Rebellion of the Body - Human Movement in a Postmodern Perspective

So it is a sort of history for the future, an exploration of the frontiers of the body to identify a series of problems and challenges with which humans in motion are currently confronted and for which adequate solutions have to be found. The starting point or, if you like, the "thesis" of this paper is contained in its title: The Rebellion of the Body: Human Movement in a Postmodern Perspective.

Despite the exponential trend in spectacular technological innovation, in the modification of values due to multiculturalism and political globalization, we are confronted with the fact that our mortal bodies have remained the same. Our bodies have not essentially changed since we climbed onto the evolutionary rung of the erect, speaking, toolmaking and playing homo sapiens sapiens.

The human body is a remarkably stable "text" in the midst of the radical changes in the technological and social-cultural context. Steven van Calcar's anatomical prints in Vesalius' De humani corporis fabrica, published in 1543, are, apart from a few minor details, still usable as a guidebook for students of the biological sciences, medicine, physical education and physiotherapy, who study human morphology. So in today's world of endings (the end of history, of geography, of nature, of democracy, of ideology) and "post-isms" (post-industrialism, post-capitalism, post-modernism and post-sportism), the human body is an anachronistic island in an over-whelmingly accelerating stream.

The seeking of limits and the exceeding of limits, both spatial and internal, the passion for speed and the cultivation of new experiences and sensations were part of the essence of modernity, and were typical of the previous fin de sicle. For example, the disclosure of the Alps and the associated, burgeoning sports of mountaineering and skiing were characteristic exponents of this notion of modernity (De Cauter, 1995, p. 153). In his standard work, From Ritual to Record (1978), Allen Guttmann attributed the following seven characteristics to the process of modernization in sport: secularization, equality, specialization, rationalization, bureaucracy, quantification and records.

Although Guttmann's analysis is open to criticism, particularly in its characterization of medieval sport, his interpretation of modern sport remains a brilliant synthesis. Compared to most popular traditional sports, modern sport has lost its religious, cultic character and has emancipated into a secular activity. In modern sport, opponents are played off against each other on the basis of matching, or equality (of age, weight and performance). In addition to this, modern sport is typified by extreme specialization based on intensive training, which is built up in a systematic and rational way.

The contemporary athlete is surrounded by a whole bureaucracy of associations and federations, administrators, officials, trainers, coaches, physiotherapists and doctors. In comparison with the Ancient Olympic Games, today's sport achievements are registered objectively, and quantified by means of time and distance statistics and judges' scores. And finally, the record is an abstract, universal standard by which means top athletes can challenge each other without ever meeting in person, as with, for example, the one-hour record in cycling.

So modern sport is a typical product of modernity. Citius, altius, fortius, the motto of the Olympic Movement, which Pierre de Coubertin (1868-1937) borrowed from the French Dominican Henri Didon (1840-1900), is a heathen ode to the modern concept of progress. Just like the grandiose world fairs of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Modern Olympic Games are flagrant examples of the pageantry of modernity. The second Olympic Games in Paris in 1900 and the third in St Louis in 1904 were in fact held as part of World Fairs. Both types of international events played on the theme of progress, in all its variations and registers, the so-called Anthropological Days in St Louis in 1904 achieving a caricatural peak (see e.g. Goksoyr, 1991).

Our definition of sport, which we have distilled from dozens of others, goes as follows: a physical activity with a recreational and competitive character, in which one tries to overcome either one\'s own physical limits or an external obstacle, in accordance with a previously determined code of behaviour (Renson, 1980: 16). Sport's inherent urge to exaggerate (citius, altius, fortius) has led, particularly at its higher levels, to its frequent degeneration into a caricature of this idea of progress. So the question I am asking here is: "Where are the boundaries of sport?". Put in a broader futuristic perspective, this would be: "What will limit human bodies in motion in a postmodern society?"

In order to answer this I would like to refer to a theoretical model (see figure 1), developed about ten years ago when the Dutch Catholic Sport Federation devoted a seminar to the topic Limits to the Practice of Sport (Renson, 1983).

