This year, Qatar National Sports Day was on February 12th, to which residents and locals were
encouraged to participate in sports and activities to raise awareness on living
healthy lifestyles. Aspire Park, Corniche and Katara were clustered with
people. At Aspire, there was a competition among the Civil Defense, kids
activities and informational sessions and, for those who missed the point
completely, people who came with picnics of unhealthy food.
National Sports Day,
although a social concept, has a lot of ethnic meaning in terms of sharing
cultural practices and perspectives. Ethnicity means common characteristics
including ancestry, history, language, religion and a shared cultural heritage.
Therefore, what most residents don’t understand is that apart from having the day
for health motivation, it’s also supposed to motivate more cultural ways to
participate in the community.
The Emir and Heir Apparent also
participated in the event by riding a purebred Arabian camel at
Um Ethnaytein. Qatar News Agency reported that the Emir’s important taking part
came due to; “HH belief in the importance of sports and its significant role in
the lives of n the lives of individuals and communities; and contributes to
revive the sports of parents, grandparents and authentic Arab heritage.” The ironic thing was
that the day mostly revolved around setting Guinness world records rather than
participating in sports that involved “authentic Arab heritage.” For example,
Qatar set the Guinness world record for the largest number of players in a five-a-side
non-stop football match and having the largest football (or soccer ball) ever
at 38-foot-high.
My opinion on what the main idea behind
National Sports day comes from the importance of community participation and in
terms of improving health, the sociological theory of social change, meaning the
alteration of the social order of society. In an interview I conducted for my Media Storytelling class project on health and the
growing issue of diabetes in Doha, I found that “[the] National Health Strategy
reported that 71% of all residents are overweight, including 75% of Qatari’s.
40% of Qatari’s are obese compared to 32% of all residents.” Therefore,
the slowly growing awareness of improving Qatari’s health was a major
sociological problem for health experts to address in Qatar, one of which was
the result of National Sports Day and what I think was the reason of importance
for the Emir and the Heir apparent to show their participation as of equal
importance.
In my freshman year, I founded Northwestern University in Qatar’s first sports team, the Men’s Football team. Back then I didn’t know I was bringing a subculture into the NUQ community. I just thought of it as a club like all the other ones that existed. However, after September 30, 2012, after a sociology class about subcultures, I realized that I should be going down in the history books as one of the first students to introduce the subculture of sports in NUQ. The girl’s basketball team, however, will be recorded as the first successful NUQ sports team. It was much more challenging for me because NUQ had plenty of girls, but very few male students.
So how is the football team a subculture? A subculture is basically a group of people within a broader or larger culture. What differentiate them are their beliefs and values, which may or may not overlap with the beliefs and values of the popular culture. In this case, I would like to refer to NUQ as the popular culture and the football team as its subculture.
The major goal of NUQ is to provide excellent education and produce individuals who will become the pioneers of the media industry in this region. The major goal of the football team, however, is to promote physical education, sportsmanship and win competitions. We see some differences in the goals and beliefs of both, but there are also some overlaps. Honesty, discipline, punctuality are values that are required by the members of both organizations.
Through the football games organized in Education City, I also observed the emergence of fandom subculture. Several people come to support their teams during tournaments and important games. The sports subculture is closely tied to the fandom subculture. Members of the sport subculture are mostly athletes and other active members in the field of sports, whereas, the fandom subculture consists of individuals who admire or are passionate about a specific sport or any activity.
Once again, here I am writing another blog post relating to what we recently discussed in Sociology class about globalization and glocalization. Globalization can be defined as the flow of goods, services, money, people, information and culture across political borders, while, glocalization is a combination of globalization and localization. In other words, glocalization is established and disseminated globally, but also recognized to remain the local customs and traditions of a particular setting.
The beauty of sociology is that whatever theory or concept we learn, we could apply it to nearly every aspect of our society. I will be applying the concept of glocalization and globalization to the Qatar Women’s Sport Committee and specifically, Qatar’s National Team of Table Tennis for women, as I am a former player.
When it gets to glocalization and globalization, we should consider the multi-national corporations involved, governments, resistance and the consequences. Multi-national sports corporations such as Nike, Stiga and Adidas will benefit by increasing their markets and increase their profits from supplying the players and the teams with shoes, equipment’s and clothing. Also, governments and the Olympic committees will get involved in this matter when deciding on whether which countries should play against each other. For instance, when the Third Muslim Women’s Games was taking place in Iran in 2001, the Table tennis team had to get the approval from the Olympic Committee on whether they could participate in the games. In addition, I always had the sense of resistance while playing table tennis. The more conservative women and the more traditional locals were against playing. For example, one my friends had to stop playing because her family did not allow her to due to the societal norms and culture. On the other hand, some girls were conservative and played with their hijab on. Another form of resistance I noticed was segregation. Most of the time we were playing tournaments with only females, as most players and officials were uncomfortable in an environment with men. Lastly, consequences were evident when most parents and elder people were complaining about the loss of traditions and culture. The players spent more time in school and then playing table tennis, while barely making enough time with the family. The way the girls used to dress was westernized; the language we communicated in was English rather than Arabic. At one instance, one of the officials questioned me on why I don’t speak Arabic when I’m a Muslim and live in Qatar. All of these cases could be a representation of material and non-material cultural loss. At the end of the day, it depends on the individual and how they allow globalization influence their life and what they do.
