Sport and society in Italy today

Summary

In ‘Itinerary’ Patrick McCarthy provides an introduction to the four articles that examine the connections between sport, politics, business and contemporary culture in Italy. Noting that mass participation in sport has been closely related to modernization, McCarthy argues that the forms of contemporary mass sport reflect the particular cultural, political and economic conditions of each European society. In Italy these made soccer and cycling the most popular mass sports by 1945.

Patrizia Dogliani’s article ‘Sport and Fascism’ examines the development of mass sport in Italy from the late nineteenth century, showing the critical role played by the Fascist regime, which rapidly expanded public sports facilities while the language of politics and combat permeated the vocabulary of sport in Italy in the 1920s and 1930s. Initially the emphasis was on international competition as a symbol of national virility, but following the success of Germany and the USA in the 1936 Olympics the regime’s search for consensus placed new emphasis on recreational aspects. The institutional and administrative organization of sport established in the 1930s remained in place in Italy, however, until more recendy.

In ‘Itinerary 2’ McCarthy examines the roles of the boxer Carnera from Friuli and the racing driver Tazio Nuvolari as sporting heroes of Mussolini’s Italy and in ‘Itinerary 3’ shows how the struggles between Catholic Italy and Communist Italy were personified in the rivalry between the cyclists Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi in the post-war period.

In ‘Itinerary 4’ he asks why soccer had by the 1970s overtaken cycling as Italy’s most popular sport. That theme is examined in greater detail by Nicola Porro and Pippa Russo, whose article reconstructs the ‘hybridization of sport, mass media and politics’ in Italy in the 1990s. Its central focus is Silvio Berlusconi, the self-made media tycoon who founded Fininvest in the 1970s, acquired AC Milan in 1986, and by 1994 controlled a media empire that enabled him to found a new political party (Forza Italia) and become Italy’s Prime Minister albeit for less than a year. Porro and Russo examine the ways in which Berlusconi’s roles in the world of the media and professional soccer have changed both Italian politics and Italian sport.

In ‘Itinerary 5’ McCarthy sets the example of Berlusconi in the context of the integration of soccer and mass media, the commercialization and politicization of sport at a global level in the last decade. These issues are developed in greater detail in Emanuela Poli’s article, ‘The revolution in the televised soccer market’, which emphasizes the critical role that has been played by soccer and soccer clubs in the development of the new media empires based on digital pay-per-view TV and the sale of sporting events in the 1990s. This has left control of the sport (in terms of who can watch and when) in the hands of major international communications moguls like Berlusconi and Rupert Murdoch.

‘Itinerary 6’ links the fragmentation of collective myths like the national soccer championships to the decline of the nation state, and surveys the situation of other sports in Italy (the Americas Cup, skiing, rugby football. Formula 1 motor racing and the gymnasium). The latter is the subject of the final article by Roberta Sassatelli on ‘The commercialization of discipline: keep-fit culture and its values’ which explores the social and cultural meanings attached to the growing vogue for fitness clubs and the shaping of the ideal body in contemporary Italy.     

Elemental mobilities: atmospheres,matter and cycling amid the weather-world

Abstract

Everyday experiences of movement have become a central concern for social and cultural geography in recent years. Work here has begun to unpack the specific meanings, imaginaries and experiences that come to be bound up with mobile bodies and their practices. However, it has been suggested that more could be done to examine the material, elementary, molecular and physical aspects of movement which are significant to the experience of being on the move. Therefore, this paper explores the experience of cycling amid such turbulent ‘elemental’ materialities. Such ‘matters’ matter to cycling in the way that they (re)make both mobile environments and mobile subjectivities. Cyclists come to have quite immediate and intimate relationships with the material and ‘elementary’ aspects of the environments they move through given their relatively unmediated encounters with them. This paper draws on video-interview based research with 24 commuter cyclists in Plymouth, UK to consider cyclists’ experience of atmospheric conditions in terms of air’s force and air quality. From this, the paper reflects on how the experience of such ‘elemental’ matters might be significant to future research on and planning for cycling.     

