Catalonia's Human Towers: Castells, Cultural Politics, and the Struggle toward the Heights

History

Vaczi, Mariann

Europe

Indiana University Press

Soccer, Culture and Society in Spain (Routledge Critical Studies in Sport)

Spanish soccer is on top of the world, at international and club level, with the best teams and a seemingly endless supply of exciting and stylish players. While the Spanish economy struggles, its soccer flourishes, deeply embedded throughout Spanish social and cultural life. But the relationship between soccer, culture and national identity in Spain is complex. This fascinating, in-depth study shines new light on Spanish soccer by examining the role this sport plays in Basque identity, consolidated in Athletic Club of Bilbao, the century-old soccer club located in the birthplace of Basque nationalism. Athletic Bilbao has a unique player recruitment policy, allowing only Basque-born players or those developed at the youth academies of Basque clubs to play for the team, a policy that rejects the internationalism of contemporary globalised soccer. Despite this, the club has never been relegated from the top division of Spanish football. A particularly tight bond exists between fans, their club and the players, with Athletic representing a beacon of Basque national identity. This book is an ethnography of a soccer culture where origins, nationalism, gender relations, power and passion, lifecycle events and death rituals gain new meanings as they become, below and beyond the playing field, a matter of creative contention and communal affirmation.   Based on unique, in-depth ethnographic research, this book investigates how a soccer club and soccer fandom affect the life of a community, interweaving empirical research material with key contemporary themes in the social sciences, and placing the study in the wider context of Spanish political and sporting cultures. Filling a key gap in the literature on contemporary Spain, and on wider soccer cultures, this book is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in sport, anthropology, sociology, political science, or cultural and gender studies.

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Routledge

<p>"Playing Fields" presents the profound reflections of a group of international scholars on how games, sports, and motor practices interact with global-local processes, inequality, gender relations, identity, representation, performance, and emotion through varied modes of analysis, approaches, and styles. Sport here is treated with disciplinary eclecticism featuring sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, and motor praxeology. The book is structured around three main themes: power, practice, and passion. Part 1, “Power,” considers playing fields as an arena of power and addresses what Joan Acker would call “inequality regimes” in sports. Gender discrimination; “hard” and “soft” essentialism; the concept of justice in sports; gendered collective embodiment and public agency; countercultural grassroots sports practices; and local-global dynamisms, Americanization, and hegemony are all discussed. The second part, “Practice,” focuses on the practice of games as, in the words of Pierre Parlebas, “a type of academy in which social connections are experienced by the body.” Through the study of motor praxeology—the relation of motor practices to the cultural and social context of the bodies that practice them—these chapters delve into the intellectual history of motor action; conceptualizations of the body; and the internal logic of games and how it influences risk-taking attitudes and the experience of emotions. Part 3, “Passion,” looks at the affective dimensions of sports and explores how collective desires are communicated through the emotion that playing fields generate. In the final chapter, a kind of codas and reflection on the entire experience of the remarkable group of scholars who share their work here, Jennifer Hargreaves reflects on her work and life in sport studies.</p>

Playing Fields: Power, Practice, and Passion in Sport

Sports & Outdoors

Miscellaneous

Center for Basque Studies

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Books by Vaczi, Mariann