Search Results - Guttmann, Allen

Allen Guttmann

Allen Guttmann (born October 13, 1932, in Chicago, Illinois) is a multifaceted, respected scholar and former Amherst College professor whose book ''From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports'' (1978) is a sport history classic.

According to the ''Journal of Sport History'', "Erudite, witty, and a polymath fluent in several languages, Allen Guttmann is ''sui generis'', a sport history and intellectual giant. Professor Emeritus of English and American studies at Amherst College, one of the most prestigious liberal arts colleges in the country, Guttmann has been studying and writing about sport history for forty-plus years. His eleven sport history books and innumerable articles cover a wide array of subjects and have been critically acclaimed (and sometimes hotly critiqued, which comes with the territory)."

Guttmann graduated from the University of Florida (B.A. 1953), Columbia University (M.A. 1956), and the University of Minnesota (PhD. 1961).

One source notes, "Guttmann was hired at Amherst on a contingent basis in 1959. His former graduate-school mentor, Leo Marx, hired Guttmann and promptly told him, 'Don’t even dream of staying beyond five years.' Guttmann retired from Amherst in 2013."

The author of eleven books on the study of sports phenomena, Guttmann received, in 2001, the IOC Research Prize. He served as President of the North American Society for Sport History from 2001 to 2003. In October 2009, he was honored by the International Society of Olympic Historians (ISOH) for his work a whole.

Drawing his references from all fields of knowledge, from history to philosophy, from sociology to anthropology and from literature to psychology, Guttmann's work sparked lively debates in many disciplines. As Thierry Terret points out in his foreword to the French translation of ''From Ritual to Record'' (2006): "To admit, these debates have hardly been followed in France where, in the 1980s, the history of sport developed relatively on the margins of the international community. " As elsewhere 30 years ago, the publication of the French translation of the book elicits quite strong reactions in France, such as Jean-François Loudcher: "The book has marked, and still marks, a whole generation of historians of sport to the point of being the subject of a number of criticisms and debates. (...) the persistence of the author in maintaining his theory raises questions about his scientific status and the need that the field of social sciences of sport feels to refer to this approach "

Its “seven criteria” defining modern sport are discussed. According to Guttmann, the seven conditions for differentiating modern and ancient sport are: secularism, equality, specialization, rationalization, bureaucracy, quantification, and the quest for records. Roman sports, closest to the modern model, are thus discarded on the sole criterion of the quest for records. However, when we know the taste of the Romans for sports statistics (see epigrahic studies), the quest for records does not really appear to be unrelated to the Roman sporting world. According to Guttmann, primitive or traditional sports do not meet any of the criteria. Greek sports and medieval sports follow, in the best possible cases, only half.

In ''Sports: The First Millennia'', he remains ironic, confessing, "No one knows enough to write such" a book, to which Laurent Turcot responded with his book ''Sports et Loisirs: A history of origins to the present day'' (2016). Provided by Wikipedia