integrating the writingsof globalist Galtung (1991) evaluating “the sport system as ametaphor for the world system”—point out the hybridizationof sports practices by young athletes during the diffusion ofcricket throughout India. The valorization of the Americanresearch benefits from the efficient relay constituted by theJournal of Sport History. In volume 33, nr 1, published in2006, this journal applies a comparative perspective, entitled“Globalization as imperialism?,” to three case studies focusedon American, German (Pfister, 2006) and French (Combeau-Mari, 2006) colonization. Although Anglo-Saxon sports werereceived with a certain amount of reserve in China, they achieveda break-through owing to the militancy of the YMCA (Gems,2004). Researchers such as Cleveland et al. (2020) are currentlypursuing these perspectives with regard to the evolution of sportin Africa.Considering the francophone historiography, we mustconsider two pioneering works: Youssef Fatès’s new light on thecultural history of Algeria’s decolonization (1994; 2002; 2020),building on the pioneering work of Kaddache (1976, 2003), andBernadette Deville-Danthu’s (1997) PhD thesis defended twoyears before on the diffusion of military and school gymnasticsand modern sports in French Black Africa. This research wasfurther developed by Bancel (1999) in his thesis on youthmovements and modern sports in the same area. As for theAfrican Great Lakes region, we should mention Thomas Riot’sthesis on colonial Riot (2011). In their IJHS special issue on“post-colonial sports,” Frenkiel et al. (2015) continued thisresearch along the same lines. Several other studies present asimilar comparative approach. A relevant example is the specialedition of Outre-mers. Revue d’histoire entitled “Le sport dansl’empire français, un instrument de domination coloniale ?”under the direction of (Abassi, 2009). Addressing the issueof “cultural globalization” initiated by Singarevelou and Sorez(2010) revisited the question of the diffusion and local adaptationof modern sports by their young practitioners.FROM SCOUTING IN IVORY COAST TOSOVIET YOUNG ELITE ATHLETESThis collection of 10 articles covers a wide chronologicalspectrum, from the second half of the nineteenth centuryto the present day, and various European and non-Europeannational realities.The role of sport in the acculturation process of youth isfirst illustrated by the example of physical education in Prague,which highlights its essential role in both healthcare and militaryterms (Waie and Pavlu). Beyond the strict domain of primaryeducation, the Swiss example shows the role of gymnasticsclubs in the extension of the phenomenon both in terms ofgeographical and political areas and age groups (Mayencourt andQuin). With the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,the question of socialization through sport is approached viacultural mediators whose youth is an asset (Bourmaud) butalso, in the case of Theodore Roosevelt and his son hunting inAfrica, as the stake in a process of learning cultural as well asmoral values (Chasles). The crossroads between sport, youth andwar are dealt through the voluntary commitment of a youngSpanish swimmer, member of a workers’ club, who joins theFrontiers in Sports and Active Living | www.frontiersin.org 2 April 2022 | Volume 4 | Article 887919Clastres et al. Editorial: Youth, Young People, and Sport in the Twentieth CenturyRepublican camp at the time of the Civil War (Viuda-Serranoand Ibarrondo-Merino).Two contributions address the propagandist role of sportthrough the examples of the High School Secondary Studentscreated by the Peron government in 1953 (Hémeury) andthe scouting movement in Côte d’Ivoire before and afterindependence (Nicolas). However, their impact is balanced inthe first case by the autonomy of the institution from politicalstruggles, and the resistance that can be observed within the scoutassociation in the second. The Cold War issue is analyzed alsoin two articles. The first one highlights the role of sport withinthe World Festivals of Youth and Students which embodies aform of cultural diplomacy of the USSR and the communistbloc (Lesnykh). The second one focuses on the representationsof Soviet elite sport in its consequences for young athletes:beyond the Western narrative on the making of champions, thecontribution underlines the need for a broader contextualizationof these issues (Dufraisse). Finally, a contemporary ethnographicanalysis of the practice of twirling in Switzerland, a practice withlittle