Sports play a giant role in contemporary society worldwide. But few of us pause to think about the larger questions of money, politics, race, sex, culture, and commercialization that surround sports everywhere. This course draws on the tools of anthropology, sociology, history, and other disciplines to give you new perspectives on the games we watch and play. It's the new and improved version of Professor Orin Starn's original "Sports and Society" for Coursera, which drew more than 40,000 students. We will focus on both popular sports like soccer (or “football,” as anyone outside America calls it), basketball, and baseball, and also lesser-known ones like mountain-climbing and fishing. You will never watch or think about sports in the same way again.
The Dark Side of Fandom
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Sports and Society
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Why Do We Care So Much about Sports?
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Orin StarnProfessor
Cultural Anthropology
[MUSIC]
Let's look this time a little more at the question of sports fandom.
And remember that Sigmund Freud draws this great distinction between
Eros on the one hand and Thanatos on the other.
Eros being love, beauty, community, togetherness.
And Thanatos being death, destruction, aloneness,
and all things troubling and disturbing.
And in the sports world as we've seen,
and as I think we all know, there are dimensions both of Eros, of beauty,
the joy, and the amazing wonderfulness of the game.
And then also, a Thanatos of violence,
of envy, of team troubles, and of all the rest.
And Eros and
Thanatos are also both present in the great story of sports fandom.
And we've talked about the pleasures, the erotic dimensions of sports fandom.
But there's also a clear dark side, a Thanatos side, to what
it means to be a fan and to the experience of being a fan around the world.
Most obviously here when one thinks of Thanatos and sports fandom.
One thinks of soccer hooligans or at least I do,
this is the phenomenon of soccer fandom gone wild.
The beer bottles, the bats, the hatred, the bloodying,
the riots, the death that has sometimes been connected to being a soccer fan.
Or George Orwell, the famous 20th century novelist and
social critic, once talked about soccer as war without shooting.
And soccer games and the contest between rival fans can sometimes
turn into if not shooting matches, matches where people are throwing rocks and
trying to wreak havoc on the opposing side.
And I think for example of 1985 in Belgium where some 70 fans
are trampled to death in a big game between Liverpool and Juventas.
Or more recently, in Port Sayid in Egypt,
dozens of people are killed in these riots around soccer games there.
Now, the question around soccer hooliganism is why.
And there's a big sociological and
historical literature dedicated to figuring all of this out.
There's some great books by journalists too about soccer hooliganism.
I recommend to you, a kind of hilarious, horrifying read,
Bill Buford's Among the Thugs as a classic of this genre.
Now clearly one of the reasons that soccer hooliganism happens is because
you have fierce rivalries, longstanding rivalries between teams
that incite these passions that can sometimes boil over in ugly ways.
But I think more deeply soccer hooliganism often, not always, but
often also has to do with the way that soccer is hitched up to ethnic and
religious and nationalist passions.
So soccer hooliganism is about the game and about the team, but
it's this contest or this confrontation where bigger,
more divisive issues, social issues, are also at stake.
So for example, we talked about Red Star and Dinamo Zagreb, and
the way that that competition and hooliganism there is linked up,
hitched up, to conflict between Croats and Serbs.
Or one could think about the famous rivalry of Celtic and
Ranger, which are two Scottish teams, but
whose allegiances are very tied to religious conflict.
Sometimes hatreds in Ireland, in Northern Ireland in particular,
where Catholics support Celtic, and Protestants support Ranger.
And if you wear that blue Ranger shirt in a Catholic neighborhood in Belfast,
it's gonna get you into trouble and vice versa.
Or one thinks of the soccer war of a few decades ago in Central America between
Honduras and El Salvador, where the tension between these two
countries at that time was melded into the World Cup qualifying match.
And led not just to hooliganism but all the way into a war,
a brief war, but a war nonetheless, between these two countries.
So hooliganism has to do with the way that soccer gets tied up to these
bigger social cleavages.
And also, soccer hooliganism has to do with the fact of crowd psychology,
the twisted, weird, unfathomable question of how we behave.
