![Samantha J. King
22
What is Cultural Studies and What is it Good For?
In vastly oversimplified terms, cultural studies draws on elements of sociology,
anthropology, political science and theory, literary and media studies, history,
semiotics, and philosophy to analyze cultural experiences, practices, texts, and
institutions. Cultural studies is therefore “not so much a discipline, but an area
where different disciplines intersect in the study of the cultural aspects of society”
(Hall et al., 1980: 7).
Most histories of the field point to its formation in post-war Britain and the con-
tribution of scholars Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson
to the radical rethinking of what cultural forms constitute legitimate objects of
study (Hoggart, 1957; Williams, 1958; Thompson, 1963). Instead of reducing
culture to canonical literary texts and works of art (“high culture”), these authors
argued for an understanding of culture as a “whole way of life” (Williams, 1958:
310). This opened the way for analyses of working-class and popular culture,
for explorations of the mundane and the marginal, and for discussions of the
variously oppressive and liberatory potential of cultural relations. Although early
work in cultural studies tended to focus on white, male, working-class culture,
the 1980s witnessed the widespread recognition that research in the field must
take seriously the intersection of relations of class with race, gender, sexuality,
and nation in shaping the experience and organization of everyday life.
Given the concern of cultural studies with the everyday and the ordinary, it
should come as no surprise that in addition to cultural forms such as clothing,
music, and popular media, sport emerged early on as a key site of analysis within
the field. Mirroring broader debates about how best to theorize the relationship
between “culture” and “society,” the connection between “sport” and “society”
represented a central problematic in initial work in sports studies.
Writing in 1982, for example, Paul Willis noted that much contemporary
physiological and sociological research on women in sport exhibited “the clearest
aspects of positivism in contemporary social research” (1993: 33). The research
to which Willis was referring centered on the ability of women to achieve in
sport and attempted to isolate a range of variables – physical and/or cultural
– that might explain particular levels of athletic achievement. Such “linear
determinism,” Willis noted, does not get us very far in understanding the
social meaning of a phenomenon. He wrote: “[T]o know, more exactly, why
it is a women can muster only 90 per cent of a man’s strength cannot help us
comprehend, explain, or change the massive feeling in our society that a woman
has no business flexing her muscles anyway” (Willis, 1993: 33). Even if it were
possible to identify all the relevant variables shaping the relationship of women
with sport, moreover, the number would be so large as to make plotting co-
variation and determination impossible. Beyond this, Willis noted, there is no
way to quantify cultural meaning as it is circulates through ideological systems,
social attitudes, and cultural values and, furthermore, cultural processes do not
operate in a unidirectional manner: “It is not the case,” he wrote, “that there is a](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1212595-250603075948-f20d278a/85/Qualitative-Methods-In-Sports-Studies-Sport-Commerce-And-Culture-1st-David-L-Andrews-36-320.jpg)
![Methodological Contingencies
25
To illustrate this point with reference to the field of sports studies, in the early
1980s, when the field was relatively young, and the history of modern sport
was inadequately theorized, scholars working in the cultural studies tradition
(particularly those located in Britain and Canada) produced a plethora of
Gramscian-inspired work (Cantelon & Gruneau, 1982; Gruneau, 1983; 1988;
J. A. Hargreaves, 1982a; 1982b; 1987; Ingham & Hardy, 1984). For Italian
theorist, socialist activist, and political prisoner Antonio Gramsci (1971),
hegemony was the consent given by the great masses of the population to the
ideological leadership exercised by the dominant group through the state as well
as civic and cultural institutions and processes. In this way, his writing challenged
those strains of Marxist thought that viewed the mode of production or the
economic base as producing and shaping all other elements in a social formation
– including culture – and in which there was little room for understanding
culture as at moments productive of economic relations as a potential site for
resistance to capitalist relations. Gramsci used hegemony to refer not simply to
political and economic control, moreover, but also to the success on the part of
the dominant group in projecting its own particular way of seeing the world
so that this becomes accepted as “common sense.” Because hegemony relies on
the consent of the dominated it was always, he argued, subject to contestation,
negotiation, and redefinition. Gramsci’s aim was to understand these complex
processes and the ways that culture was related to domination and resistance in
the service of change towards socialism (Hargreaves & McDonald, 2000).
Gramsci’s ideas enabled scholars to conceptualize the emergence of modern
sport in terms of a process of ongoing struggle, rather than either a “cultural by-
product of the technological and social changes associated with the development
of an urban and industrial society” à la modernization theory (Gruneau, 1988:
9), or a superstructural effect determined by capitalist relations of production
– the dominant approach among Marxist scholars of sport up until that point
(Brohm, 1978; Hoch, 1972; Vinnai, 1973). More specifically, Gramsci’s writings
held particular appeal for British scholars of this era because they helped
challenge orthodox Marxist theories – the inadequacies of which had become
apparent in the failure of the left to predict or forestall the popular appeal of
Thatcherism – while maintaining ideology, class analysis and political economy
as core concerns.
As the 1980s proceeded and the Reaganite/Thatcherite ideologies of self-
responsibility gained the status of hegemony, the body became the site of
condensation for a whole range of social anxieties. Fat bodies, crack bodies and
HIV-positive bodies all became symbols of failed self-discipline and what Susan
Willis terms the “hard body” emerged as the ideal against which these abject
bodies were measured (Cole, 1993). As this new social, political, and economic
formation took shape, many scholars in the cultural studies of sport and the
body turned to the writings of French philosopher Michel Foucault (particularly
Discipline and Punish [1979] and The History of Sexuality [1980]) to help “ground
their engagement” with this new set of conditions (Andrews, 1993; Bartky, 1988;](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1212595-250603075948-f20d278a/85/Qualitative-Methods-In-Sports-Studies-Sport-Commerce-And-Culture-1st-David-L-Andrews-39-320.jpg)
![Samantha J. King
26
Bordo, 1993; Cole, 1993; Hargreaves, 1987). While Gramsci’s insights into
cultural struggle remained key for understanding how one particular set of beliefs
about the body and sport gained dominance during late capitalism, Foucault’s
writings on normalizing power provided insight into the micro-level practices
through which individuals take up social norms in ongoing processes of bodily
management. Moreover, in articulating the pivotal place that the body occupies
in social relations, Foucault’s work proved indispensable to scholars in sports
studies who in the face of the emergence of the fit body as a primary emblem of
neoconservative ideologies of the period were faced with the realization that the
body had been neglected, if not erased, from research on sport (Andrews, 1993;
Cole, 1993; Hargreaves, 1987).
As this discussion makes clear, “from a cultural studies perspective ... one
never imagines that it is possible to theorize for all times and places” (Nelson,
1994: 202). While work in cultural studies is theoretically contingent, however,
it has been consistent, as Stuart Hall argues, in conceiving of the cultural realm
as a “constant battlefield” in which the constraining forces of social structures
vie with the creative impulses of human actors (1981: 233). As such, sports
studies research reflects the broader field and particularly the work of Stuart Hall
in attempting to move beyond more reductionist Marxist understandings of
the relationship between culture and society as economically determined and
cultural humanist approaches which, at the other end of the spectrum, argue that
there exists no necessary correspondence between different elements in a society,
or between the social structure/economic base and the cultural realm.
It would be beyond the scope of this chapter to explore questions about the
relationship of base to superstructure in any more detail, and at the risk of cari-
caturing both orthodox Marxism and cultural humanism, suffice it to say that
the contextual bent of cultural studies assumes that while there are no necessary
correspondences, there are always real or effective correspondences between
lines of force in a social formation.2
Thus, the meanings, effects and politics of
particular practices, texts and structures are never guaranteed and alternative
configurations of social relations are always possible.
More specifically, it is through articulation (the joining of two parts) that
social forces are connected and through disarticulation that social forces are
disconnected. Hall, drawing on Althusser, defines articulation as follows:
[T]he form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain
conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all
time. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made? So
the so-called “unity” of a discourse is really the articulation of different, distinct elements
which can be rearticulated in different ways because they have no necessary “belongingness.”
The “unity” which matters is a linkage between the articulated discourse and the social
forces with which it can, under certain historical conditions, but need not necessarily, be
connected. Thus, a theory of articulation is both a way of understanding how ideological
elements come, under certain conditions, to cohere together within a discourse, and a way of](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1212595-250603075948-f20d278a/85/Qualitative-Methods-In-Sports-Studies-Sport-Commerce-And-Culture-1st-David-L-Andrews-40-320.jpg)
![Methodological Contingencies
31
What it is/how it works What it isn’t/how it doesn’t work
Media Studies Interpretive and political approach
to analyzing media institutions,
practices, and products.
Deploys an apolitical conception of
communication with functional and
practical research objectives.
Rather than claiming objectivity
or an ability to record and measure
truth, concerned with how positivist,
objectivist research might collude
with dominant political and
economic systems.
Positivist and objectivist.
Draws on a structural and historical
model of ideology. For example,
the “criminal male athlete” – the
subject of numerous analyses in
sports studies – is not treated as a
“fact” consumed in the circuit of
public communication, but as a
relation “in terms of the social forces
and contradictions accumulating
within it ... or in terms of the wider
historical context in which it occurs”
(Hall et al., 1978: 185); that is, the
historical context is precisely what
produces the “criminal athlete.”
Acontextual reading of texts with
transactional conceptualization of
ideology in which the “criminal
male athlete,” for instance, is
treated as a fact that remains
as such “underneath” whatever
representations of it are circulated
through the public sphere.
Examples: Cole, 1997; Cole and
Hribar, 1995; Hartmann, 2001;
Howell, 1991; King, 2000; King &
Springwood, 2000; Maharaj, 1999;
McDonald, 2005; McDonald &
Andrews, 2001; Miller, 1998; Ono,
1997; Rowe, 1999; Sandell, 1995.
Personal
Narrative
Recognizes that narratives always
exist in tension with various other
accounts; that is, stories are not
stories in their own right – they don’t
claim to show a real, valid culture
underneath the official version
waiting to be revealed – but only
exist in tension with other stories
(Steedman, 1987).
According to Joan Scott,
accounts that use experience as
an authenticating source deploy a
“referential notion of evidence which
denies that it [evidence] is anything
but a reflection of the real” (1992:
24); that is, acontextual personal
narratives often fail to question
the truth of veracity of memory
and therefore of the account itself;
experience in this context becomes
incontestable evidence and the
foundation upon which analyses are
based.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1212595-250603075948-f20d278a/85/Qualitative-Methods-In-Sports-Studies-Sport-Commerce-And-Culture-1st-David-L-Andrews-45-320.jpg)
![Methodological Contingencies
33
What it is/how it works What it isn’t/how it doesn’t work
Experimental, artistic, public
political, interdisciplinary,
collaborative, inter-textual, multi-
vocal, participatory, interactive, and
always in progress.
Mainstream, scientific, private,
apolitical, disciplinary, individualist,
non-collaborative, unitextual,
univocal, unidirectional, complete.
Seeks to open the meanings of
research to the informants/research
subjects and to wide audiences;
the emphasis is on speaking “with
informants and audiences rather
than speaking for or about them”
(Mienczakowski, 1998: 117).
Dictatorial, purely academic,
objectifying.
mascots in the world of college and professional sports, Rosemary Coombe’s
(1999) “Sports Trademarks and Somatic Politics: Locating the Law in a Critical
Cultural Studies” highlights the vulnerability of such trademarks to political
critique and the claims of those they (mis)represent (i.e. Native Americans). As
such, her essay cautions us to consider the politically generative capacities of
sports trademarks (be they the Washington Redskins or the Nike swoosh) as we
might also struggle to abolish them.
