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Il calcio e un’identità nel pallonePerché la domenica si va allo stadio anziché a messa
Relatore:Prof. Mario Dossoni Tesi di Laurea di:
Stefano GhiozziMatr. 367891/45
ANNO ACCADEMICO 2009 - 2010
UNIVERSITÁ DEGLI STUDI DI PAVIA
Corso di Laurea Specialistica Interfacoltà inEditoria e Comunicazione Multimediale
Correlatore:Dott. Carlo Genta
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Liquid modernity of the western society
The Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman introduced the idea of liquid modernity. He wrote that its characteristics are the increasing feelings of uncertainty. It is a kind of chaotic continuation of modernity, where one can shift from one social position to another, in a fluid manner.
Nomadism becomes a general trait of the liquid modern man, as he flows through his own life like a tourist, changing places, jobs, spouses, values and sometimes even more (such as political or sexual orientation), (self-)excluded from the traditional networks of support.
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Crisis of:
Religion PoliticsWork
but…
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Rise of:
Sport
Football
and especially…
Why?
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P. P. Pasolini and M. V. Montalbán
«Football is the last sacred representation of our time. It is the rite in the end, even if it is a leisure. While other sacred representations, even the religious mass, is sloping down, football is the only one left. Football is the show that replaced the theater».
«Football is turning into a secular substitute of religion, with its rituals, its symbols, its cathedrals , its sects».
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The social influence of sport and football
Gino Bartali’s historic victory in the Tour de France in 1948 avoided the risk of an armed mass revolt after the attack committed against the leader of the Italian Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti. The instinct took over insurrectionary desire and people celebrated extraordinary international success of our compatriot, a real legend of Italian cycling and sport.
Brazil defeat in the 1950 World Cup played at home was one of the biggest upsets in football history, and the term Maracanazo, roughly translated as "The Maracanã Blow") has become synonymous with the match. When hosts Brazil lost the 1950 World Cup final against Uruguay 2-1, two of the 175,000 crammed into Rio's Maracana stadium committed suicide by throwing themselves off a stand.
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What is sport?
Sport: an organized, competitive, entertaining, and skillful activity requiring commitment, strategy, and fair play, in which a winner can be defined by objective means. It is governed by a set of rules or customs. Etymologically, it is said that “Sport” comes from the Old French desport meaning “leisure”.
Sociology of sport is an area of sociology that focuses on sport as a social phenomenon and on the social and cultural structures, patterns, and organizations or groups engaged in sport that is a useful way for people to increase their mastery of nature and the environment. The history of sport can teach us a great deal about social changes and about nature of sport itself.
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N. Elias and the Configurational Theory
The Quest for Excitement, written by Norbert Elias with Eric Dunning, and published in 1986 proved a seminal work for the sociology of sport, and of football in particular.
According to this theory, every social context takes on a specific configuration, which can be captured and represented sociologically by looking at the inter-dependencies between cooperation and conflict.
This theory predominantly focused on the analysis of modern civilization in the sport field, which not only operates through the strengthening and improvement of coercive instruments of social control, but also builds and provides paradigms of behavior, rules, distinctive lifestyles whose preparation acquisition and transmission is intended to make visible the social hierarchy.
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The civilizing process in sport: the fox hunting
Fox hunting in England is an example of the increasingly restrained and ritualized expression of pleasure in hunting. In his words «with the submission of the huntinggentleman to a elaborate, self imposed code of restraints, part of the enjoyment of hunting had become a visual enjoyment; the pleasure derived from doing had been transformed into the pleasure seeing it done». The dog, and not the master, has the order to kill the prey: this is an example of civilizing process.
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A. Guttmann’sFrom Ritual to Record
Allen Guttmann makes us understand how sport can be considered as the mirror of society. The central purpose of From Ritual to Record is to show what is modern about modern sports, to explain how modern sports got the way they are. “The basic explanatory factor,” what makes modern sports unique, Guttmann argues, “is the scientific world-view.”He identifies 7 characteristics of modern sport:
• secularism• equality
• quantification
• rationalization
• record obsession
• bureaucratization• specialization
According to Guttmann’s theory, physical contests pursued for the goals and challenges they entail. Sports are part of every culture past and present, but each culture has its own definition of sports. The most useful definitions are those that clarify sport’s relationship to play, games, and contests. Humans work because they have to; they play because they want to. Play is autotelic—that is, it has its own goals. It is voluntary and spontaneous.