Towards Eurasia: remapping Europe as ‘upstart peripheral to an ongoing operation’

In order to heed the call in world literature studies to work against disciplinary Eurocentrism by refiguring both what constitutes world literature and how this is read, in this article I propose world literature as an archive of world-making practices and as an impulse for the articulation of alternative methodological approaches. This takes world literature from the postcolonial South as, following Pheng Cheah, instantiating a modality of world literature in which the need for imagining worlds with alternative centres to those determined by coloniality is particularly acute. A response to this is facilitated and illustrated by a reading of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore’s Letters from Russia (1930), and South African writer/activist Alex La Guma’s A Soviet Journey (1978). By drawing forward connections between the postcolonial South and the former Soviet Union, this complicates traditional colonial arrangements of the colonial ‘centre’ as cradle of civilisation and culture, as well as postcolonial scholarship’s cumulative fetishisation of ‘Europe’, by allowing a reshuffling of the co-ordinates determining ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ and a more nuanced grasp of ‘Europe’ simultaneously. These imaginative journeys destabilise ‘Europe’ as closed category and call forth Eurasia as a more appropriate categorical–cartographical framework for thinking this space and the connections and (hi)story-telling it stages and fosters.     

Borderless sport? Imagining and organising bicycle racing in Belgium, 1869–1914: between transnational dynamics and national aspirations

From the 1860s onwards, the new sport of bicycle racing engendered transnational flows of ideas, practices and performers. However, national actors and sensitivities always remained present. In interaction with these transnational flows they shaped national identity in this sport, as the Belgian case shows. Belgium was a site of cross-border interaction for racing from early on. Nevertheless, actors like the Belgian cycling press or national cycling union also continuously tried to construct a ‘national’ racing culture. French and British influences were especially crucial here, as Belgian actors were continuously torn between both in determining their position in the amateur–professional question or in the International Cycling Association. France and Britain thus functioned as ‘significant others’ in the shaping of ‘national’ Belgian racing, a process often complicated by the transnational activities of other, commercially motivated actors like cycling tracks or racers themselves. In competition, too, the discourses of the Belgian press on racers Hubert Houben and Robert Protin celebrated their ‘small nation’ and its success against and differences from its bigger neighbours. The Belgian orientation on French racing eventually became dominant, and proved to be crucial to the resurrection of the sport in Belgium after a period of crisis around 1900.     

European integration and the social science of EU studies: the disciplinary politics of a subfield

This article takes the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome as an opportunity to reflect upon half a century of academic discourse about the EU and its antecedents. In particular, it illuminates the theoretical analysis of European integration that has developed within political science and international studies broadly defined. It asks whether it is appropriate to map, as might be tempting, the intellectual ‘progress’ of the field of study against the empirical evolution of its object (European integration/the EU). The argument to be presented here is that while we can, to some extent, comprehend the evolution of academic thinking about the EU as a reflex to critical shifts in the ‘real world’ of European integration (‘externalist’ drivers), it is also necessary to understand ‘internalist’ drivers of theoretical discourse on European integration/the EU. The article contemplates two such ‘internalist’ components that have shaped and continue to shape the course of EU studies: scholarly contingency (the fact that scholarship does not proceed with free agency, but is bound by various conditions) and disciplinary politics (the idea that the course of academic work is governed by power games and that there are likely significant disagreements about best practice and progress in a field). In terms of EU studies, the thrust of disciplinary politics tends towards an opposition between ‘mainstreaming’ and ‘pluralist versions’ of the political science of EU studies. The final section explores how, in the face of emerging monistic claims about propriety in the field, an effective pluralist political science of the EU might be enhanced.     