legitimacy that reinforces female stereotypes, underlines theneed to take into account the gendered dimension in order toapproach the general theme (Manh Ly).AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONSPC organized the CESH2019 Congress in Lausanne and designedthis special issue. NB wrote the first part of the Editorial. PC andFV edited most of the articles. NB wrote the paragraph titled“Young people and sport in non-western countries” and FV theone called “From scouting in Ivory Coast to Soviet Young EliteAthletes”. All authors contributed to the article and approved thesubmitted version.ACKNOWLEDGMENTSHere we would like to thank Prof. Bengt Kayser andProf. Emmanuel Bayle (ISSUL), the CESH Directing Council,and especially its president Mike Huggins and its secretarygeneral Daphné Bolz, our colleagues of the Scientific andOrganizing Committees, first of all Dr. Quentin Tonnerre, ourthree formidable keynote speakers, Ludivine Bantigny (RouenUniversity, France), Paul Christesen (Dartmouth College, USA)andHarald Fischer-Tiné (EPF Zurich, Switzerland), the reviewersand associate editors, and of course the ten authors and theFrontiers staff. May they all be warmly thanked here.REFERENCESAbassi, D. (2009). Le sport dans l’empire français, un instrument de dominationcoloniale ?. Outre-mers. Revue d’histoire, t. 96, n◦ 364–365, 5–15. Availableonline at: https://www.persee.fr/issue/outre_1631-0438_2009_num_96_364Alpert, R., and Remillar, A. (2019). God, Games, and Globalization: NewPerspectives on Religion and Sport. Macon: Mercer University Press.Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Bancel, N. (1999). Entre acculturation et révolution. Mouvements de jeunesseet sports dans l’évolution politique et institutionnelle de l’AOF (1945–1962).History thesis, Paris I University.Bourdieu, P. (1978). “La jeunesse n’est qu’un mot. Entretien avec Anne-MarieMétailié, ” in Les jeunes et le premier emploi (Paris: Association desÂges), 520–530,Clastres, P. (2008). Mémoires de jeunesse de Pierre de Coubertin. Paris: NouveauMonde éditions.Clastres, P. (2023). Les carnets de voyage de Pierre de Coubertin dans les îlesBritanniques. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes.Cleveland, T., Tarminder, K., and Akindes, G. (2020). Sports in Africa: Past andPresent. Athens: Ohio University Press. doi: 10.2307/j.ctv224tvfwCombeau-Mari, E. (2006). 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(2006). Colonialism and the enactment of German identity: Turnen inSouth West Africa. J. Sport History 33, 59–83.Riot, T. (2011). Sport et mouvements de jeunesse dans l’émancipation politique duRwanda colonial. Histoire d’une libération imaginée (1935–1961). STAPS thesis,Strasbourg University.Sacks, B. (2019). Cricket, Kiriti and Imperialism in Samoa (1879-1939).Londres: Palgrave.Singarevelou, P., and Sorez, J. (eds) (2010). L’empire des sports, une histoire de lamondialisation culturelle. Paris: Belin.Sirinelli, J.-F. (2009). “Préface,” in Jeunesse oblige. Histoire des jeunes en France,XIXe–XXIe siècles, eds L. Bantigny and Y. Jablonka Siècles (Paris: Pressesuniversitaires de France), 2.Conflict of Interest: The authors declare that the research was conducted in theabsence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as apotential conflict of interest.Frontiers in Sports and Active Living | www.frontiersin.org 3 April 2022 | Volume 4 | Article 887919Clastres et al. Editorial: Youth, Young People, and Sport in the Twentieth CenturyPublisher’s Note: All claims expressed in this article are solely thoseof the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliatedorganizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers.Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that maybe made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by thepublisher.Copyright © 2022 Clastres, Vallotton and Bancel. This is an open-access articledistributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided theoriginal author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the originalpublication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice.No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with theseterms.Frontiers in Sports and Active Living | www.frontiersin.org 4 April 2022 | Volume 4 | Article 887919

Editorial: Youth, Young People, and Sport in the Twentieth Century.

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Editorial: Youth, Young People, and Sport in the Twentieth Century.

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