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Play, Game, Contest and Sport
The German theorist the creator of the Olympic torch Carl Diem wrote: «Play is purposeless activity, for its own sake, the opposite of work».
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The ritualistic nature of sport
Haka (singular is the same as plural: haka) is a ritual dance form of the Maori of New Zealand. It is a posture dance performed by a group, with vigorous movements and stamping of the feet with rhythmically shouted accompaniment. New Zealand’s national rugby team, All Blacks, performs the Haka, a Maori war dance that has become an iconic pre-game ritual today.
A ritual is a set of actions, performedmainly for their symbolic value. It maybe prescribed by a religion or by thetraditions of a community.A ritual may be performed on specificoccasions, or at the discretion ofindividuals or communities. A ritual may be restricted to a certainsubset of the community, and mayenable or underscore the passagebetween religious or social states.
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The Soccer TribeDesmond Morris compares the game with hunting. The footballer is the hunter with his weapon, the ball. He uses his weapon to catch the prey - the goal. When he achieves scoring a goal, he enjoys the hunter's triumph of killing his prey.He traces the roots of sports such as football to the activities of our evolutionary ancestors.
In his 1981 book, The Soccer Tribe, Morris starts off by describing the survival hunters, who relied on the chase and kill to stay alive. When hunting for food was no longer necessary for survival, men became sports hunters, keeping alive the thrill of the chase. The third stage of development was marked by the creation of arena blood-sportsmen who brought the hunting activities of the countryside to the center of cities: Spanish bullfighting for instance. These were finally replaced in relatively recent times by the arena ball-sportsmen, who adapted the rules and rituals of blood sports to create more socially acceptable games.
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Most sports involve skills that were once essential for survival within hunting communities: strength, stamina, agility, territorial defense and accurate aim. These skills are no longer essential in contemporary societies but they have filtered down to the sports we engage in today.
Similarities between hunting and football
More importantly, these skills are of no value without coordination with other players. Strong bonds between teammates are essential for a win, just as strong bondsbetween tribesmen were essential for group hunting.
In football, the two teams are not trying to destroy each other, they are trying to get past each other to make a goal, a symbolic killing.
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IDENTITY
A person compares himself to the figures whom he feels like his own and with whom he shares the same characteristics and treats. This produces the membership in a collective entity (family home, a group of friends, supporting a football team) that the individual feels as "we".
IDENTIFICATION DETECTION
A person refers to the characteristics that distinguish himself from “others”, whom he feels as different and threatening. In this sense, any identification/ inclusion implies detection/ exclusion.
With modern societies marked by mechanism, sports offer deliberately sought-after emotional risks. They bring about ritual activity and heighten bonds between people. They evoke a sense of belonging and help people find their own identity. Here is theprocess of the construction of the individual identity:
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Football Hooliganism
The behavior known as football hooliganism originated in England in the early 1960s. It is unruly and destructive phenomenon—such as brawls, vandalism and intimidation—by association football club fans. Fights between supporters of rival teams may take place before or after football matches at pre-arranged locations away from stadiums, in order to avoid arrests by the police, or they can erupt spontaneously at the stadium or in the surrounding streets.
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In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ian Taylor argued that football hooliganism was caused by young, working class fans, who were showing resistance to the forces of modernization in football. Taylor wrote about the attempt to bourgeoisify football, and argued that the so-called football hooligans were actually expressing a form of resistance to this take-over of a working class game.
In the late 1970s, Peter Marsh carried out research with young football fans. They argued that football hooliganism was primarily a harmless ritual, and a way of releasing natural, aggressive impulses within a young, male social context. They argued that the general public, the politicians, the judges, and the press, all had a tendency to exaggerate the scale and the danger of 'football hooliganism' or what they called 'football aggro'. This exaggeration or amplification tended to give rise to real violence among fans, as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Accorging to Eric Dunning and University of Leicester’s theory, football hooligans tend to come from the rough working class social groups. Violence at football is not a new phenomenon. However, the general public do not tolerate violence as much as in the past, because they have become more civilized.