Although these analyses demonstrate unambiguous political commitments,
we should be clear that to undertake cultural analysis and commentary is not
tantamount to undertaking political action. As Ian McDonald argues in an essay
on critical social research on sport and political intervention, to identify and
critically analyze dominant power relations can help create the possibility for
transformation, but it is not the same as “securing practical changes” (2002:
108). Describing his involvement with an anti-racism campaign in which he
was both an activist and researcher, he highlights the dangers that involvement
in activism can pose to academic integrity, but also the benefits that a symbiotic
relationship between the two can bring. He writes: “As an activist I knew that
academically sound research could be used as powerful evidence to pressurize
the ECB [English Cricket Board] into action. As a social researcher I was
committed to the production of knowledge that would expose and explain
injustice and unequal relations of power, and thus provide the possibility for
social change” (McDonald 2002: 114). Cultural studies, since its inception, has
been distinguished by its commitment to exposing dominant configurations of
power and it has done so by tracing the articulation of economic, political and
social forces in the cultural field. Cultural studies researchers should be aware,
however, that doing contextual analysis is not equivalent to rearticulating, in a
practical sense, those conjunctures of forces that produce the conditions under
analysis.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1212595-250603075948-f20d278a/85/Qualitative-Methods-In-Sports-Studies-Sport-Commerce-And-Culture-1st-David-L-Andrews-47-320.jpg)
Qualitative Methods In Sports Studies Sport Commerce And Culture 1st David L Andrews
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- 5. Qualitative Methods in Sports Studies
- 6. Sport Commerce and Culture Series ISSN: 1741-0916 Editor: David L. Andrews, University of Maryland The impact of sporting issues on culture and commerce both locally and globally is huge. However, the power and pervasiveness of this billion-dollar industry has yet to be deeply analyzed. Sports issues shape the economy, the media and even our lifestyle choices, ultimately playing an unquestionable role in our psychology. This series examines the sociological significance of the sports industry and the sporting world in contemporary cultures around the world. Previously published books in the series: Sport and Corporate Nationalisms, edited by Michael L. Silk, David L. Andrews and C.L. Cole Global Sport Sponsorship, edited by John Amis and T. Bettina Cornwell
- 7. Qualitative Methods in Sports Studies Edited by David L. Andrews, Daniel S. Mason and Michael L. Silk Oxford • New York
- 8. English edition First published in 2005 by Berg Editorial offices: First Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford OX4 1AW, UK 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA © David L. Andrews, Daniel S. Mason and Michael L. Silk 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg. Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Qualitative methods in sports studies / edited by David L. Andrews, Daniel S. Mason and Michael L. Silk. p. cm. — (Sport, commerce and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-85973-784-6 (cloth) — ISBN 1-85973-789-7 (pbk.) 1. Sports—Study and teaching. I. Andrews, David L. II. Mason, Daniel S. III. Silk, Michael L. IV. Series. GV361.Q35 2005 796'.07'2—dc22 2005017084 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13 978 1 85973 784 2 (Cloth) 978 1 85973 789 7 (Paper) ISBN-10 1 85973 784 6 (Cloth) 1 85973 789 7 (Paper) Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn www.bergpublishers.com
- 9. v Contents Notes on Contributors vii 1 Encountering the Field: Sports Studies and Qualitative Research Michael L. Silk (University of Maryland), David L. Andrews (University of Maryland) and Daniel S. Mason (University of Alberta) 1 2 Methodological Contingencies in Sports Studies Samantha J. King (Queen’s University) 21 3 The Socio-Historical Process in Sports Studies David K. Wiggins (George Mason University) and Daniel S. Mason (University of Alberta) 39 4 Sporting Ethnography: Philosophy, Methodology and Reflection Michael L. Silk (University of Maryland) 65 5 Interviewing for Case Study Research John Amis (University of Memphis) 104 6 Qualitative Methods in Sport-Media Studies Darcy Plymire (Towson University) 139 7 Sport and the Personal Narrative Pirkko Markula (Exeter University) and Jim Denison (University of Bath) 165 8 Performed Ethnography Heather Sykes (OISE, University of Toronto), Jennifer Chapman (Albion College) and Anne Swedberg (University of Wisconsin-Madison) 185 Index 203
- 11. vii Notes on Contributors John Amis is an Associate Professor at the University of Memphis, where he holds joint appointments in the Department of Health & Sport Sciences and the Department of Management. Amis’s current research interests are predominantly centered on organizational change and the identification, utilization and management of intangible resources. His work has appeared in journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, Journal of Sport Management, European Marketing Journal, European Sport Management Quarterly and Leisure Studies. He has recently published a co-edited collection (with Bettina Cornwell), titled Global Sport Sponsorship (Oxford: Berg, 2005). David L. Andrews is an Associate Professor in the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Maryland at College Park. He is assistant editor of the Journal of Sport and Social Issues, and an editorial board member of the Sociology of Sport Journal. He has published on a variety of topics related to the critical analysis of sport as an aspect of contemporary commercial culture. Jennifer Chapman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theater at Albion College. Her research interests include issues of gender and sexuality in theater and drama education, especially in relation to high-school drama curricula. Jim Denison is a lecturer in Coach Education and Sports Development at the University of Bath, UK. His first book, Moving Writing: Crafting Movement in Sport Research (Peter Lang), is a co-edited scholarly monograph outlining various ethnographic writing practices in sports studies. He has also published Bannister and Beyond: The Mystique of the Four-Minute Mile (Breakaway Books), a collection of in-depth interviews with a wide array of sub-four-minute milers; and The Greatest (Breakaway Books), the authorized biography of the Ethiopian long-distance running legend, Haile Gebrselassie. Denison is also the editor of The Coach, a bi-monthly magazine for track and field coaches. He is currently at work on a number of autoethnographic projects related to athletes’ and coaches’ experiences. Samantha King is an Assistant Professor in the School of Physical and Health Education at Queen’s University. Her research explores how individuals and populations are governed, within the realms of sport and health, through what are often described as “neoliberal” rationalities of thought and practice. As part
- 12. viii of this work, she has recently completed a manuscript titled, “Pink Ribbons Inc: Breast Cancer Culture and the Politics of Philanthropy.” A member of the editorial board for the Journal of Sport and Social Issues, her recent publications have appeared in Social Text, the International Journal of Sport Marketing and Sponsorship and the Journal of Sport and Social Issues. Pirkko Markula is currently with the Department of Education at the Uni- versity of Bath, UK. She is a co-editor with Jim Denison of Moving Writing: Crafting Movement in Sport Research (Peter Lang). She also edited Feminist Sports Studies: Sharing Joy, Sharing Pain (State University of New York Press). Her research interests include post-structuralist feminist analysis of dance, fitness and sport. In addition, she is interested in alternative ways of representing social science research, such as dance performance, performance ethnography and autoethnography. Daniel Mason is an Associate Professor with the Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation and an adjunct professor with the School of Business at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada. His research takes an inter- disciplinary approach and he has published in numerous journals, including Economic Development Quarterly, European Journal of Marketing, European Sport Management Quarterly, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, Journal of Urban Affairs, Media History, Sport History Review, Sport in Society and Urban History Review. In 2004, he was named a Research Fellow by the North American Society for Sport Management. Darcy C. Plymire is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Kinesiology at Towson University. Her interest in sport and media reflects her life-long love for sporting spectacles. When she can tear herself away from the mediated sport, she coaches girls’ field hockey and lacrosse at an independent school in the Baltimore, MD area. Michael L. Silk is an Assistant Professor and a member of the Physical Cultural Studies Research Group located in the Department of Kinesiology at the Uni- versity of Maryland. His work is committed to the critical, multidisciplinary and multi-method interrogation of sporting practices, experiences and structures. He has published a number of book chapters and journal articles in Media, Culture, Society, the International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, the Journal of Sport and Social Issues, the Sociology of Sport Journal, the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, Sport, Culture and Society, the Journal of Sport Management and Media Culture: A Review. Anne Swedberg is completing her dissertation with the assistance of an American Association of University Women fellowship. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is writing about the politics of power and representation in community-based theater. Notes on Contributors
- 13. ix Heather Sykes is an Assistant Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. She uses queer, psychoanalytic, feminist and postmodern theories to examine issues of gender/sexuality, embodiment and anti-homophobia pedagogy in physical education and sport. She has published articles in journals such as Sociology of Sport Journal, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education and Journal of Curriculum Studies, and is Editor of Curriculum Inquiry. David K. Wiggins is Professor and Director of the School of Recreation, Health, and Tourism at George Mason University. A specialist in sport history, he has published numerous essays in journals such as the Journal of Sport History, The International Journal of the History of Sport and the Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport. He is also the author of Glory Bound: Black Athletes in a White America (1997), co-author of The Unlevel Playing Field: A Documentary History of the African American Experience in Sport (2003); editor of Sport in America: From Wicked Amusement to National Obsession (1995) and African Americans in Sports (2004); and co-editor of Ethnicity and Sport in North American History and Culture (1995) and Sport and the Color Line: Black Athletes and Race Relations in Twentieth-Century America (2004). Notes on Contributors
- 15. 1 1 Encountering the Field Sports Studies and Qualitative Research Michael L. Silk, David L. Andrews and Daniel S. Mason The academic discipline known as “sports studies” has evolved over the last few decades into an eclectic mix of research ideologies and viewpoints that seek to critically investigate the role, effects and position of sport within broader society. Contextualizing sport within networks of political, economic and social linkages, the field of sports studies critically interrogates the sporting empirical and attempts to provide comprehension of the dynamism and complexities of cultural life. Such an approach is one that recognizes the creative and contextual character of human interaction (Hammersley, 1989), a position that centers on research designs suited to studying performative human beings in their lived (physical) cultural domains. As the following chapters will show however, the field has developed a number of (at times, conflicting) viewpoints on the nature of research, the types of research questions that are asked, and the manner through which these questions can be explored. In many instances, these views have been taken from broader, parent disciplines, such as history, cultural studies, cultural geography, management, psychology, and/or sociology, and have been held by scholars in traditional kinesiology/physical education/sports studies programs, or by scholars in parent disciplines who have chosen to focus on sport in their research. Locating sport – as a cultural form within which the production of knowledge and identities takes place – within the material and institutional contexts that structure everyday life provides the underlying site for the critical interrogation of sporting experiences, forms, meanings, structures, and practices. No longer marginalized as a second-rate field of study within academe, and indeed taking a central role in a symbolically oriented, global, entertainment economy, the study of sport must now be taken seriously. Sport provides the site for critical interroga- tion through a variety of theories or “lenses,” a space that has been characterized by a broad spectrum of research approaches, interdisciplinarity, flexibility, and, as Samantha King indicates in the second chapter of this volume, a methodological contingency that can allow the researcher to employ the tools suitable for critical interrogation of the particular sporting phenomena under investigation.
- 16. Michael L. Silk et al. 2 Unfortunately, the diversity of interests, ideologies and methodologies be- tween sports studies scholars has lead to isolation in the evolution of some of the research that has been conducted in this field (see for example, the discussion of the relationship between sport historians and sociologists in Chapter 3). A result has been the development of a strong body of literature that has been fragmented and lacks the unity of interests found in other social disciplines. Thus, students and/or aspiring scholars may find their initial forays into the realm of research in sports studies a daunting task. In this sense, students and scholars are often faced with determining how to conceptualize and analyze the complexities of the “constant battlefield” (Hall, 1981) of the (sporting) world, while at the same time recognizing that they are participating in this world, and thereby shaping it (Slack, 1996). Further, concerns over deciding what questions to ask and how to go about answering them abound, as do issues concerning methodological approaches that would suit an aspiring scholar’s ideas about what questions should be asked and how they should be answered. Typically, students can start to address these issues by taking courses in research design within their respective institutions, which mostly rely on a number of quality, established texts that discuss qualitative research method and design, such as those written by Denzin and Lincoln (2000a), Berg (2001), Creswell (1994), Burton (2000), Denscombe (1998), Silverman (2000) and Yin (1994), or journals that, relatively recently, have treated qualitative research as a field in its own right (e.g. Qualitative Inquiry, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies). However, while these texts are critical in providing a foundation, and indeed for teasing out the complexities of the field, for students who seek to use qualitative research methods in their research, there still exists a knowledge gap between the research strategies learned in these and how they have been specifically applied within the sports studies context. This volume thus provides a modest attempt to fill this gap by bringing together a number of varying research approaches to the critical interrogation of the contextually grounded sporting empirical. Given the breadth of research areas within sports studies, and the varying methods used within each, it would be beyond the scope of any book to provide representative examples of all of the strategies used within sports studies. Instead, we have sought to present a small sample of the ways in which certain methods, designs and approaches can illuminate the investigation of physical human beings in their cultural worlds. The contributors offer an array of qualitative approaches that can be used to shed light on the sporting empirical – this volume thus provides a space for the connections between various research strategies, methods, paradigms, histories and communities of those involved in contextual sports studies. In doing so, we hope to provide a supplementary text for courses exploring qualitative research methods and designs that allows students to get a closer look at how some of the varying approaches have been employed in research being done in the field, written by those who have had first-hand experience with a given approach.
- 17. Encountering the Field 3 Encountering the Field: A Brief Genealogy of Qualitative Research The emergence and utility of qualitative research were not universally embraced by scholars attuned to the rigor and mechanics of positivism. Denzin and Lincoln’s (2000b) genealogy of qualitative research outlines seven moments that have impacted upon the critical analysis of human beings in their contexts. Such a genealogy is, as Denzin and Lincoln (2000b) suggest, socially constructed and quasi-historical; these moments overlap and simultaneously operate within the present. Nonetheless, these moments provide an excellent sketch of the emergence of qualitative research and the nuances, contradictions and increasing sophistication of the field, and provide the underpinning for consideration of a contemporary contextual sports studies. While we cannot do justice to the history of qualitative research, or indeed the genealogy provided by Denzin and Lincoln (1994; 2000a; 2000b), it is important to briefly summarize these moments for they build toward a “conceptual framework” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000b: 2) for qualitative research within the field of sports studies. This historical field consists of the traditional, the modernist, blurred genres, the crises of representation, the postmodern, post-experimental inquiry and the future. The traditional period, not surprisingly given its specific socio-historical location, was characterized by often misguided attempts to objectively analyze “other” or “exotic” human beings in colonized settings. The modernist phase was dominated by the collection of qualitative data which researchers attempted to fit to the canons of positivism (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994; 2000b). The blurred or interpretive genres phase drew upon a range of often competing theoretical narratives (e.g. symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, neo-Marxism, feminism, racial and ethnic theories) that bought into question the “golden age” of social science (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000b). Following from the blurred genres phase, the crisis of representation began to address questions of race, gender and class, making writing more reflexive and rupturing foundational concepts such as validity, reliability and objectivity. The “crisis” referred to the researcher’s authority and ability to write the experience of the “other” (and indeed the separation of the researcher/ other) and the recognition that this experience is created in the text “written” by the researcher (Richardson, 2000a). Postmodern influences have produced new expressions of qualitative data such as fictional ethnographies, ethnographic poetry, self narratives, performance pieces and multi-media texts (Denzin, 1997; Denzin & Lincoln, 2000b). The sixth moment asks that the social sciences and the humanities become sites for critical conversations about democracy, race, gender, class, nation-states, globalization, freedom and community (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000b), while the “future,” according to Denzin and Lincoln (2000b: 3) is the current temporality “concerned with moral discourse and the development of sacred textualities.”
- 18. Michael L. Silk et al. 4 The Promise of a Contextual Sports Studies: Paradigms, Potentialities and Pitfalls Denzin and Lincoln’s (1994; 1998; 2000a; 2000b) moments are not necessarily directional, or a purview for the way contemporary qualitative research ought to be carried out. Rather, as we indicated above, qualitative research is char- acterized by all of these overlapping “moments” simultaneously operating in the present (Atkinson et al., 1999; Denzin & Lincoln, 2000b) and pointing towards an increasing sensitivity to the promises of qualitative research within sports studies. A contextual sports studies that places sport within the material contexts of everyday life can become an important site for critical conversations about cultural politics and multiracial, economic, and political democracy – conversations that address the imperatives of consumption, the dynamics of the marketplace, commercial space, the sweeping reach of neo-liberal ideology, power and influence, the production of knowledges and identities, nation-states, globalization, freedom and community (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000b; Giroux, 2001). Further, qualitative research speaks to the varying roles of contextual sports studies researchers, the civic and political responsibilities assumed through their roles as engaged critics and cultural theorists, forms of intervention, and pedagogical practices that are interdisciplinary, transgressive and oppositional (Giroux, 2001). Thus, qualitative researchers in sports studies can engage in concrete steps that will “change situations” and potentially “bring new value to identities and experiences that are marginalized and stigmatized by the larger culture. They will demonstrate how particular commodities or cultural objects negatively affect the lives of specific people. They indicate how particular texts directly and indirectly misrepresent persons and reproduce prejudice and stereotypes” (Denzin, 2002: 486). This is a contextual sports studies that can, and should, “take sides” (Denzin, 2002: 487), revealing through multifarious forms of (re)representation the shifting oppressive structures of global and local capitalism and how the (sporting) media reproduce gender, racial, sexual orientation, and social class stereotypes and even contribute to consumer practices that are harmful to personal health and the environment (Denzin, 2002). In so doing, this is a contextual sports studies that engages in social critique and moral dialogue, identifying the different relations of cultural capital that operate in specific cultural contexts, offers programs and recommendations for change, and holds the researcher accountable for the moral and personal consequences of any particular instance of advocacy (Denzin, 2002). Given the potential of qualitative research for a contextual sports studies, the chapters in this volume offer a variety of strategies, methods of inquiry and expressions of “data.” These contributions reflect a variety of perspectives and suggest that qualitative research in sports studies is shaped, refined and recreated by diversity, controversies and continuities from the past (Atkinson et al., 1999). These rich and turbulent histories provide the (ever changing) parameters for what is currently considered qualitative research. Given that a definition
