O Divertimento do Corpo Corpo, Lazer e Desporto na Transicao do Sec. XIX para o Sec. XX em Portugal

Between the transition of the nineteenth century to the twentieth century in Portugal, an original pattern of the body was socially constructed. The movement toward a definition of a new way of felling, doing and thinking imposed the abandonment of the ancient pattern, made of suffering and excess, place of a pronounced degeneration. The confrontation with progress introduced new difficulties over the handicaps (blindness, deafness, muteness) and dislikes (obesity), an amount of other problems to overcome. The conscious and unconscious efforts on the sense of a new body, a different man, were materialized in original solutions that were introduced in order to guarantee the integration of a new way of thinking and therefore to the representation of man, his body and life. Hygiene and regeneration were the words of order. Agencies like the spa-waters, mothers education, gymnastics and sports were to be established as the more adequate forms of relation with life, the others and natural evolvement. The civilizing process acts by the subtle introduction and intensification of new rules and regulations over ways of conduct in general, which demanded a different attitude, more persistent and exigent over the body than the former, like over movements and behaviour too, - especially through entertainments and pleasureAvailable from Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia, Servico de Informacao e Documentacao, Av. D. Carlos I, 126, 1200 Lisboa / FCT - Fundação para o Ciência e a TecnologiaSIGLEPTPortuga