‘If I was Irish I'd be crying by now’: Irishness and exteriority,Doyle's Deportees and the Irish plays of Martin McDonagh

While variations on the relationship between Irishness and exteriority resound throughout Irish literature and Irish studies, the implications and applications of the version offered by Roddy Doyle's short story ‘Home to Harlem’ remain underdeveloped. This article explores the particular paradigm of Irishness derivable from Doyle's work, and is motivated by it to revisit and re-examine the Irish plays of Martin McDonagh and the question of audience relation to them. I argue that the constituents of the overly rehearsed ‘McDonagh enigma’ – his reliance on stereotypical representation and his highlighting of artifice – ensure a dynamic of recognition and exteriority in the Irish-identifying audience, which, in turn, enacts an extreme version of the process of Irishness extrapolable from Doyle.     

'Homo Sacer' out of left field: communist "slime" as bare life in 1930s and Second World War Sweden

This article maps ways in which radical left‐wing politics in 1930s and Second World War Sweden were conceived in medico‐biological and eugenic terms that expressed strong dehumanizing sentiments. The article engages Agamben's and Foucault's thinking on ‘biopolitics’ and ‘biopower’, and extensively exemplifies dehumanizing discourse as deployed by leading Social Democratic politicians, leading figures of government within the police and military, as well as by editors of both right‐wing and Social Democratic press. Ways in which individuals labelled ‘Communists’ were spatially managed in terms of extensive surveillance, registration, detainment planning and forms of incarceration are addressed. I further discuss state measures that may be seen as elements of a state of exception, some measures implemented against ‘Communists’, and others against individuals deemed to have undesirable characteristics seen to be hereditary. In employing Agamben's notion of ‘inoperosity’ in a discussion of a state paradigm of social productivity, eugenic measures in the building of the Swedish welfare state are then related to the dehumanizing framing of ‘Communists’. In conclusion, conditions for regaining a place in the body politic are briefly addressed. The article's focus on ways in which the ethnic and racial same was dehumanized within a democracy on political grounds results from a conscious effort to complement studies of dehumanization as related to colonialism, dictatorial regimes as well as identity politics.     

‘Generation Emigration’: the politics of (trans)national social reproduction in twenty-first-century Ireland

Placing social reproduction at the heart of the experience of migration, this article attempts to move beyond regulatory discourses of emigration as tragedy, lifestyle choice or ‘the Skype generation’. Following a review of feminist literature on social reproduction, the article returns to research with Irish women migrants and non-migrants in the 1990s to demonstrate how technologically mediated ‘time-space compression’ and its promise of transnational proximity actually gave rise to the experience of gendered ‘time-space expansion’. The Irish Times' ‘Generation Emigration’ (GE) project is then introduced as a site in which similar gendered dynamics emerge as contemporary technologically mediated connections between emigrants and the homeland are celebrated through a compensatory (trans)nationalist discourse that competes with but also compensates for framings of emigration as national tragedy. The article suggests that discourses of emigration as tragedy, lifestyle choice, or new globalised practice serve to bring emigration into being in circumscribed ways and to produce emigrants as particular kinds of ‘recognisable’ subjects. It asks how the work of social reproduction in the context of emigration might be posed anew in ways that challenge dominant assumptions regarding the location and composition of the population to be reproduced. By moving beyond these regulatory discourses of emigration, and by emphasising the dynamics of technologically mediated transnational social reproduction, the article identifies the racialised heteronormative assumptions that intersect with national and global projects of economic production and social reproduction to produce uneven gendered effects.     

Understanding criminal mobility: the case of the Neapolitan Camorra

Italian mafias are now present and active abroad, and many national legal economies are undermined by their activities. The American government responded to this threat in 2011 by introducing an ‘executive order’ that blacklisted the Camorra's (the Neapolitan mafia) activities in the United States. Recently, there has been a growing debate on criminal mobility and, in particular, why, when and how Italian mafiosi move out of their territory of origin and expand into new foreign territories. Recent literature suggests that Italian mafias change their behaviour across territories and will succeed in ‘transplanting’ when there are emerging new markets. This article examines some brief case studies of camorristi in Europe to discuss these concepts of mafia mobility; and it concludes by suggesting that there is no ‘one size fits all’ analysis and that more attention should be paid to the interdependence of territories.     

