Sport as a Life Strategy

From an Ethnographic Report on a Boxing Gym and Squatter's Life in Metro Manila, Philippines

Abstract

In existent studies, there are three sociological perspectives for capturing the relationship between poverty and sport: 1) sport as ‘opium’, 2) sport as an ‘arena for class struggle’ and 3) sport as a vehicle to create ‘open cultural space’. These three perspectives contain the presupposition that sport is a meaningful practice as long as it gives the poor opportunity for civic participation.
This study, which exemplifies how one boxing gym in Metro Manila creates a ‘buffer’ (Wacquant) for the boxers to survive their severe everyday lives, presents a different viewpoint which takes sport practice as a life strategy of the poor. This study tries to grasp pugilistic sense by re-constructing “the boxer's points of view” and discusses how an important social space is produced in the boxing gym.
From ethnographic descriptions, we utter the pugilists practice boxing to sustain the life of their families. Hence this study presents another perspective, which is that the poor take part in sports in order to keep their lives. Such a perspective makes it possible to rupture the existing paradigm of sociological study on sport in socio-economically poor societies.