Sport as a “calming culture”

Abstract

Erving Goffman's analysis, in his early stage of ‘cooling of the mark out’ views the handling of failure as something concertedly to be coped with. He suggests that the arrangements of everyday life contain built in cooling processes and the application of the cooling notion to a wide range of social life. Given this suggestion, an educational sociologist Takeuchi Yoh who taking an examination system as the example, says that the system is apparently filled up with the warm-up slogan but in fact, it is stationing prep students according to each one of real ability, so implicitly it cools them out. In this paper, also discuss a sport is the same as that examination system, and although it is visible like an agitating culture on a message level, if it sees by the function achieved to implicit is the meta-level, it is claimed that is the calming culture. One of the reason is that participants, excluding the professional elite of a sports event be father than the rating scale which is sorting out prep students convinced to the rating scale which classifies the victory or defeat. The second basis is the sports world which consists of framed reality and belongs to the domain of ‘jeu’ unlike the everyday ‘profane’ life world. The theories to which it otherwise referred are, the scrupulous argument on the routinization of charism by M. Weber, triadic model of ‘sacré·profane·jeu’ by R. Caillois and the theories about the latent functions of conflict by L. Coser. I want to also add the point that the suggestions about “nobility of failure” by Inoue Shun is a big hint to the last.