This integrated model diagrammatically represents the complex relationships humans in movement have with the biological, psychological, social, cultural and ecological subsystems. The biological organism interacts with the personality by way of the motor system. This bio-psychological human in motion interacts by means of role play with the social system of which he is an integral part, and which in its turn interacts by means of symbols with the cultural system. As expressed in the Latin saying primum vivere deinde philosophari, culture needs a material infrastructure in order to maintain its existence. To this end energy is harnessed and drawn from the anorganic and organic physical environment, of which we are ourselves a humble part. As all these aspects interplay - that means play together - it requires a holistic approach to study humans in motion. I shall now use this so-called integrated model to explore the various limits that restrict the freedom of movement of humans in motion.

This exploration of limits is not intended as a contest in the great modernity versus postmodernity debate. I would however like to explain briefly my personal point of view with regard to this debate. Without going so far as Mark Eyskens (1995, p. 24) who branded postmodernism as more of a desperate endeavour than anything else, I nevertheless have serious restrictions about certain preachers who represent postmodernism as a complete transformation of our cultures and societies. Their arguments are often more of a theoretical discourse than a social reality, verbal discourse instead of intellectual intercourse. I prefer the point of view of Keith Tester, who in The life and times of post-modernity (1993), states that "Postmodernity is not the harbinger or expression of a new world. It is a reflection of the unresolved paradoxes and possibilities of modernity". I would also like to paraphrase T.K. Oommen (1995, p. 251), by stating that the genesis and the disappearance, the construction and deconstruction of all sorts of limits, biological, psychological, social, cultural and ecological, form the true story of human civilisation and of present-day social changes. Accordingly, here follows a five-part contribution to this story of border exploration, seen in the framework of a rapidly changing society, no longer the Belle poque, but the Schnelle poque of fast food, fast sex and fast sport.

Modern sport is of course a child of its time. There are a great many points of contact between the origins of the modern sport movement on the one hand and the scout movement on the other. Both originated in the imperialist Victorian and Edwardian eras in Great Britain; both movements were intended to be breeding grounds for a genuine virility; both propagated a spirit of idealistic internationalism, and finally, both movements heralded a new sort of experience of nature for the young men of the urban middle class.

So originally sport was equivalent to out-door life. The playing fields of England offered not only the opportunity to escape from the drab life of the industrial cities and the public schools, but also functioned as character factories, moulding both missionaries zealous for conversion and intrepid adventurers. By way of example, the Alps and the Himalayas were not opened up by the local population but by British travellers. The Alpine Club (founded in 1857) did not even consider it necessary to prefix its name with the word British. Whereas the climbing of Mont Blanc by Jacques Balmat and Dr Michel Paccard from Chamonix, in 1786, can still be seen as a scientific trip - though at a high level - the ascent of the Matterhorn by the British Edward Whymper, in 1865, was the true consecration of the modern sport of mountaineering.

When asked why he wanted to climb Everest, George Mallory phlegmatically replied, "Because it's there". This modernist line of thought ran on right up to the summit of Everest, which was conquered by a British expedition in 1953. After all, in modernist eyes, nature was seen as a hostile element that had to be overcome. If one now consults the report by John Hunt, the leader of the expedition, one is struck by its military jargon: ... the summit was conquered using oxygen tanks, after several attempted assaults from advance camps, and so on. Mount Everest has in the meantime been climbed by several hundred mountaineers, including two Flemings: Rudy van Snick and Ingrid Baeyens.

The base camp has become an enormous postmodern rubbish dump composed of abandoned camping equipment, oxygen tanks and climbing equipment. Thousands of hikers visit this record-breaking dump every year to contribute their bit of rubbish to it. A more or less similar story can be told about the development of skiing. Whereas the British writer Conan Doyle (1859-1930), the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was able to experiment playfully with Nordic skis in an unspoiled winter landscape in Switzerland at about the turn of the century, the Alps today are overrun by twenty million skiing fanatics from all corners of Europe every year. Local industry has long since discovered that the tourists are a lucrative source of income and this Disneyfication of the Alps is having serious ecological consequences.

