SOCI201 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Traditional Climbing, Georg Simmel, Argot

• School: University of Delaware
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOCI201
• Professor: Best Joel

Document Summary

Lisa m. bogardus examines the neglected issue of how participants define the informal rules of a self-governed sport. Georg simmel observed in 1895 that making mountains accessible to the masses comes at the cost of adventure the bolt wars are a battle for control of cliffs, most of which climbers do not own. Retro-bolting: the practice of adding bolts to established climbing routes in order to reduce risk. Alternative sports are windsurfing, snowboarding, and skydiving, generally share a highly masculine ethos that values some combination of risk-taking, prowess, individualism, hedonism, and creativity, and typically they are self-governed, self- organized, and anticompetition. A central theme in the research is how participants express their individualism in alternative sports while they simultaneously contribute to these sports" commodifications. Unlike sports in which a third party allocates space for practice and performance, alternative sports often must compete with other groups to use the same spatial resources.