‘We are of the connections’: migration,methodological nationalism,and ‘militant research’

Abstract

If there were no borders, there would be no migrants – only mobility. The persistent reification of migrants and migration – even in critical migration studies –(re-)fetishizes and (re-)naturalizes the epistemological stability attributed to the (‘national’) state as a modular fixture of geopolitical space. In this regard, migration scholarship (however critical) is implicated in a continuous (re-)reification of ‘migrants’ as a distinct category of human mobility. Thus, the methodological nationalism that rationalizes the whole conjuncture of borders-making-migrants supplies a kind of defining horizon for migration studies as such. The dilemma of methodological nationalism has never been merely a problem of thought, however. It is indeed a manifestation of the veritable participation of researchers and scholars – whether consciously or unwittingly – in the very same sociopolitical processes and struggles through which the ‘national’ configuration of ‘society’ (or, the social field) is reified and actualized as the territorial expression of state power. Therefore, the questions of methodological nationalism and what might be called ‘militant research’ are deeply interconnected, indeed, mutually constitutive. As scholars of ‘migration’ – and above all, as practitioners of ‘militant research’ – we must attend to a self-reflexive critique of our own complicities with the ongoing nationalization of ‘society’. Hence, as researchers or scholars of migration, we are indeed ‘of the connections’ between migrants’ transnational mobilities and the political, legal, and border-policing regimes that seek to orchestrate, regiment, and manage their energies. We are ‘of’ these connections because there is no ‘outside’ or analytical position beyond them. The larger juridical regimes of citizenship, denizenship, and alienage configure us to be always-already located within the nexus of inequalities that are at stake in these conflicts.     

Cronies,economic crime and capitalism in Putin's sistema

The books included in this review article are essential for the understanding of what I call Putin's sistema—the governance model that originated in the Soviet system but has transformed and adapted to global change. Each book tackles, from a different angle, the issues of Russia's transition and suggests ways to describe its political consequences. The books all attempt to identify some underlying logic or organizing force in a Russian society that has emerged through weak institutions. Although I join the authors in their criticisms of the ‘transition paradigm’ and its ‘opening‐breakthrough‐consolidation of democracy’ formula, transformations of the Soviet sistema seem to resonate with the ‘opening‐breakthrough‐consolidation of capitalism’. Perestroika can be seen as an ‘opening’ in shaking the foundations of sistema; Yeltsin's era as a ‘breakthrough’; and Putin's regime as the ‘consolidation’ of capitalism but with its distinct characteristics.     

The Game: Or, ‘the making of migration’ along the Balkan Route

‘The Game’ is how many refugees describe their attempts to informally travel to Western Europe via the so-called Balkan Route. This article conceptualises The Game as a spatial tactic implemented by refugees as a response to the impossibility of legally entering the EU and as a gray area in the governance of informal migrant mobilities. It does so by engaging with the recent literature on the Balkan Route to analyse how The Game has been performed and ‘managed’ in Serbia, a key ‘buffer state’ along this corridor. Drawing from Tazzioli's work on ‘The Making of Migration’, and in particular on her understanding of refugee forced mobility as a form of ‘migrant management’ on the part of the authorities, this article shows how the ambivalent connotations of The Game reveal the troubling configurations of EU border politics and of its formal and informal geopolitical arrangements. At the same time, it argues that the practices related to The Game ultimately reflect the extraordinary determination of the refugees in creating new itineraries, spatial interstices, invisible networks and ‘holes in the border walls’ that allow them, despite all the difficulties, to challenge such border politics. We conclude by proposing to understand The Game as part of the biopolitics of migration and by suggesting that it represents a powerful manifestation of the condition (and the field of possibility) of thousands of refugees along the Balkan Route today.     

