No abstract

This paper examines how social mixing and celebration of diversity can be enabled through sports festivals marked by their carnivalesque atmosphere. Our analysis draws on a longitudinal ethnographic study of the Mondiali Antirazzisti (Antiracist World Cup), a non-competitive football tournament and intercultural festival featuring the yearly participation of hardcore football fans (ultras), migrant groups, third-sector associations and other informal groups. We consider how the multifocal ritual form of the event helps to create a liminal space in which discrimination and stereotypes can be temporarily challenged. The sources of collective effervescence are multiplied by placing sport games within a wider range of other leisure and cultural activities, thus promoting internal diversity and the inclusion of outsiders. Additionally, social boundaries are also blurred by not emphasising the competitive dimension of the sporting activities, making sporting categorizations more fluid, and breaking down the separation between protagonists and spectators. Nonetheless, considering the transient character of liminality, we also investigate problems and limitations implied by the pursuit of these objectives. It is concluded that, despite a certain degree of selfreferentiality, the festival fosters the spreading of anti-discriminatory cultures by enhancing the participants' reflexivity and feeding their commitment in generating spin-off activities in different local contexts.

Although many initiatives use sport as a tool to blur boundaries and foster social mixing, the way physical activity is organized and displayed for such purposes suggests critical reflections about the potential of sport in terms of social inclusivity. When used for social purposes, mainstream sports often need to be adapted and partially de-structured by downplaying their competitive dimension, blurring categorizations through mixed-gender, mixed-age, mixed-ethnic, or mixed-ability teams, and reducing the distinction between players and spectators.Therefore, while the process of sportisation has re-shaped old forms of play and games, re-framing them as sports, when it comes to use physical activity to foster sociability the tendency seems to be the other way around, meaning that sports are re-shaped (or de-shaped) into mere games and even less structured forms of play.Drawing on both fieldwork carried out by the author and the main literature in the field, the paper provides a theoretical and analytical exploration of such a desportising trend.

With the outbreak of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), each ethno-national group -Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks), Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats -set up its own football federation and began to organize its own competitions separately.