Muerte en la Catedral: Cenizas y ritos funerarios en los campos de fútbol

An important aspect of funerary rites and modern, Western mortuary practices has been a shift from religious-institutional settings to private and secular ones. Nevertheless, there still exist performative responses, like spreading the ashes of dead fans in sport stadiums, which continue to define death as a social relation situated in a cultural system of wider symbolic obligations. Spreading ashes in football stadiums is believed to have consequences for the future of the community. There are three factors that turn stadiums into pertinent places for the re-ritualization of modern death: emotion, identity, and iconicity. The intense emotional experiences, family traditions, collective narratives, and the transformative power of liminal space allow fans to imagine their own transition from dead to alive, and their continuing presence in the social order.Un aspecto principal de los ritos funerarios y las prácticas mortuorias modernas y occidentales ha sido un desplazamiento de ubicaciones religiosas-institucionales a otras seculares-privadas. Sin embargo, algunas respuestas performativas, como esparcir las cenizas de los aficionados difuntos en estadios deportivos, continúan definiendo la muerte como una relación social emplazada en un sistema cultural de obligaciones simbólicas más amplio. Los esparcidos de cenizas en los estadios son actos de los que se cree que tendrán consecuencias para el futuro de la comunidad. Hay tres factores que convierten los estadios en emplazamientos pertinentes para la re-ritualización de la muerte: emoción, identidad, e iconicidad. Las intensas experiencias emocionales, la tradición familiar, las narrativas colectivas y el poder transformador del espacio liminal permiten a los aficionados imaginar su propia transición de muerto a vivo, y su presencia continua en el orden social

¿Somos distintos o estamos locos? Los dobles vínculos del fútbol y la identidad en Bilbao

Athletic Bilbao has a unique player recruitment policy, allowing only Basque-born players or those developed at the youth academies of Basque clubs to play for the team, a policy that rejects the internationalism of contemporary globalised sport. Despite this, the club has never been relegated from the top division of Spanish football. In 2007, however, Athletic came one game away from descending to second division, which sent the fan community into an impasse of identification. Its proud exceptionalism, the philosophy that made the club a “unique case in the world” now appeared to be in conflict with first division performance, and the identity of the city was at stake. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper approaches collective identity as a Catch-22 type double bind as theorized by Bateson: an impasse that reveals not just the pleasure, but also the intense suffering identity produces in Basque soccer and society.; El Athletic Club de Bilbao tiene una filosofía única: ficha solamente a jugadores que son vascos, una política que rechaza el internacionalismo del fútbol contemporáneo globalizado. A pesar de esta filosofía, el club nunca ha bajado a segunda división. Sin embargo, en 2007 el Athletic estuvo a solo un partido de bajar a segunda división, lo que obligó a su comunidad de seguidores a enfrentarse al impasse de su identificación localista. Su excepcionalismo altivo, la filosofía que hizo que el club bilbaíno se considerara “un caso único en el mundo”, parecía ahora estar en conflicto con las exigencias de calidad necesarias para pertenecer a la primera división, y la identidad misma de la ciudad parecía estar en juego. Apoyado en una investigación etnográfica, este artículo indaga en la identidad colectiva como una trampa-22, un doble vínculo según la teorización de Bateson: una situación que presenta una elección inevitable entre dos resultados irreconciliables y no deseados, un dilema vital que desvela no solo los placeres sino también el sufrimiento de identidad producido por el fútbol en la sociedad vasca

Review Essay: An Ethnography of Pastness Identity Playgrounds and Battlefields in Post-Post-Soviet Estonia

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Sport, Nation, Gender: Basque Soccer Madness

A centenarian Basque soccer club, Athletic Club (Bilbao) is the ethnographic locus of this dissertation. From a center of the Industrial Revolution, a major European port of capitalism and the birthplace of Basque nationalism and political violence, Bilbao turned into a post-Fordist paradigm of globalization and gentrification. Beyond traditional axes of identification that create social divisions, what unites Basques in Bizkaia province is a soccer team with a philosophy unique in the world of professional sports: Athletic only recruits local Basque players. Playing local becomes an important source of subjectivization and collective identity in one of the best soccer leagues (Spanish) of the most globalized game of the world. This dissertation takes soccer for a cultural performance that reveals relevant anthropological and sociological information about Bilbao, the province of Bizkaia, and the Basques. Early in the twentieth century, soccer was established as the hegemonic sports culture in Spain and in the Basque Country; it has become a multi billion dollar business, and it serves as a powerful political apparatus and symbolic capital. This dissertation will explore the social, cultural and political dimensions of soccer in the Spanish Basque area, and explores the interfaces of soccer with globalization, identity construction, discourse, power, political ideologies and gender relations through the specific case of the Basque Athletic Club. Soccer is intimately embedded in Bilbao, and has consequences for macro and micro communities as well as individuals: it represents a people, an ethos, a morality; it structures people`s free time, daily interaction and relationships; it affects individual subjectivization. I argue that soccer culture offers fresh insight and new perspectives to the rich social scientific research on the Basques

¿Somos distintos o estamos locos? Los dobles vínculos del fútbol y la identidad en Bilbao

Athletic Bilbao has a unique player recruitment policy, allowing only Basque-born players or those developed at the youth academies of Basque clubs to play for the team, a policy that rejects the internationalism of contemporary globalised sport. Despite this, the club has never been relegated from the top division of Spanish football. In 2007, however, Athletic came one game away from descending to second division, which sent the fan community into an impasse of identification. Its proud exceptionalism, the philosophy that made the club a “unique case in the world” now appeared to be in conflict with first division performance, and the identity of the city was at stake. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper approaches collective identity as a Catch-22 type double bind as theorized by Bateson:  an impasse that reveals not just the pleasure, but also the intense suffering identity produces in Basque soccer and society.El Athletic Club de Bilbao tiene una filosofía única: ficha solamente a jugadores que son vascos, una política que rechaza el internacionalismo del fútbol contemporáneo globalizado. A pesar de esta filosofía, el club nunca ha bajado a  segunda división. Sin embargo, en 2007 el Athletic estuvo a solo un partido de bajar a segunda división, lo que obligó a su comunidad de seguidores a enfrentarse al impasse de su identificación localista. Su excepcionalismo altivo, la filosofía que hizo que el club bilbaíno se considerara “un caso único en el mundo”, parecía ahora estar en conflicto con las exigencias de calidad necesarias para pertenecer a la primera división, y la identidad misma de la ciudad parecía estar en juego. Apoyado en una investigación etnográfica, este artículo indaga en la identidad colectiva como una trampa-22, un doble vínculo según la teorización de Bateson: una situación que presenta una elección inevitable entre dos resultados irreconciliables y no deseados, un dilema vital que desvela no solo los placeres sino también el sufrimiento de identidad producido por el fútbol en la sociedad vasca

Playing Fields: Power, Practice, and Passion in Sports

Playing Fields presents the profound reflections of a group of international scholars on how games, sports, and motor practices interact with global-local processes, inequality, gender relations, identity, representation, performance, and emotion through varied modes of analysis, approaches, and styles.Reflections on games, sports, and motor practices and their interaction with global-local processes, inequality, gender relations, identity, representation, performance, and emotion.This book was published with generous financial support from the Basque Goverment