At most times, I felt like I’m playing table tennis, but the Arabic version in respect to the Qatari and Islamic traditions and customs.
It turns out that yet another component plays an influential factor in a game like badminton—a person’s gender.
Badminton, one of the 8000 varied sports in the world, shares the common feature of being an inherently male dominated sport. As of 2004, the number of male badminton players (in the 16-34 age-group) was almost double the number of their female counterparts (retrieved from sports.espn.go).
Originally traced back to 16th Century Japan and Greece, badminton as we know today, was a 300-year-old European innovation in India. Then, elite men and women somberly playing shuttlecock and battledore were a very common sight.
Over the years though, the formula has changed dramatically as restrictions in movement have completely vanished.
Present day badminton= verve+ vitality+vivacity [B= 3V]
There is a certain degree of ease for those with a strong and supple body that is fairly well-built and amply energized. Men naturally have an upper hand in such a fast racquet sport that requires continuous exertion.
To summarize (and, once more, grossly to simplify) such positions, sport is a crucial site for the reproduction of patriarchal structures and values, a male- dominated secular religion that has celebrated the physically aggressive and often violent deeds of men. Sport has been an integral element of self- sustaining forms of exclusivist male culture, lubricating a closed system of male bonding and female denigration. (Rowe, 1998)
The last game of badminton I played was at EC, barely a few hours ago, and I must say I still feel dizzyingly tired. In the 45 minutes I spent at the game, I left the court four times to get a drink of water, and spent a total of about 15 minutes being an "audience," simply because I was too tired to play. Which brings me to the next formula:
Energy Level= Exhaustion- (Spirit + Motivation)
Towards the end of the game, my right hand ached as if it were bloated. Physical discomfort aside, I couldn't help but notice that throughout the entire span of the game, a majority of the shots were a) exceedingly fast-paced; b) usually directed upwards (because of the amount of strength expended on each shot, the shuttlecock would sometimes reach the ceiling, which was several feet high).
Every five seconds in a game of badminton, you are guaranteed to be doing either one of the following: jumping, running, skidding, stretching, hitting-as-hard-as-you-possibly-can. (And occasionally saying “Dayyum!” when you miss a shot because you are too distracted by the lights overhead, but that is an altogether different matter). Badminton is a reaction sport that can drain energy levels very easily, so sufficient physical strength is a must to stay buoyant.
That established, the following statistic is not particularly surprising:
Total number of badminton players in Rec Center on 18/04/’12 = 13 = 12 Males + 1 Female
Yes, I was the only female.
There are usually an equal number of women around though, said my badminton partner, Kee Guan NG. Although he agreed that such a sport involves intense physical activity, he stressed that the you-should-constantly-be-on-your-toes part of the game has not lugged back women in any way, at least in his home country, Malaysia. I learned that badminton is Malaysia’s national game and that the world’s leading player, as of 2012, is a Malaysian Lee Chong Wei.
Kee, a regular player at the Recreation Centre, continued about the relatively negligible gender segregation and equal woman proactivity in badminton, even in EC.
But I noticed that while he mentioned Wei as being the foremost international competitor, Guan said nothing about a similarly top-ranked woman player.
Which can be explained by the fact that badminton definitely has a manlike connotation attached to it. Wikipedia-- one of the most frequented websites around the world-- is proof enough of this: of the six coloured pictures of badminton players, only one shows (and rather vaguely) a woman player.
But it’s not just badminton.
For most of us, the term “Woman’s sports” is fed into our mental lexicon, while the term “Men’s sports” sounds deviously wrong.
Imagine, for example, Men’s cricket, or Men’s hockey. Or Men’s badminton. Somehow, the former part is taken for granted-- if it is a game, it is assumedly men’s.
Another interesting trend I noticed was that most players played for points
i.e. Men playing a game ∞ Level of competition
Throughout, the intense games were heavily peppered with split-second conversations like:
“What is the score?” “Six to Seven.”
The competitiveness was amusing. Interestingly though, my game with Kee was a score-free, casual one-- the only competition-bereft game he played. Perhaps this can be explained as follows (retrieved from jsssagepub.com):
The competitive hierarchy of athletic careers encouraged the development of masculine identities based on very narrow definitions of public success. The fact that winning was pre- mised on physical power, strength, discipline, and willingness to take, ignore, or deaden pain inclined men to experience their own bodies as machines, as in- struments of power and domination—and to see other peoples’ bodies as objects of their power and domination.
