SPORT AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE: LEISURE AND PUBLIC HEALTH IN THE LIGHT OF THE PRINCIPLE OF SEGMENTARITY

Abstract

The present theoretical essay aims to investigate the mimetic structure of sports leisure, in its relationship with affective health. It evokes the principle of segmentarity, an absolutely nuclear category for anthropology, as a operator concept of the interpretation elaborated. The central argument suggests that sport organizes in more stable terms, processes of social segmentation that, in everyday life, are endowed with great uncertainty. In this sense, the ludic practice of sport offers a laboratory of emotional experimentation that contributes to the formation of subjectivities accustomed to interact with conflicts and differences; therefore, subjectivities resistant to the avoidance of otherness and, consequently, to fear and malaise that mark the forms of life based on identity standardization.