Maybe not so unfathomable, but big question of how we behave in crowds.
Here an important thinker is a man, a French intellectual,
an activist, politician of the 19th century named Gustave Le Bon,
who wrote a lot about crowds and crowd psychology.
And Le Bon coins the idea of
what he calls submergence to make sense of how crowds behave.
And his idea was that when we're in crowds our individual will and
desires and moral sense are submerged, melded into the larger will of the crowd.
And it's the will of the crowd that takes precedence over everything else.
Everything else is submerged and Hitler and
Mussolini were actually very interested in Le Bon's work.
Because they understood how you could use mass rallies and
create these giant crowd atmospheres to get
everyone to support their fascist projects, and their personal leadership.
And crowds are what we have in sports and in soccer games as well.
And when crowds get into big numbers and the will of the crowd becomes to attack,
whether inside the stadium or out, members of the fans of the opposite team.
We tend to where people can lose their own sense of individual right and wrong.
So, if the crowd is saying,
let's go after them, using an example, the Beshiktash team.
The individual will often not stop to think, hey maybe it's not a great idea for
me to be going around and hitting other people on the head with a beer bottle.
You lose that sense of individual judgement within the great dynamic,
the swelling dynamic of the crowd.
So, these are some of the reasons and the forces at work in soccer hooliganism.
But soccer hooliganism isn't the only dark side of fandom.
There are also less pernicious, yet also problematic,
aspects of sports fandom, and being a sports fan around the world.
And one of the most obvious, to me,
is simply the danger of what could be called a culture of passivity,
that fandom, and especially too much fandom, too much sports can create.
Juvenal, the Latin poet, coined the famous phrase,
panem et circenses, of bread and circuses.
And his idea was that the Roman emperors use,
providing a little food but also the great gladiatorial entertainment
spectacles in the Coliseum of Christians and lions and gladiators.
To keep people from rising up against them, to accept and
go along with their tyrannical behavior.
And certainly in the modern world, one gets the sense now and
then that people are spending too much time watching sports on TV,
streaming sports and all the rest.
Particularly in the United States, there's a critic who talks about Sports Glut USA
to describe the way that we seem so mesmerized by the 24/7 sports cycle.
Now, certainly some escape is good.
At the end of a long day, many of us like to tune in and watch a bit of a baseball
game, or a football game, or to go to a bar and watch a game with our friends.
But then how much is too much?
And is it too much when you're watching 20 or 25 hours a week of sports,
as I have in certain moments of my own humble existence?
And one needs to keep in perspective here that our time on this planet is short.
Our time is precious, and all those hours that we spend watching games,
are hours we have less to volunteer in the homeless shelter,
to do art or music or some other kind of creative pursuit.
To be with aging parents or children or family.
And so, there are these questions also of proportionate state and
the way that sports watching can become this
almost addictive thing where we're drawn into watching so much of it.
And here I leave you with the final way of thinking about this and
the dark side of sports fandom in particular, the culture of passivity.
And that's the tools that are provided by thinkers from what was called
the Frankfurt School of the 1930's in Germany, clustered around the Institute
of Social Research in Frankfurt before the full Nazi takeover in Germany.
And here famous social theorists like Ted Adorno and Max Horkheimer,
contemplate the rising influence of mass media in modern society.
Television has not taken off but you already have radio,
the movies, television will soon spread across the world.
And Adorno and Horkheimer and other Frankfurt School thinkers worry
that mass media, and it's addictive powerful
effect are going to create what they call one-dimensional people.
People who are spectators.
People who can't think for themselves.
People who can't act creatively and powerfully in the world.
And Adorno and Horkheimer were concerned about the role of sports in all of this.
And whether the sports entertainment complex would be part of this kind of
machinery of modern society that would spit out these one-dimensional people.
Now, this may be an exaggerated fear.
Surely there's nothing wrong with watching the game now and then.
But I think these warnings about the way that
sports has grown into such a gigantic part of the global imagination.
And the question really of how much sports is too much?
Is one that we would all do well to keep in mind.
[MUSIC]
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