Under the evocative title From Bambi to Rambo, Bart Vanreusel (1993), has outlined the birth of the postmodern conflict between sport and nature. Nature sportsmen, once a handful of adventure-seekers, are nowa-days dropped by the busload in natural areas by tour operators. Instead of approaching nature with respect and knowledge, woods, rocks, caves, canyons and rivers are used purely as a setting for Rambo-like exploits or for psychotherapy. Nature sport has been psychologically propagated into a metaphor: The basis is the insight that success in sport and success in business are the result of closely parallel approaches. Knowledge and will-power should here go hand in hand. (De Standaard, 26-27.8.1995, p. 2/39).

The invasion of nature by sport has provoked a reaction from the green movement. Riders and mountain-bikers are kept to the straight and narrow path, caves are sealed off, and valuable natural sites have been protected against cross- country skiers. In Flanders today a golf war is raging between the promoters of nine-hole courses and those who prefer to leave the making of holes in the landscape to moles. Outdoor sports must straighten themselves out with regard to the natural world. These natural resources are of course there for humans in movement too, but sportsmen should act less aggressive against their environment. The old conflict between forest rangers and poachers has now become one between the rangers and the joggers.

The concept of culture we employ here is the anthropological concept of culture that includes both the material culture, meaning technology and the economy, and the intellectual culture with its values, norms, beliefs and symbols. Physical culture, or les techniques du corps as Marcel Mauss (1935) identified it sociologically in 1935, has remained hidden too long in the twilight zone of the material culture and the intellectual culture.

Even the anthropologists, to whom nothing human is too hot or too cold to handle, have, with a number of notorious exceptions, relatively disregarded physical culture. Physical culture, culture physique, was steeped in a suspicious, sinful atmosphere of nudists or bodybuilders. In Catholic circles they were saddled with a hierarchical dualism between the mind and the body (D'hoker, Renson & Tolleneer, 1994) and in the history of physical education one might well speak of The Forgotten Body (D'hoker & Tolleneer, 1995).

It was only after the sexual wave, with its slogans like make love, not war, had rock'n rolled its way over the sixties that the body, and physical education and sport, came more to the public and political attention. This was the time when President John F. Kennedy spoke of the soft American, which launched a wave of national fitness campaigns in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Meanwhile there remains an old internal conflict between serious physical education on the one hand and increasingly commercialized sport on the other. After 1969, the extremely sound but often boring Swedish gymnastics were suddenly replaced by introductions into all sorts of sports. Having been labelled gym teacher for years, the physical education teachers were now called sports teachers. Physical education is not two hours of relaxation within the total weekly package of 32 hours of lessons. Physical education presupposes perspiration, coupled to inspiration (Renson, 1994).

Despite the fact that physical education and sport would be better off complementing each other rather than lying in each other's line of fire, we agree with Gilbert Andrieu (1992, p. 153) when he says that L'education physique est malade parce qu'elle ressemble trop au sport. We shall return to this in our conclusion. During the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, Pierre de Coubertin, in his speech in the Antwerp town hall, had already sounded a note of warning against the dangers of mercantilism and arrivism which had come to threaten the future of true sport. These words turned out to be quite prophetic, foretelling both the financial debacle of the 7th Olympiad in Antwerp and the later evolution of the Olympic Movement (Renson, 1996: 78). During the 1984 Los Angeles Games, the Olympic torch run was commercialized into a torchrun venture. Sport-minded yuppies paid US$ 3000 each for the privilege of bearing the torch over a distance of 1 km (Slowikowski & Loy, 1993). This is a telling example of the Neo-Liberal mentality of the eighties, which maintained that the best possible service to society is to get rich, no matter how, even by unproductive methods or by speculation. Bernard Tapie, twice minister and holder of many other jobs including that of manager of Olympic Marseille, was the symbol of the fraudulent ideology of les annes fric, as this era is now branded in France. Sport lost its innocence because it has been turned into a commodity. Accordingly, it urgently needs new sport ethics instead of management rhetoric.