- 19. Encountering the Field 5 of qualitative research is essentializing and thus grounded within a particular historical conjecture it is somewhat problematic to “define” what is meant by the term. Recognizing that qualitative research will mean different things in the future, as it did in the past, Denzin and Lincoln (2000b: 3) offer the following account: Qualitative research is a situated activity that locates the observer in the world. It consists of a set of interpretive, material practices that make the world visible. These practices transform the world. They turn the world into a series of representations, including field notes, interviews, conversations, photographs, recordings and memos to the self. At this level, qualitative research involves an interpretive, naturalistic approach to the world. This means qualitative researchers study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or to interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them. This definition of qualitative research is clearly guided by paradigmatic assump- tions, values and beliefs that work against (or alongside, or even, at times, within) positivist and post-positivist models (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000a). Indeed, the paradigms that structure qualitative research work within relativist ontologies (multiple constructed realities), interpretive epistemologies (where the knower and the known interact and shape one another) and interpretive, naturalistic (in nature) methods (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000a; Lincoln & Guba, 1985; 2000). The critical interrogation of the sporting empirical, by its very nature, cannot treat the dynamism and complexities of the physically active human being as a set of static, isolatable, measurable, mechanical, artificial and observable variables (Atkinson & Hammersley, 1994; Hammersley, 1989). Rather, to capture the essence and contexts of the sporting empirical, research needs to recognize the fluid and intricate interactions between people and the socio-historical worlds in which they exist. This recognition speaks to a deeply entrenched, and at times quite bitter, battle within the field of research design – the debate over legitimate, or “valid,” research designs and methodologies – often manifested in a crude paradigmatic positivism versus interpretivism. Of course, methodologies are commensurate with particular paradigmatic stances, thus prior to addressing particular methodologies there is a need to understand how they are interwoven with, and emerge from, the nature of particular disciplines and perspectives (Lincoln & Guba, 2000). It was the work of Thomas Kuhn (1962) which brought the concept of the paradigm into the popular lexicon of research design. Kuhn (1962) suggested that a paradigm is the entire constellation of beliefs, values and techniques shared by the members of a given scientific community. Of course, paradigms are human constructions, yet nonetheless provide the basic set of beliefs that guides the researcher (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000a). In essence, Denzin and Lincoln (2000a) propose that a paradigm encompasses axiology (questions of ethics within the social world), ontology (the nature of reality and the nature of the human being in the world), epistemology (how I know the world and the relationship between the knower
- 20. Michael L. Silk et al. 6 and the known) and methodology (the best means for gaining knowledge about the world). The history of research design has been plagued by (an almost redundant) quest by various groups of scientists to “prove” that their way of conducting research is the correct, and thereby only, way to investigate the matter at hand. Technical or physical scientific thought dominated these debates which appropriated a particular dominant approach to studying human beings. This approach, taking place within the positivist paradigm, is based on decontextual, formal and standardized experimentalism that seeks to analytically separate distinct variables in an effort to prove causality – cause and effect. In other words, through formal measurement and conceptualizing the social world as a system of variables, positivism seeks facts or causes of certain phenomena, a truth that can be objectively obtained through the rigorous testing of hypotheses. As such, positivist researchers distance themselves from the particular phenomena under investigation, searching for a reality that is entirely independent of our opinions about certain phenomena. We can term this a positivist ontology – a measurable and objective reality that determines a universal truth. This positivist ontology thus provides the permit for scientists to go about their daily lives, investigating isolated variables in relation to the cornerstones of scientific faith – universal truth, validity, reliability, generalizability. Of course, this perspective lends itself to certain ways of knowledge generation – often termed “epistemology.” As such, a positivist epistemology is centered on controlled data collection, objective distance between the researcher and the subject, quantitative measurement, hypothesis testing and statistical analysis to prove causality. Given that human behavior is not reducible to fixed patterns, and that it is shaped by, and in turn produces (sporting) cultures, positivist science is not well suited to capturing the myriad perspectives of those in the social world, the contextual character of human interaction (Hammersley, 1989) and thereby the network of political, economic and social linkages that produce, and give meaning to, the sporting empirical. Such a position does not reject outright, the important contributions of positivist science to the understanding of our life worlds; however, it does reject the position that for so long dominated the study of human beings, that positivism was the only way to critically interrogate human beings (Atkinson & Hammersley, 1994; Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995; Harding, 1986; Maguire, 1991) – a position that dominated, and perhaps to some degree still does, “sports studies,” kinesiology and physical education departments throughout the world. The recognition of the limitations or pitfalls of positivism frames the rich, and often troubled, history of the emergence of qualitative designs and methods that aim to recognize the central importance of human action and meaning in the construction of the social world (Hollands, 1985). Challenges to the positivist hegemony began to emerge around the beginning of the twentieth century, and centered on a different set of ontological and epistemological propositions that framed the type of research methodologies employed. Rather than a quest for universal truths or laws, and a distinctly artificial and static
- 21. Encountering the Field 7 laboratory environment, there was the belief that the social world should be studied in its natural, as opposed to artificial, state (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995). This approach was thus rooted, from the outset, in a doctrine that surpasses: “the notion that the world is a value free, objective, experiential realm that can be reduced to neat rows and columns of numbers ... in a very basic sense, qualitative methodology plays with words instead of numbers. It is an intellectual field in which language is stretched, moulded and turned on itself, but where numbers evoke – not without reason – anal, male forms of power” (Lewis, 1997: 86). In this sense, rather than suggesting that “reality” or truth will be the same for everyone (positivist ontology), the interpretive project is founded upon the premise that the social world is complex, that researchers and subjects are fundamentally and subjectively attached to the world, and that people define their own realities. In the quest for knowledge then, the interpretive project – a pursuit in understanding the particular behaviors, meanings and realities of individuals within particular social settings – is distinct from its positivist sibling. As opposed then to strict, laboratory standards, qualitative methodologies centred on observation, texts, conversation, interpretation, narrative, writing, performance, and small-scale and local interaction, tend to dominate – a set of approaches to gathering knowledge of the social world that are more fluid and flexible, and often emerge as the project unfolds. Lincoln & Guba (2000) suggest that the paradigms that provide the structure for qualitative research take as their primary field of interest subjective and intersubjective social knowledge and recognize that the active construction and co-creation of such knowledge by human agents is produced by human consciousness. As opposed to positivism and post-positivism, the metaphysics of the constructivist paradigm assumes a relativist ontology, a subjectivist epi- stemology and a naturalistic set of methodological procedures – the orientation is thus to the production of reconstructed understandings of the social world (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000a). In a sense, this epistemological approach towards the social world can be characterized as hermeneutic in that to offer an under- standing of a particular action requires an emphasis upon grasping the situation in which human actions make or acquire meaning (Schwandt, 2000). Indeed, a contextual sports studies, in many ways, draws upon the hermeneutic circle that suggests to understand the part (the specific) there needs to be comprehension of the whole (context, beliefs, desires of the text, practices, forms of life, language, beliefs and so on) (Schwandt, 2000). In essence, the hermeneutic circle thus requires a “continuous dialectical tacking between the most local of local detail and the most global of global structure in such a way to bring both into view simultaneously . . . Hopping back and forth between the whole conceived through the parts that actualize it and the parts conceived through the whole which motivates them, we seek to turn them, by a sort of intellectual perpetual motion, into explications of one another” (Geertz in Schwandt, 2000: 93). “Data” are thus ground in context, while credibility, transferability, dependability, trustworthiness, conformability and reciprocity replace the usual positivist criteria
- 22. Michael L. Silk et al. 8 of internal and external validity, reliability and objectivity (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000a; Harrison et al., 2001). Existing alongside the constructivist paradigm is the participatory paradigm. The participatory paradigm suggests a participative, co-created, subjective– objective reality (ontology), an experiential, propositional, practical epistemology producing co-created findings, and a practical methodology centered on political participation in collaborative action inquiry and a language that is grounded within a shared experiential context (Heron & Reason, 1997; Kemmis & McTaggart, 2000; Lincoln & Guba, 2000). Participatory research is characterized by researchers entering into interactive relations with research participants in some or all phases of the research. Clearly eschewing many of the last vestiges of positivism, the co-participation and co-constriction of knowledge can take place throughout the research process, including: collectively deciding on relevant research questions, determining appropriate data collection methods, collaboratively analyzing the results, and communicating the findings (Frisby et al., 2005; Greenwood et al., 1993; Reid, 2000; Ristock & Pennell, 1996). The participatory paradigm is a relatively new approach in qualitative inquiry generally, and has only recently begun to make an impact within sports studies. In particular, it is in the pioneering work of Wendy Frisby and colleagues (Frisby et al., 1997; Frisby et al., 2005), who have utilized participatory forms of research to ensure relevance (to the community under investigation), trustworthiness of the data, and that research projects in sport are conceptualized and conducted with the aim of improving the human condition. Existing alongside these paradigms are a series of perspectives – each with its own criteria, assumptions and methodological practices – which are not as well unified or solidified as the paradigms (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000a). Privileging a materialist–realist ontology centered on a recognition that the real world makes a material difference in terms of race and gender, feminist, ethnic, Marxist, cultural studies and queer theory models (all of which are multiple projects) proffer a subjective epistemology and naturalistic (often ethnographic) methodologies (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000a). Under the influence of post-structural and postmodern sensibilities, the social text is itself problematized given the inability to fully represent the world of lived experiences; as such, works that emphasize reflexivity, that are multivocal, that are ground in the experiences of oppressed peoples and that focus on emancipation are produced (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000a). Doing Contextual Sports Studies Despite important differences among paradigms and a recent conceptual blurring (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000a; Fine et al., 2000; Lincoln & Guba, 2000) between paradigms, the qualitative researcher cannot afford to be naïve to the axiological, ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions of each. As research becomes increasingly interdisciplinary, and given the recognition that all
- 23. Encountering the Field 9 truths are “partial” and “incomplete” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000a), the researcher is being freed from the shackles of a single way of seeing the world. As Lincoln & Guba (2000) suggest, the various paradigms are beginning to interbreed – such that two theorists previously thought to be in irreconcilable conflict may now appear, under a different theoretical rubric, to be informing one another’s arguments. As such, it is time to shift the argument away from how different paradigms structure our efforts to “do” qualitative inquiry and which “label” best suits us. Instead, and as Schwandt (2000: 204) proposes, we should focus on the choices about how each of us wants to live the life of a social inquirer in terms of practical and moral knowledge – “how should I be towards these people I am studying?” This question of course raises a number of issues in respect to our differential quests, and indeed the underpinning reasons of our efforts, to critically interrogate the physically active, and socio-historically contextualized, human being. These issues therefore form the balance of this chapter, and indeed, the other chapters in this book. In the spirit of Denzin and Lincoln’s (2000c) call to “get on with it,” and in an effort not to get caught in “prescribing” a “right way” to investigate the sporting empirical – every researcher will develop their own axiological, onto- logical and epistemological stances – we would like to devote some space to consideration of what a qualitative approach to sport might look like. Again, it is important to reiterate that we are not proposing to provide the “correct” or “only” way to address the sporting empirical; rather, the individual researcher will approach the social world with their own political, moral, ethical, ontological and epistemological positions that will inform the particular methodological strategies to be deployed. However, and in an attempt to aid us in recognizing the potential influence of our investigations and, of course, the (re)presentations of such investigations – whether written, performed, poetic, visual, auditory or involving a combination of these or some other forms – we draw on the work of Michelle Fine and colleagues (2001), who provide tentative “guidelines” for the qualitative researcher. These guidelines are useful across, between and beyond approaches to the sporting empirical and offer a lucid starting point for the critical interrogation of the sporting world. Fine and her colleagues propose a set of questions that each researcher may well ask of themselves as they conduct qualitative research. No matter the specific methodological approaches deployed as part of the armory of the qualitative researcher as bricoleur – an interdisciplinary jack of all trades (see Denzin & Lincoln, 2000b; Kincheloe, 2001; Lincoln, 2001) – the following list perhaps provides an idea of the life worlds, and indeed challenges, facing the qualitative researcher. Such a list, far from exclusive, and operating across paradigmatic (or not) boundaries, provides a useful point of departure for the qualitative researcher: 1. Have I connected the voices and stories of individuals back to the set of historic, structural and economic relations in which they are situated? (Is the sporting empirical addressed in context?)
- 24. Michael L. Silk et al. 10 2. Have I deployed multiple methods so that very different kinds of analysis have been constructed? 3. Have I described the mundane (as opposed to the unique or startling)? 4. Have some informants/constituencies/participants reviewed the material with me and interpreted, dissented, challenged my interpretations? And then how do I report these disagreements in perspective? 5. How far do I want to go with respect to theorizing the words of informants? 6. HaveIconsideredhowthesedatacouldbeusedforprogressive,conservative, repressive social policies? 7. Where have I backed into the passive voice and decoupled my responsibility for my interpretations? 8. Who am I afraid will see these analyses? Who is rendered vulnerable/ responsible or exposed by these analyses? 9. What dreams am I having about the material presented? (What issues am I pulling from my own biography and what emphasis have I given these?) 10. To what extent has my analysis offered an alternative to the common-sense or dominant discourse? What challenges might very different audiences pose to the analysis presented? (Adapted from Fine et al., 2000: 126–7) Clearly, such a list not only frames qualitative inquiry, but embodies a set of self- reflexive points of critical consciousness around how to “represent responsibility” (Fine et al., 2000: 108) and thereby transform public consciousness and common sense about the sporting empirical. Qualitative inquiry into the sporting empirical then is more than methodology alone; it is bound with a set of questions to do with oppression, marginalization, subordination, politics, the economy, crisis, morality, the status quo, the personal, the public and the private – it is a civic, participatory, collaborative project ensconced in moral dialogue (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000c). In locating, or articulating, sport as an element of the cultural terrain within a wider cultural politics, qualitative inquiry of the sporting empirical can begin to understand sport as a site through which various discourses are mobilized in regard to the organization and discipline of daily life in the service of particular political agendas (Andrews, 1995; Giroux, 2001; Grossberg, 1992; 1997). Sport, thus becomes a component of a wider ideological critique that critically interrogates a range of sites in which the production of knowledge and identities takes place (Giroux, 2001). In essence then, at a methodological level, whatever the geographies and histories at stake, such an approach to the sporting empirical sets great store on situating (Hebdige, 1988) particular objects for analysis (Frow & Morris, 2000). By this, we mean that to understand the site or object of inquiry (sporting structures, experiences and forms) we need to understand the disparate structures that meet in and flow through sport. To do so, the critical sporting empiricist may not only draw upon, and cross, a number of disciplines
- 25. Encountering the Field 11 and theoretical approaches, but also draw on a number of strategies of inquiry to aid in “situating sport.” Somewhat modifying Frow and Morris then, the critical sport researcher may well attempt to: 1. Address the local and global economic context of sport 2. Address the aesthetic context – in relation to architecture, advertising and the interrelations between aesthetics and economies 3. Address the political context that addresses the mundane and the politics of physically active bodies in space 4. Address a gendered context – such as the organization of gender relations by a mythologized spatial structure 5. Address the ethnographic context – to get at the particularities of lived experience 6. Address the historical context – in terms of thinking through change and continuities 7. Address a textual context – allowing for consideration of sporting forms, structures and experiences as a textual construct and as a form of popular culture directly interrelated with other cultural forms and with an economy of representations and practices that make up a way of life. (Adapted from Frow & Morris, 2000: 326–7) Clearly, there would be very few qualitative inquiries that would be able to complete such an analysis; rather, the majority of cultural analyses accept their partiality and provide accounts that are openly incomplete and partisan and insist on the political dimensions of knowledge (Frow & Morris, 2000). In this way, critical analyses of the sporting empirical often start with the particular, sport, the “scrap of ordinary or banal existence,” and then work outwards, upwards, internally, sideways and across to unpack the density of relations and intersecting social domains that inform it (Frow and Morris, 2000: 327). The nuances of qualitative research are important for considering the type of impact, in respect to the generation of knowledge, which qualitative research designs can bring to our understanding of the sporting empirical. Indeed, as Maguire (1991) suggested, qualitative research provides a bold, imaginative, multidisciplinary view of sports studies that has the potential to tell us about human beings generally, rather than reducing them to variables within a performance-enhancing research agenda. Embracing the interpretive paradigm in sports studies clearly recognizes the complexity of the social world, the role of the researcher within that world and the meanings that people attribute to everyday life. Furthermore, through rejecting the idea that research can be carried out in some autonomous realm that is insulated from the wider society and from the particular biography of the researcher, the qualitative researcher in sports studies focuses on the qualitative values and meanings in the context of a “whole way of life” – a concern about sporting cultures, life-worlds and identities
