Identifier: TDX:1444
Authors: Salvador Duch, Jordi Josep
Abstract:
Football, and most precisely FC Barcelona (FCB), has been very much neglected by the social sciences. With the aim of breaking away from this isolation emerges the idea of the doctoral thesis titled: ' Football, metaphor of a cold war. An anthropological study of Barça', where, from the social and cultural anthropology, it has been tried to draw a portrait of Barça, as well as an academic approximation to this social phenomenon which breaks up with reductionisms, clichés, and the contempt shown by the university world to Barça and the world of sports in general.Why does Barça take up so much social space in Catalonia? What kind of society is this where thousands of people devote an important part of their time to follow the career of a football club? Where they get excited with their goals, their victories or defeats? Why are national speeches formulated in their name? To answer and explain correctly, with rigor and in an understandable way these and other questions has been the aim of this research.Chapter by chapter all the symbolic aspects and rituals that the 'bluereds' environment generates are being revised and deciphered. Beginning with a historical contextualisation of the FCB and following with a mythological analysis of the club; their analysis as an identity symbol, and an anthropological reading of the rites that are generated around the blaugrana sporting body (football matches, open doors days, floral offering to Rafael Casanova, the centennial ceremonies, the visit to the Museum of the club, the victory celebrations, etc.The second part of the thesis is devoted to the interpretation of the 'bluereds' rites analysing them with that gaze learnt from the classics of anthropology: Douglas, Durkheim, Geertz, Leach, Gluckman, Lévi-Strauss, Mauss, Radcliffe-Brown, and Victor Turner whom I'd like to make a special mention, since this thesis is in big debt with this author's work. In fact, his theory of the symbol developed in his book the 'Forest of the symbols' has been a tool of permanent interpretation along the thesis; as well as his notion of rites as a social drama developed in his book 'The ritual process' that allows us to read the football like an enormous setting in scene done by a society in order to see itself and to dramatize what unites it as well as the conflicts it goes through. Following these teachings, the thesis shows that football stadiums are a privileged space to read the values of a society, their tensions, their transformation, the things that unite people and the things that divide them... in short, the study of football is also a trip to the marrow of the Catalan society and a good diagnosis tool of the conflicts that it goes through, the latent or potential ones. The thesis ends up with an opened epilogue where the relationships of the sport rituals, specially those generated by Barça, are analysed with the religious rites. At the end we come to the conclusion that these relationships go beyond the simple analogy to become a sort of ethnic-national religion
Repositori URV