ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH IN SPORTS.

This paper is an introduction to sports ethnography, and its purpose is to highlight the significance and applicability of ethnographic researchto sports studies. In this article, the authorwants to emphasize the importance of ethnography in sports research. The paper reflects personal points of view, but also relevantinformation extracted from literature. As a research strategy, ethnographyis idealto investigate the dynamic and complex activities constantly encountered in different sports cultures. Thus, from aerobic gymnastics to windsurfing, sport provides amultitude of cultural and social experiences, as well as a real perspectiveon the way in which we, as humans, act in everyday life through sport. The paper describes in detail the main characteristic feature of ethnographic research, namely fieldwork, achieving a deconstruction of the definition and the main stages of an ethnographic sports study. To assume that ethnography consists only in doing fieldwork and making observations is totally inappropriate and wrong. In other words, the ethnographer must penetrate beyond the initial field experience, where each aspect seems fascinating, any nuance seems to be in correlation with another one andeach small fragment he reads adds new ideas to thealready existing ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]