- 26. Michael L. Silk et al. 12 – and thereby provides an opportunity for the expression of “other” cultures and indeed those from the margins of our own cultures. In essence, a qualitative approach to the critical interrogation of sport can provide the route by which our own sporting cultures can be made strange to us, allowing for new descriptions of the world to be generated which can offer the possibility of improvement of the human condition (Barker, 2000). This opens up the critical interrogation of sport to a plethora of intimate and previously “taboo” topics in the social sciences and sports studies – friendship, love, sexuality, physical violence, rape, body habitus, sexuality, ethnicity, physicality, misogyny, gender politics, (marginal) sub-identities, power, disempowerment, diaspora, exercise disorder behavior (a far from exhaustive list) – providing space for marginalized voices in important steps towards the democratization of (sporting) knowledge (Tedlock, 2000). Strategies of Sporting Inquiry We suggested above that the qualitative researcher is likely to be a bricoleur – a handyman or handywoman who makes use of the tools available to complete a task (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994). This of course can be as problematic as it is exciting for reaching the potentialities of contextual sports studies. Bricoleurs refute the limitations of a single method, the discursive strictures of one disciplinary approach, the historicity of certified modes of knowledge production, and the inseparability of the knower and known (Kincheloe, 2001). However, at the same time, bricolage is critiqued for potential superficiality, a failure to understand the disciplinary fields and knowledge bases from which particular modes of research emanate, and for signifying interdisciplinarity – a daunting concept for a graduate student and tenure track faculty member within the halls of institutionalized disciplinarity (Kincheloe, 2001). Yet, despite these critiques – negotiating the boundaries is never going to be easy – the potential gains and insights from such work can go some way to the development of a “vibrant democratic public culture and society” (Giroux, 2001). The contextual sports studies researcher then is likely to require an expansive and flexible methodological arsenal – not to mention an array of disciplinary knowledge bases. In terms of method, this point has been clearly made by Lawrence Grossberg, who noted: I believe that one can and should use any and every kind of empirical method, whatever seems useful to the particular project. Use them as rigorously and as suspiciously as you can ... I do not think that ethnography, or any other methodology, has a privileged status... Nor do I think that any one methodology has a greater claim to being somehow more empirical than another. Use anything, including surveys and statistics, if it seems useful, but consider how they are themselves rearticulated (and their practice changed) by the theoretical and political commitments ... of one’s own project. I am in favor of anything that helps you gather more and better information, descriptions, resources, and interpretations. (Wright, 2001: 145)
- 27. Encountering the Field 13 Within this text then, we provide an array of strategies of inquiry that the critical sport researcher may choose from, and across, to locate sport within context – what we would essentially term as a contextual sports studies informed by a critical hermeneutics.1 We have deliberately steered away from crudely splitting the process of gathering data (engaging the field) from the process of expressing data to an audience given they are highly interrelated, simultaneous and continuous processes (Burgess, 1984). Further, and in line with the latest “moments” addressed in the work of Denzin and Lincoln (2000b), there has been a recent shift towards a concern with various different ways of describing, inscribing and interpreting reality (Denzin, 1994; Richardson, 2000a; 2000b) in qualitative research, a concern that derived from recognition that qualitative written accounts have been the products of asymmetrical power relations. As such, we asked each of our contributors to think about how the particular methodo- logical strategies that they explicate engage with newer forms of (re)presentation, including the multiple voices of those being represented and a rejection of the authoritative, realist and objectivist style of scientific writing (James, Hockey & Dawson, 1997). As such, the purview of the contributions is to provide the reader with a deeper comprehension of the types of questions that can be addressed by various approaches, the types of knowledge gained thus far from engagement with particular methodologies within the realm of sports studies, the nuances and techniques of the particular methodologies and the opportunities to be derived from utilizing the approaches within sports studies that have yet to be addressed, and critical reflection on “exemplar studies,” providing the reader with (often personal) accounts of the actual research experience. Given the above call to locate, or articulate, sport within the wider cultural context, and in an effort to avoid reducing “complex connections into simple catchwords” (Gottdiener, 2000: 7) we open this anthology with an explication of cultural studies that draws on the nuances of engaging and expressing the sporting empirical. Samantha King’s contribution not only points to the ways in which cultural theorists in sports studies conceptualize, analyze and participate in the varied sites of the sporting empirical but highlights the ways in which “data” is weaved or articulated with political, economic and social contexts. In sum, King’s contribution suggests a way for scholars to attune the sporting empirical to the methodological, epistemological and ontological debates that run throughout this text, yet at the same time negotiate praxis in linking the lived experience of human actors, and cultural texts and representations, with the broader political and economic structures of contemporary societies. This chapter sets the scene as it were for the deployment of qualitative strategies that can unearth and reconstruct the context within which a sporting practice, product or institution becomes understandable (Andrews, 2002). In their chapter, “The Socio-Historical Process in Sports Studies,” David Wiggins and Daniel Mason speak to the developments in sport history in recent decades – developments that have emerged from a recent self-referential
- 28. Michael L. Silk et al. 14 examination of the discipline. Through epistemological and ontological trans- formations within the field, Wiggins and Mason point towards the insights that can be gained from a critical, interpretive sport history, distanced from objectivity, that can yield rich knowledges on social change and (dis)continuities with the present. In Chapter 4, “Sporting Ethnography – Philosophy, Methodology and Reflection,” Michael Silk discusses the rich and troubled histories of ethnography and proposes that the variety of often contradictory approaches and epistemologies classified under the umbrella term “ethnography” provides an exciting space for the acceptance of competing ontologies and for the production of knowledge of the sporting empirical. Following discussion of the varied ethnographic approaches, Silk highlights how these have been taken up within the field of sports studies, pointing to the utility of ethnography in provision of space for marginalized voices in interrogation of dominant and subordinate power struggles, and in (re)connection of the field to the inexorable questions and tensions between praxis, politics and power. Finally, Silk provides a critical and personal reflection on his own work, a “confessional tale” (Sparkes, 1995) that offers the reader a first-hand account of an ethnographic experience. Often bound with the multiple tools of the ethnographer, the techniques, philosophies and power relations in the practices of interviewing are worthy of academic consideration in their own right – a contention taken up by John Amis in Chapter 5 “Interviewing for Case Study Research.” Amis proposes that to understand the various interpretations of social life requires a position of relativism, a realization underpinned by the logic that talking to people will provide access to the multiple realities, complexities, inconsistencies, contradictions and paradoxes of everyday lives. The chapter provides the reader with a trace of the different types of individual and group interview that have been used within sports studies and an account of the ethics of the research interview, the nuances of, and protocols inherent within, the interview process, and the political decisions made in interpretation, analysis, and expression of interview data. Finally, Amis points towards a number of exemplar studies that provide pointers towards good interviewing practice. Given sport’s embeddedness within the symbolic regimes of late capitalism, Darcy Plymire, in Chapter 6 “Qualitative Methods in Sport-Media Studies,” highlights the recent boom in sport-media studies. Although media research has a long and established history, Plymire contends that due to its relatively recent entry into the field of sports studies, those studies centered on the relationships between the sport and the media have tended to be, for the most part, qualitative in nature and heavily influenced by the epistemological turn towards cultural studies within the academic study of sport. This influence has meant that the majority of sport-media studies have focused on (1) observations of production, (2) the text and (3) consumption. Plymire discusses the key researchers in each of these three areas, the epistemological, ontological and methodological approaches to each area and the rhetorical strategies that can be employed in expressing media research and points towards exemplar studies that have employed a
- 29. Encountering the Field 15 multilayered approach to sport-media studies in an effort to provide a robust analytical framework. As highlighted in a number of these chapters, the ways in which qualitative data is analyzed, interpreted and presented, have been the subject of a fundamental debate within the field of qualitative research design. Initially centered around the concern over the author’s place in the text and over voice, who speaks, who is excluded, how individuals are given weight and how they are interpreted, debate emerged around the decisions made in, and the style of, qualitative writing (see Altheide & Johnson, 1994; Atkinson, 1992; Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Clough, 2001; Denzin, 1989; 1994; James et al., 1997; Sparkes, 1992; 1995; Richardson, 2000a; 2000b). The central concern was the realization that the qualitative account was often written in the language of science and that the researcher was a politically bound conduit for the decoding and recoding of the data. The concern with writing culture, and the emergence of differential styles of data presentation are essentially attempts to break down the misleading distinctions between science and rhetoric (Atkinson and Hammersley, 1994). These concerns have heralded a new age for qualitative research, one in which “messy,” uncertain, multivoiced texts, cultural criticism and new alternative works have become more common (and in many ways displaced classic forms of representation as the “only” legitimate form) alongside reflexive forms of fieldwork, analysis and intertextual representation (Tedlock, 2000). These expressions of qualitative data are clearly more than just questions of semantics or aesthetics; rather such accounts clearly contribute to our understanding of social life (Denison & Rinehart, 2000; Richardson, 2000a), can create voices for previously silenced groups, and are thus at the center, according to Denzin and Lincoln (2000c) and Tedlock (2000), of qualitative practice. The final contributions to this volume speak in different ways to the philosophical and political strategies of expression. Markula and Denison reveal the transformations in the expression of data in recent years, pointing towards the theoretical, methodological and interpretive convergences inherent in hailing writing as a method of inquiry and praxis. The particular focus for Chapter 7, “Sport and the Personal Narrative,” is the insights to be gained from crafting stories from people’s experiences, showing how lives are lived and understood as complete wholes from the inside and recognizing the role of the researcher in the reconstruction of the narrative text. From this juncture, Markula and Denison discuss the various steps and procedures in the conduct of storied research, the strategies involved in representation, and provide examples of different storied genres that have appeared within sports studies. Finally, the chapter deals with an oft-raised concern over “experimental” representations, the judgment of multiple, or relaxed, ways of representation. While the borders between the “institution” and the “street,” the (private) “intellectual” and the “public” are becoming increasingly crossed (Giroux, 2001) within a number of parent disciplines that inform sports studies – manifest for example through participatory research, intervention, art, image, film, performance, multiple voicing and stylized representations – there has been little
- 30. Michael L. Silk et al. 16 movement within sports studies away from “scientific writing” as the form of expression (there are of course, a few notable exceptions which surface in a number of chapters within this volume). To remove the last vestiges of objectivity, yet sustain voice, an increasing number of scholars are moving towards performance as a mode of research/presentation (Carlson, 1996; Gergen & Gergen, 2000). In the final chapter in this volume, Heather Sykes, Jennifer Chapman and Anne Swedberg show how intellectual work can be both theoretical and performative in a personal account of the construction of a performance ethnography, based on life history interviews of physical education teachers, titled Wearing the Secret Out. Sykes et al. details the ontological, epistemological methodological issues inherent in life history interviewing and the potentialities of a “public pedagogy” and “performative politics” (Giroux, 2001), and offer a detailed account of the creation of a performance ethnography prior to reflecting on a number of important issues that emerged from the project. Both of these final two chapters straddle a key issue in qualitative research – the intersection of epistemology and the dilemma of practice and politics. While there has been profound and dramatic transformation in the short histories of qualitative research in sports studies, concerns over self-reflexivity need not be barriers to the political and practical orientations of the qualitative researcher in sports studies. The key appears to be an almost contradictory ability to recognize and embody the insights from reflexive and deconstructive critiques of expression, yet maintain a “residual” need for political action, mis- representation, an historical pervasiveness and theoretical abstraction (Bourdieu, 1977; Quigley, 1997). In this way, writing, performance and as yet unimagined ways of expressing our research are never simply a narrative or a life story; rather they are wider projects that proffer a space for disputing conventional academic borders and expanding the range of cultural sites and locations across which knowledges, values, identities and social practices are produced and disseminated (Giroux, 2001). Such expressions not only embrace the tensions between the scientific and interpretive inquiry, between impersonal and experimental texts, and between realist and experiential analyses – the very struggles that will hopefully allow for the continued discussion of the litany of social, personal and ethical dilemmas and for the expansion of qualitative horizons within sports studies – but speak to the potential for a contextual sports studies to interrogate, critique, oppose and intervene in the most pressing social problems of our time. Note 1. We acknowledge the existence and utility of an array of methodological approaches available to the sports studies researcher. For example, ground within a psychological perspective, are projective methods (e.g. laddering and the Zaltman technique) seeking to identify the cognitions and/or affect of people in sport. There also exists an array of other qualitative methods that take an avowedly positivistic stance which
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- 32. Michael L. Silk et al. 18 Denzin, N. (1989). The Research Act: A Theoretical Introduction to Sociological Methods (3rd edition). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. —— (1994). The Art and Politics of Interpretation. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (eds). Handbook of Qualitative Research. London: Sage —— (1997). Interpretive Ethnography. London: Sage. —— (2002).ConfrontingEthnography’sCrisisofRepresentation.JournalofContemporary Ethnography, 31, 4, 482–90. Denzin, N. & Lincoln,Y. (1994). Introduction: Entering the Field of Qualitative Research. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (eds). Handbook of Qualitative Research. London: Sage. —— (eds) (1998). Strategies of Qualitative Inquiry. London: Sage. —— (eds) (2000a). Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd edition). London: Sage. —— (2000b). Introduction: The Discipline and Practice of Qualitative Research. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (eds). Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd edition). London: Sage. —— (2000c). The Seventh Moment: Out of the Past. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (eds). Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd edition). London: Sage. Fine, M., Weis, L., Weseen, S. & Wong, L. (2000). For Whom? Qualitative Research, Representations and Social Responsibilities. In N. Denzin &Y. Lincoln (eds). Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd edition). London: Sage. Fontana, A. & Frey, J. (2000). The Interview: From Structured Questions to Negotiated Text. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (eds). Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd edition). London: Sage. Frisby, W., Crawford, S. & Dorer, T. (1997). Reflections in Participatory Action Research: The Case of Law-Income Women Accessing Local Physical Activity Services. Journal of Sport Management, 11, 1, 8–28. Frisby,W., Reid, C., Millar, S. & Hoebnar, L. (2005, forthcoming). Putting “Participatory” into Participatory Forms of Action Research. Journal of Sport Management, Special Issue: Expanding Disciplinary Horizons (eds J. Amis and M. Silk). Frow, J. & Morris, M. (2000). Cultural Studies. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (eds). Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd edition). London: Sage. Gergen, M. & Gergen, K. (2000). Qualitative Inquiry: Tensions and Transformations. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (eds). Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd edition). London: Sage. Giroux, H. (2001). Cultural Studies as Performative Politics. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 1, 1, 5–23. Gottdiener, M. (2000). Approaches to Consumption: Classical and Contemporary Perspectives. In M. Gottdiener (ed.). New Forms of Consumption: Consumers, Culture, and Commodification. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Greenwood, D. J., Whytes, W. F. & Harkavy, I. (1993). Participatory Action Research as a Process and as a Goal. Human Relations, 46, 2, 175–92. Grossberg, L. (1992). We Gotta Get Out of this Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. London: Routledge. —— (1997). Bringing it all Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hall, S. (1981). Notes on deconstructing “the popular.” In R. Samuel (ed.). People’s History and Socialist Theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hammersley, M. (1989). The Dilemma of Qualitative Methods: Herbert Blumer and the Chicago Tradition. London: Routledge.
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- 35. 21 2 Methodological Contingencies in Sports Studies Samantha J. King In the face of what has come to be viewed as the widespread misuse of the signi- fier “cultural studies,” scholars in the field have devoted considerable energy to defining and delineating the criteria for effective cultural studies research (Andrews, 2002; Bennett, 1992; Grossberg, 1989a; 1989b; 1997a; 1997b; Grossberg et al., 1992; Hall, 1980a; 1980b; Johnson 1986/7; Nelson, 1994).1 A claim common to most of these expositions is that the field of cultural studies is characterized by a refusal either to endorse a singular method, or to conceive of and apply methodological tools as rigid, formal templates. Indeed, the usefulness of cultural studies as a critical approach for understanding cultural phenomena is said by these scholars to lie in its interdisciplinarity, anti-formalism, and flexibility – particularly in its sensitivity to changing economic, political, and social conditions. Taking these claims seriously, this chapter is less of a “how to” guide to cultural studies, and more of an exploration of the ways that the different methods discussed in the remainder of this volume have been taken up within cultural studies analyses of sport (i.e., in “sports studies”). In drawing attention to the enormously diverse range of methods deployed in the field, it is particularly concerned with elaborating upon the assertion that cultural studies research is “sensitive” to its economic, political, and social context. In so doing, the chapter characterizes sports studies as a practice that is most useful when it is characterized by methodological contingency. As is the case with other research traditions, effective work in sports studies employs the methodological tools that will best enable the researcher to answer her or his research questions. Cultural studies approaches to sport are distinctive, however, in that the assembled sources are always analyzed within the context of a network of economic, political, and social linkages that produce and give meaning to them. Called “contextual analysis” or “articulation” by scholars in the field, and strongly embedded in neo-Marxist theories of culture and society, these approaches provide both a methodological framework “for understanding how cultural theorists conceptualize the world, analyze it, and participate in shaping it” (Slack, 1996: 112) as well as a strategy for mapping the complexity of the “constant battlefield” that is cultural life (Hall, 1981: 233).
- 36. Samantha J. King 22 What is Cultural Studies and What is it Good For? In vastly oversimplified terms, cultural studies draws on elements of sociology, anthropology, political science and theory, literary and media studies, history, semiotics, and philosophy to analyze cultural experiences, practices, texts, and institutions. Cultural studies is therefore “not so much a discipline, but an area where different disciplines intersect in the study of the cultural aspects of society” (Hall et al., 1980: 7). Most histories of the field point to its formation in post-war Britain and the con- tribution of scholars Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson to the radical rethinking of what cultural forms constitute legitimate objects of study (Hoggart, 1957; Williams, 1958; Thompson, 1963). Instead of reducing culture to canonical literary texts and works of art (“high culture”), these authors argued for an understanding of culture as a “whole way of life” (Williams, 1958: 310). This opened the way for analyses of working-class and popular culture, for explorations of the mundane and the marginal, and for discussions of the variously oppressive and liberatory potential of cultural relations. Although early work in cultural studies tended to focus on white, male, working-class culture, the 1980s witnessed the widespread recognition that research in the field must take seriously the intersection of relations of class with race, gender, sexuality, and nation in shaping the experience and organization of everyday life. Given the concern of cultural studies with the everyday and the ordinary, it should come as no surprise that in addition to cultural forms such as clothing, music, and popular media, sport emerged early on as a key site of analysis within the field. Mirroring broader debates about how best to theorize the relationship between “culture” and “society,” the connection between “sport” and “society” represented a central problematic in initial work in sports studies. Writing in 1982, for example, Paul Willis noted that much contemporary physiological and sociological research on women in sport exhibited “the clearest aspects of positivism in contemporary social research” (1993: 33). The research to which Willis was referring centered on the ability of women to achieve in sport and attempted to isolate a range of variables – physical and/or cultural – that might explain particular levels of athletic achievement. Such “linear determinism,” Willis noted, does not get us very far in understanding the social meaning of a phenomenon. He wrote: “[T]o know, more exactly, why it is a women can muster only 90 per cent of a man’s strength cannot help us comprehend, explain, or change the massive feeling in our society that a woman has no business flexing her muscles anyway” (Willis, 1993: 33). Even if it were possible to identify all the relevant variables shaping the relationship of women with sport, moreover, the number would be so large as to make plotting co- variation and determination impossible. Beyond this, Willis noted, there is no way to quantify cultural meaning as it is circulates through ideological systems, social attitudes, and cultural values and, furthermore, cultural processes do not operate in a unidirectional manner: “It is not the case,” he wrote, “that there is a
- 37. Methodological Contingencies 23 culture over here that affects sport over there, in a simple, one-way relationship” (Willis, 1993: 33). To acknowledge that sporting practices, texts, subcultures, institutions, and events (hereinafter referred to as “sport”) are shaped by “society” and in turn shape “society” goes someway towards a more useful conceptualization of the sport and society problematic in that it moves us away from linear determinism and towards a more dynamic sense of the relationship between the two. But it still assumes an analytically imposed separation between these realms such that “society” appears as a “great monolithic entity, with a protuberance – sport – stuck on the outside” (Willis, 1993: 33): “The understanding of interrelationship and interconnection is of the essence,” Willis argued, “if we are even to ask the right questions” (1993: 33) (Figure 2.1). Here Willis advocated a contextual, cultural studies approach to the study of women and sport. In doing so, he joined a growing number of sport scholars who at that time were drawing on the cultural studies tradition to understand the place of sport in society (Cantelon & Gruneau, 1982; Gruneau, 1983; J. E Hargreaves, 1982; J. A. Hargreaves, 1982a; Hollands, 1984). The particular contribution of cultural studies to research on sport, according to Robert Hollands (1984), has been to link up the lived experience of human actors, and cultural texts and representations, with the broader political and economic structures of modern industrial societies. In other words, cultural studies research conceives sport relationally. To paraphrase Cary Nelson, the analysis of a sporting text, discourse, behavior, ritual, style, genre or subculture does not constitute cultural studies – despite claims often made to the contrary – unless the thing being analyzed is considered in terms of its “competitive, reinforcing, and determining relations” with other objects and forces (1994: 199). Figure 2.1 The “sport as a reflection of society” approach SOCIETY SPORT
- 38. Samantha J. King 24 Contextual Analysis/Articulation: Theoretical and Methodological Contingencies Thus, although as the introduction to this chapter made clear, cultural studies has never been dominated by a single theoretical or methodological position – according to Stuart Hall (1992), its growth has been characterized by an ongoing “unity-in-difference” – it can be distinguished by an orientation to research and writing processes that seeks to capture the relationality of culture. The term “articulation” has been used most often to describe this orientation. In its manifestation as a theoretical sensibility, articulation offers for scholars in sports studies a model of society as a “layered complex of elements” – including sporting phenomena in all their variety – “all intricately and dialectically interrelated with one another” (Willis, 1993: 33). As a methodological ethos, articulation provides strategies for undertaking a cultural study of sport, that is, for contextualizing one’s object of analysis. It seems important to recognize here – via a rather lengthy detour – that articulation is referred to variously as a concept, a theory, a method, a political strategy, and sometimes as a combination thereof (Andrews, 2002; Grossberg, 1997a; Slack, 1996). How articulation might be best categorized is a difficult question to settle given that theory and method are conceived of as mutually constitutive in cultural studies research on sport (Andrews, 2002; Grossberg 1997a). This difficulty is compounded, moreover, by the fact that articulation has more explanatory power than a concept (it is in part an attempt to reconfigure the perceived economic determinism of classical Marxism and the relativism of cultural humanism, both of which were key influences in the emergence of cultural studies), but at the same time does not pretend to offer an overarching explanation of social structure and social change. This is typical of theoretical approaches deployed within cultural studies because although the field is theoretical, it does not “apply” pre-existing theory as an objective, formal tool that can be attached with “exact theoretical fit” to a given empirical field (Morris, 1997; Slack, 1996). Nor does cultural studies “do theory” as a literary genre – it would be hard to imagine, for instance, a self-described cultural studies scholar whose oeuvre is devoted to theoretical exegesis of articulation or any other central line of thought (Morris, 1997: 43). Rather, theory within cultural studies is developed in relation to changing epistemological and political conditions and thus is itself radically contextualized. In Cary Nelson’s (1994) words: “Cultural studies accepts the notion that the work of theorizing its enterprise is inescapably grounded in contemporary life and current politics. New social and political realities require fresh reflection and debate on the cultural studies enterprise, no matter what historical period one is studying” (1994: 202). So, while contextual analysis is committed to a “detour through theory,” it is not “theory-driven.” The detour it takes is used to “help ground our engagement with what newly confronts us and to let that engagement provide the ground for retheorizing” (Slack, 1996: 115).
- 39. Methodological Contingencies 25 To illustrate this point with reference to the field of sports studies, in the early 1980s, when the field was relatively young, and the history of modern sport was inadequately theorized, scholars working in the cultural studies tradition (particularly those located in Britain and Canada) produced a plethora of Gramscian-inspired work (Cantelon & Gruneau, 1982; Gruneau, 1983; 1988; J. A. Hargreaves, 1982a; 1982b; 1987; Ingham & Hardy, 1984). For Italian theorist, socialist activist, and political prisoner Antonio Gramsci (1971), hegemony was the consent given by the great masses of the population to the ideological leadership exercised by the dominant group through the state as well as civic and cultural institutions and processes. In this way, his writing challenged those strains of Marxist thought that viewed the mode of production or the economic base as producing and shaping all other elements in a social formation – including culture – and in which there was little room for understanding culture as at moments productive of economic relations as a potential site for resistance to capitalist relations. Gramsci used hegemony to refer not simply to political and economic control, moreover, but also to the success on the part of the dominant group in projecting its own particular way of seeing the world so that this becomes accepted as “common sense.” Because hegemony relies on the consent of the dominated it was always, he argued, subject to contestation, negotiation, and redefinition. Gramsci’s aim was to understand these complex processes and the ways that culture was related to domination and resistance in the service of change towards socialism (Hargreaves & McDonald, 2000). Gramsci’s ideas enabled scholars to conceptualize the emergence of modern sport in terms of a process of ongoing struggle, rather than either a “cultural by- product of the technological and social changes associated with the development of an urban and industrial society” à la modernization theory (Gruneau, 1988: 9), or a superstructural effect determined by capitalist relations of production – the dominant approach among Marxist scholars of sport up until that point (Brohm, 1978; Hoch, 1972; Vinnai, 1973). More specifically, Gramsci’s writings held particular appeal for British scholars of this era because they helped challenge orthodox Marxist theories – the inadequacies of which had become apparent in the failure of the left to predict or forestall the popular appeal of Thatcherism – while maintaining ideology, class analysis and political economy as core concerns. As the 1980s proceeded and the Reaganite/Thatcherite ideologies of self- responsibility gained the status of hegemony, the body became the site of condensation for a whole range of social anxieties. Fat bodies, crack bodies and HIV-positive bodies all became symbols of failed self-discipline and what Susan Willis terms the “hard body” emerged as the ideal against which these abject bodies were measured (Cole, 1993). As this new social, political, and economic formation took shape, many scholars in the cultural studies of sport and the body turned to the writings of French philosopher Michel Foucault (particularly Discipline and Punish [1979] and The History of Sexuality [1980]) to help “ground their engagement” with this new set of conditions (Andrews, 1993; Bartky, 1988;
- 40. Samantha J. King 26 Bordo, 1993; Cole, 1993; Hargreaves, 1987). While Gramsci’s insights into cultural struggle remained key for understanding how one particular set of beliefs about the body and sport gained dominance during late capitalism, Foucault’s writings on normalizing power provided insight into the micro-level practices through which individuals take up social norms in ongoing processes of bodily management. Moreover, in articulating the pivotal place that the body occupies in social relations, Foucault’s work proved indispensable to scholars in sports studies who in the face of the emergence of the fit body as a primary emblem of neoconservative ideologies of the period were faced with the realization that the body had been neglected, if not erased, from research on sport (Andrews, 1993; Cole, 1993; Hargreaves, 1987). As this discussion makes clear, “from a cultural studies perspective ... one never imagines that it is possible to theorize for all times and places” (Nelson, 1994: 202). While work in cultural studies is theoretically contingent, however, it has been consistent, as Stuart Hall argues, in conceiving of the cultural realm as a “constant battlefield” in which the constraining forces of social structures vie with the creative impulses of human actors (1981: 233). As such, sports studies research reflects the broader field and particularly the work of Stuart Hall in attempting to move beyond more reductionist Marxist understandings of the relationship between culture and society as economically determined and cultural humanist approaches which, at the other end of the spectrum, argue that there exists no necessary correspondence between different elements in a society, or between the social structure/economic base and the cultural realm. It would be beyond the scope of this chapter to explore questions about the relationship of base to superstructure in any more detail, and at the risk of cari- caturing both orthodox Marxism and cultural humanism, suffice it to say that the contextual bent of cultural studies assumes that while there are no necessary correspondences, there are always real or effective correspondences between lines of force in a social formation.2 Thus, the meanings, effects and politics of particular practices, texts and structures are never guaranteed and alternative configurations of social relations are always possible. More specifically, it is through articulation (the joining of two parts) that social forces are connected and through disarticulation that social forces are disconnected. Hall, drawing on Althusser, defines articulation as follows: [T]he form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made? So the so-called “unity” of a discourse is really the articulation of different, distinct elements which can be rearticulated in different ways because they have no necessary “belongingness.” The “unity” which matters is a linkage between the articulated discourse and the social forces with which it can, under certain historical conditions, but need not necessarily, be connected. Thus, a theory of articulation is both a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under certain conditions, to cohere together within a discourse, and a way of
- 41. Methodological Contingencies 27 asking how they do or do not become articulated at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects. (1986: 141–2) What makes articulation particularly useful is that it presents a way out of what Meghan Morris calls “paralyzing debates” about the relative status of different practices conceptualized as though they were mutually exclusive realities (e.g., the “discursive” and the “real”) and a way to ask, instead, how these practices connect and interact in specific instances (1997: 47). This, in very broad strokes, is how articulation works as a “‘process’ in the world around us” (Morris, 1997: 48), but, as I have already emphasized, articulation is also a methodological practice – in order to “do” articulation, it is necessary to reconstruct or fabricate the network of social, political, economic, and cultural articulations, or linkages, that produce any particular cultural phenomenon and trace, in turn, how the phenomenon (re)shapes the formation of which it is a part. Indeed, as Sugden and Tomlinson suggest, theoretical models are ideal-typical and society as lived out is a “much more fluid enterprise” (2002: 9). Drawing on Michael Mann (1986), they argue that it is only through empirical research, not theory, that we can understand how particular social forces are articulated to one another or what these articulations might mean to those engaged with them. This fluid understanding of social relations also means that articulation as a methodological sensibility cannot be deployed as a rigid template or offered up as a set of clearly defined practical techniques for undertaking research as is the case with research methods traditionally defined (Slack 1996). The outline that follows should therefore be read with two general insights, put forth by Slack (1996), in mind: first, articulation is not a completely “sewn-up” method but rather a complex, unfinished perspective that continues to emerge geneaologically. Second, articulation should not be understood as “simply one thing” (Slack, 1996: 115). It has been discussed and developed in ways that variously background and foreground certain theoretical, methodological, polit- ical and strategic forces, interests and issues. It has thus emerged unevenly within a configuration of those forces and carries with it “traces” of forces from one piece of scholarly interpretation to another. Doing Contextual Analysis The process and procedures through which contextual analysts gather and analyze their data or sources, the research ethics that must be considered, the question of the relationship between the researcher and the “researched,” and concerns about validity, all vary according to the research questions under exploration and the methodological tools borrowed, combined, worked and reworked in any particular project. These issues are best adddressed, therefore, in the context of discussions about particular methods in the chapters that follow. Having said this, the understanding of sport as an element of the cultural terrain through which disparate forces flow and coalesce, and the emphasis on situating particular objects for analysis, require that researchers draw on at least
- 42. Samantha J. King 28 some of the possible strategies outlined by Silk, Andrews and Mason in Chapter 1 (Frow and Morris, 2000; Hebdige, 1988; Silk, Andrews & Mason, this volume). These might include critically analyzing the research object’s economic, political, gendered, racial, historical, ethnographic, or textual contexts, among many possible others. Although, as Silk et al. note, there would be very few inquiries that would be able to explore all of these realms, the most successful research in cultural studies tends to be the most complex and intricate in its analysis of context – even as its practitioners acknowledge its inevitable partiality and incompleteness. Instead of presenting a step-by-step guide, then, I explore the ways that the six different qualitative methods described in the remaining chapters of this volume might be deployed in contextual analyses of the sporting world and in so doing aim to highlight the strengths of articulation as a mode of analysis for advancing the field of sports studies. Inspired by Toby Miller’s (2001) introductory essay in A Companion to Cultural Studies, the analysis is presented in the form of a table. The left side of the table highlights key features of contextual methodology – “what it is and how it works” – and the right side highlights “what it isn’t and how it doesn’t work.” As Miller acknowledges, attempts to draw lists like the one below, especially when they engage in binarization, are inevitably fraught since demonstrating the linguistic and thus material interdependence of supposed opposites has been at the core of much work in cultural studies, and such lists depend on oversimplification and generalizations about the methods under analysis. In the present case, by necessity, both sides of the table, but especially the right side, are ideal types, or caricatures, of what are in reality are extraordinarily diverse approaches to scholarship. Nevertheless, I have tried to compile some central and recognizable features of contextual and “acontextual” research because binaries are, in Miller’s words, “good to think with and good to tinker with” (2001: 7) and it is in this spirit of openness and incompleteness that the table is presented. A Note on Objectivity As the table makes clear, contextual cultural studies analysis makes no pretensions to scientific objectivity or political disinvestment. It assumes that all scholarship is partial (that is, incomplete and partisan) and that our research methods and theories cannot be usefully distinguished from their social origins and institutional locations. However, research in cultural studies goes further than other methodologies that refuse claims to objectivity in that it is always undertaken – explicitly – as a response to and intervention in political and social conditions. To take some examples from recent work, Kent Ono’s (1997) essay “‘America’s’ Apple Pie: Baseball, Japan-Bashing, and the Sexual Threat of Economic Miscegenation” is explicitly positioned as a response to what Ono demonstrates to be the racist ideologies motivating anxieties about Japanese investment in major league baseball in the United States. For scholars and activists struggling to end the use of Native American team names, logos, and
- 43. Methodological Contingencies 29 Table 2.1 Contextual Sports Studies What it is/how it works What it isn’t/how it doesn’t work History Premised on the understanding that social practices, not nature, genius, or individuality make a way of life and change over time; sometimes known as “cultural materialism.” Highlights the role of individual failures and accomplishments in the creation of cultural forms and change over time. Rather than focusing on individual people, dates, and events as representative of cultural dynamics and change, focuses on the products of culture and their circumstances of creation and circulation (Williams, 1977). A documentarian approach that records the facts of the sporting world in order to preserve specific insights into the time period in question; does not “read” products or consider their circumstances of creation and circulation. Focuses on marginal, ordinary, everyday, and grass-roots sport experiences as well as those of the dominant culture; demonstrates how sport is produced by ordinary people and repackaged and sold back to them. Often privileges the actions and experiences of dominant groups (e.g., sport leaders, elite athletes, organized sport). Focuses on power relations, conflict and struggle. As Miller writes, “The relations of culture, their twists and turns, the often violent and volatile way in which they change, are part of the material life of society” (2001: 5). Utilizes a one-dimensional approach focused on linear “marches of progress,” such that power dynamics are often invisible. Examples: Adams, 2004; Cahn, 1994; Farred, 1999; Gillick, 1984; Gruneau & Whitson, 1994; Staurowsky, 2001. Ethnography Recognizes spaces of fieldwork as already thoroughly mediated through other projects of representation. Through thick description provided by the ethnographic reporter, conceives of and recreates the object of ethnography as an “unmediated site of discovery” (Marcus, 2001: 182). Involves reflexive, contextual fieldwork which interprets and maps the experiences of subjects within layers and competing sectors of those representations (Marcus, 2001).