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Ultras
The ultras movement originated in Italy in the early 1970s, 10 years later hooligan’s birth. Officially the first ultra group in Italy was created in 1967 and was named “Moschettieri Nerazzurri” that supported FC Inter (it was an idea promoted by the legendary Spanish coach Helenio Herrera) but historically the largest one was AC Milan-supporting group “Fossa dei Leoni” that was composed by over 20.000 ultras.
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Alessandro Dal Lago views football fan behaviour as essentially ritualistic and much of his approach stems directly from the work of Peter Marsh and his colleagues in England. He hypothesises three main factors which underlie the expressive behaviour of football fan groups:
1. Football allows for identification by fans with with a specific set of symbols and linguistic terms. These enable and encourage the division of the social world: friends and enemies.
2. Football match in Italy is not simply a meeting between the two teams. For the fans it is an opportunity for an “friend/enemy” ritual confrontation. Such rituals can, in specific and foreseeable circumstances, be transformed into physical clashes.
3. Stadium where football is played is much more than a physical environment. For fans it is the symbolic stage on which the ritual of friend/enemy is enacted.
Alessandro Salvini’s theoretical model to explain more general aspects of football fan aggression is based on cognitive social learning theory, which he uses to explain the phenomena of dominance and aggression, self-identity and group affiliation and acceptance of group norms with the ultras. He also examines the role of situational variables and the impact these have on transforming ritual behaviours.
Differences hooligans/ultras: HOOLIGANS come from most disadvantaged social classes (i.e. low working class). Their real aim is just the physical violence against opponents and establishment. To them political issues are useless and heavy drinking is considered a social value.ULTRAS come from several social classes, concern especially about choirs and choreography. Italian curves are highly politicized (extreme left or right wing, even if in the last years most of the curves declare themselves as fascist and racist).
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Football hooliganism is a highly visible phenomenon, as journalists and TV cameras are present at virtually every match. Since the 1960s, journalists have been sent to football matches to report on crowd behavior as much as on the game itself. As a result, media coverage of football-related disorder and violence is extensive, and the British tabloid press in particular devote apparently unlimited column inches to any incident that occurs, complete with sensationalist headlines. Many researchers argued that this sensationalism, together with a “predictive approach” whereby violence at certain matches is anticipated by the media, actually contributed to the problem.
Media coverage
The marriage of media and sport
The relationship between mass media and sports has profoundly influenced both institutions. This relationship has passed through a series of stages, the first of which was parallel development, with the mass media reaching a broader audience through new technologies and market growth while sports were attracting a growing base of paying spectators. Sports were correctly perceived as ideal for capturing audiences for advertisers. Public or state media also recognized sporting events as opportunities to reaffirm national culture and to bolster patriotism. Sports entrepreneurs began to see the mass media as important for generating interest among spectators and sponsors.
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Finally, by the late 20th century, mass media and elite sports formed a marriage of convenience, becoming in this last stage so economically interdependent as to be virtually inseparable. It is now, for example, impossible to imagine the continued existence of professional sports—football, basketball or baseball—without billion-dollar broadcast rights in the sports pages.
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Conclusiondespite its apparent rationality, our society is as ritualistic as others that are considered extremely traditional. Rituals are important because make our lives dense and significant; rituals are effective when producing mental states that unite a collective group. There is no society that does not want to occasionally revisit and strengthen the collective feelings at certain times;sport, and football in particular, is a powerful way to channel passions and helps people find their own psychological and social identities;although few of them are real punks, most ultras stage a certain conception of justice, aesthetics, protest and identity. The stadium is one of the arenas where it is possible to represent frustrations and needs which remain unexpressed and hidden in everyday life;the bond between sport and media is extremely strong. Media magnates such as Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch, and Silvio Berlusconi, along with the Walt Disney Company, have developed this logic of convergence to the highest level, becoming the owners of sports teams—the Atlanta Braves and Los Angeles Dodgers baseball teams, football’s AC Milan, and the National Hockey League’s Mighty Ducks, respectively;football has become the secular religion of rich and relativist western society.
Finally we have understood that:
