Sport, Communities, and Nations

There are two primary definitions of community

1. A group of people living occupying the same area (physical/spatial)

2. A sense of belonging derived from sharing common interests and attitudes (cultural)

Community: a population living within a bounded space and sharing specific cultural practices through which they express a common identity

Solidarity and Communitas

Bowling Alone?

Putnam’s (2001) argued that there is a general decline of community in contemporary American society

Decline in membership of civic organizations due to the individualising tendencies of modern society

• In other words, Putnam argued that something about modern society has led to a breakdown in social ties

Bowling alone → Working out alone → risking alone?

• Sporting Individuality?

Sporting Individuality

Fact: Adult competitive team sports are on the decline while involement in individual sports is increasing

WHY?

Social Explanations:

1. Within wealthy societies, involvement in individual sports is a marker of social/status differentiation and individual improvement

2. Individual sports demand less social investment and are easier to “drop”

3. As society has become more time-pressured, individual activities are easier to coordinate more time-pressured, individual activities are easier to coordinate than team activities

4. Within appearance-based consumer culture, many individual activities are body-focused

5. As organized team sport has become more rationalized and commercialized (and thus disenchanting), people seek enchantment through individual sports

Sport and Community

• Regardless of why, many agree that the individualization of society has led to a decline in community

• Individual digital technology has facilitated the “absent present” self: people may be physically present in a space, but not really “present” with their surrounding space and peers

• This decline is also evident within sport

• However, many argue that sport is one of the few remaining bastions of community left in Western society

Speaking “Sportuguese”

The “language” of sport

• Includes the way we “talk sports” to identify ourselves, establish connection, and locate ourselves within American culture

• The infiltration of sporting metaphors into a wide range of non-sporting language

Beyond participation, the formation and maintenance of community is especially apparent through sporting spectatorship and digital forms of sports media

Collective (communal) Representation

French sociologist Emile Durkheim used the term “collective representation” to describe the elements of life (religion, art, and sport), that are the commonly shared institutions or experiences through which individuals express and derive their:

• Sense of collective identification and belonging

• Sense of “we-ness”

According to Durkheim, collective representations can contribute to levels of social solidarity (community/group cohesion) within a society

Social solidarity is created through the assemblage of practices, symbols, and values which are considered to be common to the average member of a society

Sport acts as a metonym for communities

• Metonym: Something that stands in place for, or comes to represent, something else

• Teams and/or athletes come to represent entire communities, cities, and nations

Communitas

• “a special experience during which individuals are able to rise above those structures that materially and normatively regulate their daily lives and that unite people across the boundaries of structure, rank, and socioeconomic status”

• A moment of (temporary) unity, cohesion, and solidarity

Representative sport is often the collective glue for the community, creating moments of “communitas” that binds people together in various ways

• Sports Fandom as Communitas? → Uniting people across the boundaries of structure, rank, and socioeconomic status

Levels of Sporting Communities:

1. Organic/ Face-to-Face communities

2. Extended Metropolitan Communities

3. Imagined National Communities

Sport and Small Town Communities

Small-scale communities are those in which we are familiar with a large percentage of community members

We learn the histories, rules, and bonds of community belonging through face-to-face interactions and experiences within the community

High School Sports

• Often in small-town communities, the high school sports teams are metonyms for the community

• High school sports are often the glue which provides a sense of belonging and binds the community together

“North Town” , TX

Small town (8,000) in south Texas

Predominantly farming/ranching community

Considerable local poverty

80% Mexican-American population

North Town H.S. 600 athletes/Triple-AAA level sports team in 5 level state system

“The games enlivened the community’s social life… community sports was the patriotic, neighborly thing to do”

• Friday night games

• Weekly pep rallies

• Marching band

• Cheerleader/Pep Squads

• Homecoming bonfire and dance

• Powder puff football game

• Booster club

Involvement in each of these elements of the North Town high school football ritual represented a context for the performance and display of individual commitment to the community’s traditions/rituals/values

Thus, on the surface, football becomes a vehicle for affirming the collective solidarity and harmony of the community

HOWEVER, the example of North Town demonstrates that is important not to overly romanticize the organic community

As much as the high school football ritual contributes to the creation of collective identity and belonging (communitas), it also reproduces dominant class, ethnicity, and gender based power structures, relations, and hierarchies

• According to Foley, “North Town” high school football: “socialize(s) people into community structures of inequality”

Social Cohesion…Or Social Division?

• Gender divisions/hierarchies

• Sexuality divisions/hierarchies

• Ethnic/Racial divisions/hierarchies

• Social class divisions/hierarchies

Do the benefits and the “feel-good” vibe of sporting communitas cause us to go to extreme and excessive lengths to preserve it?

Do communities stake so much of their identity in sport that they are willing to overlook its potential flaws, issues, and human costs?

