The Practice of Sport as Political Expression?: Rock Climbing at Claret, France

A number of sporting activities are qualified today as `fun' or `Californian'. In contrast to the so-called `classical' sports, their practitioners value the game, the pleasure of being together, the humour and the shared emotions. These elements are indicative of their distancing themselves from the `serious' aspects of competitive sports, even as their activities are classified as futile, undemanding, marginal or even socially immature. This study, based on the ethnography of a small community of climbers who appropriated a cliff in the south of France, demonstrates that far from being futile, this activity is a theatre of social concerns which surpasses the practice of sport itself. In fact, if, on the one hand, conviviality, sharing and the play dimension of rock climbing unite some players in a community of belonging, on the other hand, the use of symbolic violence and the process of normalizing behaviour lead to the exclusion of `others' (those who do not `play the game of the place'). These phenomena are interrogated here because they demonstrate how, within the context of a sport, tensions occur between (free and equal) individuals and a community of belonging, thereby challenging contemporary ways of `living together'.