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.
The difficulties with interfaith dialogue are linked, at least in part, to the lack of ritual forms (consisting of rules, ceremonial idioms, liturgy, and repertoires of action) Bosnie-Herzégovine, l'auteur
Comparing the forms of religious rituals and those of sports rituals -in particular of football rituals -the author develops some considerations that can be applied to the general debate about inter-religious dialogue. The comparison brings to light some of the limits and difficulties that religious institutions encounter in giving life to an interfaith dialogue that directly and concretely involves the members of different communities.
Key words: phenomenology -ritual -Bosnia-Herzegovina -football -inter-religious dialogue Les difficultés du dialogue interconfessionnel sont liées, du moins en partie, au manque de formes rituelles (faites de règles, idiomes cérémoniels, liturgies et répertoires d'action) ayant pour but d'unifier et intégrer un "meta-groupe" d'individus qui appartiennent à des communautés religieuses différentes. À travers une enquête ethnographique conduite en
Whilst being the world's fastest growing informal sport, parkour is also undergoing a gradual institutionalisation which is shaped differently by each national context's specific sport system. We investigate this glocalised process by examining the subcultural tensions and power struggles it generates within the Italian parkour community. Whilst in other countries parkour practitioners (the so-called traceurs/traceuses) have managed to gain public recognition by forming a specific and independent national governing body, in Italy they are gradually affiliating with different Sport Promotion Bodies (Enti di Promozione Sportiva), the distinctive umbrella organisations which compete for the provision of sport-for-all within the country. Through a qualitative mixed-method approach based on focus groups, individual interviews and the analysis of ethnographic and documentary material, we explore the institutionalisation of Italian parkour by focusing on the controversies surrounding the introduction of teaching standards and qualifications, which is becoming a battlefield between competing authenticity claims based on different visions and interpretations of parkour.Our analysis shows how sport policymakers become influential agents in this authentication process by (often unwittingly) favouring certain forms and meanings of the practice and thereby contributing to legitimising certain practitioners over others, distributing subcultural reputations and shaping hierarchies in the field. Moreover, by highlighting how the specific characteristics of the Italian sport system contribute to increasing tensions amongst traceurs but also stimulate discussion and pluralism, this study calls for future comparative analysis of the role of policymakers in the local recontextualisation of highly globalised practices.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.