This past week we have been focusing on the Anthropology of Sport in my European Ethnography course. The first thing that struck me was that we could not agree on a definition of sport: do billiards and darts count as sports? What makes an activity a sport? Does it depend on physical exertion, skill or both? This got me thinking about the embodiment of skill; something that had also come up in Anth 422 in relation to work.

The previous week we explored the historical rise of nationalism and whether nationalism is still a valid area of inquiry for anthropologists in the face of the European Union. Do we need to talk about post-nationalism or supranational identities? As we work through the framework I have set out for this course, major themes are becoming apparent; in particular, we keep returning to the question of identities.

Studying European football, we took a closer look at the flexibility of the identities of both spectators and players. Depending on the type of game or championship we noticed that fans’ identities shifted. In local matches, it could even be said that fans are defending their cities. At an international level, national ties are deepest. From the side of the players, we were fascinated by professional teams and the way in which the international and racial differences are erased in order to create a unified team that represents common values. This, however, does not always hold true: we saw how at the end of the last World Cup Zinedine Zidane’s Frenchness was challenged by fans and the press when he lost his temper in the face of a taunting Italian player.