At the turn of the last century, the playground of humans in movement in Belgium could still neatly be divided into three parts. Firstly, there were the traditional games, some of which were centuries old: the traditional ball game of kaatsen, all kinds of bowling games, traditional forms of archery in which a popinjay is shot off a vertical or horizontal stake), etc. They found a safe haven in the immediate surroundings of the friendly local cafe.

Secondly, there were the gym halls of the turnvereine, veritable workshops for building muscle power and character. In these clubs, the members were also incorporated in one of the three large political groups via the back door which connected the gym directly to the Liberal casino, the Catholic parish centre or the Socialist people's house.

Thirdly, there were the modern sports imported from Great Britain. They were monopolized by a handful of dandies in the upper middle class, who had the time, money and physical energy to wear themselves out for no other reason than for the game's sake. The American sociologist Thorstein Veblen was merciless in his criticism of these sports-loving aristocrats and nouveaux riches in his Theory of the leisure class (1899).

The members of this unproductive class, which, according to Veblen, had lost the instinct of workmanship, used their leisure time as a conspicuous social status symbol by their membership of elitist jockey, cricket, yachting or football clubs. Amateur sports were therefore essentially linked to the possession of leisure time. The gradual democratization of sports followed in the wake of the humanization of labour which was obtained after much struggling. In the fifties, this emerging leisure society gave rise to all kinds of future fantasies and utopias. It was predicted that by the eighties, people in the Western industrialized world would work only twenty hours a week, or that work would be reduced to six months a year, or that people would work for a year and then have a year of leisure, and so on. In reality, things have turned out rather differently. Those who have a job have to work harder and harder, and the new forced leisure class consists of those who cannot find a job.

In her bestseller The overworked American: the unexpected decline of leisure, Juliet Schor (1992), a labour economist from Harvard, claims that working hours have increased again, especially in the United States. "Americans have been lured into a cycle of work-and-spend" (p. 126). The increase in productivity was not used to shorten working hours but to raise wages. "DINK" philosophy has become prevalent: Double Income, No Kids.

Increased income is spent via increased consumption. Shopping has become a leisure activity. Sport consumption too is a complicated matter, and it seems that homo movens behaves more like a homo sociologicus than a homo economicus. Sports are still clearly socially stratified.

In Belgium, there are still typical elitist sports such as golf, field hockey, sailing, skiing, etc. But in the meantime, the lower classes have developed their own code of physical culture with sports such as bicycle racing, motor sports, archery, shooting, angling, boxing and wrestling. Essentially, this social status pyramid of sports is based on a sociological question of taste rather than on an economic question of money. For instance, it is remarkable that - with the exception of the expensive sport of golf - typically higher-class sports are not necessarily more expensive than certain sports such as bicycle racing and angling, which are characteristic of the lower classes (Taks, Renson & Vanreusel 1995). In the meantime, many contemporary sports people and practitioners of trditional sports have abandoned the familiar environment of the popular sports caf, the gym hall or the sports club. Postmodern movement enthusiasts are individualists. They go jogging or mountain-biking, reserve a squash court or go to a fitness centre for a half-hour work-out, or relax in the artificial surroundings of a beauty farm or a subtropical swimming paradise, that is, if they are not cocooning at home watching the Eurosport TV channel. Postmodern movement behaviour is characterized by shortlived imitations rather than by serious initiations. Besides the zap watcher and the zap reader, one can now talk of the zap sportsman and -woman.

Our personality is created by means of a permanent dialogue with society. By imitating role models, and by social role play, individuals try to gear their personal needs to fit in with and correspond to social expectations. This gradual internalization of cultural value patterns is called inculturation by anthropologists, while sociologists talk of socialisation. In everyday language, we just call it education in its broadest sense.

In the fifties, Riesman, Glazer and Denney (1950) had already established that there was clearly a shift from the traditional inner-directed man to the new otherf-directed man. Whereas the in-ner-directed man went off independently in search of inner enrichment by means of self-study, self-initiative and asceticism, the other-directed man allows himself to be led and lured by the promises of the no-longer-hidden persuaders. Instead of being himself and following a course of his own, he stages a kind of playback show of what is held up to him as an example by the trendsetters. The postmodern lifestyle has become a parasocial experience, in which people tune in to distant reference persons and groups. These new saints are sports heroes, film stars and pop stars. This process creates style-communities of people who follow the same lifestyle, but who do not interact. These new heroes of consumption culture turn their lifestyle, their look, into their life project (Oommen, 1995, p. 262).

