Articles

This essay investigates whether the term national signification may serve better than the more common national identity to describe how sports people variously enrol and reference the nation to position themselves and their practice. Taking the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu as a ground for analysis, this essay investigates four cases involving elite athletes from Norway to situate them within the field of sports culture and the larger fields of power and class relations. For Bourdieu actors' 'practical sense' mediated between their subjective striving for autonomy and the objective weight of structured class relations. This essay shows how these athletes' struggle for relative autonomy is differently expressed by the way they enlist the nation to position themselves within the field of power. An athlete's positions within the larger, structured fields circumscribe their articulatory space, and realising this state of affairs can aid our understanding of how these elite practitioners differently enlist the national sign in their specific quest for cultural autonomy. The analysis shows athletes that are better placed in economic terms can afford to take greater risks when it comes to the national signifier. Conversely, a relative smaller access to economic gain appears to correlate with an increase in the importance granted to the national signifier. Thus, the nation becomes a sign that can be actively enlisted in an ongoing struggle for relative autonomy from the field of class relations, rather than an attribute that is passively endorsed by them. What this suggests is that a term such as national identity is less descriptive for the actual work of these elite players; instead, we propose that an active national signification more aptly describes how these cultural actors enlist a highly coveted sign to achieve their specific aim.