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- Convenors:
-
Noel Dyck
(Simon Fraser University)
Gregor Starc (University of Ljubljana)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
-
Noel Dyck
(Simon Fraser University)
- Format:
- Workshops
- Location:
- 232
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 August, -, -, -, Thursday 28 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Ljubljana
Short Abstract:
The capacity of sporting events to entertain and excite participants and spectators has long been appreciated by aficionados and has begun to attract the interest of anthropologists. This workshop explores ways in which sport and celebration are staged in a range of social and competitive settings.
Long Abstract:
The capacity of sporting events to entertain and excite participants and spectators has long been appreciated by aficionados and has more recently begun to attract the interest of anthropologists. Events ranging from the Olympic Games to 'world cups' of many different sorts - not to mention more routine professional and amateur competitions - demonstrate the remarkable popularity, profitability and power that may be harnessed through the staging of sporting activities. What is also evident is that stylised and elaborate celebrations of many kinds have become an integral and expected component of sporting events. Indeed, the action on the field of play is often far less compelling than the 'play' that occurs around and beyond it. This occurs not only at national and global sporting events that command exhaustive media coverage but may also enter into the staging of sports and celebrations at decidedly more mundane levels of competition.
This workshop will explore the ways in which sport and celebration are staged in a wide range of social and competitive settings. Specifying the processes and purposes of those involved in various dimensions of staging of sport and celebration offers a promising point of entry into understanding the capacities and powers evident within these arenas. What we seek are accounts of the myriad ways in which individuals and members of groups strive to construct celebrations connected to sport as a means to pursue larger or smaller, immediate or subsequent, and expressive or instrumental purposes.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 August, 2008, -Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how and why child and youth sports in Canada are organizationally and discursively marshalled in order to facilitate and celebrate the pursuit of American athletic scholarships by young Canadian athletes.
Paper long abstract:
This paper investigates the discursive construction of American athletic scholarships within the field of child and youth sports in Canada. Specifically, it examines the articulation of various "powers" associated with sports as embodied practices, organizational forms, and competitive performances. It is argued that commonplace discourses about the value and provenance of athletic scholarships serve not only to celebrate the significance of athletic accomplishment but also to orient the organizational hierarchies and resources devoted to child and youth sports in Canada.
Paper short abstract:
The proposed paper will present the strategies and cultural outcomes of media campaigns involving skiing aesthetics in Slovenia in the 1980s when the idea of Yugoslav brotherhood and unity lost its appeal to the people in Slovenia and started to be replaced by the idea of independent Slovenian state.
Paper long abstract:
The ideas of national sports are common phenomena among the European as well as other nations. In the case of Slovenia, the aesthetics of skiing became one of the key identification points of the Slovenian people in the times when the idea of independent existence outside Yugoslavia started to be disseminated across the masses. Nationalist skiing aesthetics grew in importance during the 1980s when skiing was turned into one of the most characteristic features of Slovenianness and started to be perceived as naturally inherent to all Slovenians. The imagery of the snowy Alpine world was intertwined with the imagery of skiing, cow bells, courageous mountaineers, and old Slovenian traditions; they all became signifiers of the chain of equivalence of Slovenianness, and the prevalent one in the homogenisation of Slovenian identification. The main dissemination channel for this dissemination was television, supported by press, which together formed an effective national-building tool that made masses of people believe that skiing is an important and impassable difference between Slovenians and other Yugoslavs. The proposed paper will present the strategies and cultural outcomes of media campaigns involving skiing aesthetics in the 1980s Slovenia that introduced new nationalist knowledge about Slovenianness based on old myths.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the emotive politics embedded in spectators’ celebrations of a home run, the one undeniable, unstoppable event in Cuba’s national sport. Based on a decade’s worth of multisited fieldwork, I consider how these tropes of passion inform understandings of baseball and being Cuban.
Paper long abstract:
Baseball, like many sports, is intricately and intimately tied to nationalist representations that reinforce a supposedly homogenous nation. Cuban baseball certainly appears to do just that, but manner in which baseball is organized accentuates rival notions of what it means to be Cuban in what I have called elsewhere the language of contention. Using ethnographic material compiled over the past decade, this paper explores the emergent dramatic 'nocout' moments in Cuban baseball. This paper considers these emblematic and ephemeral instances moments in which a Cuban Self is attenuated and affirmed as an undeniable assertion of one version of being Cuban. These celebrations are spontaneous emotional declarations of being. The entity in question, however, being affirmed is not a question of whether a Cuban self exists but which one. Cuban baseball provides an embodied narrative spectacle of what I call the politics of passion. These experiential politics inform how Cubans imagine themselves and their worlds and yet are structured by the discourse surrounding what it means to be Cuban as embodied on the baseball diamonds across the country.
