From its very inception the Soviet state valued the merits and benefits of physical culture, which included not only sport but also health, hygiene, education, labour and defence. Physical culture propaganda was directed at the Soviet population, and even more particularly at young people, women and peasants, with the aim of transforming them into ideal citizens. By using physical culture and sport to assess social, cultural and political developments within the Soviet Union, this book provides a new addition to the historiography of the 1920s and 1930s as well as to general sports history studies.

Topics include: Clara Bow, Rudolph Valentino, Hollywood in the 1920s.

This book is the first to deal with physical culture in an Irish context, covering educational, martial and recreational histories. Deemed by many to be a precursor to the modern interest in health and gym cultures, physical culture was a late nineteenth and early twentieth century interest in personal health which spanned national and transnational histories. It encompassed gymnasiums, homes, classrooms, depots and military barracks. Prior to this work, physical culture’s emergence in Ireland has not received thorough academic attention. Addressing issues of gender, childhood, nationalism, and commerce, this book is unique within an Irish context in studying an Irish manifestation of a global phenomenon. Tracing four decades of Irish history, the work also examines the influence of foreign fitness entrepreneurs in Ireland and contrasts them with their Irish counterparts.

The work of French sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu has been influential across a set of cognate disciplines that can be classified as physical culture studies. Concepts such as field, capital, habitus and symbolic violence have been used as theoretical tools by scholars and students looking to understand the nature and purpose of sport, leisure, physical education and human movement within wider society. Pierre Bourdieu and Physical Culture is the first book to focus on the significance of Bourdieu’s work for, and in, physical culture. Bringing together the work of leading and emerging international researchers, it introduces the core concepts in Bourdieu’s thought and work, and presents a series of fascinating demonstrations of the application of his theory to physical culture studies. A concluding section discusses the inherent difficulties of choosing and using theory to understand the world around us. By providing an in-depth and multi-layered example of how theory can be used across the many and varied components of sport, leisure, physical education and human movement, this book should help all serious students and researchers in physical culture to better understand the importance of social theory in their work.

This book strives to unmask the racial inequity at the root of the emergence of modern physical culture systems in the US Progressive Era (1890s–1920s). This book focuses on physical culture – systematic, non-competitive exercise performed under the direction of an expert – because tracing how people practiced physical culture in the Progressive Era, especially middle- and upper-class white women, reveals how modes of popular performance, institutional regulation, and ideologies of individualism and motherhood combined to sublimate whiteness beneath the veneer of liberal progressivism and reform. The sites in this book give the fullest picture of the different strata of physical culture for white women during that time and demonstrate the unracialization of whiteness through physical culture practices. By illuminating the ways in which whiteness in the US became a default identity category absorbed into the “universal” ideals of culture, arts, and sciences, the author shows how physical culture circulated as a popular performance form with its own conventions, audience, and promised profitability. Finally, the chapters reveal troubling connections between the daily habits physical culturists promoted and the eugenics movement’s drive towards more reproductively efficient white bodies. By examining these written, visual, and embodied texts, the author insists on a closer scrutiny of the implicit whiteness of physical culture and forwards it as a crucial site of analysis for performance scholars interested in how corporeality is marshaled by and able to contest local and global systems of power.

Qualitative Research for Physical Culture is a practical guide to qualitative research methods in the multidisciplinary field of physical culture. This innovative, unique and clearly-written book provides a complete one-stop manual to designing, researching and writing an effective research project. The authors identify the '7 Ps' of research which allows the reader to navigate a clear pathway through the research process. The '7 Ps' are divded into three areas: - Design which examines the Purpose of using qualitiative methods; Paradigms of approach; and the Process of putting together a project - Doing which looks at a range of different methodological Practices and the Politics of Interpretation of such approaches - Dissemination which examines the Presentation of research and the Promise - how to judge the quality of research Exploring interviewing, textual analysis, narrative analysis and field methods such as ethnography, case studies and participatory action research, the text also includes invaluable advice on the writing process and how to critically assess the quality of research, and will be invaluable as a teaching tool or essential reference for experienced and inexperienced researchers alike.

This groundbreaking anthology provides a transnational view of the use of physical culture practices - to strengthen, discipline, and reimagine the human body. Exploring theses of colonialism, gender disparities, and race relations, this international examination of bodily practices is a must read for all sport historians and those interested in physical training and its meanings. Erudite, solid, enlightening, this is a truly valuable book for our field.

Focusing on Bernarr Macfadden, a bodybuilder turned publishing mogul, Shanon Fitzpatrick charts the rise and export of US mass media and consumer culture. Macfadden’s magazines—featuring fitness tips, celebrity gossip, and sensational “true” stories—created an enduring editorial template and powered worldwide demand for interactive American media.

This work examines the role of language in forging the modern subject. Focusing on the idea of the "New Man" that has animated all revolutionaries, the present volume asks what it meant to define oneself in terms of one's class origins, gender, national belonging or racial origins.

This book focuses on yoga’s transcultural dissemination in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the course of this process, the term “yoga” has been associated with various distinctive blends of mental and physical exercises performed in order to achieve some sort of improvement, whether understood in terms of esotericism, fitness, self-actualization, body aesthetics, or health care. The essays in this volume explore some of the turning points in yoga’s historico-spatial evolution and their relevance to its current appeal. The authors focus on central motivations, sites, and agents in the spread of posture-based yoga as well as on its successive (re-)interpretation and diversification, addressing questions such as: Why has yoga taken its various forms? How do time and place influence its meanings, social roles, and associated experiences? How does the transfer into new settings affect the ways in which yogic practice has been conceptualized as a system, and on what basis is it still identified as (Indian) yoga? The initial section of the volume concentrates on the re-evaluation of yoga in Indian and Western settings in the first half of the twentieth century. The following chapters link global discourses to particular local settings and explore meaning production at the micro-social level, taking Germany as the focal site. The final part of the book focuses on yoga advertising and consumption across national, social, and discursive boundaries, taking a closer look at transnational and deterritorialized yoga markets, as well as at various classes of mobile yoga practitioners.