The Imagined sense of Metropolitan Community

Metropolitan/urban communities are “imagined communities” : members can only realistically be expected to know, or be familiar with, a very small percentage of the entire population

Through popular media and political rhetoric, people largely imagine the common bonds and affinities which produce the feeling of communities

We imagine (assume) that other members of the community practice and express learned communal norms

Elite sport teams are one of the most powerful sources of identity for cities and their populations

Teams/athletes represent cities and often times come to enbody and enhance aspects of communal identity

Hence, supporting/following a team becomes an expression of an imagined civic/community unity, identification, and belonging

Professional teams thus allow for the performance of community in various ways

Although sometimes communitas occurs “organically”, we must also consider the ways that communitas is manufactured and exploited, as well as the political, economic, and cultural motivations for doing so

“Sport, as a civic ritual, is embedded in political-economic relations”

• Established sporting communitas → Reconfirmed imaginings and experiences of sporting communitas

• Commercially manufactured sporting communitas → Politically manufactured sporting communitas

Politically Manufactured Sporting Communitas

In addition to selling products and merchandise, there are political motivations for manufacturing communitas

Many politicians and political figures latch onto sport to align themselves with the populace, or to push their ideological agendas through the guise of sporting “unity”

Because sport is so integral to the identity of cities, politicians face pressure to cater to sports franchises

Gaining/retaining a beloved sports franchise is seen as a major political win, while losing a beloved sports franchise is seen as a career-ending political loss… regardless of the actual implications to the citizens of the city

Sporting Communitas: Good or Bad?

Community consciousness: It provides the “social glue” generating shared values, beliefs, and experiences that “bind community members to one another”

Community self-esteem: it increases the “self-esteem” of citizens, through their perception of living in a “first-rate, major league city”

In manufacturing community, professional sport may indeed transcend difference, but in doing so may divert attention away from the real social inequalities and injustices that persist within urban life

Ignoring the Urban “Rot” Beneath the “Sporting” Glitter

Economically Manufactured Sporting Communitas

Why do cities invest in sport franchises?

• Similar to sporting spectacles and mega-events (such as the olympics), the importance of sport to the community often gets exploited, and allows sports franchises to “hold cities hostage” through the building of stadiums

• The vibes of sports franchises/stadiums for cities are good, but the real economic and social benefits are questionable

• Through tax-payer funded corporate subsidies and commercially-focused initiatives, neoliberal city governments look to invest in spectacular “tourist bubbles” designed to attract the discretionary leisure income of:

  • Out of Town Tourists $ + Suburban Tourists $

There is also a perceived need to continually “feed the downtown sporting monster” through public subsidies for redevelopments of existing stadia or building new ones

There is intense competition between post-industrial cities vying to be a major league city, and hopefully attract business investment, tourist dollars, and new residents

Within cities such as Baltimore, the city is:

• “hard pressed to meet the mounting social needs of an increasingly impoverished population with a diminishing tax base”

• “This fiscal squeeze promotes, in Baltimore as in other similar cities, an emphasis on flagship downtown developments such as football stadia, ballparks, race car events and convention centers. These benefit downtown business interests but fail to do much for the stubborn poverty in the inner city”

The Helicopter Effect?

“If you want to inject money into the local economy, it would be better to drop it from a helicopter than invest it in a new ballpark”

The Drain Effect?

“Leakage - money that doesn’t stick in the local economy imagine a stadium as a giant drain. Money flows from the community into the stadium, where it whirls around for a bit, then funnels down some murky pipes, exiting far, far away”

Sport and National Community

Benedict Anderson famously conceptualized the nation as an imagined community:

SPORT: “uniquely effective a medium for inculcating national feelings”

Specific sports are vehicles for expressing American national identity, and thereby helping constitute the very sense of communal belonging (communitas) of the nation

In other words, in different ways and to different intensities, they embody what it is to “be” American

We, more than any other nation, care about the “homegrown national trinity of American football, baseball, and basketball”

Hot Nationalism: The intensified, extreme, or overt forms of nationalism which often occur during times of real/perceived national threats

Banal Nationalism: The routine, everyday, and often unacknowledged expressions and performances of nationalism which punctuate all aspects of our lives

Cool Nationalism: The expressions of indifference and/or hostility toward the nation, and a reluctance to acknowledge it as a source of identity

Post 9/11 Sport

In the aftermath of 9/11, American society has been described as being in a: perpetual state of war, terror, fear, and insecurity

Periods of hot nationalism can, over time, raise the levels of banal nationalism

• in effect, these raised levels of nationalism become the new normal, and become routine and unacknowledged aspects of everyday life

Sporting Militarization as Banal Nationalism

Sport spectacles are thus important agents of nationalism/national pedagogy:

They are sites at which the population are told, and learn, how to properly “be American” , or at least perform it

More problematically, they also:

• Stifle dissent

• Exclude certain people/groups from definitions of American

• Define “patriotism” as "blind/uncritical support for a country’s action

• Serve to normalize and perpetuate (rather than working to end) constant global warfare