The question I ask myself here is whether the hybridization of sport and the new trends in the field of physical culture are manifestations of the postmodern personality curriculum.

On the face of it, some of these trends in fact seem to be mere reincarnations of older practices, reintroduced in a new- fangled guise. Fundamentally, the gleaming instruments of torture in the fitness centres are no more than contemporary copies of the castiron mechanotherapy equipment invented by Gustav Zander, which could be found in all metropoles and spas before World War I. The difference lies, literally, in the packaging. Whereas the Zanderists wore proper clothes which covered their bodies when they were hooked up to their equipment, fitness fans nowadays expose as many pores as possible.

Long before Jane Fonda, generations of fitness prophets sold their own patented method for health and slimness, but with less knowledge of product marketing. Callanetics is not only a play on the word callisthenics, but owes its very existence to this 19th-century invention, a form of gymnastics without equipment which was developed by Heinrich Clias (1782-1845).

Aerobics is a combination of aerobic endurance training and good old gymnastics, but this product thanks its commercial success to the fact that it comes with pop music at full blast and with glamorous leotards, leggings and leg warmers. This has already sprouted the off-shoots of step aerobics, funk aerobics and hydrobics (exercises in the water). All these exercises and cures are full of health symbols and can be seen as products of the culture of narcism and the I-age (Lasch, 1979). 

According to Rudy Laermans (1993), being a picture of health has even become a new civil duty, a new form of good manners, which increases a person's chances on the labour market and on the marriage market. In the United States, this is referred to as lookism. Culture sociologist Norbert Elias (1897-1990) once called the rise of modern sports "The quest for excitement in unexciting societies" (Elias & Dunning, 1986).

His theory has been used to explain football hooliganism, amongst other things. Where else can postmodern new savages still express their need for collective excitement in a welfare society, where one would have to insure oneself against insurances? (see e.g. Maffesoli, 1988). IIn addition to the trend of narcissistic individualization in physical culture, which Laermans (1993) has dubbed Individual flesh, there is the second trend of searching for new kicks in subcultures centred on thrilling sports. These modern and postmodern experiences are analysed by Lieven de Cauter in his Archaeology of the kick. A kick is a pleasurable shock experience, which many sports strive to attain through achieving the sensation of pure speed or through the cult of dizziness (De Cauter, 1995, p. 165-166).

Our metropolitan youngsters have traded in the hoops, scooters and roller skates of yesteryear for skate boards, skeelers and city bikes. New forms of skiing are ski-boarding, paraskiing, and the recently revived sport of Telemark skiing. The air provides kick space to gliders, delta flyers, sky divers, parapente gliders and air surfers. In the water, the rush of speed can be got on a raft, a catamaran, a surfboard or a water scooter. Finally, in bungy jumping, which was invented by A.J. Hackett near Queenstown, New Zealand, one buys not only the kick, but also the accompanying photo series and a personal videotape. The inner experience is being replaced more and more by exteriorized experience.

At the basic level, boundaries involve the human body(Oommen, 1995, p. 261). Through our body, we learn to experience and explore our surroundings. Our body is made to move. Humans therefore are homobiles. Through play, we discover our spatial, social, mental and physical limits, and through sports, we try to expand them. Sport is therefore inherently physical, and the human body is the primary instrument of Homo Movens (Renson 1991; Loy, Andrews & Rinehart, 1993). Our physical performance is the product of our physical constitution and our motor abilities: balance, speed, strength, flexibility, endurance, and our capacity to co-ordinate these qualities and harness them with our mind. Human movement is therefore at the same time biomotor, neuromotor, psycho-motor and a sociomotor activity.

These physical and motor qualities vary widely according to age and sex, as well as interindividually. The fact that sport in this way emphasizes human inequality was well understood by the patriarchal aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin. He saw sport as a social amortisseur (shock absorber).

