Abstract

From an Anglo-Saxon athletic perspective, the 20th century has been largely the history of the expansion of competitive sports, especially in the Western hemisphere. This view is complicated because in Scandinavian languages the use of the term 'idraet' is widespread and means something more than the term 'sport'. To Scandinavians the term 'sport' is mainly concerned with the competitive sports that were imported from Britain in about 1900, such as soccer, rowing and athletics. Here the term 'sport' is to be understood in this way. 'Idraet', however, also includes aesthetic 'movement cultures' like gymnastics. The term 'movement culture' is an expression which covers both fance, gymnastics and sports. Gymnastics played an even more dominant role than competitive sports in Denmark at about the turn of the century and continued to grow alongside competitive sports in the 1920s. Gymnastics had, however, a quite different sociological basis from that of sport. Whereas sport was a town phenomenon which attracted members of the bourgeois and working classes, gymnastics gained a foothold in the countryside among farmers. Questions to be asked here are: can the use of semiotics illuminate the study of 'movement culture'; why did gymnastics become a strong force in farmers' culture in the period between 1880 and 1920; what was it in the structure of Ling gymnastics that made it so suitable to rural society; what was the role of the two sexes in gymnastics and sport; and how did gymnastics react to the growth of urban industrial society? Eaton