Meeting with Big D ~ 10/01/07

I didn’t expect to have the meeting be a love fest over my thesis, I know Dr. D better than that, but I also didn’t expect to have it savaged like this. I write this not with anger but with a real challenge in front of me now. The main criticism was that this was, as it stands, an easy thesis without any really new ideas. Granted, I had my suspicions after discovering more scholarship than expected on this topic of soccer instilling values and developing a democratic civil society.

This EU organization that Dr. V put me in contact with has a number of papers on this already. But I figured, by looking at the question of how this is a mechanism of identity and what that means for the culture, that I would be taking a different approach. Largely, I think I am doing, and I think that I could stick with this, do the thesis, be done in May and move on. Or…

…I could take the challenge laid down of moving my thesis outside the institutional perspective and attempt to look at the spontaneous nature of soccer at the grass roots level. Here I would need to consider how soccer at this level is co-opted by the institution and how it re-enforces status quo mentality. While it might remove differences within, it reifies discrimination.

Um, ok. But what about when the UN goes into a conflict zone and uses soccer to bring together community members normally found on different sides of the conflict? What is the negative aspect of this, and why does it not lead to harmony? Is it because you are basically creating a soccer “community” or system that will become what it is in Europe: part of civil society, and representative of one identity?

Ok, lets look at a conflict zone: Kosovo for example, a state struggling for independence against Serbia. Why would reconciliation through soccer be a problem? Well, if the teams are divided along ethnic lines I can see the problem, it would be a case of re-enforcing nationalist feeling and the game would default to being about victory over the opponent. But what if an outside force (the UN, or an NGO) came and mixed up the team, removing the ethnic lines of the competition by placing people from opposite sides on the same team? Does this still mean that the system is being re-enforced? I feel stuck on this question. I want to answer no, because the sport will teach them that the differences are fabricated by some other mechanism. But Dr. D would think that this is not the case. His reasoning is hazy to me, that this forced break-down of the opposing identities is still part of the same system that puts them in conflict to start with.

Well, I am reading Hargreaves’s take in Sport, Power and Culture. Here sport is examined in its British context and how the state uses sport as a form of socialization. If I understand correctly, then sport means making model citizens, the type who are not challenging the status quo, not “anti-social” and who are productive laborers. In other words, this develops healthy consumers. In a UN context, the idea would be similar, we are replacing one identity with another. The individual goes from being a tribal member to being one who now wants to own a house, buy a car, eat at a fancy restaurant: basically they become a consumer. This, I think, is the core of Dr. D’s criticism. My paper approaches the topic from an assumption that the bigger system into which the individuals are being socialized is good. Just because the war has ended, or the border dispute is resolved, it does not mean that there is a more just system in place.

Ok, so then, lets figure out how to move this monster out of the system. Soccer that emerges spontaneously is different in its anarchical nature. There is no-one controlling it, there is no-one benefiting from it (in the economic sense), thus it is soccer for soccer sake, not for societies sake. With this analysis, the individual plays a very different role than in a structured, controlled environment. First of all, this spontaneous soccer is about the individual, not the team. Thus it is more empowering on an individual level. The people become cognizant of their individual ability not as a result of the team performance. The two performances are not linked when it is spontaneous and uncodified. In a dirt pitch pick up game no-one really cares about the final score, beyond some minor disappointment that they failed to shoot a winning goal.

This places the debate of intra or extra institutional as the value of a sporting culture.