- 44. Samantha J. King 30 What it is/how it works What it isn’t/how it doesn’t work An approach known as “writing culture,” as opposed to recording an objective reality that is “out there” (Clifford and Marcus, 1986). Conceptualizes mediated experiences as articulations of broader social forces, which must be mapped in their complexity in order to understand the ethnographic lifeworld under investigation; that is, ethnographic lifeworlds are considered to develop in specific historical contexts. Focuses on the “internal” dynamics of the ethnographic setting rather than broader social forces and patterns of development; as Silk suggests in this volume, this has been an observation made, in particular, about symbolic interactionist ethnography. The effort to connect ethnographic interpretations to wider social processes is linked to the political commitment of cultural studies research, particularly the struggle to overcome social oppressions of class, race, and gender. Eschews politicized forms of ethnography as subjective, unscientific, and hence invalid. Examples: Crossett & Beal, 1997; Donnelly, 1985; Gruneau, 1989; MacNeil, 1996; Silk, 2001; Wheaton, 2002; Zwick & Andrews, 1999. Interviewing In cultural studies, has primarily been used to explore how audiences interact with media texts ranging from news programming, to soap operas, to television commercials; although contextual media studies is discussed above, here the focus is specifically on audience research. Experimental or survey methods focused on the attitudinal and behavioral consequences of media tests on viewers while ignoring their active, interpretive capacities. Key assumption of contextual audience research is that the influences of the media cannot be “read” simply from the message of any media text and that interviews with consumers are necessary to understand what audiences do with what they consume. Understands responses to interviews to be negotiated within structural constraints. Examples: Wilson & Sparks, 1996. Table 2.1 Contextual Sports Studies (continued)
- 45. Methodological Contingencies 31 What it is/how it works What it isn’t/how it doesn’t work Media Studies Interpretive and political approach to analyzing media institutions, practices, and products. Deploys an apolitical conception of communication with functional and practical research objectives. Rather than claiming objectivity or an ability to record and measure truth, concerned with how positivist, objectivist research might collude with dominant political and economic systems. Positivist and objectivist. Draws on a structural and historical model of ideology. For example, the “criminal male athlete” – the subject of numerous analyses in sports studies – is not treated as a “fact” consumed in the circuit of public communication, but as a relation “in terms of the social forces and contradictions accumulating within it ... or in terms of the wider historical context in which it occurs” (Hall et al., 1978: 185); that is, the historical context is precisely what produces the “criminal athlete.” Acontextual reading of texts with transactional conceptualization of ideology in which the “criminal male athlete,” for instance, is treated as a fact that remains as such “underneath” whatever representations of it are circulated through the public sphere. Examples: Cole, 1997; Cole and Hribar, 1995; Hartmann, 2001; Howell, 1991; King, 2000; King & Springwood, 2000; Maharaj, 1999; McDonald, 2005; McDonald & Andrews, 2001; Miller, 1998; Ono, 1997; Rowe, 1999; Sandell, 1995. Personal Narrative Recognizes that narratives always exist in tension with various other accounts; that is, stories are not stories in their own right – they don’t claim to show a real, valid culture underneath the official version waiting to be revealed – but only exist in tension with other stories (Steedman, 1987). According to Joan Scott, accounts that use experience as an authenticating source deploy a “referential notion of evidence which denies that it [evidence] is anything but a reflection of the real” (1992: 24); that is, acontextual personal narratives often fail to question the truth of veracity of memory and therefore of the account itself; experience in this context becomes incontestable evidence and the foundation upon which analyses are based.
- 46. Samantha J. King 32 What it is/how it works What it isn’t/how it doesn’t work Shares in common with contextual critical ethnography a concern with the practice of writing and representation (see Markula, this volume) Recognizes the dynamic relationship between competing accounts of the world and thus allows the possibility that a critical examination of personal experience can contribute to a reworking of existing theories and paradigms. Assumes that personal experience is the process by which subjectivity is constructed. In de Lauretis’s words, “Through that process one places oneself or is placed in social reality and so perceives and comprehends as subjective ... those relations –material, economic, and inter-personal – which are in fact social, and, in a larger perspective, historical” (de Laurentis, 1984: 159); thus, by analyzing experience in the broader context of the social world, it is possible to trace how subjectivities are constructed and in turn how we help shape, as active agents, the world around us. When personal narratives are decontextualized, questions about the constructed nature of experience, how subjects are constituted, and how their vision is structured, are erased; the evidence of personal experience then becomes evidence for the fact of difference, rather than a way of exploring how difference is established, how it operates, and how it constitutes subjects who see and act in the world. Examples: Sociology of Sport Journal Special Issue, 17, 1, 2000; Sparkes (1996; 2002). Performance Ethnography Like ethnography and personal narrative, shares a concern with the politics of representation both within and beyond academic writing. In particular, seeks to find new ways of presenting scholarly work so that it moves beyond the confines of the academic world and becomes more immediately politically and socially useful and engaged. A purely artistic/scholarly exercise. Table 2.1 Contextual Sports Studies (continued)
- 47. Methodological Contingencies 33 What it is/how it works What it isn’t/how it doesn’t work Experimental, artistic, public political, interdisciplinary, collaborative, inter-textual, multi- vocal, participatory, interactive, and always in progress. Mainstream, scientific, private, apolitical, disciplinary, individualist, non-collaborative, unitextual, univocal, unidirectional, complete. Seeks to open the meanings of research to the informants/research subjects and to wide audiences; the emphasis is on speaking “with informants and audiences rather than speaking for or about them” (Mienczakowski, 1998: 117). Dictatorial, purely academic, objectifying. mascots in the world of college and professional sports, Rosemary Coombe’s (1999) “Sports Trademarks and Somatic Politics: Locating the Law in a Critical Cultural Studies” highlights the vulnerability of such trademarks to political critique and the claims of those they (mis)represent (i.e. Native Americans). As such, her essay cautions us to consider the politically generative capacities of sports trademarks (be they the Washington Redskins or the Nike swoosh) as we might also struggle to abolish them. Although these analyses demonstrate unambiguous political commitments, we should be clear that to undertake cultural analysis and commentary is not tantamount to undertaking political action. As Ian McDonald argues in an essay on critical social research on sport and political intervention, to identify and critically analyze dominant power relations can help create the possibility for transformation, but it is not the same as “securing practical changes” (2002: 108). Describing his involvement with an anti-racism campaign in which he was both an activist and researcher, he highlights the dangers that involvement in activism can pose to academic integrity, but also the benefits that a symbiotic relationship between the two can bring. He writes: “As an activist I knew that academically sound research could be used as powerful evidence to pressurize the ECB [English Cricket Board] into action. As a social researcher I was committed to the production of knowledge that would expose and explain injustice and unequal relations of power, and thus provide the possibility for social change” (McDonald 2002: 114). Cultural studies, since its inception, has been distinguished by its commitment to exposing dominant configurations of power and it has done so by tracing the articulation of economic, political and social forces in the cultural field. Cultural studies researchers should be aware, however, that doing contextual analysis is not equivalent to rearticulating, in a practical sense, those conjunctures of forces that produce the conditions under analysis.
- 48. Samantha J. King 34 Potential Pitfalls Like any approach to scholarly production, contextually contingent research has its potential pitfalls. Because there is no template for contextual analysis, no clearly identifiable place at which a particular study should begin or end, there is a danger that radical contextualization becomes random contextualization. There is a tendency within cultural studies research, for instance, for scholars to assert connections without doing the careful work that it takes to reconstruct the connection and to show it actually exists. When this occurs, the context begins to appear as a mere backdrop to the object of study and to exist independently of it, rather than as a set of productive social forces that represents the conditions of possibility for the appearance of that object in its current form and that is therefore a constitutive part of it. So while contextual analysis asks how economic, political, social and cultural forces shape and produce the phenomenon being analyzed, it is not sufficient to merely identify the context into which a particular text is inserted. Indeed, Grossberg (1992) has argued that the context is in some sense the goal and end product of any cultural studies analysis and that as such it will only be defined more fully at its conclusion. It could be argued, of course, that this potential weakness in contextual research is not evidence of the limitations of the approach itself, but of bad scholarship. While this might be so, contextual analysis does lend itself to this possibility. While contextual analysis tries to move us away from a concern with sport “for its own sake” or sport as a practice isolated from broader social forces, there is also a danger that the object of analysis, the thing we are trying to understand, might get “lost” in the context. While the study of sport in itself is a rather limited intellectual and political enterprise, it is nonetheless necessary to carefully excavate the nature, meaning and organization of the phenomenon under analysis, for it is at this level that the articulation of social forces is experienced and at which they might also be transformed or rearticulated. Notes 1. This chapter is heavily indebted to David Andrews’ essay “Coming to Terms with Cultural Studies,” which appeared in the February 2002 edition of the Journal of Sport and Social Issues. Andrews’ piece issued a call for intellectual specificity on the part of scholars claiming to do cultural studies work on sport, but also outlined some primary methodological tenets of cultural studies research. My chapter can be read as an attempt to elaborate on the latter. I am also grateful to Ben Carrington for his comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 2. In a recent essay on post-Marxism and the sociology of sport, for example, Ian McDonald argues that “within the broad Marxist tradition, only the most fatalistically naive Second Internationalist, or the most ideologically driven Stalinist, would insist on the ‘absolute predictability of particular outcomes’” (2004: 4).
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- 53. 39 3 The Socio-Historical Process in Sports Studies David K. Wiggins and Daniel S. Mason In 1974 Marvin H. Eyler, one of the founders of the academic subdiscipline of sport history and long-time Dean of what is now the University of Maryland’s College of Health and Human Performance, published an article in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Sport History titled “Objectivity and Selectivity in Historical Inquiry” (Eyler, 1974). The article, which appeared alongside three others written by well-known sport historians David Voigt, Eugene Murdock and Steven Riess, discusses the problem of communicating truth in historical research. Utilizing the works of historians Sidney Hook, William Von Humboldt and Charles Beard among others, Eyler speculated as to whether truth about the past was ever attainable, if historians could escape personal bias, and if the necessary method of historical reconstruction precluded objectivity. In the end, Eyler contended that “the past can never be precisely replicated,” but must be “reconstructed on the basis of evidence which has been selected from pre-suppositions” (1974: 45). Furthermore, he noted that history uses a “different standard of objectivity,” to science and is concerned with knowledge that is “inferential and indirect” (Eyler, 1974: 45). According to Berg “historical research attempts to systematically recapture the complex nuances, the people, meanings, events and even ideas of the past that have influenced and shaped the present” (2001: 210–11). Another definition, offered by Burke, is that history is “the study of human societies in the plural, placing the emphasis on the differences between them and also on the changes which have taken place in each one over time” (1992: 2). Quite simply, a history is an account of some event or series of events that has taken place in the past (Berg, 2001). To put historical research within the broader context of this book, perhaps the best way to justify the use of historical methods is through the following statement by Peter Burke: “If we want to understand why social change takes place, it may be a good strategy to begin by examining how it takes place” (1992: 139). Thus the role of the historian is then to uncover the evidence and analyze it in a way that lends new insights into social change over time. This chapter draws on Eyler’s article and subsequent historiographical works to examine the status of sport history as an academic subdiscipline and the major issues and methodological approaches associated with sport history,
- 54. David K. Wiggins and Daniel S. Mason 40 identify exemplary research studies in sport history, and discuss future avenues of inquiry in the field. The underlying contention of the chapter is that a great deal of progress has been made in sport history since the 1970s with regards to the expansion of knowledge and the quality of publication outlets, but as an academic subdiscipline sport history has only very recently engaged in self- examination and reflection. It is hoped that this review will provide a greater awareness of sport history as an academic subdiscipline and, more specifically, the strengths and weaknesses of the research process in this field. The Development of the Discipline Returning to the time of Eyler’s article, it is important for aspiring sport his- torians to understand this period in the evolution of the field of sport history. First of all, the article was written at a time when there was unbridled optimism about the future of sport history as an academic subdiscipline. The first four years of the 1970s alone would witness the creation of two organizations, two journals, and three symposiums devoted to sport history (Berryman, 1973; Pope, 1997b; Struna, 1997). Second, the article was one of the first attempts by a sport historian to reflect on the historical process and discuss both methodological and epistemological issues related to the subdiscipline. Although covering debates waged for years by those in the parent discipline of history, Eyler’s article provides an initial blueprint for sport historians concerned with the meaning of their work, and methods for recovering information from the past and seeking historical truth. Last, the article provides, albeit very briefly, an analysis of the early models utilized by sport historians. These were models “emanating particularly from the social sciences” (Eyler 1974) and used in efforts toward a greater understanding of the development of sport. Much of the momentum established in sport history during the early 1970s would be maintained over the next twenty-five years. Courses in various aspects of sport history at both the undergraduate and graduate levels of instruction were added to university curriculums, and a number of research studies on sport history proliferated. Utilizing different methodologies and approaches, scholars examined what seemed to be every conceivable topic (Adelman, 1983; Baker, 1983; Guttmann, 1983; Hill, 1996; Kruger, 1990; Morrow, 1983; Park, 1983; Pope, 1997b; Struna, 1985; 1997; 2000; Walvin, 1984; Wiggins, 1986; 2000). Perhaps most important, the number and quality of research outlets increased significantly. Besides Sport History Review, the Journal of Sport History, and International Journal of the History of Sport, scholars could choose to publish their work in one of the journals from the parent discipline or in such sports studies- related journals as Sport, Education and Society, Sporting Traditions and Olympika. In addition to academic journals, both university and commercial presses added sport history titles to their publication lists. A real boon to the subdiscipline was the establishment of the “Sport and Society” series by the University of Illinois Press in 1986, and the production of similar types of series by such publication houses as Syracuse University Press and the State University of New York Press.
- 55. Other documents randomly have different content
- 56. rock bound valleys of the Wapsipinicon south of Troy Mills and of the Cedar at the Palisades. On the final retreat of the glaciers waters from the melting ice swept over the county, leaving deposits of sand on the lower lands and in the valleys. Since the glacial epoch the rivers have cut their beds a score of feet and more below the deposits of glacial floods and in many places, as near the Ivanhoe bridge, remnants of these ancient flood plains are left as terraces or "benches" or "second bottoms." At Bertram the sands deposited by glacial waters near the mouth of Big Creek stand about fifty feet above the level of the river. THE LOESS A large part of the county is covered with a deposit of fine yellow silt called loess. Dry, it crumbles into powder at a finger touch; wet, it is somewhat plastic and can be moulded into brick and tile. On the hill and uplands the loess is thickly spread, adding in places at least forty feet to their elevation. Over the lowlands it is thin or absent. This yellow earth has been and is to be of greater value than mines of yellow gold. It is of inexhaustible fertility. It contains abundant mineral plant foods, partly constituent, and partly brought up into it by ground water; and these foods are so finely pulverized as to be of readiest solution and absorption by the roots. In wet weather the loess mantle absorbs the rainfall like a sponge; in months of desert drouth, like those of the summer of 1910, it returns the water to the surface, like a wick, to preserve the crops from failure. A disadvantage of the loess lies in the readiness with which it washes. The forest which once covered nearly all the uplands protected the soil from wash by means of its mattress of roots and the thick prairie sod was equally efficient where hill slopes were grassed over. But where forests have been thoughtlessly cut down, and steep slopes turned to plow land, it is but a few years until the brown top-soil is all washed away and the fields in spring when freshly plowed are as yellow as a deep cut in road or brick yard. The
- 57. foot path in the pasture or the furrow of the plow becomes a gully in a single heavy rain, and unless checked soon becomes a gulch scores of feet in width. By accenting the height of the ridges the loess also adds to the scenery of the county. Our area lies in a part of east central Iowa where the stony clays deposited by ancient glaciers accumulated in long ridges and belts of upland rising many feet above the intervening undulating plains. Because of the alternation of ridge and lowland no part of the state except the valley of the Upper Mississippi has so beautiful and wide and varied prospects. Over more or less of their course the rivers of the county have cut their channels lengthwise in the ridges, thus giving rise to the bold scenery of the Wapsipinicon above Central City, and of the Cedar near Mount Vernon. Some of these picturesque reaches of river and cliff and forest slope should surely be converted into county parks in the near future and preserved for the gratification of all coming generations. Unless this is done we may expect that the forests will be cut down and the hill slopes gashed with countless gullies; while the lichened rocks of the river cliffs fringed with fern and tamarisk will give place to unsightly quarries. While Linn county was sheeted with glacier ice, no life of any sort was possible within its limits. But during the long interglacial epochs which intervened between the ice invasions, forests grew and animals now extinct roamed over our hills and plains. Among these early inhabitants may be mentioned extinct horses and the giant proboscidians, the mammoth, and the mastodon. These returned to the area after the final retreat of the ice and their remains are found in the peat bogs and river gravels. In the earliest of the interglacial epochs it is quite probable that some of the gigantic groundsloths of South America made their home here, since they are known to have done so in the western counties of the state. No traces of man have been found in the glacial deposits of Iowa, nor have any indubitable evidences of his presence in glacial times been found in North America. Sometime, we know not when, roving tribes of Indians set
- 58. foot within our area, and geology gives place to archeology. And when the white man appeared, inductive history ends and there begins the history of tradition and written records.
