The Native Sport And Recreation Program - 1727 Words

The Native Sport and Recreation program, Sport: Everbody’s Business, and Sport the Way Ahead, can also be understood through Foucault’s concept of biopower. Importantly, when delineating biopower Foucault postulates that the transition from welfarism to neoliberalism is related to a subtler means of moral regulation by emphasizing the innovation of technologies and ideologies, which utilize self-regulation, responsibilization and governance (Hunt, 1999; Orsetto, 2010). A consequence of the aforementioned shift from the welfare to neoliberal state was the emergence of biopower, which Foucault (1978) describes as, â€Å"a political technology that brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge and power†¦show more content†¦Consequently, Foucault considered these transformations to occur at two levels: first, at the level of the human body as an object of discipline and surveillance; and second the population as the ob ject of regulation and control (source). In this context, the notion of contemporary discipline is linked to the type of power exercised on the body, which is developed around two corresponding poles: One of the poles—the first to be formed, it seems—centered on the body as a machine: its discipline†¦its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body. The second†¦focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancies and longevity†¦Their supervision was affected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population. (Foucault, 1978a. pp. 138) Given the abovementioned, Foucault’s (1978) concept of biopower can be explained as a form of governance that seeks to normalize and construct bodies as targets of control through techniques of measurement, visualization, and classification (Ettorre, 2012; Hunt, 1999). Ultimately, these were the precise goals of the Native Sport and Recreation program, Sport: Everbody’s Business,