International audienceStellenbosch is a South African town long perceived as a stronghold of Afrikaner culture and rugby; however, soccer is also played there. This essay examines the difficulties met by the Stellenbosch Local Football Association (SLFA) in its attempt to unify the different local soccer leagues inherited from the apartheid period. The recent effort by the South African Football Association (SAFA) to restructure the country’s soccer leagues ahead of the 2010 World Cup could not be implemented in Stellenbosch without upsetting entrenched habits. An ethnographic survey of the allocation of sport fields in Stellenbosch exemplifies these difficulties. All the fields are managed by local Sports Boards and they do not always answer the SLFA’s requests to allocate the necessary pitches, especially to outside soccer teams. In spite of the tangible progress achieved since the end of apartheid, the SAFA faces problems in implementing its unification policy in a context still influenced by parochialism and tensions from the past
International audienceThis article examines sport and social cohesion in South Africa through a case study of a project on aid and social development through tourism and football in the provincial town of Stellenbosch, in the Western Cape. The field of study includes the project that was initiated, the group that benefits from it – African footballers – and another group that believes they too were entitled to benefit – Coloured footballers. The observation scale focuses not on the content of the initiative, as the usual sociological approach would do, but on the effects of its allocation. Those effects are observed first from the viewpoint of how they contribute to heighten acceptance of the national governance principles, and then from that of the consequences of that level of acceptance. The results show that the allocation of the project has heightened acceptance of the democratic framework among African footballers, and had the opposite effect among Coloured footballers, who view it as deeply inequitable. In Stellenbosch, the project on aid and social development through tourism and football thus has been harmful to the national project of social cohesion as, far from enhancing the acceptance of the governance framework by all, it has fostered conflict. Next, our results show that allocating the project to one group has strengthened the feeling that there are fundamental differences between the two football groups, by throwing the inequality between them into relief. It has revived among each group the stereotypes inherited from apartheid, in which Coloureds are perceived as ‘racists’ and Africans as ‘primitive’, which harms the South African social cohesion project further, as such stereotypes only contribute to harden the boundaries between the different groups
This article offers a review of the literature on long-distance running, i.e. marathon, ultralong-distance and trail running, based on French studies in the sociology of sport. The interest of such a synthesis lies, firstly, in its affording better understanding of the continued craze of runners for those running disciplines, which are now major practices on the sports scene; secondly, in its presenting to the sociology of sport in English the premises and theoretical conceptions which in France have examined "the wave which has swept the country" (Segalen, 1991, p. 21). The articles collected on the theme range over a period of thirty years and more, from 1982 to 2015, and were produced by French sociologists of sport. The majority of them have examined the phenomenon through the question of undertaking such sports. Therefore it is the question: "Why do people take up those forms of running?" which is addressed in this synthesis and round which its presentation is organised.
International audienceThis article analyses how football membership has been transformed in Kayamandi, a township situated on the outskirts of Stellenbosch in the Western Cape province of South Africa. It focuses on the rationales behind membership in the Mighty 5 Star, a Kayamandi amateur club created in 1972, in order to understand the changing interrelationships between the club and the neighbourhood. Based on participatory observations, written sources published by the club on the internet, as well as interviews, this article discusses the various membership processes between the club and the players from 1972 to 2011, characterising the social and urban rationales that have structured and organised them, and situating those rationales, whenever possible, in the history of the political and social changes in South Africa since 1972. The article illustrates how an imported football model can move into spaces hitherto organised around football models which expressed different interests on a local level. Moreover, it shows how north-south sports relations may, at an amateur sport level, transform the social rationales around and interrelationship with an urban territory
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