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on city marathon events, this paper examines mass-participation sporting events as celebrations of charity, which link personal endeavour and realisation of the self with broader structures of morality and economy.
Paper long abstract:
UK mass-participation athletics events have expanded exponentially over the past 20 years. The London Marathon - now Flora London Marathon - for example has expanded from an initial field of 7,747 in 1981 to 46,500 in 2007. This expansion has gone hand in hand with an expansion of the charitable sector in general, and of charitable sporting activity in particular, to the extent that such events are now veritable carnivals of charity. This paper examines these celebrations of charity in the context of, on the one hand, the intensification of bodily projects in the articulation of the self in modern society, and on the other hand, the (re)moralising of the economy, work and leisure in the context of neoliberalism. In these contexts, participation can be thought of as a particular type of voluntary activity, geared towards cultivating both the self - physically and morally - and the other: the generalised 'other' of wider society, and the specific 'other' as recipient of charity. As such, it encompasses both larger and smaller goals, with immediate and subsequent, and expressive and instrumental consequences.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how runners in the 2007 Laugavegur ultra marathon in Icleand experienced the 'natural' scenery promoted and marketed by the organisers of the marathon and the travel board through the bodily activity of running.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the bodily and sensational relationship between runners and the landscape they run through in the Laugavegur ultra marathon in Iceland. The event is a sporting event that has taken place in July every year since 1997. Laugavegur is a well known 55 km long hiking route in the south of Iceland. The event of Laugavegur ultra marathon has become more popular every year with an increasing number of foreign visitors taking part and is now being promoted as one of a life time event for runners from all over the world to partake in. What is emphasized is the stunning unspoild landscape of wilderness that the participants run through which offers not only a magnificent scenery but also the challenge of running through a constantly changing nature, or as the slogan says: 'The extreme challenge in a magnificent environment'. This holds in hand with the way in which the Icelandic Travel Board is promoting Iceland as a place to visit, as a place of untouched wilderness, displaying magnificent contrasts in a landscape of mountains, glaciers and thermal springs. Thus the venue has been created, packed and marketed as a remote natural setting at the edge of the world, as something detached from the urban everyday lives of the participants, which nevertheless can be explored through the bodily challenge of running through it. This paper looks at how the runners experience the landscape whilst running through it and how it matches the image the Travel Board promotes.
Paper short abstract:
The main question addressed in this paper is: are there any connections between popularity of modern sport and human search for immortality?
Paper long abstract:
There is only one real problem each human being faces and this is death, because nobody lives eternally. In the essence, human is a mortal being; being-unto-death, as posed it Heidegger. But human being never reconciles with this fact. Since ancient time humans have been searching ways to become immortal; to somehow stay alive eternally. In this paper we will focus on one specific common understanding of immortality among people - immortality in memory. Since ancient Greece success and fame have meant not only different privileges in the community but also achieving immortality. Artists, politicians and athletes - all of them were trying to become well-known. So other people would remember them after their death, praise them, and keep them in their memory. In times when transcendental immortality was not known (or accepted), this was the only mean to become immortal. Till now list and statues of ancient Greek Olympic champions survived. So in a way champions are still alive - they achieved immortality. With the rise of metaphysic in philosophy and the Christianity with transcendental understanding of immortality also the need to be famous, to stay alive in memory declined. But nowadays, when the faith in transcendental immortality is weak, once again the ancient notion of immortality is becoming more and more powerful. Being fame, recognized among others, staying in the memory of others - that can be one of important causes for trying hard to become a champion in the field of sport.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the interplay of national identity and global awareness in two major football tournaments, namely the European Championship of 2004 in Portugal and the World Cup of 2006 in Germany.
