Sports Culture in New Zealand: Rugby

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Sports Culture in New Zealand Perspective

Sport Culture rugby, in particular plays a major role in the creation of New Zealand’s national identity over the past 140 years. New Zealand is identifiable with its strong ties to Rugby on an international scale. Introduced as contact sport by European men it grew, Rugby Union Clubs began to emerge in cities and towns all over the nation. Sport culture allowed pakeha and Maori to unite, as previously the solidarity of New Zealand culture dwindled beneath the Maori Land Wars of the 19th century. Rugby football acts as an example of Pakeha and Maoris common ground in the Rugby field. The unification of society in a regular space and time Sport has solidified nations. But in recent years it has become an entity of Hegemonic masculinity, a home for alcoholism, violence and Beer drinking.

The origin of Rugby in New Zealand came with the arrival of European settlers and native Maori who soon came to distinguish with Rugby as a part of their culture. Modernly this makes to Rugby Union the most popular sport in New Zealand today. Our nation unofficially names rugby our national sport, our nations men are very competitive in this contact sport. There are many other popular sporting disciplines such as netball, cricket, rowing and more. Maori and pakeha became part of a unified nation after an ongoing history of conflict between native Maori and European settlers. Native Maori acceptance of these cultural forms makes rugby an anchoring device solidifying the nation and bringing cultural harmony to the once divided country. In the late twentieth and early twenty first century with the sport has become more than a simple game, it is now a forum for international recognition as a small and ...

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...nd commercialization. It is '’sport, gambling and alcohol’ (Thomson, R & Sim, J. pg. 121) that defeats notions of sport as high culture by the bourgeois class due to their front row attendance at major sporting events.

Pakeha and Maori culture merged into a World where sport plays a huge role in the development of national identity, which made Rugby a major pillar in upholding social cohesion in our newly founded and previously divided society. A tourism New Zealand website (100% Pure New Zealand) states that Rugby is an integral part of New Zealand’s national identity, and supposedly stirs pride in the hears of Kiwis around the World. Sporting culture has become a negative entity in the international public eye, because of alcoholism and hegemonic masculinity disrupting the harmony in the cultural recognition and depiction of sporting culture in New Zealand.

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