Revisiting Weber's Concept of Disenchantment: An Examination of the Re-enchantment with Sailing in the Post-Communist Czech Republic

The significance of sport as a social practice remains hidden at the margins of sociology. This article aims to highlight the social significance of sport by providing a sociological interpretation of the transformations of sailing in Czechoslovakia, and later in the Czech Republic, following the Ve...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inSociology (Oxford) Vol. 43; no. 3; pp. 439 - 456
Main Author Numerato, Dino
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London, England SAGE Publications 01.06.2009
Sage Publications
Sage Publications Ltd
Cambridge University Press
Subjects
Boats
Committee meetings
Communism
Communities
Culture
Czech Republic
Economic change
Ethnicity
Ethnography
Field notes
Political Change
Political Factors
Political revolutions
Postcommunist societies
Recreation
Sailing
Sailing & sailboats
Sociocultural factors
Sociology
Sociology of knowledge and sociology of culture
Sociology of leisure and mass culture
Sports
Studies
Volunteerism
Weber, Max (1864-1920)
Czech Republic
Czechoslovakia
Czech Republic
sporting culture
disenchantment
enchantment
sailing
re-enchantment
political transformation
Weber (M.)
Sailing boat
Elitism
Post-communism
Sports
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:The significance of sport as a social practice remains hidden at the margins of sociology. This article aims to highlight the social significance of sport by providing a sociological interpretation of the transformations of sailing in Czechoslovakia, and later in the Czech Republic, following the Velvet Revolution of 1989. These sport-related changes are understood to be consequences of wider socio-cultural, economic and political transformations. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork of the Czech sailing movement I argue that during Czechoslovakia's communist period, a time when sailing was labelled pejoratively as a 'bourgeois sport', it actually experienced a 'golden age' of enchantment Based on Weber's concept of disenchantment and its subsequent developments in contemporary sociology, this article demonstrates how this earlier enchantment was jeopardized by disenchantment threats that occurred after 1989, and how sailing has once again been re-enchanted in the current period.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 23
ISSN:0038-0385
1469-8684
DOI:10.1177/0038038509103198