Paper long abstract:
The European Championship of 2004 in Portugal and the World Cup in 2006 in Germany provided arenas in which football fans from all over the world redefined their national identities. This interaction took place under an overarching global consciousness of the "football fan". It is argued that this consciousness, in these sporting events, created a non-threatening environment where everyday people had the chance to spontaneously express, reassert and celebrate their national uniqueness at the same time that they could transcend boundaries, socially and culturally constructed, that differentiate them from others. This is a complex process that deserves systematic investigation in light of, to date, unsuccessful political and economic efforts to replicate it. The paper is based on participant observation in both tournaments where the anthropologist was himself subject to these processes.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how globalization effects football (soccer) and to what extent the forging of identities in football can be seen as local responses to globalization.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses how transnational connections in football challenges more homogenouse notions of local and national identity. This issue is highlighted through authorized calls for protection of "our" talents and restrictions for the possibility of "foreign" footballers. This is particularly evident in debates which seeks to promote the interests of national team football in times when international club football, with players competing in a global labour market, in many respects holds a more important position as a generator of identities for the supporters. Drawing from empirical research in Northern Europe, this paper seeks to analyse the ways in which football supporters apply notions of 'who we are' and 'who we are not' within a complex, globalized semiotic system. The paper also seeks to delve into the issue of how these orientations can be linked to more general social, racial and cultural issues.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses why football and volleyball games have become central activities in the everyday life of Maskoy people of the Paraguayan Chaco. Behind the façade of similarity with White people’s practice, in fact, other social goals are achieved.
Paper long abstract:
This paper addresses the issue of the massive adoption of football and volleyball by Maskoy indigenous people of the Paraguayan Chaco. I argue that the adoption of these 'Western' games on the part of indigenous people is part of a wider mimetic strategy through which indigenous people attempt to become accepted by the surrounding society by adopting dominant visual/structural features. However, the adoption of football and volleyball has not been undertaken in a passive way: while retaining the visual identity of the performance, the space/time of the game is the space/time in which money is made visible and socialised. The antagonistic nature of football and volleyball games allows players to become involved in an elaborate betting system through which money is circulated and made acceptable within a broader social context in which money is seen as dangerous. The antagonism between the players allows money to circulate and enhance sociality instead of conflict.
Paper short abstract:
Le phénomène sportif fait partie intégrante de la vie sociale des sociétés africaines. Nous étudierons comment les évènements sportifs peuvent influencer les soudaniens occidentaux, plus précisément les populations qui vivent entre, les aires culturelles mandé, gur et fulbé.
Paper long abstract:
C'est au travers de diverses pratiques que nous exposerons nos travaux. Nous nous intéresserons principalement à deux pratiques:la course à pied et le football. Il semblerait qu'au fil des ans, le football soit devenu un projet de société dans des pays comme le Mali ou la Côte d'ivoire. L'évènement sportif de grande envergure que représente la Coupe d'Afrique des nations 2002, a été utilisé comme un véritable outil de développement. De plus, le football semble être une des causes, parmi tant d'autres, de l'énorme gâchis du potentiel athlétique des pays soudaniens, dont les habitants ne jurent que par le football. On peut parler d'une position monopolistique. Le sport constitue un véritable analyseur des sociétés africaines comtemporaines. Ainsi, on constate, une distribution sociale et spatiale des pratiques physiques et sportives. Fruit d'une longue enquête de terrain, cette étude premettra de mettre en exergue, les processus qui mènent aux sports et les incidences, les influences des pratiques sportives sur les sociétés d'Afrique soudano sahélienne.
Paper short abstract:
The paper will be based on the outcomes of a one year long ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Sarajevo / Bosnia and Herzegovina, February 2007 – January 2008. It will try to show out how football, as a current dynamic component of culture may be a determiner of cultural identities.
Paper long abstract:
Football is the most popular game in the world. Simplicity of the game makes it easier to be popular, but on the other side, the main reason behind its global popularity is its promise of identities. Especially in the postmodern age, underestimating the boundaries of time and space, this popularity becomes one even more crucial for daily life. Bosnia and Herzegovina is as a country where cultural dynamics are bind to ethnic differences. However, on the other side there are different dynamics which may be effective on cultural differentiation. One of them might be argued as football fandom.
Although ethnicity plays a crucial role in Bosnian football rivalries, urban-rural (Sarajlija-Palanka) rivalries shall also be considered. On the other side, some rivalries are free of any other identity backgrounds, which do have implicit cultural dynamics stemmed from the very nature of football fandom itself. One of the most well known rivalries in Bosnian football is recognized as that of between the fans of Sarajevo and Zeljeznicar, although their fans are recognized as mostly comprised of Bosnian Muslims. The historical rivalry between those two fan groups is effective on establishment of cultural differentiation on different levels. This paper will simply try to show those different levels referring to the ethnographical study conducted with fans of both football clubs.