Physical education, culture and the production of meanings

Abstract

The present text executes analyses which search to understand how Physical Education uses the cultural dimension as a central strategy of its intervention, opening spaces to argue itself also as a cultural construction. The focus on the symbolic dimension of the culture represents an analysis in which the production, distribution and access to the cultural products are involved with the way we value or we ignore certain aspects of the social life. The basic point of this argument is the understanding that the directions and meanings historically constructed are inserted in a conflicting process where relations of power characterize a combat for meaning. In this combat, social relations are established, knowledge is produced and distributed, politics are generated. In this context, Physical Education is seen not as a mere activity which chooses supposedly free techniques of coercions, but as a cultural and politic production that participates in the way meanings are historically constituted.