When George Bernard Shaw described Dartington Hall as a ‘salon in the countryside’, he was referring to the maelstrom of ideas, conversations, and experimentation around psychology, mysticism, and spirituality within the estate's larger ethos of community living and rural reform. Disenchanted with the effects of industrialization and the ravages of the First World War, American railway heiress Dorothy Whitney Elmhirst and her second husband, Leonard Elmhirst, purchased the extensive Devonshire estate in 1925 and began to encourage regular visits and social (...) and spiritual advice from prominent British interwar intellectuals such as Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard. As the estate's activities expanded during the 1930s, Dorothy enlisted the help of visiting American constitutional psychologist William Sheldon to assess and advise upon the well-being of children attending Dartington's experimental school. Sheldon's ‘Promethean Psychology’ and ‘Somatotyping’ body classification system offered the Dartington group, a social, spiritual, and ‘scientific’ alternative to Freudian understandings of the mind. Visitors such as Huxley, decades later, relied on Sheldon's somatotyping system to fashion a utopian education in Pala (in his last novel, Island) where the population might live in nonmaterialistic cooperative harmony. Dartington's attraction to the use of Sheldon's Promethean psychology in supporting a utopian view of progressive education was as short-lived as were Pala's utopian ambitions decades later. In years to come, however, elements of Sheldon's views continued to find an audience among physical educators and sports scientists, who saw in somatotypes a useful guide for assessing talent identification and future sporting success. (shrink)

Cet article explore la signification de l’espace comme un « lieu pratiqué » selon la notion reprise à Michel de Certeau, en examinant la construction d’un gymnase et ses effets sur les relations sociales et les réseaux disciplinaires. Tout comme le laboratoire ou le théâtre, le gymnase a été spécifiquement pensé pour permettre certaines actions et en témoigner, en reflétant des conceptions de l’entraînement et de l’éducation corporelle. Ses divers agencements de l’espace y favorisent une incorporation de la race, du (...) lieu, du genre et de l’identité. Le War Memorial Gymnasium de l’Université de Colombie britannique dans l’Ouest du Canada, construit en 1851, est utilisé pour illustrer la manière dont, sous des formes complexes, les géométries du pouvoir – ces multiples configurations de l’espace et des relations sociales à l’intérieur et autour du gymnase – produisent dans ses murs une culture didactique et sportive aux enjeux véritablement stratégiques et tactiques, qui active et articule les division de genre. (shrink)