SUSAN E. BROWNELL

Most of the sports to which we commonly refer in modern usage, such as soccer,
basketball, volleyball, boxing, and track and field, took their present form in
England and the United States during the nineteenth century, and are therefore
closely connected with a specific culture--Anglo-Saxon. The cultural distinc-
tiveness of this connotation of "sport" is reflected in the fact that, around the
world, whenever Anglo-Saxon sports were adopted, the word "sport" was si-
multaneously adopted to describe them. Mandarin Chinese is a notable excep-
tion. The official Chinese phrase is tiyu (physical culture). Tiyu is an overarching
term that refers to three categories: competitive sports (jingji tiyu or tiyu yun-
dong), physical education in the schools (xuexiao tiyu or simply tiyu), and rec-
reation and physical fitness for the masses (qunzhong tiyu). The meaning of
jingji tiyu is much more restricted than that of "sports" in English, so there is
a genuine translation problem in dealing with sports-related concepts. Because
of the specific cultural background of the word "sport," it is often questionable
whether it should be used to refer to traditional (pre-twentieth century) Chinese
physical culture. The following definition will allow me to delineate a field of
inquiry.

Sport consists of a variety of activities that range outward from an ideal type.
The ideal type of sport is found in ballgames like soccer and basketball, or in
individual contests like boxing and track ( Lüschen and Sage 1981, 5). The focus
of this chapter is on the competitive sports found in the modern Olympic Games
and the traditional Chinese sports that more or less resemble them. These activ-
ities grade into other types of activities; most notably, the line between tradi-
tional martial arts (wushu) and hand-to-hand combat sports (wrestling, boxing,
leitai) is not at all clear.

A cultural analysis of sport should describe sport practices as one facet of the

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