The problem of the cultural dimension of sports as a socio-cultural phenomenon
The article analyzes the current situation with the culturological scientific understanding of the sociocultural phenomenon of sport, and actualizes the related problems. Arousing the well-deserved researchers’ interest, this phenomenon is considered in the absence of justified methodological instruments in the field of culturological knowledge. In the various dimensions of sport proper, sociological, political, philosophical and many other approaches, the sociocultural phenomenon of sport acquires different, sometimes opposite meanings. The uncritical attitude to methodologically based dimensions generates significant contradictions in the culturological analysis of this phenomenon. Considering the most conceptual approaches, the authors analyze their culturological dimensions, using the historical and dialectical research methods, as well as analysis and synthesis. The research is based on a representative source base of domestic and foreign authors. The novelty of the research lies in the proposal of a reasoned change in the vector of the culturological dimensions of the sociocultural phenomenon of sport from the anthropogenic understanding of its game nature and praxiology to the axiological dimensions of this phenomenon. Assessing the productivity of the main methodologically based scientific approaches to the sociocultural phenomenon of sport, it can be concluded that the very ways of understanding need motivated culturological dimensions of this phenomenon. Without determining the location of these dimensions in the study, the latter loses its goal-setting vector. Taking the theory of considering sport as culture as the basis, asserting it as a game activity and turning to anthropological, sociological, political, cult (quasi-religious), etc. dimensions, postmodernity excludes the axiological approach to thephenomenon of sport. The axiological dimension in culturological studies of sport as a sociocultural phenomenon can perform an integrating methodological function with all the variety of approaches, since it is actualized in the situation of the destruction by postmodernity of moral, ethical and aesthetic oppositions.