the bottom. Through sportive movement, people display a theatre of production. A contrasting model within modern body culture is delivered by mass sports. In gymnastics and fitness training, the body is disciplined by subjecting it to certain rules of "scientific", social geometrical or aesthetic order (Roubal 2007). By rhythmic repetition and formal homogenization, the individual bodies are integrated into a larger whole, which is recommended in terms of reproduction (→reproduction (economics)), as being healthy and educative. Through fitness sport, people absolve a ritual of reproductive correctness and integration. A third model is present in popular festivity, dance and play. In carnival and folk sport, people meet people by festive movement. This type of gathering may give life to the top-down arrangements of both productive achievement sport and reproductive fitness sport, too. But the body experience of popular festivity, dance, play and game is a-productive in itself – it celebrates relation in movement. Practices of sport in their diversity and their historical change, thus, clarify inner contradictions inside social life more generally – among these the contradictions between state, market and civil society. The trialectics of body culture throw light on the complexity of societal relations. Body cultures in plural "Culture" in singular is an abstraction. The study of body culture is always a study of body cultures in plural. Body cultures show human life in variety and differences, assimilation and distinction, conflicts and contradictions. This demands a comparative approach to otherness, and this is the way several studies in body culture have gone. Culture was studied as cultures already by the school of Cultural Relativism in American anthropology (American Anthropological Association) in the 1930s (Ruth Benedict). Postcolonial studies have taken this pluralistic perspective up again (Bale 1996 and 2004; Brownell 1995; Azoy 2003; Leseth 2004). The discourse in singular about "the body in our society" became problematic when confronted with body cultures in conflict and tension. The plurality and diversity of body cultures is, however, not only a matter of outward relations. There are also body cultures in plural inside a given society. The study of different class habitus (→class culture), youth cultures, gender cultures (→gender identity) etc. opened up for deeper insights into the differentiation of civil society. Configurational analysis Body culture studies try to understand bodily practice as patterns revealing the inner tensions and contradictions of a given society. In order to analyze these connections, the study of