Matter in or out of place? Bicycle parking strategies and their effects on people,practices and places

This study explores what bicycle parking strategies tell us about the place of mobility objects in contemporary urban streetscapes. It examines the bicycle's liminality by combining approaches from practice theory with Mary Douglas' concept of ‘matter out of place’. Much research on cycling has concentrated on the bicycle in movement, yet in our research, based in four relatively high-cycling English urban areas, a common theme was concern about the bicycle when not in use. Bicycles at rest were perceived as threatened or threatening, risky or at-risk; affected by theft, vandalism, the weather, official and familial disapproval. In the study, we link this to the tenuous place of urban cycling in England; while bicycle ownership is widespread, everyday cycling remains marginalised and this shapes the place of the bicycle resting on city streets, in homes and in workplaces. Bicycles waiting for their owners are often ‘matter out of place’. This is seen within the context of broader motorised landscapes which have made driving easier through locating driving competences in the car itself, while comparable cycling competences remain on the outside—with the cyclist.     

Bringing the feudal law back home: social practice and the law of fiefs in Italy and Provence (1100–1250)

ABSTRACT

The Libri feudorum is a composite law book containing the customary laws of fiefs held in Lombardy which were codified in 1100–1250. Its function in shaping a late medieval ‘feudal vocabulary’ and, ultimately, modern models of feudalism was highlighted by Susan Reynolds and lies at the core of her anti-feudalism paradigm. This paper questions the disjuncture between social practice and learned law that underlies the paradigm, by analysing the context and making of the Libri feudorum and of legal writings associated with it – by Pillius de Medicina, Iacobus de Ardizone and Jean Blanc. By showing how practice could shape legal tools used by learned lawyers to frame fiefs and by reassessing the influence of the Libri feudorum on practice, the paper challenges the idea that fiefs were the outcome of professional or academic law and unveils aspects of the practical nature and intellectual dimension of lawyerly writing.     

Harnessing the hijab: the emergence of the Muslim Female Footballer through international sport governance

The Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and other international sport governing bodies have recently been involved in contestations concerning the allowance of the hijab in sport. This article interrogates how these institutions participate in the regulation of Muslim women, and the relationship that these actions have with colonial and imperial constitutions of race. Drawing on critical race feminist theorizing, this article argues that the regulation of women who wear the hijab is a technology of power that frames these sport governance bodies as benevolent actors operating within the ‘best interests’ of female footballers. This hijab that has become a cause of concern in sport is hegemonically understood through Western colonialisms and racial grammars that have historically constituted the figure of ‘The Muslim Woman’ as in need of protection. The recent contestations represent a new moment in a global field, however, as notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘equal rights’ are being invoked to now allow the hijab, albeit under conditions that insidiously reinscribe white patriarchal authority.     

An investigation of factors determining cycling experience and frequency

A bicycle tourism destination is composed of complexes of different attributes that are crucial for the determination of tourist satisfaction levels. However, the relative impact of sector-specific destination attributes on bicycle touring and leisure cycling experience and frequency has been both poorly understood and studied. This study is an attempt to fill this literature gap by exploring a demand-side perspective on the important contributors of overall satisfaction with cycling experience and the key determinants of cycling frequency. The 28 sector-specific destination attributes were drawn from the relevant literature, and then modified by a panel of industry experts. Using exploratory factor analysis, three destination-specific attribute-level satisfaction factors were identified in descending order of satisfaction degree: ‘provision of signage services,’ ‘provision of safety and emergency services,’ and ‘quality of bicycle routes.’ Among these factors, ‘provision of safety and security services’ and ‘provision of signage services’ were found to be the most important contributors to overall satisfaction. Finally, ‘monthly income’ was proven to be a significant predictor of cycling frequency. This study is of great importance as there is a growing body of evidence that the use of bicycle for leisure, recreation, and tourism is undergoing a resurgence worldwide. The findings of this study may be of interest to scholars in Western countries where bicycle tourism is mature and highly developed and in Asian countries where the sector is at an early stage of development. Since bicycle touring and leisure cycling experience and frequency can be increased by modifying destination marketing and management practices, the government and industry sectors should focus more attention on ensuring the provision of multi-functional grocery and convenience stores along designated bicycle routes, developing an informative and visible signage system for designated bicycle routes, and targeting middle- to high-income bicyclists with diverse bicycle touring and leisure cycling experience options.     