So he advocated the democratization of sport, however - paradoxically - not in order to abolish social differences, but precisely to make them socially acceptable through sport. By granting the workers access to the ideal school of sport, they would discover their own limits as well as learn to accept social inequalities. Indeed, sports - and especially sport records - dramatically demonstrate the limits of the limits of humans in motion.

This fact of physical limitation (or handicap) challenges the philosophy of progress cherished by physics and the applied sciences. What we are living in is no longer a biotope, but a technotope, in which science and technology intervene in our everyday life (De Moor et al, 1995, p. 277). This discrepancy impels humans in motion to try and expand their physical boundaries too. Biomechanics, exercise physiology, biochemistry, training science and applied physical architecture (viz. body building) attempt reconstructing the natural body into an artefact of physical culture (Seltzer, 1992, p. 56).

The body appears to be the last part of nature which still remains to be cultivated. On this issue, Stefaan Decostere produced a cybernantropical video exploration, in which he shows how technology is colonizing the human body. This video shows the Frenchwoman Orlan displaying her body as a do-it-yourself kit. She models it according to the example of historical cult women, making use of plastic surgery and liposuction (a technique by which fat tissue is moved or removed through suction). The human body is heavily charged with social symbols.

Models and top athletes are elevated to the status of superheroes of a community. The sport sociologist John Loy (1995) states: "I can think of no sphere of society that so clearly dramatizes the social inequalities associated with the processes of ableism, ageism, elitism, homophobia, racism and sexism [as the world of sport]." Loy quotes the revealing examples of the release of Mike Tyson and the acquittal of O.J. Simpson to illustrate the social impact of sport on sexual and racial tensions in the United States.

It is already implied in the term physical constitution that the biological organism is largely genetically determined. This is the reason for the sayings: "If you want to be an athlete, choose your parents well" and "Athletes are first born, then made". Not only are an individual\'s motor qualities, such as endurance, genetically determined, but so is their trainability. For instance, training studies on identical twins have shown that if one of the twins has not made any progress after a period of intensive training, neither will the other (Bouchard & Lortie, 1984; Prud'homme et al, 1984).

This leads to the painful conclusion that some people might as well not bother to train at all for a top performance which they will never be able to reach. It is comparable to the fact that some people can eat whatever they like without putting on weight, while others, as the saying has it, put on weight simply by looking at a glass of water. That is why the Canadian kinanthropologist Claude Bouchard warns of the enormous consequences, including exploitation and abuse, which could result from this fact in the process of selecting and constructing top athletes. In the third millennium, the evil of doping might be greatly overshadowed by the genetic manipulation of 'bionic men and women. After Jurassic Park, are we now standing before the gates of an Athletic Park?

Conclusion:

1. With regard to the problem of the environment, humans in movement will have to change the way they treat nature and behave in it. This could be solved by the repressive measure of closing off valuable bio-topes to sports, or by allowing outdoor sports only selectively and restricting the number of people admitted for this purpose, which is already an established practice in nature reserves in America, Australia and New-Zealand.

People who have not made a reservation in time are not allowed in, and people who fail to follow the instructions of the park rangers are thrown out. But all in all, is a little bureaucracy and discipline not preferable to trekking and camping in a shanty-town? An alternative solution is the construction of artificial sportotopes: indoor climbing walls, speleology cellars (e.g. in the basements of the Basilica of Koekelberg in Brussels), artificial ski slopes or swimming paradises, golf courses on urban rooftops, etc. At first sight, these would seem to offer ersatz gratification, but they do take a lot of the pressure away from nature, and in many cases they start to lead a sporting life of their own.

Personally, I am in favour of an integrated form of nature and sport education. Moreover, I speak with some experience, because I have been collaborating on an interdisciplinary project on Learning and moving in nature since 1989. This annual workshop offers learning packages of several days to mixed teams of teachers of physical education, biology and geography. They can then apply this formula when they take their pupils on hiking, climbing, canoeing, or other trips, with an open eye and with respect for the natural environment.

