Macumba Dance Fitness is a family of folklores. The role of a Macumba Dance Fitness certified instructor as translator/interpreter

This chapter is dedicated to language in sport, the power of the English language, how it is often applied to social context, its daily use by Macumba Dance Fitness instructors through translation processes as well and its influence in commercial decisions for music CDs productions and videos on TV networks.

“A few studies place the sports lexicon in the larger context of linguistic development and usage, seeking to understand the ‘codes’ inherent in sports language and the affective, connotative, emotive, and valorative messages which they communicate.”

As we have seen in Chapter I, since the mid-1980s sport historians have shown a growing interest in the cultural aspects of sport and have recognized the importance of language as integral to cultural analysis. This is most evident in the incorporation of discourse analysis into sport history.

I have briefly referred to reconstructionism, the preferred model of enquiry among sport historians, that pays minimal attention to language. An enquiry that includes questions about word use and how language articulates ideas. But in these studies language remains subordinate to extralinguistic social experiences.

On the opposite, I have also briefly referred to deconstructionist theories of language that start from the premise that language has a material reality. Accordingly, language determines consciousness and linguistic structures are said to shape social structures and cultural practices, such as sport, and therefore to constitute history.

We have also seen the central role of sport in cultural interaction and identity production within a variety of cross-cultural contexts.

Another discipline that has been concerned with the role of sport in society is anthropology. Indeed, as argued by McGarry, there are “examples of pervasive and dismissive perceptions of sport within anthropology”, whereas in other disciplines such as sociology, sport has been investigated extensively.

Reviewing the literature on the subject, she has noticed that the majority of studies on anthropological aspects of sport, show connections with research on different races and cultures in history. Furthermore she has analyzed other subfields, such as archaeology where exist many studies about sport, and linguistics, where the focus has been put on the relationship between sport and language. [...]