- 59. CHAPTER VI Beginnings in Linn County The Black Hawk war, though confined to the state of Illinois, made an epoch in the history of Iowa. It was the last of the many Indian wars, and was concluded by a cession of much of the valuable lands of Iowa to the government. Reports of the war had stirred up more or less enthusiasm as to the future of the west, and settlers began to come soon after the war had ended. Many of the officers, and others who had taken part in the war, became the government agents and officials in various capacities in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa. The government also, through its representatives in congress, planned great things for the west in opening canals and roads, while rivers were made navigable and steamship traffic opened up. One must not be led to believe that Iowa was the only part of the west which grew so rapidly. The growth was general, it is true, but Iowa seems to have grown more rapidly than any other of the territories between 1836 and 1846. Illinois was admitted as a state in 1818; Missouri three years later; next came Iowa in 1846, while Wisconsin, which had been explored in 1639, was not admitted to statehood till 1848; and Minnesota, settled as early as 1680, and having a fort built in 1820, was not admitted to statehood till 1858. Thus, it would appear, that Iowa remained a territory for a shorter period of time than any other of the western states located in the Mississippi valley, but, of course, there is reason for this. It was a prairie state, in the first instance, and on the east was bounded by a great waterway and by a state teeming with an aggressive population, many of whose people soon
- 60. crossed the borderland even before the government had made proper surveys and thrown the land open to settlement. Henry Dodge was appointed governor of the new Territory of Wisconsin in 1836, Iowa at that time being a part of Wisconsin. With the exception of a few settlements of white people along Lake Michigan and in the mining region around Dubuque there were few, if any, white settlers. Governor Dodge's work was largely with the Indians, in making contracts and ceding lands to the government. Settlers were coming in constantly and a demand for a survey of the lands was made from time to time. Survey of the public lands in Iowa was begun in the fall of 1836. Great preparations for the land sales were made. These were to take place in Dubuque and Burlington in November, 1838. The settlers who had arrived on these lands for some time prior to its survey arranged among themselves to select an arbitration association, each township making a register of all claims, and choosing one representative to attend the land sales, giving him authority to bid off the lands selected by each claimant. A. C. Dodge was appointed the first registrar of the land office at Burlington, and George W. Jones the first surveyor-general of Iowa. One of the surveyors-general in the early '40s was no other than Judge James Wilson, of Keene, New Hampshire, a son of a Revolutionary soldier, and himself a lawyer of more than ordinary ability, a judge, and at one time a member of congress. He was appointed by General Harrison, an old friend. At the first convention which met at Burlington in November, 1837, for the purpose of organizing a separate territory of Iowa, were the following delegates from Dubuque county, which, at that time, included a part of what later became Linn county: P. H. Engle, J. I. Fales, G. W. Harris, W. A. Warren, W. B. Watts, A. F. Russell, W. H. Patton, J. W. Parker, J. D. Bell and J. H. Rose. The convention in its petition to congress asserted that there were 25,000 people in that portion of Wisconsin Territory known as "The Iowa District;" that houses had been erected; that farms were cultivated, and still
- 61. people could not obtain title to their lands, and asking that the part west of the river be set aside as a separate territory. This was one of the most important conventions held on what became Iowa soil, and congress at once took action to make such provisions as were thought wise and expedient. Linn county was established by an act of the legislature of the Territory of Wisconsin approved on December 21, 1837. The county was regular in shape, but four townships larger than its neighbors on the north and east, which were created at the same time. The boundaries received at this time have not been altered. The spelling of the name was Lynn, although it was spelled in the body of the act itself Linn; it took its name from Dr. Louis F. Linn, United States senator from Missouri, who was appointed to that office in 1833 and who was a friend and admirer of President Jackson, and much interested in the development of the west. The eastern part of Linn county, perhaps one-third, had been part of the original county of Dubuque since 1834, the boundary line running from the southeast corner of the county in a northwesterly line a little to the west of the middle in the northern part of the county. Linn county then embraces within its limits two Indian land cessions. The eastern part was acquired from the Sac and Fox Indians by the treaty of September 21, 1832, known as the Black Hawk Purchase; the western part, or the other two-thirds, was acquired by treaty of October 21, 1837. The fourteen counties created by an act sub-dividing Dubuque county into new counties, which was approved October 21, 1837, were as follows: Dubuque, Clayton, Jackson, Benton, Linn, Jones, Clinton, Johnson, Scott, Delaware, Buchanan, Cedar, Fayette, and Keokuk. While most of these counties were established outright the wording of the act relating to Dubuque county implies that it was looked upon as the former county reduced in size, which was not correct, as this land from which these counties were laid out also included much of the Sac and Fox cession made after Dubuque county had been formed
- 62. and laid out, and which county had not been ceded to the United States government. These boundary lines were reduced in size later; however the boundaries of Dubuque, Delaware, Jackson, Jones, Linn, Clinton, Cedar, and Scott have remained as they were laid out at the time. The Territory of Iowa was created by an act of congress approved June 12, 1838. Among the bills passed by the first legislature, which met during the winter of 1838 and 1839, was the following: "An Act to Organize the County of Linn, and establish the Seat of Justice thereof. "Section 1. Be it enacted by the Council and House of Representatives of the Territory of Iowa, that the county of Linn be and the same is hereby organized from and after the 10th of June next, and the inhabitants of said county be entitled to all the rights and privileges to which, by law, the inhabitants of other organized counties of this Territory are entitled, and the said county shall be a part of the Third Judicial District, and the District Court shall be held at the seat of justice of said county, or such other place as may be provided until the seat of justice is established. "Section 2. That Richard Knott, Lyman Dillon and Benjamin Nye be and they are hereby appointed Commissioners to locate the seat of justice in said county, and shall meet at the house of William Abbe, on the first Monday of March next, in said county, and shall proceed forthwith to examine and locate a suitable place for the seat of justice of said county, having particular reference to the convenience of the county and healthfulness of the location.
- 63. DOUBLE LOG CABIN Built by Wm. Abbe, Linn County's First Settler "Section 3. The Commissioners, or a majority of them, shall, within ten days after their meeting at the aforesaid place, make out and certify to the Governor of this Territory, under their hands and seals, a certificate containing a particular description of the situation of the location selected for the aforesaid county seat; and on the receipt of such certificate, the Governor shall issue his proclamation affirming and declaring the said location to be the seat of justice of said county of Linn. "Section 4. The Commissioners aforesaid shall, before they enter upon their duties, severally take and subscribe an oath before some person legally authorized to administer the same, viz: I, ............, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I am not, either directly or indirectly, interested in the location of the seat of justice of Linn County, nor do I own any property in lands, or any claims, within the said county of Linn. So help me God. (Signed) A. B., etc. "Section 5. If, at any time within one year thereafter, it shall be shown that the said Commissioners, or any of them, received any present, gratuity, fee or reward in any form other than that allowed
- 64. by law, or before the expiration of six months after the Governor's proclamation, declaring the said seat of justice permanent, become interested in said town or any lands in its immediate vicinity, the Commissioner or Commissioners shall, upon conviction thereof by indictment in the District Court of the county in which he or they may reside, be guilty of a high misdemeanor, and be forever disqualified to vote at any election or to hold any office of trust or profit within this Territory. "Section 6. The Commissioners aforesaid shall receive, upon making out their certificate of the location of the seat of justice of said county, each two dollars per day, and also three dollars for every twenty miles going and returning from their respective homes. Approved January 15, 1839." Two of the Commissioners named in the act, Richard Knott and Benjamin Nye, accepted the trust, meeting at the house of William Abbe, two and one-half miles west of what is now Mount Vernon. The Commissioners located the county seat in the middle of the county and named it "Marion," in honor of one of the Revolutionary generals. The Commissioners reported to the governor of the territory the completion of their work, and Governor Robert Lucas proclaimed the county of Linn duly established. For election purposes Linn county was attached to Cedar, Johnson, and Jones, the first polling precinct being located at Westport, which had been laid out by Israel Mitchell with the expectation that this would be the county seat, Mr. Mitchell believing that the county seat should be located on the river, and that that location would be near enough the center for all practical purposes. In October, 1838, the entire county composed one precinct, and thirty-two ballots were cast for candidates for the legislature. Charles Whittlesey was chosen for the senate and Robert G. Roberts for the house. The first county election was held in August, 1839, when three commissioners were selected at Westport—L. M. Strong, Peter
- 65. McRoberts, and Samuel C. Stewart. This body had the same powers as was later conferred upon the county supervisors. This commission first sat as a body officially September 9, 1839, in the log house of James W. Willis. Hosea W. Gray was sheriff and acted as clerk of the court until a clerk was duly appointed. The minutes state: "The Board proceeded to the appointment of a Clerk. Thereupon it was ordered that John C. Berry be and is hereby appointed to the office of Clerk of the Board of Linn County Commissioners. "Ordered. That the county seat of Linn County be and is hereby called and shall hereafter be known and designated by the name of Marion." At this session W. H. Smith and Andrew J. McKean were appointed constables for the county. Jonas Martin was appointed road supervisor, his district embracing all the land east of Marion and west of Big creek and east on the Marion and Davenport roads crossing Big creek. "It was also authorized that as Linn County had no safe place for the keeping of criminals that Sheriff Gray contract with the Sheriff of Muscatine County for the keeping of one Samuel Clews, and that the Sheriff borrow funds to pay for the support and keeping of said Clews while in confinement." It seems that the board met monthly and the county was divided into three voting precincts as follows: One at William Abbe's, known as Sugar Grove Precinct, with the following judges: William Abbe, John Cole, and John McAfferty; one at Marion, with James W. Bassett, Henry Thompson, and Rufus H. Lucore, judges; one at Michael Greene's, with Michael Greene, James Cummings, and Bartimeas McGonigle, judges. At this time Ross McCloud was appointed county surveyor and was ordered to make the survey of the county seat and report, which he did, and also to lay out additions, which was done. A county jail was also ordered erected in January, 1840, and the contract for the
- 66. building of the same was let to William Abbe and Asher Edgerton for the sum of $635.00; the first money raised by sale of lots in Marion was applied on the contract for the erection of the jail. THE FIRST SURVEY The first survey was made in 1838, being all of Jones county and townships 84, 85, and 86 north, in range 5, west, in Linn county. This was made public in the newspapers and many settlers came in, taking the best lands that had been surveyed and squatting on the other land which they knew would soon be open for settlement. Linn Grove was an ideal place, and here in an early day a large number settled. The sale of lands in the county was advertised to take place in January, 1840. On account of the difficulties of transportation, the settlers petitioned to have the same postponed until the summer of that year, which petition was granted. George Greene, who had been a school teacher near Ivanhoe and even at that time was a man of no ordinary ability, was asked to see what could be done in changing the place from Dubuque to Marion. Mr. Greene volunteered to go to Washington and lay the matter before congress, or the men in charge of the land department. After some time he succeeded in his mission and won the grateful respect of his fellow pioneers, saving them a great deal of money. Thus, for a time, Marion was a United States land office, and the people of Linn county who had little money to spend could claim their lands without much trouble. THE FIRST COURT HOUSE IN THE COUNTY The first court house built in the county was a log structure for the use of the pioneers. This structure was erected during the years 1840 and 1841. As there was no money in the county treasury and as the court house was needed, the settlers donated their labor. They cut the logs, hauled them to Marion, and constructed the building, the roof being of shakes and the floor of puncheons. Among those who helped erect this first seat of justice were James
- 67. and John Hunter, the Stambaugh brothers, James and Elias Doty, and others. The first case, it is said, tried in this court house was one brought against James Doty for jumping a claim on the west side of the river, adjoining the claim of Robert Ellis, the question being whether or not a man erecting a bark building and claiming the land had complied with the law. The jury was impaneled and a trial had which lasted for some time. When the case went to the jury the judge and all vacated so that the jury could use the small room in arriving at a decision. The jury was out the afternoon and all night, and at ten o'clock the next morning they reported that they were unable to agree. During all this time they had had nothing to eat, and the water they had to drink was very poor. Upon this jury sat James Hunter, one of the first settlers of the county, who was the only stubborn one to hold out in favor of Doty. He used to tell later that he felt that he could never look James Doty in the face if he should consent to such a verdict as the other eleven had framed up against him. The case was tried at a subsequent term when the jury decided in favor of Doty, to the effect that while he was later than the claimant in making his claim he was a bona fide settler with the intention of becoming a permanent settler. The next court house built in Marion was a frame structure still standing just west of the present brick building, and now used as a hotel. The present brick court house was erected by George W. Gray, the brick superstructure being built by Peter D. Harman, of Bertram, father of Warren Harman, of Cedar Rapids. Much of the carpenter work was done by that old pioneer, recently deceased, William Patterson, father of W. D. Patterson, of Cedar Rapids. The first jail was erected in January, 1840, the contract for the building being awarded to William Abbe and Asher Edgerton for $635.00. The building was finished by May 1st of the same year. The first moneys raised by sale of lands were applied on this contract. At the July session, 1849, the county was divided into three districts as follows: the townships of Washington and Fayette composed District No. 1; Franklin and Brown composed District No. 2; and
- 68. Marion and Putnam District No. 3. At the July session, 1840, the board of commissioners began to discuss the question of township organizations. A vote of the county was ordered at the next election to determine the voice of the people; the election took place in August of that year and resulted in favor of the proposition. Lists of townships are as follows: Marion, Franklin, Washington, Fayette, Putnam, and Brown established in 1841; Linn and Rapids, 1843; Otter Creek, 1844; Buffalo and Maine, 1848; Monroe, 1849; Spring Grove, 1853; Clinton, 1854; Jackson, 1855; College, Bertram, Boulder, and Fairfax, 1858; Grant, 1872; and Cedar, 1906. THE JUDICIARY The first records of the district court held in Linn county are dated Monday, October 26, 1840, Iowa Territory, Linn county. Pursuant to an act of the legislature of the territory, approved July, 1840, the district court of the United States and also for the Territory of Iowa met at Marion in said county on Monday, October 26, 1840. Present: The Hon. Jos. D. Williams, judge of the second judicial district for the territory; W. G. Woodward, district attorney of the United States for the district of Iowa; R. P. Lowe, prosecuting attorney for the second judicial district; H. W. Gray, sheriff of the county of Linn; S. H. Tryon, clerk of the district court; Lawrence Maloney for the marshal of the territory. The following grand jurors were among the best known settlers: Aaron Usher, Samuel Ross, James Leverich, D. W. King, Israel Mitchell, W. H. Chambers, William Donahoo, Dan Curtis, W. T. Gilberts, G. A. Patterson, Isaac Butler, John Goudy, J. A. Gibson, Joe Barnett, Asher Edgerton, William Chambers, O. L. Bolling, Dan J. Doty, and Joseph Warford. As bailiff of the grand jury served Perry Oxley, one of the best known settlers. The petit jurors were: D. A. Woodbridge, Isaac Carroll, G. W. Gray, B. McGonegal, John McCloud, Thomas Goudy, J. W. Willis, John
- 69. Long, J. W. Margrove, Ira Simmons, John Crow, Joe Carroway, Steve Osborn, H. B. Mason, O. R. Gregory, John Nation, Thomas Maxwell, and George Yiesly. One of the early cases of record is that of A. Moriarty vs. N. G. Niece. One of the early jury trials was that of H. C. Dill vs. John Barnett: one of the first criminal cases was that of Territory vs. W. K. Farnsworth, indicted for starting a prairie fire; the jury returned a verdict of "not guilty." The probate docket is a very small volume but is filled with entries of much historical interest concerning the old citizens of the territory. Among a number of entries can be found the following: In the estate of A. Coles, claim filed and allowed November 8, 1842; in the estate of Thomas Gray, claims allowed in 1844; in the estate of J. Barnett, claims allowed in 1843 in favor of Israel Mitchell in the amount of $4.50; in the estate of John Crow, claims allowed 1842, as well as against the estate of Elias Doty, administered upon in 1843 by M. J. Doty and Jos. Crain, administrators. The estate of A. L. Ely takes up a number of pages. The first default case seems to be listed for the October term, 1840, that of James D. Stockton vs. Stephen Osborn, et al, the claim being assigned by John O. Gray to plaintiff. The next case was that of Thomas W. Campbell and Perry Oxley vs. John Barnett, which was a transcript from J. G. Cole, a justice of the peace. R. P. Lowe acted as district attorney, while Isaac Butler was foreman of the grand jury. The first entry made by a native of a foreign country to become a citizen of the United States was made by Peter Garron, stating that he was then a resident of Linn county and that he was formerly a subject of Scotland of the United Kingdom of England and Ireland, and that it was his intention to renounce allegiance to Queen Victoria and become a faithful citizen of the United States. The first divorce action was brought by Dyer Usher against Mary Usher at the October term, 1842, but it seems that the notice of
- 70. publication was not served as ordered and no decree was granted. The first decree of divorce granted was that on the petition of Mrs. Parthena C. Hewitt vs. Abraham Hewitt, rendered at the March term, 1844. CIRCUIT COURT Pursuant to an act of the legislature of Iowa, approved April 3, 1868, the county of Linn became part of the second circuit of the eighth judicial district, the circuit consisting of Cedar, Linn, and Jones counties, Hon. S. Yates, of Cedar, being elected judge. The first term was held at Marion January, 1869, when W. G. Thompson appeared as prosecuting attorney and A. J. McKean as clerk. The legislature in a few years changed the boundaries of this circuit, making it composed of Cedar, Linn, Johnson, Jones, Iowa, Tama, and Benton counties. It was known as the eighth district of the circuit and district courts. John McKean was judge of the circuit court and John Shane, of Vinton, judge of the district court. By an act of the legislature the circuit court was abolished and Linn county was incorporated into a district composed of Linn, Cedar, and Jones counties with three judges. NOTED AND EXCITING TRIALS Linn county has had its share of noted trials, and many are the pages which may be gleaned from its musty records to show how treachery, cowardice, and selfishness have here, as in many other places, played their parts. It is not best to uncover many of these pages, as it would perhaps add nothing to the general information or be of any value except as historical relics of a former age.
