The possibilities and limitations of the hermeneutics of sports

Abstract

It is important to investigate what is meant by sport, a domain of physical culture, and how these meanings are interpreted by performers and researchers. The purpose of this study was to present a basic frame of reference for discussing symbolic meanings of sports. To gain the purpose, both the possibilities and limitations of interpreting the meanings of sports as texts written by performer's behaviors were examined from a hermeneutic perspective. Procedures adopted were as follows: First, the research trend of hermeneutics of sports was surveyed. Secondly, in order to illustrate the imagery of hermeneutics of sports, the Japan high-school baseball championships at Koshien was interpreted in accordance with the analytic methods of cultural hermeneutics. Thirdly, some problems in those methods were brought into relief. Finally, based upon the framework of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, it was concluded that the fundamental stance of hermeneutics of sports could be formulated as "hermeneutics of sport is to interpret playtext of sports in accordance with context and in conisideration of metatext". The concept "interpretation" was provided here as follows: 1. It premises an interpreter's Horizont (horizon) subject to Vorurteil (preconception). 2. It is a dialectic relationship between an interpreter and the object of interpretation, i.e., between Zugehorigkeit as nearness and Verfremdung as farness. 3. It is Horizontverschmelzung (fusion of horizon) between an interpreter and the object of interpretation. 4. It needs continual interpretative elaboration conformable to Hermeneutischezirkel (hermeneutic circle). 5. It must interpret sports not as brute facts but as soft data of sports which lie behind the hard data and thrust actually into a performer's behavior. There still remains, however, the problem of verification of interpretation as hermeneutic aporia. It would be necessary to apply hermeneutic methods continually to real sports situations for the further refinement of hermeneutics of sports.