Bursting the Bubble: The Pseudo-Development Strategies of Microstates

Developing microstates are bountiful on the world political map today. Yet the concept of smallness, apart from being relativistic, conjures up a sense of deviation, indicative of a subtle discrimination which implicitly takes large to be normal and preferable. Based on an extensive yet selective literature review, this article suggests that the orthodox development paradigm, in both its liberal and radical traditions, has borne little relevance to small developing states, either in theory or in practice. On looking more closely at the survival strategies of developing micro-economies, it is proposed that a different conceptualization of ‘development’ is warranted; one which, for all its negative connotations, is both plausible and consistent with the peculiar practices of microstates.     

A military camp in the middle of nowhere: mobilities,dislocation and the archaeology of a Second World War German military base in Finnish Lapland

This article discusses military mobilities and encampment, and associated themes such as dislocation and displacement of people, through the case of a Second World War German military camp in Finnish Lapland. The article describes the camp and its archaeological research and discusses various aspects of the camp and camp life in its particular subarctic ‘wilderness’ setting, framing the discussion within the themes of mobilities and dislocations, and especially their multiple impacts on the German troops and their multinational prisoners-of-war based in the camp. A particular emphasis is put on how mobilities and dislocation – in effect ‘being stuck’ in a northern wilderness – were intertwined and how the inhabitants of the camp coped with the situation, as well as how this is reflected in the different features of the camp itself and the archaeological material that the fieldwork produced.     

Chopsticks,phone bells and farms: Fuyuko Taira's diasporic spatial practice

In this article, I revisit my earlier project on local poetry practices by Japanese ‘war brides’ from the Second World War and explore a creative, transnational home-making activity by focusing on one of my informants, Fuyuko Taira's senryu poetry. Drawing on theories of global space and diasporic home-making practices, I suggest that her engagement in senryu involves a transnational spatial practice through the use of familiar everyday language. While the experience of displacement among Taira and other so-called ‘war brides’ cannot be understood without a consideration of socio-historical and economic constraints that characterized their emigration, my aim here is not to analyse how Taira's senryu simply reflects her diasporic victimhood but to explore how she exercises her creative agency to make her new home familiar and habitable by engaging with the everyday poetry practice of alternation between ‘pause’ and ‘move’ in the midst of changing landscapes. I argue that to a member of the Japanese diaspora like Taira senryu can be thought of as a different mode of experiencing at once the local and the global in an organic way.     

Unmanaging the past: Truth,data and the human being

Management systems in archaeology seek to impose the scientific objective‐reductionist paradigm on archaeologists and their data. This orthodoxy has been enshrined in English Heritage's document Management of Archaeological Projects (English Heritage 1991) which prescribes rigorous application of a standardized methodology. MAP II, as it is known, is based on a processual model in which ‘data’ enter at one end and valuable archaeology emerges at the other. Such a view not only lacks any appreciation of the distinctions between ‘data’ and ‘information’ but also fails to acknowledge the beliefs and values which underpin the decision‐making criteria crucial to the model. In this paper we argue for an approach which un‐manages the past — by building relativistic humans into our strategies for dealing with the past. Examples are given which demonstrate how such an approach might work in practice.