This study has as a starting point a story of life involving volleyball as an educational, sportive and academic research practice. In this context, the Brazilian volleyball’s history in the last three decades was defined as the focus of this study. Analysing the peculiarities in the history of this sport, which were detected since its creation, it is noticed that volleyball has passed for transitions. The changes from amateur to professional and later spectacular sport were called turning points. From the problematic of these turning points emerges the hypothesis that the structure of the actual volleyball and other sports that follow the same spectacular sport’s path do not have the creation of a contingent of adepts as aim, but an emerging consuming market of symbols and social signs related to the capital of a distinctive sporting practice. In terms of aims of this study, it was attempted to identify how and why such transitions occurred in the history of this sport and to explain the relationships, consequences and interdependencies established in this course, which, in a broad sense, redirected and transformed the sense and logic of consumption of volleyball’s practice. For such a purpose, the largest number of references was searched to recover, constitute and analyse the recent story of the Brazilian Volleyball. As a theoretic-methodological background, the main concepts of the “theory of fields” of Pierre Bourdieu was used with the complementary support of the “competitive game model” of Norbert Elias. From the analysis of the references, theoretical and empiric subsides that corroborate with volleyball’s change of goals were found in consonance with the dispositions and perspectives of a consuming society. |