- 71. One of the first murder cases in the county, at least as far as known, was that of Nathan Carnagy who was brutally assaulted by James Reed in Marion in 1847. Reed had been drinking heavily and got into a quarrel with Carnagy about some old trouble. Reed was arrested, tried before a jury, and acquitted. Another case was that of the killing of Pat O'Connell by Samuel Butler in 1865, the affair growing out of a dispute over some property interests. The parties met on a public highway, a quarrel ensued with disastrous results. The jury in this case also returned a verdict of "not guilty." FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, CEDAR RAPIDS, COMPLETED IN 1851
- 72. RESIDENCE OF WILLISTON JONES, WHERE COE COLLEGE WAS BORN FROM CARROLL'S HISTORY John Akers was murdered in a saloon in Cedar Rapids in 1864 by one Decklots; the jury returned a verdict of "guilty." This sad affair was due to liquor, both parties being more or less under its influence at the time the quarrel began. There are a number of murder cases of an appalling nature on record; sometimes a conviction and sometimes an acquittal resulted. On the civil side of the calendar can be found many cases attracting attention, sometimes on account of the charges made, at other times on account of the large amounts of money involved. In this forum magnificent addresses were heard, and no lawyer practicing
- 73. at the Linn county bar was ever a miser of his eccentricities, whatever they might have been. Most of them had the thread of the attorney in their nature and took to oratory like a duck to water, and most of them in these early pioneer days went in to win the jury at all hazards, possessing the power to stir the heart and to make their personality felt. THE ERA OF THE OUTLAW Along the American frontier were always found the outlaws; sometimes they outnumbered the honest settler and sometimes not, depending more or less upon conditions. Outlaws preferred to hover on the frontier where courts of justice were unknown and where the sons of toil, busy with making a living, had no time to defend themselves against outlawry. Some of these outlaws had committed theft and robbery and were living upon this borderland of civilization, knowing that it would be perfectly safe under assumed names. Others came here for the special purpose, knowing it was easier to make a living by theft than by honest toil. Thus, the Linn county frontier at an early date was infested with this class of people, and for a number of years the rights of the people had to be protected by associations organized for this purpose, and made up of the best class in the community, until such a time as law and order could be enforced by decrees of court and by penitentiary sentences. When the first white settler came into the Red Cedar valley there were only two counties fully organized west of the Mississippi, with the exception of the state of Missouri. These counties were Dubuque and Des Moines. They extended from a flag station at Fort Armstrong back into the country forty miles, and from the Missouri line to a line running westward from Prairie du Chien in Wisconsin. It was a large tract of country, and offered secure hiding places for law violators. In this wild country, along rivers where the timber was thick, hiding places for the outlaw were offered, and when settlers did come in the outlaw did not like to remove, and, consequently
- 74. tormented the actual settler and frequently took by stealth or force such personal property as he wanted. In the early day the country bordering on the Cedar river was flooded with counterfeiters, and it is stated that this counterfeit money was so well made that it was difficult to tell which was the good money and which the bad and, in fact, at times it seems that the good money was a scarce article. No one was able to tell where this counterfeit money came from, but it is supposed very little, if any, was made here but that it was imported from other places and distributed by "healers" on a percentage basis. While a cry was raised against counterfeit money, only the government could handle such cases and very little was done to start proceedings. Now and then the government attorney would bring a case or two, but as a rule the defendants were generally released by a jury, many of whom were friends of the parties accused. It was not until horse stealing became prevalent that the people arose in arms against the outlaw and formed associations called "anti-horse thief" associations. It was a difficult thing at first to prosecute, as the gang was well organized and had a perfect system of stations, agents, signs, and signals. The members of these gangs which infested Cedar, Jones, and Linn counties in the early days dressed better than the honest farmer, were more charitable, and in the day time, at least, were looked upon as the most respectable persons in the community. They were shrewd and cunning in their business transactions, and hedged themselves in such a way as to escape detection and exposure for a long time. These "free booters" and plunderers would move from county to county and from community to community if things got a little hot and they feared exposure. In counties where they were in the majority they would intimidate and scare the actual settlers, even if these knew positively that depredations had been made. And frequently the honest settler who attacked and complained was forced to leave the country instead of the outlaw who had many friends who came to his rescue. Many a man who was known to make a complaint before a grand
- 75. jury, to a prosecuting attorney, or judge would be trailed by a company of outlaws, threatening letters would be written against himself and members of his family, that his buildings would be destroyed by fire if he persisted in bringing suits or attempted to file an information of any kind against any members of the band. A few of these men who were at least accused of being members of these various gangs of counterfeiters, horse thieves and other desperadoes may be mentioned. Perhaps the most noted ones were the members of the Brodie gang, composed of John Brodie, and his four sons—John, Jr., Stephen, William, and Hugh—who came into Linn county in 1839 and were among the first settlers in this county. They were natives of Ohio. Some had lived in Michigan for a time, and before coming here had commenced their career of villainy. On account of some misdemeanor they were driven from Clear Ford on the Mohican river in what is now Ashland county, Ohio, in 1830 or 1831, and sought refuge for a time in Steuben county, Indiana. Here they remained for a couple of years when they became so notorious as to arouse the country against them, and they fled westward in about 1835 and found their way into what was known as the Rock river country, or Brodie's Grove, Dement township, Ogle county, Illinois. In this part of Illinois at this time the country was completely under the control of outlaws and desperadoes, and here the Brodies found congenial companionship. Early in 1839 the Brodies gang were driven out by an organized society called the "regulators," composed of law abiding people who insisted upon law enforcement. They then drifted westward and located in Linn county. From this time on for a number of years there was scarcely a term of court but that one or more members of this family was arraigned for trial on some criminal charge or other. Sam Leterel, Christian Gove, James Case, also known as Jim Stoutenberg, McConlogue, Squires, McBroom, and others were members of this gang. McConlogue resided for a time at Cedar
- 76. Bluffs, later removing into Johnson county where Morse is now located. Stoutenberg resided at times with McConlogue and at times with Squires. A number of others associated with the gang and lived on the borders of Linn and adjoining counties and went by various names. Where they came from no one knew and they dropped out of sight if there was any danger of arrest and conviction. In 1839 John Goudy and his son-in-law, Thomas McElheny, and a son settled in Linn county, and it was noised abroad that the family was very wealthy. To ascertain whether or not they had money, some time in April, 1840, a man by the name of Switzer was sent to visit the Goudys under the pretense of wanting to borrow money, the real object being to ascertain whether or not the parties kept money and whether or not he could obtain a pretended loan. The loan was declined for some reason or other, but it is supposed that Switzer learned enough in his talk with the Goudy family to know that they had money and there would be a chance to make a good haul. The gang went up along the Cedar river on the west side and crossed the river about where Goudy's home was. Here McConlogue had some conversation with a person who knew him. About midnight of a day in April the door of the Goudy cabin was forced open and the inmates awoke to find themselves surrounded by five burglars who threatened their lives if they did not give up their money. Old Mr. Goudy replied that he had but little money, only $40.00, and that they could find that in his vest pocket. The vest was searched and the money found. They insisted that he had more and demanded it. The old man persisted that it was every dollar he had, or that was about the house. The leader of the gang then ordered the house to be searched and directed the occupants of the beds to cover their heads at once. In the shuffle for places Mrs. McElheny, a daughter of Goudy, recognized Switzer, who had been there to borrow the money a few days before, and also another member of the gang who was well known by the family. In the search for money a purse containing $120.00 belonging to a daughter, Hannah, was found by the burglars. In an old leather belt
- 77. used by Mr. Goudy there was also a $100.00 bill which the robbers overlooked or could not find in their hurry to search the house. They became very angry at not finding any more money, having expected to find $9,000.00 which Mr. Goudy was reported to have had in the house at the time. The robbers on leaving the house cursed every member of the family, and seemed much put out at the haul they had made. Captain Thomas H. Goudy, a married son, lived near his father's cabin. He had been a captain of militia in Ohio and his uniform was hanging upon the wall. The robbers seeing this remarked "a military officer must be a rich man," and his money was demanded, but they received nothing, and after turning over everything in the house and finding only some provisions, they left Goudy and went to the cabin of William F. Gilbert, another prominent settler in the neighborhood, who was also supposed to have considerable money. On the night in question Gilbert had stopping with him three men, the mail carrier who operated a stage between Dubuque and Iowa City, and two others. In the Gilbert house, as in the other house, the cabin consisted of only one room with several beds, and on this night Mrs. Goudy and her children occupied one bed, the strangers another bed, while Goudy and the mail carrier slept on the floor by the fire. The entrance of the robbers was so sudden that before the occupants knew what was going on they were covered with guns and clubs, and their money was demanded. Goudy rallied to defend his home, and so did the mail carrier who slept near the door. Both men were knocked down and the cheek bone on one side of the mail carrier's face was smashed completely by a blow from a club wielded by one of the robbers. The house was thoroughly searched and the drawer of a box which was supposed to be opened by a secret spring known to no one but members of the family was forced and a $50.00 bill and some $30.00 or $40.00 in change were found and taken. While all the older members were frightened Mr. Goudy's son, during the plundering, arose in bed and recognized a neighbor—one Goodrich, who lived but a half mile distant—as one of the robbers. This
- 78. neighbor had up to this time been looked upon as a respectable man. It was he who opened the drawer as quickly as though he was one of the family. The robbers secured as their share of the booty this night about $240.00. A young daughter of Mr. Goudy, who remembered well that night, was later married to Judge John Shane, of Vinton, a well known jurist and a most excellent judge. This wholesale robbery stirred the whole country, and Captain Thomas Goudy especially, being a military man, insisted that now it was high time for the people to arouse themselves and if the officers of the law refused to do anything then the settlers would take the law into their own hands and start something going. Thomas and his father went to J. W. Tallman at Antwerp and Colonel Prior Scott at Pioneer Grove for advice and counsel, and especially to apprehend one Wallace who was implicated in this robbery. Colonel Scott went among his people and organized a "mutual protective association," the settlers hunted up their rifles and shot guns, and the organization was ready to begin work. Wallace had fled, but pursuers were on his track and he was apprehended in Illinois City in Illinois, ten miles above Muscatine, by a citizen named Coleman and turned over to Thomas Goudy and his party. Coleman's reputation in the vicinity was not the best and he had been suspected of harboring outlaws, but it was stated on account of some difficulty in the division of spoils he and Wallace had had a falling out and hence Wallace's easy capture. A warrant was taken out for the arrest of Switzer, and when Wallace was returned Switzer was also arrested and a preliminary examination was held before John G. Cole, one of the first justices of the peace in Linn county. Both of the parties were held to bail. Their cases came on for trial at Tipton at the October term, 1841, of the district court. James W. Tallman, a resident of Antwerp, accompanied by several neighbors, started out to arrest Switzer, a large man and an ugly one. Switzer resided near Halderman's mill. At two o'clock in the morning a posse surrounded Switzer's home. He refused to open the
- 79. door and they waited till daylight before he was taken in custody. Switzer's cabin was a perfect arsenal, there being guns, pistols, and ugly knives scattered all around. Later James Stoutenberg, also known as Jim Case, was arrested at McConlogue's as an accomplice and member of the gang. He was taken into the woods near McConlogue's and examined in the court of "Judge Lynch" in order to obtain a confession from him, and he was finally tied to a tree and severely flogged. He was never seen alive again. Some assert that he left the country, and others that members of the party carried him to the Cedar river, tied him to a stone raft and left him to his fate. McConlogue was also arrested as being a member of the gang in the robbery, but he established an alibi. Being satisfied that he was guilty of helping to plan the robbery, the pioneer settlers, duly aroused, tried him by rules not known in the ordinary law court. He was sentenced to be hanged, but finally it was agreed that this sentence should be changed to whipping, and that each one of the citizens should give him five lashes on the bare back, and if that failed to bring a confession as to the particulars of the robbery and the extent and names of the gang, then he should be whipped the second time until he died. Blows continued to fall upon his quivering and bleeding back until he implored for mercy and promised to reveal all he knew about the robbery and the operations of the "free booters." He admitted having knowledge of the Goudy robbery and that he received as his share of the booty $25.00. He also admitted that Wallace was the leader of the gang at this time and that Switzer was another member of the gang of five men who perpetrated the robbery. The members of the association after this confession let him go, but first applied a solution of salt on his lacerated flesh, followed by an application of slippery elm bark to remind him of the ordeal he had recently passed through, and which he never forgot. At this time McConlogue was under indictment in Johnson county for assaulting a man named Brown with intent to rob him; on this charge he was tried and sent to the penitentiary.
- 80. Goodrich, a neighbor of the Gilberts, who had taken part in the robbery and who had been recognized by the latter's son, was also horse whipped and gagged at the same time but he refused to answer any questions and denied having taken part in the robbery. Soon after this he removed from the county and was never heard of afterwards. McConlogue's admission implicated McBroom, who had been known for some time previously as one of the brightest men of the gang, and who was also supposed to be a lawyer. He was also caught and whipped nearly to death near what is known as Scott's mill, without making any confession, but with threat that if anything more was heard of any attempted robbery of any kind by any member of the gang everyone, including himself, would be swung up to the first oak tree. It is needless to say that he immediately left the country and was never heard of again.
- 81. DANIEL SEWARD HAHN One of the First Settlers in Linn County William Stretch, an old settler, many years afterwards made a trip down the Mississippi and there in one of the river cities, either New Orleans or Memphis, he met and recognized McBroom who had been so severely flogged on the banks of the Cedar river. McBroom claimed that he had lived an honest life since removing from the Cedar river and he begged Stretch not to say anything about it, at least in his new home. Stretch agreed to this, but investigated to ascertain whether or not McBroom had told the facts, and found that
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