2. Physical culture has been commercialized into a product for consumption. Sports are promoted according to the principles of the marketing mix, the Olympics go to the highest-bidding show promoter, etc. This process in which sport is turned into a commodity leads to a loss of quality, because the context of human movement culture is reduced to a simplistic economic dimension. The current social crisis is not one of means, but of goals.

Many options are still open for the cultural revaluation and the upgrading or degrading of sport. Physical education must resist being corrupted or taken over by the sport entertainment industry, and must safeguard its own specific objectives. Instead of management rhetoric, sport has an urgent need for a new ethics.

Sport can find inspring innovative alternatives in its own historical roots and must - in order to renew itself - go in search of its inherent values instead of its sponsor appeal (Tolleneer, Vanreusel & Renson, 1995).

3. Within the various social sport structures, humans in movement must be able to move freely. The authorities should have respect for the different areas which make up the domain of sport. Sport has grown into a multifaceted and hybrid domain, which must not be reduced to standardized competition sport in clubs. That is why sport policy should be dynamic and pluralist, based on a broadened concept of sport. A post-modern definition of sport could read: sport is what people do when they claim they are practising sport. A pluralist concept of sport should, on the one hand, stimulate new creations in the field of physical culture, and on the other hand, protect the autonomy of the various spheres of sport.

4. As far as the development of personality through physical education and sport is concerned, it is evident that the educational system must provide sufficient time and space to realize these objectives. On this point, I would like to remind that both Unesco and the Council of Europe have proposed a minimum of three hours of physical education per week, and this at all levels of education. Universities too should award credits to students who put meaningful physical activities on their curriculum. Physical education has recently been flirting too much with sport, and has sometimes lowered the threshold of effort down to the level of relaxation.

Physical education should again become more Spartan, and sport more Athenian (Renson, 1994). With the actual two hours a week of physical education, the most one can do is instruct and evaluate. Therefore, it is time that pupils are given movement-homework. Physical education must not become a vassal state of certain sport federations which are actually part of the show and entertainment business. Physical education is not a miniature copy of sport, but comprises the purposeful organized and methodical application of all kinds of physical activities such as exercises (gymnastics), sport, games and dance, in order to develop the whole personality in its physical, motor, psychosocial, cognitive, ethical and moral dimensions. It is therefore education of the total being, but with human movement as its point of application.

5. In the domain of the body, the biological organism, humans in motion experience their finiteness. In spite of phenomenal medical progress, preventive health care, plastic surgery and hormonal therapy, the body is a permanent reminder of our limits, in short, of the fact that we are mortal. To go in search of the boundaries of our physical capacity, in a healthy, vitalist perspective, can make us more human. People who have never gone to extremes to win a volleyball game or to reach a mountain top, do not know what it means to fly with the eagles instead of to scratch with the chickens (the motto of the F16 pilots).

Man must however remain the measure of all things. Everyone has to find out about these boundaries for themselves. This organic-orgastic optimum, this flow experience, lies in the zone beyond boredom and anxiety (Csikzentmihalyi, 1975). It is therefore a danger zone, where one should be able to rely either on vast experience or on an experienced guide. It is precisely on this point that things are going wrong.

Garage-owners and building contractors need to have the necessary qualifications before they are allowed, respectively, to convert a car or to build a wall. If you want to be a football trainer or open a fitness centre, the rule is that all you need is guts. In applied bio-mechanics and body architecture, which are about people and not about car parts or bricks, no diplomas or certificates are required. The situation is clearly one of what the American sociologist William Ogburn (1922) has called a cultural lag.

A cultural lag is a form of departure from the general rhythm of change, which occurs at moments when certain aspects of society start to lag behind compared to others. In our postmodern society for instance, there have been enormous accelerations in the rhythm of the technological domain, which have not always been followed in the social domain or in the domain of body culture. In the exponentially accelerating movement of the so-called information society, the body remains an exceptionally inert and conservative thing. In this text on the theme of Rebellion of the body, I have tried to provide a brief outline of the problem of humans in movement on the borderline between modernity and postmodernity. I have done this from the perspective of kinanthropology. This interdisciplinary science of humans in movement claims its own field of knowledge ...a body of knowledge about knowledge of the body in movement.