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The Game Notion of Legitimate Opposition · Jan 24, 11:25

Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play p.97

The selling of sports, however, although it often resulted in the direct ludic identity of the imperial sports teams, also led the colonials or Third World people to adopt the rhetoric of game superiority (called winning) that went with playing those sports; in the long run they sometimes successfully contested their overlords for that same glory. It is another paradox that the British imperial powers should use contestive games to sell their own rhetoric identity of moral gentlemanliness when they were also, less wittingly, selling the game notion of legitimate opposition.

Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play p.98

Perhaps it can be said that whenever one is taught and beaten at games by another group—whoever they are, masters, aliens, foreigners, adults, gangs, or the opposite sex—one’s own group frequently develops a desire to contest that superiority on the same playing field. This opposition is a public transcript widely shared by the world’s underdogs, and indeed it is a breach in the hegemony of the dominant groups, even though the playing of the same games is itself consistent with such hegemony (Scott, 1990). Many authors have seen the selling of sports as a facet of the extension of imperial hegemony or the capitalist way of life, work, and consumption. The problem is that the same imperial way of life in some places permitted different social classes or ethnic groups to compete for hegemony at least within the ludic sphere. And such participation is at the very least a form of enactive subjunctivity, with all its implied optimism and fantasies about the possibility of success.