In both cases, identities are enacted in the utterances and practices of agents inside and outside the club and/or city. Footnote 12 Identification, then, is viewed as an active process. Both city and club identities are taken to be social constructs. There are several basic assumptions underlying this article. Footnote 10 Furthermore, by envisioning historical football rivalries as part of both cultural history and urban history, it aims at countering the ‘ghettoization’ of sports history. This article is intended to bring more depth to the field of research concerned with the relationship between city identification and sport identification, which remains underdeveloped.
This will provide insight into the practice of ‘othering’ in an everyday context, helping to explain fundamental societal hostilities and shed light on why groups preserve or even nurture these hostilities. The aim of this article is to provide a historical analysis of the rivalry between two football clubs, Vitesse Arnhem and NEC Nijmegen, explicating the various ‘axes of enmity’ Footnote 9 between them and examining how the cities’ images inform, and are informed by, this rivalry. Footnote 6 Analyses by historians, on the other hand, tend to underrate the relevance of continuing rivalries to club identification, Footnote 7 or fail to engage truly with historical city images, despite the fact that there is often a perceived relationship. Footnote 4īut how does such a deep relationship between place and club come into being, and is it truly inevitable? Some ethnographic studies offer valuable insight into how local football cultures engage in the practice of ‘continually (re)inscribing and policing physical, as well as, cultural boundaries’, Footnote 5 yet such studies generally lack historicity.
Footnote 2 Others have argued that supporting a football club offers the possibility to ‘assert a kind of membership of the city’, Footnote 3 and that in the past teams have revitalized the distinctiveness of city images, making clubs vehicles for the promotion of ‘place’. As John Bale has claimed, there is ‘little doubt that it is through sport that current manifestations of localism (and regionalism and nationalism) are most visible’. The cultural relationship between ‘place’ and a sports club is often considered self-evident. Footnote 1 Sports rivalries in particular have received attention from sociologists and historians, as they allow investigations into community bonding and the process of ‘othering’. According to Jeff Hill, the texts and practices of sports represent ‘structured habits of thought and behaviour which contribute to our ways of seeing ourselves and others’.
The history of sport has proved a fruitful field for research into processes of identification.
0 kommentar(er)
